Tag Archives: book recommendation

The Summer Game by Roger Angell

20 Apr

I know that I’m a couple of weeks late in writing about the beginning of the 2015 baseball season. But that shouldn’t undermine the level of excitement and complacency I feel. Playing softball with my friends on the warm Spring days. Watching the Mariners at a sports bar while eating wings and drinking beer. All is right with the world. Everything is as it should be.

During this time of the year, I spend a lot of time working with Dr. G who is a lifetime Yankees fan. We tease each other back and forth and talk about the ups and downs of our respective teams. Dr. G is the one who told me about Roger Angell who is a friend of his and a client of the clinic’s. I had no idea that the adorable old man with the Jack Russel Terrier also happens to be one of the most legendary baseball writers of all time. “The Summer Game” is the first book of his that I have read.

The book is full of essays that he wrote during the sixties. To be honest, some of the writing didn’t grab me, only because I was reading about games that happened almost 60 years ago. And while I easily recognized names like Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, and Carl Yastrzemski. So many of the other players and games he wrote about are so far in the past that their importance doesn’t translate. So I did skim over a handful of the recaps of who stole what base in what inning.

There was an interesting arc to the essays as they followed the nascent years of the New York Mets whom I support on a casual and Queens-pride level. He wrote about how horrible they were in their first couple of seasons, yet how the fans supported them with a fervor that some of the more successful teams couldn’t come close to. He wrote about the transition from the Polo Grounds to Shea stadium, tracking the evolution of major league baseball to newer venues, expanded franchises, players rights.

“This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that here is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom the foghorn blew; it blew for me.”

Angell writes about baseball as only a true baseball-obsessed person can, as a religion. I get tired of the debate I have with people about whether baseball is boring or not. If other people don’t like it, I simply don’t care. It’s something I need in my life. And there’s a special kind of recognition to spend time with another baseball fan who understands the game and what makes it so special. This is the recognition that I found in his writing.

“Whatever the pace of the particular baseball game we are watching, whatever its outcome, it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own.”

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Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

23 Feb

People just kept recommending this book to me. Everyone saying the same thing. They couldn’t put it down. The writing is stunning. So I began this book with the highest of expectations. This always makes me nervous as it makes books easier to fall short, to not be perfect.

This however lived up to the many wonderful things said about it. Most of the talk generated around this book has to do with race, which Adichie addresses beautifully and in a way that I had not seen done before. The novel is about a young Nigerian woman Ifemelu and the love of her life, Obinze. The two of them dream of emigrating to America together. However, only Ifemelu is able to obtain the visa. Over the years, they drift apart as Ifemelu tries to acclimate to the United States, and Obinze unsuccessfully tries to get to the US by working in London, but eventually ends up back in Nigeria.

A lot of books talk about the Black experience in America, but this book does so through the lens of a woman who spent the first 20 years of her life where being Black didn’t make her a minority. The subtlety of the racism she encounters is beautifully documented, not overly dramatized, yet apparent. It’s real. It makes all the people in this country that want to try and deny that we don’t have an issue with race look insane. Black people have come a long way, but to try and say that racism has been eliminated from our culture is foolish. Books like this that confront the issue are more important now than ever.

But beyond the expansive issue of race, the book is a beautiful love story. Ifemelu is a whip-smart, loveable character, and I found myself not wanting the book to end if it only meant that I could follow her story forever.

That being said though, to anyone out there that read the book, did the last three pages feel rushed to you? Maybe I was overwhelmed with grief that the story was ending, but I felt it was forced. I wanted more, not multiple months and the most important encounter of the book (to me) slapped on at the end.

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Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

21 Feb

“Have you started reading your book-pick yet?”

This is how my friend and fellow book club member Melis greeted me as I entered my friend Jonah’s launch party for his new website.

“Not yet. Why? Is it bad?” I ask her. This is my second time picking a book for my book club, and both times I’ve been terrified that I’ve selected a dud.

“It’s kind of fucked up.”

“It’s about Nevada!”

“It’s not about Nevada. It’s about fucked up things happening in Nevada.”

