ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE – Barbara Kingsolver

Monday was Jay County Public Library book group and this was our chosen title. Pretty good show this time! There were nine of us and discussion went pretty well. Most of us had read Kingsolver's novels and they are delightful. Many of us agreed that our favorite of her novels was The Poisonwood Bible. Animal, Vegetable however, is a work of nonfiction. It chronicles one complete year for the Kingsolver family after they move from Arizona to Virginia to live upon only locally grown food. It is a book to make you think about your food and what the complete cost of every morsel is.

I don't think there is an issue that isn't examined when it comes to food production. She tackles corporate farming, CAFOs, processed foods, pesticides and hormones in farming, transportation of foodstuffs, exotic imports, farm subsidies, taxes to support the food industry, vegetarianism and much more.

This is truly a thought-provoking work. I spent many hours in hmmmm mode thinking about chapters and ideas. She definitely made me think about how much meat we eat. By the time I finished the chapter on carnivory I felt better though. She had many statistics on the price of eating only vegetables when you add up the cost of fossil fuels used to get it to you, the resources depleted growing it in hostile environs, the packaging etc. While it is a known fact that Americans need to eat less meat, it isn't actually helping the unprivileged in any way to do so like so many try to tell us. According to Kingsolver anyway.

Her style is as usual engaging with delightful storytelling and a rich vocabulary. Her family is intelligent, dedicated to each other and to their experiment. I believe the author's aim is to make us more aware of our food and our impact on our world by what we choose to consume. Also she would like us all to get better in touch with our environment including our neighbors in order to be productive and helpful. Their year was filled with a lot of joy, much learning, and some travail. Overall, it was a very good read for nonfiction which isn't my usual fare.

THE THIN PLACE - Kathryn Davis

I actually picked this short novel up last summer and kept looking at it all year but other titles kept getting in my way. I was intrigued with the cover for one thing (I tell my students not to do that – pick a book by its cover) and then the idea of a story about a small closely knit town of church goers piqued my interest.

After spending a good part of yesterday sitting on my porch swing with this book I am a bit aggravated to realize I have no idea who the strange looking people on the cover are supposed to be! What is the deal? Now I want to talk to the cover artist or the publisher because I want to know why there are no recognizable characters depicted. Oh well. It is actually an extraordinary read and quite peculiar. Not really like anything I have read before.

The book is set in a small town named Varennes which is apparently close to the Canadian border. There are three preteen girls who have been best friends since kindergarten. It begins when these three girls come upon a seemingly dead Mr. Banner on the beach. While two girls go for help Mees Kipp stays with him. As she sits with him the reader realizes that Mees has some kind of spiritual powers and she revives him. All the while the other two girls are dealing with trying to get help from other neighbors and the reader learns that Lorne is a slightly pudgy child forever looking for stability and acceptance. Sunny is the pretty one, the good one, the boss of all.
 
After that introduction the point-of-view jumps among various characters even the neighborhood animals. Also the narrative is not always in the same form. Sometimes it is in the form of a police blotter, a letter to a friend, or a diary entry. But the reader starts to feel the lives connect and to feel the thin place where the miraculous may slip through.

Don't be mislead, this is not a sweet syrupy story of finding religion. The reader is privy also to the hidden lives of the community members and of course there is plenty of deceit, lust, manipulation, and meanness. All along also one character is reading a piece of Varennes history as she rebinds the journal of a late 19th-century schoolmarm who apparently had a secret romance and was responsible for the drowning of many of her pupils in what has become known as the Sunday School Outing Disaster.
 
My favorite character is Helen Zeebrugge. At 92 she resides at the Crockett Home for the Aged and is always angry at what she sees as the ineptitude and condescension of her caretakers. She is a spunky old gal and all the chapters she is in are so good. Her son, Piet, is obsessed with exercise, looking young and finding his fifth wife. He is irritating but he does look out for Helen.
 
There is an interesting high school French teacher and a new-to-town book binder. One chapter includes the escapades of the neighborhood dogs running at night replete with all the canine thoughts and insights. Finally there is much excitement in church one Sunday when criminals break in and the newly installed security system fails, so to speak.

LETHAL LEGACY - Linda Fairstein

My friend Ingrid gave me this book at last Monday's Public Library Book Club. She knew I would like it as it is a mystery about rare books, maps and the NYC Public Library. I loved everything about the NYC library and visited it 3 times during the time our kids lived there. Anyway, it took me all week to finish it because I was so busy and dratted things kept getting in my way. Therefore even though I took it everywhere I went all week I didn't finish it until this afternoon.
 
