Wrapping Up Four Books
221. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea
I can imagine reading the encyclopedia. I cannot, however, in my wildest dreams, imagine making my way through over twenty thousand pages of a dictionary. Would anything be retained? Wouldn’t whole sections of words run together? How useful is it really to know words you will probably never be able to bring up in conversation?
Nevertheless, it was great fun to read this book. Shea starts each chapter with an essay about an item of interest to word lovers, including where to read, reading glasses, short dictionaries to read, and the history of dictionaries. Shea concludes each chapter with favorite words from each volume of the dictionary. His comments about the words are a hoot.
Yes, I can truly say it was great fun to read this book about reading the dictionary.
222. Apples & Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found by Marie Brenner
Marie and her brother, Carl, have never gotten along. Not as children. Not as teens. And certainly not now as adults. Carl is not an easy person to get along with. This is something his neighbors say, his girlfriends say, his employees say. It seems clear that Carl is difficult. And Marie is also a strongly opinionated person.
Then Carl is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Marie is determined to establish a relationship with her brother and to help him through this time.
The fascination with this book for me was in listening to and observing Carl. Was there ever a person more intent on putting others off him? Marie explores reasons for her sibling difficulties by examining difficult family relationships in her family’s past. If being difficult has genetic components, this is useful. But if these difficult genes are inherited, can they be overcome? If Carl is our example, we would have to conclude no.
223. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima
I am glad to have finished this book, but I am sorry I ever started it. I took away very little from this book. Our main character, Mizoguchi, is troubled by stuttering. He ends up (this is no plot giveaway) setting fire to one of Japan’s most beloved sites, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mizoguchi, between the beginning and the end of the book, meets other deeply troubled people and sees people he hoped to respect acting in deeply troubling ways. He gets no consolation from his studies or his work or his friends; instead, these seem to lead him farther along the path to destruction.
Why did he decide to destroy the temple? It was beautiful and it represented everything he wanted. Why, then, did he decide to destroy it?
The front cover of this book proclaims, “An outstanding novel by one of the literary geniuses of the century.” Mishima, I learn, later kills himself by using a classical Japanese sword to disembowel himself. And I spent many hours reading a book by this person? His path and the path of his character were inexplicable to me.
224. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Alas. I never would have thought it, but I seem to be just another modern woman. I clearly remember reading this book back in high school and loving its slow pace, its carefully chosen words. Not today. I found myself wishing Thoreau would pick up the pace, leave off all the tedious details of his life in the country, go into town and get some perspective. And then, abruptly, Thoreau would say something so profound and so wise that I would forgive him everything. I seem to have a love-hate relationship with this book.
I would like to ask Thoreau a question or two. Most pressing: If living at Walden Pond was so great, why did he leave?
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217. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee
Lee undertakes a difficult challenge: find out all there is to know about Chinese food. I am happy to say she lived up to the challenge. I learned more about General Tso’s Chicken and fortune cookies and soy sauce than I thought I ever wanted to know. All in all, it was an entertaining trip through Chinese American dining.
218. Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos
I wouldn’t call this book literary fiction; most people, I suppose, would call it chick lit. But it is a little more than that. The characters are a little more complex than you might think and there are all those multisyllabic words. Yes, it is a little more than your typical chick lit.
But don’t go expecting Tolstoy either. Cornelia, our main character, decides to move from the decidedly high culture big city to the ‘burbs, though she’s not quite clear about her rationale. She and her husband try to fit in and make friends, but their new neighborhood can be disdainful of the bright and clever city dwellers. Cornelia makes an enemy before she makes a friend; her enemy, Piper, seems out to make Cornelia miserable. But Piper suddenly becomes the chief caregiver of her best friend and the new experiences Piper has with her friend’s suffering soften her heart.
219. Various Miracles by Carol Shields
I’ve had this book on my wishlist forever and I finally acquired this copy a good while back, but somehow I never got around to reading it. Then the Canadian Authors Bookbox arrived and I found I had almost nothing to put into it for trade. Thus this read yesterday.
I’ve read Shields before I had no recollection of this kind of Shields, a Murakami-ish Shields, full of magic and mysticism and the odd and strange. I loved this book of short stories where the unexpected always happens, just like in the real world, and who knows why. I loved the first story in the book, the title story, a simple listing of all the miracles in the world, miracles in the broadest sense of the word. “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” takes us through the twisting life of Mrs. Turner, a life that winds and bends, making stops she’d never anticipate, that ends with Mrs. Turner, yes, cutting the grass. A girl who is accidentally locked inside a church, a church used only once a year. A man who writes satire watching his wife slowly die. A couple who receives yearly Christmas cards from a man they met for a few minutes twenty-five years earlier. Very real, very wacky stories.
220. Dewey: The Small-Town Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron with Bret Witter
In general, I hate sappy stories. I loathe abject sentimentality. I hate sweet little stories where everything ends happily ever after and the main characters dance off together into the sunset.
Two exceptions: Romances and animal stories.
Dewey is an animal story that, happily, I will exempt from my sappy stories rule. Dewey is a stray cat who is found one icy morning in the drop box of the public library. Dewey wins the hearts of the librarian, the library staff, the library patrons, and, finally, the entire town. And what a cat he is! Somehow he manages to help farmers troubled by a bad economy, disabled children, lonely people, and depressed people, and all by just being a kind and gentle cat.
Yes, the story reeks with sappiness, but I loved reading it.
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