A New Year: It's Time for Reading Revelry and Shelf Reflection

The calendar has flipped to 2016, but we're still un-draping garland and un-stringing lights, plucking pine needles from the living room carpet, reveling in recent happy holiday memories. In the spirit of the season-just-passed, we take a last-chance glance back at ten notable reads from 2015, reflecting upon what brought us to the books and celebrating the stories they told.

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson.

Little, Brown and Company, 2015. 468 pages.
Fiction Favorites

We relish this companion to Life after Life, Atkinson’s masterful exploration of multiple life-trajectories of Ursula Todd in World War II-era England. This time and time around, Atkinson tells the story of Teddy, Ursula’s decidedly decent, stiff-upper-lip younger brother. After remarkable wartime work as a Royal Air Force pilot, Teddy embarks upon a studiously unremarkable life—a pragmatic wife, a practical vocation, a poetic sensibility– a life he never expected to lead, given the statistical realities of his previous occupation.

Life after Life.

We’ve observed time and time again that Atkinson bends chronologies and conventions of fiction at will. Teddy’s narrative winds and rewinds, visiting and revisiting moments in time, altering perspective and accumulating detail, creating a latticework of plot and character. How happy we are, dwelling in possibility, pondering how a life unfolds—and what part free will, fortune, and outright fabrication play in that unfolding. Even as she constructs an intellectually challenging plot, Atkinson guides us toward an emotionally wrenching denouement. As we close the book on A God in Ruins, many notions of fiction lie in rubble.  This is spinning, spiraling sleight of hand! It messes with our heads! But it absolutely, unreservedly, fully wins our reading hearts.

Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment....

The Backbone of the World: A Portrait of a Vanishing Way of Life along the Continental Divide by Frank Clifford.

Broadway Books, 2003 (2002). 288 pages.
History and Travel

Our Western treks and travels have frequently crisscrossed the Continental Divide, a mostly mountainous and principally picturesque hydrological schism that extends, in the United States, from the badlands of Southern New Mexico to the Rocky Mountain highs of Montana before meandering into Canada. All that wandering gets us wondering and, it turns out, while water is flowing this way and that, winds of change are blowing across the mythic frontier. In a collection of engaging essays, Clifford explores environmental, social, and political forces at work along Continental Divide Trail.

Sightseeing along the Divide.

Clifford’s tone and temperament suit the trail he travels. Before he put pen to paper, he put hands to work, participating in life along America's longest wilderness corridor, taking in the scenery, talking to people, meeting with hospitality and inhospitality from Mother Nature and humans along the way. This hands-on approach to research and writing introduces both timelessness and immediacy to portrayals of brutal natural beauty and imperiled lifeways. His storytelling is deeply moving but never maudlin, a hard-edged homage to enduring frontier values that have defined our national character and made our destiny manifest.

He takes a last wistful look at the map and puts it away. 'We’ll do it next time,' he says. We saddle the horses, load the boxes, and head down a steep, rocky trail, our backs to the Divide.

The Dust That Falls from Dreams by Louis de Bernieres.

Pantheon Books, 2015. 513 pages.
Fiction Favorites

Hard to believe it’s nigh unto twenty-two years since Our Excellent Middle Sister led us to Corelli’s Mandolin, de Bernieres' magical novel of love, loss, loyalty, and World War II, set on the Greek island of Cephallonia. Corelli’s Mandolin retains a prominent spot on our bookshelf, and lingering literary approbation nudges us toward the author’s newest offering, an understated saga of love, loss, loyalty, and World War I, predominately set in the staid English countryside.

Corelli's Mandolin.

At a prewar coronation party in 1902 Kent, we meet three neighboring families, McCosh, Pendennis, and Pitt, ensconced in Edwardian tranquility and oblivious to life-altering events looming on the horizon. The McCosh family includes a droll inventor-investor father, an eccentric, class-conscious mother, and four exceptional daughters-- including Rosie, a particularly exceptional twelve-year-old who already has plans to marry American-born-boy-next-door Ashbridge Pendennis. Predictably and painfully, Edwardian tranquility gives way to World War I. The Pendennis and Pitt brothers fight and fly their way through the conflict; the McCosh sisters engage in war work, volunteering in hospitals and deferring dreams. More predictably and more painfully, the aftermath of combat involves picking up proverbial pieces, searching for purpose, struggling with social change… coming to terms with the steep price of war.