Assistant district attorney, Alexandra Cooper is called to an apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan to an investigation. At the scene the neighbor of Tina Barr is sure the young woman has been the victim of an assault. However, Tina who is a noted conservator of rare books and maps will not cooperate with the authorities. A few days later in the very same apartment another young woman is bludgeoned to death and Alex is once again called in. The dead woman is clutching a very rare book and is dressed in the clothes of noted heiress Minerva Hunt who appears upon the scene to identify the victim as her employee. A few days later while she is working on a conservation project in the library Tina Barr is murdered and her body dumped in Central Park. So the plot thickens including mysterious messages found on the corpses, a dropped key, a hidden cemetery in the city, a noted wealthy family fighting over rare family owned books and maps, and missing pieces of the oldest map in the world.
 
Alex hooks up with her two friends on the NYC police department and the intrigue unfolds. What I really liked about the book, being a bibliophile myself, was all the interweaving of the workings of the NYCPL including how acquisition and deaccession of legacy donations is handled, the details about how conservators work, and also the history of the best-known New York collectors of rare books and maps.
 
I got a little bogged down with the minutia of police procedure and lingo but then again that happens to me often when I read a police thriller. It was fun and kept my attention. Here is my favorite quotation from page 302
           "“Now how do you know that?” Mike asked, patting her  on the back. “I've got a library card, Mr. Chapman. It serves me well.”"

Ah, yes. Libraries have always served me well and I hope they do the same for you my friends.

THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOKS TOO MUCH - Allison Bartlett

My youngest son is a bibliophile so I thought he might enjoy this piece of nonfiction and purchased it for him for Christmas. Apparently it didn't impress him as it remained at my house so I picked it up one day a few weeks ago. I myself read mostly fiction but I try to get in a nonfiction or two once in a while. This one is perfect for me as it reads much like a fiction book and I couldn't put it down.

This true story of a bibliokleptomaniac (a person who steals books not for profit but for love of them and who simply “must” have them) is really about one man's obsession for rare books and another's obsession to catch him stealing them.

John Gilkey, who had a very unconventional upbringing in a family where thievery was commonplace, grew up to be a narcissistic thief of rare books. In San Francisco Gilkey used his job at Saks Fifth Avenue to steal credit card information that he later used in a very successful scheme to acquire rare books from all over the world.

In Bartlett's interviews he appeared to have no remorse. His claim was that it is unfair that the the books he wants are priced so that he cannot afford them. While feeling strongly that he is entitled to them it follows, in his mind, that he is justified in simply taking them. He remains therefore by his judgment guilt-free as he was only doing what he “had to do.”

The other major character in Bartlett's book is Ken Sanders, a rare book dealer who has been a victim of Gilkey and has turned detective determined to catch him. By interviewing and then following Sanders on his investigative travels Bartlett opens up to the reader the inner workings of the rare book collecting world. Much is revealed about how a book acquires the status of “rare” and what kinds of people pursue the ownership of them. Beyond just recognizing rareness in the book world there is a whole psychology to collecting that Bartlett gives some insight into.

As of the publishing of this book in 2009 the Gilkey story is still evolving as the author revealed in her afterword. Gilkey is still stealing and learning new ways to do so. As a sociopath he is a very interesting character. By the end of her investigation Bartlett realized that he is not only trying to create a collection that is to be admired but is also trying to refashion his own persona into a kind of “gentleman” that others should look up to. How strange. For my most recent nonfiction adventure it was well worth the travel into the world of rare book collecting and also into the world of a strange kind of sociopath.

THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE - Diane Ackerman

It's 6 in the morning and I have been up since 2:00 with a tummy ache and worry over my sick cat so I finally told myself to post about this book. I have been avoiding it for a month. The reason being that I have read it for two book discussion groups and was waiting until the second meeting to avoid posting twice. But after the second meeting I was a little miffed and so avoided thinking about it. But I digress.
 

My adult Literati group in Monroe, Indiana had been so anticipating reading this selection since last summer when we chose it. We like to pick one or two nonfiction per year to read and member of our group so liked Zookeeper that we could hardly wait to get to it. We finished off our school year with this book in May. We totally enjoyed it.

It is a remarkable true story about Jan and Antonina Zabinski who were the directors and operators of the Warsaw Zoo before during and after the WW II German occupation of Poland. Of course since the book is about the Warsaw ghetto and persecution of Polish Jews a reader knows there will be stories of heartache and loss within. But that is not the book's focus. It is the uplifting and heartwarming story of how the zookeepers spirit Jews out of the ghetto, protect, and feed them in the zoo and then send them on in the underground to safety. All the while they continue to take care of the remaining animals after the Nazi's kill most of the bigger ones and the wild ones they feel might be a threat if left loose. The Monroe Literati members had a good time doing some research about the Zabinski's and other people mentioned and finding out what happened to them after the war. We found later pictures of them and read about the honors they acquired in Israel for their work. In all there were 300 people that they helped to survive the war.