My relationship with my home state is fraught with tension. I hated living there. I often felt embarrassed about being from there. Yet it’s shaped a huge part of who I am. And since I’ve left, my nostalgia for that weird place has become bittersweet. I don’t know how it happened, but I reluctantly fell in love with Nevada.

It has crept into my writing as a loaded setting, and a new friend of mine who has been kind enough to read the short stories I’m churning out told me to check out this book. He recommended it not just because of her use of the Nevada setting, but he thought our styles were similar as well.

I was ready to love this book from the moment it arrived in the mail. An initial kudos goes to an incredible title. “Battleborn” is the slogan of the state of Nevada, referring to the fact that we only became a state so that our silver could help finance the North in the Civil War. But it is also an adjective that can aptly describe the characters that Watkins writes about. They come out of poverty. They come out of the desert. They come out of heartbreak. But I don’t agree with Melis’ assertion that it’s about fucked up things. I think it is about unpleasant situations (unwanted pregnancy, sexual assault) in a somewhat gritty place (rundown apartment buildings, whorehouses, desert.)

And I think that’s exactly the kind of thing that I’ve grown to love in my own writing, in the things I read, and in my home state. It’s not the shiny fantasy that the tourist boards from California, Florida, even New York present of themselves. Even Las Vegas, the shining glory of the state drips with seediness. It’s a quirky place that’s hard to understand unless you are from there. But I think the thing that Watkins does that I admire is she is able to bring the reader closer to what life in Nevada is like, making it a character in itself. I also couldn’t help but get giddy as she mentioned so many things that I remember and love. Penny poker slot machines and the Bucket of Blood Saloon, anyone? Above all, it’s fine writing. I savored every sentence, and I felt physical pain as I neared the end. I wanted more. More Nevada. Not enough has been said about that place, but I’m glad that a brave soul is out there bringing it into the conversation.

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Drunk Mom by Jowita Bydlowska

4 Nov

Have you ever had a friend confide something somewhat disturbing to you? Maybe they warned you there was something they wanted to talk about. Or maybe they just blurt it out while you’re enjoying your weekly meetup for coffee/drinks. They look you right in the eye while they confess a truth that’s been weighing on their heart. They hush their voice and tell you the unpolished, unaltered secret that they can’t hold onto any longer. You are enraptured in them at that moment. You don’t know whether to condemn them or tell them it’s okay, so you just sit and listen, because that’s probably all they want you to do anyways.

That’s what reading this book was like. Somebody baring the dirty, nasty secrets of their past. I read this book in two days, glued to every word. While getting my hair done, waiting for the subway, eating a bagel and sipping coffee at a diner. I couldn’t turn away. Jowita Bydlowska describes a year of being a relapsed alcoholic while also being a new mother. Her prose is jarring, overloaded with metaphors and missing dialogue and cuts between time. I found it beautiful and felt pulled into what it must be like in the mind of someone completely under the spell of addiction.

I was reading some of the reviews of this book on Goodreads and was shocked to see how many people gave it one or two stars. These reviews always read something along the lines of “Great book/writing, but I can’t give her a good rating, because she was a horrible mother who did deplorable things while caring for her child.” WHAT?! When you rate a book, you aren’t rating the author as a human being. She doesn’t speak highly of the things she did. If anything the book is full of shame, grief, self-loathing and disappointment. I loved the book because of her absolute honesty. Who wants to read a 300-page book about someone being a perfect mother, never making any mistakes? Bigger question: Who wants to read a 300-page book about anyone being a perfect person, skating through life making all the right choices?

Sometimes when I sit down to write personal essay/memoir/blog posts, I hesitate. I think less about the craft of writing and more about who might one day read it. My mom, my friends, ex-boyfriends, future boyfriends. I even worry about possible future children who will think their mother was a moron/shitty person in her younger days. So I censor myself. I tell half the story and shelve the rest. I’m not ready for the world to see the ugly parts of me. It always makes me think of one of my favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes:

“You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner…you only have your emotions to sell.”