Our patience with Rosie wears a bit thin. She is unfailingly pious, assiduously mopey—and central to the narrative. The other McCosh sisters are livelier, seemingly more interesting to hang out with and, alas, consistently peripheral. Louis de Bernieres, however, demonstrates great patience with Rosie, and we follow his lead, refraining from armchair-based eye-rolling and intermittent sighs of vexation. And at the end of the day, there is admirable gentility and gracefulness to de Bernieres' storytelling: passages that could be sweeping and hyperbolic retain a measure of intimacy and restraint that is at once poignant and disarming.

The bird remained perfectly calm… He opened his hands, and they watched as it hesitated, hastily straightened a feather on its chest, and flew out over the valley, banked, dived, and disappeared.

Grendel by John Gardner.

Vintage Books, 1989 (1971). 174 pages.
Fiction Favorites

We’ve had a twisted fascination for Beowulf ever since our high school English teacher—who was also the varsity baseball coach—attempted to read a few lines of the epic poem in Old English. Standing behind the lectern, red in the face, clearing his throat, adjusting his collar, swilling water, he was obviously more comfortable discussing split-finger fastballs in the dugout than dishing Old English to twenty-three somnolent juniors during seventh-period survey class. Nonetheless, we appreciate his brave, shambling effort to broaden our literary horizons. Hwaet! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum peod-cyninga, prym gefrunon, hu oa aepelingas ellen fremedon! Or something like that, Coach S.

Fine Lines: Grendel Illustration.

John Gardner’s slim novel is a retelling of a bit of Beowulf from the perspective of antagonistic anti-hero monster Grendel. It explores the power of myth, the meaning of life, and the nature of good and evil. We spend a lot of time looking at swirly-lined pen and ink illustrations of Grendel’s head that accompany the narrative.

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction. ‘Poor Grendel’s had an accident,’ I whisper. ‘So may you all.’

Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson by S.C. Gwynne.

Scribner, 2014. 672 pages.
Non Fiction and Biographies

We coordinate our reading of this biography with a summer road trip to Manassas National Battlefield, site of two of General Thomas Jackson’s legendary military triumphs. We walk and explore the First and Second Manassas Trails, moseying along Bull Run, lingering at Stone Bridge, touring Stone House, climbing Henry Hill, tracing the Unfinished Railroad, and meandering through fields of nodding golden grass—acutely aware that the sun-drenched stillness of a late-August morning, 2015, belies a bloody, storied Civil War past.

There Stands Jackson Like a Stone Wall.

We pause at the larger-than-life statue of Jackson that stands watch for the ages over Henry Hill, thinking of the man and the legend that Gwynne reveals chronologically, with ample anecdotal digression: a hardscrabble boy, a tenacious West Point cadet, a strong-willed soldier in the Mexican-American War, an undistinguished professor at the Virginia Military Institute… an awkward, pious, eccentric young man who rose, improbably and dramatically, through the tumult of conflict to become the Confederate army’s tactically brilliant avenger and the bane of the Union army.

We’re no great fans of Civil War re-enactments, on battle-hallowed ground or on paper. We’re born-and-bred-and-educated north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and we understand that Jackson’s place is on the wrong side of history. Nevertheless, Gwynne’s nimble narrative brings his subject’s military career to vivid life, and Stonewall’s ardent audacity gives us pause to consider the War of Northern Aggression from a different perspective.

The time for war has not yet come, but it will come, and that soon. And when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.

The Children Act: A Novel by Ian McEwan.

Anchor Books, 2015. 221 pages.
Fiction Favorites

Years ago, our book group had a seminal meeting after reading Atonement: half of the group vigorously explaining to the other half of the group what happened or didn’t happen and what it all meant or didn’t mean. It was rip-roaring literary ambivalence, and we’ve been interested or not interested in reading McEwan ever since! Now this: In late summer, 2012, high-middle-aged High Court judge Fiona Maye presides over cases in London family court. Intelligent, respected, and immersed in the law, she is properly taken aback by trouble on the homefront: her husband expresses interest in an open marriage. Reeally? Reeally! Fiona finds herself alone, adrift, and pondering life choices—i.e. career over children—just as she hears a case involving a gravely ill seventeen-year-old boy whose Jehovah’s Witness parents are refusing life-saving medical treatment on religious grounds.

Atonement, Anyone?

There is admirable tautness and tension in McEwan’s storytelling.  But much of the time, we feel uncomfortable (or are we comfortable?) with how things are playing out. And, of course, we find the conclusion satisfying. Or unsatisfying.

That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away.

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the World of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery.