Of course the Zabinskis didn't work alone and there are plenty of stories here to enjoy about how they and other influential Polish people conspired right under the noses of the Nazis to take care of their neighbors. The lessons about how to appear Aryan given to the residents and the story about the extensive bug collection that survived and today resides as an important exhibit in a Polish museum were awe inspiring. I learned so much I didn't know about the Nazi machine also. For instance there is some explanation of the narcotics used to keep the German soldiers aggressive and a bit of their ideas about eugenics and reverse evolution by breeding.

The complicated procedures and signals the zoo residents used while sheltering Jews consisted of using music (a specific piece was played on the piano with gusto to signal Nazis being near) and coded phrases (when Rhys is sent to “feed the lizards” he is actually going to that section of the zoo but taking food to refugees) revealing the elements of both danger and humor in the book.

The hosts for this discussion decorated the tables with animals, WWII artifacts, and books about the Polish occupation including articles about the Zabinskis.

Alas, I was so excited to go to discussion with my public library group in June thinking we would also have a good time with this title but the reviews from that group were negative. Most did not like it and some didn't bother to read it saying someone told them they wouldn't like it. And so it goes. But that depressed me. So finally I am getting around to giving my $.02.

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY - Annie Barrows

Jay County Public Library Book Club met tonight to discuss this selection. I believe we all agreed that it was delightful and we had a good time with it. Eight of us presented ourselves which is a good turnout for this group anymore.

The format of the book is in correspondence between a popular British author/essayist and some of her friends, fans, and her publisher following WW II. When the book begins Juliet is living in London and is recuperating from having lost all her belongings and her precious books in the bombings, and trying to keep her temper in check while dealing with the public during book tours. Her life is drastically changed once she strikes up an interest in the residents of the Island of Guernsey as they begin to tell her through their letters about the time under German occupation. There is much pain and loss revealed in their stories as they share with Juliet, but also they exhibit humor and show her their resilient spirit.

While it was a bit hard for me to get started I was hooked by about the third letter. There are a lot of characters but they all become real to the reader. The culture of the island is so fun to enter into and their stories are enthralling. Of course one of the best stories is the one about the pig party and how the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society got started. Bibliophiles will revel in how once the society members are forced to read to continue their “cover-up” they all get hooked on their particular books. They even cite from their readings (Austen, Shakespeare, Bronte) to Juliet as they correspond with her.

There are several websites devoted to this book and to Guernsey which are interesting to investigate. Now I want to go there!

I had not done any research on this title before we read it but I did notice as I read that the last one-third or so of it seemed to not have the exact same feel to it in writing style and even the plot lines seemed to me to get a bit cliché for this particular book, or a bit too predictable. Then I read that the author had died before the editing was complete so I am wondering if that had something to do with it.

But I still liked it a lot. Also, there is really no such thing as potato peel pie. That was made up during the writing of the book to illustrate that nothing was was wasted during the war.

PS

Did you know that the term for something constructed in the form of written letters is an epistolary? Therefore, this book is in epistolary form. Why did I not know that?

THE UNNAMED - Joshua Ferris

 

Started it Monday morning and had to read until I finished it Tuesday evening. What a page turner. Which is hard to imagine since there is no murder and no mystery. It is a heart wrenching tale of a wealthy couple whose lives are devastated by the husband's strange and unnamed illness. With all their money and influence it is still impossible to find a doctor that can identify or treat his obsession to walk out of and away from his life and continue to walk to the point of total exhaustion. It comes on with no warning and he simply MUST just walk away from whatever he is doing and wherever he is at the time. He will walk no matter what the elements and will walk until his body gives out and he collapses.

Tim Farnsworth is a very successful lawyer in NYC and has survived two terrible bouts of the illness as the novel begins. He and his family have been, up to this point, able to adapt, hide it, and fix things but now it is back and is so aggressive that he begins to lose everything. And I do mean lose in the literal term. Since he cannot stop walking he is subjected to harsh weather causing frostbite and tissue death. For much of the novel the family copes and Tim's wife Jane is able to rescue him each time. But as the illness progresses he walks farther away and can no longer do his job. Eventually it gets so bad and he becomes so irrational that she can no longer figure out where he is. Then begins the long years of trying to find him and make sure he has not died. After years of endless walking Tim starts to become psychotic and his personality begins to split.

The love story between Tim and Jane is heart-wrenching. They try so hard to keep their life together, save each other, and to not damage their daughter. I found it interesting and inventive. Years ago I was interested in another author, Anne Tyler who also liked to create quirky characters with bizarre mental illnesses or personality disorders. I read so many I forget all the titles but I do remember they all took place in Baltimore. Saint Maybe was good and I also liked The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons, and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.