And that’s what made me so in awe of this writer and this work. It was the truth, her truth as she felt it and she lived it in what was the darkest year of her life. I thought it was beautiful.

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28 Before 28: Join a Book Club

7 Apr

In my 28th year of life, I’m attempting to do 28 new things. Full list here.

I’ve had this on my list for three years now. I searched for book clubs I could join online, finding only stay-at-home moms who read books about parenting. I mentioned it to people in passing, a lot of whom responded that Book Clubs are lame and for…stay-at-home moms.

“Preposterous!” I replied to the nay-sayers. So I started a book club myself.

As a bookish person, I have over the years attracted a number of friends with similar book nerd tendencies. All it took was posting a query of interest on my Facebook page to get together a modest group of six to discuss books about once a month.

Yesterday was our first meeting, and it went well! I was so happy to hear other people’s feelings about the book, their favorite parts, their criticisms. As the de facto leader, I was the one who picked the book, “The Poisoner’s Handbook” (link in caption above for purchase). It turned out to be a fitting book about Prohibition. So we sat together, throwing back Bellini’s and Bloody Mary’s, discussing.

For me, the best part about a book club is the widening perspective as a reader. By reading books other people have selected, it causes me to read books that I might shy away from. In the discussion itself, I got to see the book through five other people’s perspectives. The English major in me felt right at home.

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Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro

13 Jan

It’s such a tiny, little book. It fit so snuggly in my purse, and I took it out almost everywhere I went the week I was reading it. It’s not even a book as much as an amalgamation of all the different things she has learned in her years as a writer. It’s her wisdom, it’s the wisdom of the people who have inspired her, it’s little tips on how to approach writing.

I had fun reading this book. So much so that I bought my own copy while I was still reading the one I had checked out from the library. It now sits atop my printer on my writing desk with its own designated bookmark. Each nugget of advice is only a page or two long, and I’m trying out a ritual (at her suggestion). I read one little nugget as preparation for an hour of uninterrupted writing. It inspires me and reminds me why I write. It makes that hour of solitary writing a little less lonely.

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Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

8 Jan

Because of my dependency on the public library, I don’t get to read a lot of newer books. I usually have to wait 5 months to get ahold of a copy, and I’m an impatient person.

But over the holidays I splurged and bought myself a book…at a bookstore. An extravagance in my life as a poor New Yorker. This book was in the bestseller section which makes me wary. I worry about cheesy romances or over-hyped memoirs. This memoir, though, surprised me.

The book is written by a young journalist from New York. Within a couple of weeks, she goes from being a normal, productive member of society to a paranoid, barely verbal, mental patient in NYU’s epileptic ward. I don’t want to give too much away, because the book is written with such subtle and creeping suspense. I read it in two days. But I will say that her story takes unexpected turns and is a terrifying read.

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Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe

19 Nov

My favorite Marilyn Monroe movie is “Some Like it Hot.” If you haven’t seen it, she plays Sugar Kane, the lead singer of an all-girl jazz band who has a weakness for falling in love with saxophone players. In the movie, she’s adorable and funny and heartbreaking as the girl who “always gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop.” It’s the epitome of the characters she was known for playing. Beautiful, helpless, not so smart.

Unfortunately, that has become not just the roles she played, but her legend. But did you know that MM often insisted on having her photograph taken whilst reading books? Did you also know that she took night classes in literature at UCLA in her spare time? She also scribbled poems and little notes to herself in a variety of notebooks. This wonderful book collects many of those.

This book, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, places side-by-side her actual writing and transcriptions of them. Often her stream-of-consciousness writing jumps all over the page and only gives a small insight to what was really going on inside her mind. They have also collected a variety of pictures of MM with authors and artists whom she admired.

To me, this book is vital in understanding her. It is also vital in understanding that people are not always the image they present. We never know what’s stirring in someone’s mind. Marilyn Monroe was no exception. It makes me so happy that we can finally put a little of this “dumb blonde” nonsense away and respect her for the complete human being she was.

“Not a scared lonely little girl anymore Remember you’re sitting on top of the world (it doesn’t feel like it).”