Atria Books, 2015. 261 pages.
Non Fiction and Biographies

We have well-documented issues with anthropomorphism—specifically talking animals—and so, when CS recommends this little hardcover to our land-locked book group, we squirm at bit. While none of the octopuses speak or call up lyrics to Ringo Starr’s subaquatic masterwork, they do indeed communicate in strange and wonderful ways. Naturalist-Author Montgomery’s curiosity and enthusiasm for octopuses is infectious. She cultivates relationships with several at Boston’s New England Aquarium: sweet-tempered Athena, stalwart Octavia, impish Kali, and newly-acquired Karma, and she takes us along for the bilaterally symmetrical ride. We learn that octopuses possess intelligence, discernment, and impressive problem-solving skills. Cephalopod problems are, of course, different and damper than those of terra firma-dwelling vertebrates. But still. They are capable, willful, inquisitive, gentle, playful, and affectionate.  They sense with their suckers, taste with their skin, eat with their armpits. They can shift their shapes and change their colors.

Viva Las Vegas Octopus.

And so it comes to pass: on a vacation visit to the Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, we find ourselves face-to-suckers with a Giant Pacific Octopus. A cephalopod and starfish entourage on The Strip! We wiggle fingers from our side of the tank; the octopus unfurls a sinuous, salmon-colored tentacle, gently brushing aquarium glass. We are mesmerized. More often than not, what happens in Vegas correctly stays in Vegas… but we carry the moment with us when we are homeward bound.

They have changed my life forever. I loved them, and will love them always, for they have given me a great gift: a deeper understanding of what it means to think, to feel, and to know.

Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris.

W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. 228 pages.
Food for Thought

Late in the year, we happen upon this cheerful, cheeky usage-manual-slash-memoir and embark on a paradoxical adventure in parsing and proofreading. Norris, who worked in the New Yorker copy department for three decades, delivers a message that is short and semi-sweet and snappy and to-the-point. Speaking of points, she devotes admirable attention to a venerable tool of the trade, the pencil—the sharpened end and the eraser end.

Pencil-with-Eraser.

And while it’s not quite the unabated linguistic romp that we anticipated, Between You and Me makes us ponder the art and craft of writing: why we write, how we strive to express ourselves clearly and accurately, and why grammar comma spelling comma and punctuation matter period. 

A good dictionary can only help.

Ideal: The Novel and the Play by Ayn Rand.

New American Library, 2015. 246 pages.
What Were We Thinking?

We were thinking that recurring sophomoric obsession with Ayn Rand entitles us to revel in writings that our favorite shrill-strident-Russian-born objectivist provocateur stashed away, unpublished, in a Depression-era drawer. The prose-plot and the play-plot present classic Ayn Rand themes: on a dark and stagey night, an enigmatic Hollywood starlet, wanted for the murder of a wealthy oilman, seeks refuge with—and tests the philosophical mettle of—a succession of stereotypic admirers who have written her fan letters.

Atlas Shrugged.

Suffice it to say that neither the novel nor the play are strokes of literary genius, but the two enjoyed in rapid succession are thought-provoking enough and make us feel all nostalgic for happy, heady days of misspent youth— a time of binge-reading Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead— a time when we scanned Central Pennsylvania bridge overpasses for the scrawled interrogation: WHO IS JOHN GALT? 

If it’s murder, why don’t we hear more about it? If it’s not—why do we hear so much?

Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties by Kevin M. Schultz.

W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. 387 pages.
Non Fiction and Biographies

It’s a bit of an eye-opening experience, reading history that occurred during one’s childhood. The heyday of Buckley and Mailer’s difficult friendship spanned the 1960s, a decade when we were blessedly unaware and basically unconcerned with the cultural revolution that raged about us. To be sure, we participated in the Sixties in a guileless way: paging through Grandma’s Life magazines, doodling chalk peace signs on the driveway, and penning passionately misinformed anti-war poems condemning Gorilla Warfare in Southeast Asia. 

Buckley and Mailer Back-in-the-Day.

This social history doubling as biography provides useful perspectives that resonate today: we witness early transition from a rules-based to a rights-based culture, and we admire a relationship between rivals—the pompous icon on the right and the pugnacious idol on the left—who engage in robust yet respectful debate about the condition of a country they love… in different ways.

I think this is the wrong time for us to have dinner… there’d be too much pressure to have a screaming match.

Buckley and Mailer understood that timing, in dining as in reading, is everything. Resolved for 2016: we’ll make every attempt to read the right book at the right time, to revel in that reading, and to engage in periodic shelf reflection.