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28 Before 28: Read Slaughterhouse-Five

12 Nov

In my 28th year of life, I’m attempting to do 28 new things. Full list here.

One thing you can say about me and my bucket list is that despite never completing my birthday bucket list, I always manage to accomplish the book portion. So, yes, I might be dilly-dallying about visiting a new country. And, no, I don’t know of any gun ranges in the tri-state area. But, dammit, I put this book on hold at the library the day after I formulated the list.

“Slaughterhouse-Five” was a book I knew little about going into it. I knew it had something to do with war, but I didn’t even know which one. It’s about WWII.

I have read plenty of books about war. The heroism, the death, the senselessness, the evil necessity. This book, however, I didn’t find overly emotional. The plot jumps back and forth through time as the main character is unable to live his life chronologically. So we see him in Dresden, but a moment later we see him in optometry school, sometimes we even see him abducted my aliens flying miles away from Earth.

What I loved about the humor of Vonnegut’s writing was that everything was presented as fact, as simple detail. He left it to us to string it all together. Every time death is mentioned in the book, he sums it up with the phrase “So it goes.” That might seem cold, but it’s a beautiful thing in a sense.

I did some brief Internet research into Vonnegut and any relation to Buddhism, and I couldn’t find a link. But this idea of “So it goes” and the frequent jumping back and forth through time reminded me of some of the basic principles of Buddhism. Mainly the idea of impermanence. Nothing in our lives is permanent. Moments of suffering, moments of happiness, times of success, times of failure. Everything comes to an end, as do we. It’s a peaceful way to look at things. It also leads into the idea that nothing is real except this moment. The images we have of the past and the future are illusions. The only truth is now, in this moment. It is the only thing that is real.

For me, taking a main character and making him “unstuck” in time, flying through eras of his life, jumping from year to year, plays with this idea of what is real, what is past, and what is future. It was fascinating and a curious concept to think about.

Whoa, didn’t mean to get so Bodhisattva there. I couldn’t help it though. Vonnegut got me thinking with this one.

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

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Book Roundup #2

16 Oct

Columbus Day weekend meant a lot of cat-sitting for me. This also meant a lot of extra travel time to and from my client’s apartments. It can be irksome to get out of bed earlier than usual on a Saturday morning, but the extra money is so nice to have. Plus, CATS! And one of the greatest joys I take in living in New York City is the opportunity to use travel time to read. I love popping on the subway, pulling out my book, and zoning out until I hear my stop announced. No matter how busy my life gets, I still need to get from point A to point B, and I love that I get to read whilst doing just that. I also took care of one of my favorite cats this weekend, Grayer.

Grayer

Grayer

Despite being a former feral cat and a rescue, Grayer loves people and wants nothing more than to be petted. I often like to sit and pet him with one hand and read with the other. I was lucky enough to read two great books with Grayer this weekend.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

4989I grew up in a Christian home and am well-versed in the Bible. Somewhere in my teenage years I began to question the faith I had been raised in. My questions were varied and complicated and eventually led me away from the church. One of my biggest problems with Christianity was the way women were treated in the Bible. I didn’t like that women were often a sidenote. Often reduced to nothing more than mothers or sinners or whores.

This book is about the wives and daughter of Jacob who is spoken about in Genesis. While it is fiction and imaginative, the writing is beautiful and captivating. She captures the relationships of mothers and daughters of sisters and of friends. I did some basic research on the book once I was done and most of the things she writes about aren’t historically accurate. But the story is moving and believable.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

zeitounWhen Hurricane Katrina hit, I was 19-years-old and self-centered. I remember so little about the hurricane and the after math. I remember going to a keg party to raise money for the Red Cross, and I remember this.

But I was young and didn’t pay much attention to the news of the struggles going on in my own country. “Zeitoun” is a beautiful, creative non-fiction book that depicts the experiences of a man who stayed behind, who canoed through the streets of New Orleans. I feel late to the show, but wow was that a FEMA fail. The main character Zeitoun is separated from his wife who flees the city with their children. The unfolding of the catastrophe and the injustice they exprienced was so suspenseful, so enraging. I read this in two days.

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