Bingo Questions Answered! Plus, Reading Update From the Empty Nest

 

 

Hello, February!

 

I wanted to update you all on my progress through my midlife crisis. Both of my children departed the nest last month and journeyed to their sub-optimal Covid-era college situations. That’s right – my nest has no tiny birds in it anymore! Most of the time, I am happy to celebrate my lack of responsibility by having potato chips and bourbon for dinner while watching movies from the 80s. Also, Midlife Crisis Bingo has helped. 

 

 

Speaking of which, I appreciate that so many of you are Bingo-curious! Many of you have contacted me in an effort to clarify the rules. Here are a few examples:

 

1)    Can I read cookbooks?

2)    Can I read children’s literature?

3)    Can I read comic books?

4)    Can I read art books?

5)    Can I read sports books?

6)    Can I read really short books?

 

My answer to all of these things is YES! Read whatever the heck you want. Everything goes. There is no such thing as the Bingo Police. 

 

But hold up, my life partner just told me that I am a liar. When he asked me if he could read one book this year and put it in every single square, I said no. “Isn’t that a rule?” he asked, smugly. I have since made a set of punitive rules specifically for him. Moreover, I am making him fill out a nightly reading log and do a plot summary of each book he reads if he wants to get an A in Bingo. 

 

For the rest of you, I want to show you how most things that I read will naturally find their way to a square, especially in these early months. Here are the books I read in January. I will show you which squares (descriptions of squares are here) they could possibly inhabit. 

 

You can print this card here

 

Eat a Peach by David Chang: This is a memoir by the creator of the Momofuku restaurant in NYC. He discusses a variety of things, including what it’s like to be an Asian American restaurant chef in a historically white arena; the role of creativity in the restaurant business; and his own struggles with mental illness. Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; Hero and Sidekick; Free to Be You and Me; Life Unlike Your Own; Delicious; Truth Be Told.

One Grave Too Many by Beverly Connor: I have been kvetching a bit about reading too many books with too little plot, so I decided to have a plot sundae with all the toppings. I have a soft spot for police procedurals with female forensic detectives at the helm, and I found an old series that is new to me! This is the first book in the series. The main character is a specialist in mass graves who decides to exchange that depressing career for a gentler one in a natural history museum. Murdered bodies turn up anyway. Good times! Squares where this book could work for me: Free to Be You and Me; Most Comfortable Sweatpants; Get a Clue.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu: This book won the 2020 National Book Award. Most of the narrative is in the form of a screenplay. The main character, Willis Wu, is an actor of Taiwanese descent. He is limited by the very few roles available to Asian and Asian American actors, roles that blur ethnicities into stereotypes. Underneath the story about film roles is the story about the actual roles that immigrants from Asian countries and Asian Americans fill in American society and the ways that structural racism constrains those roles. Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; Made It Big; Free to Be You and Me; Life Unlike Your Own; Hot Topic. 

 

The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months of Unearthing the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country by Helen Russell: This British author and her husband move for a year to a seaside house in rural Denmark and contemplate why the people they meet claim to be so happy. They encounter all sorts of unfamiliar and kooky Danish traditions. She also finds herself confronting the deep and vast state reach into its citizens' lives -- which is so supportive (education; health care; work/life balance promotion) and also constraining (taxes; rules). Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; The Great Escape; Long Trip; Free to Be You and Me; Life Unlike Your Own; I Wonder; Side Splitter.

 

Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore: This is a light, breezy version of a time travel novel. In it, the main character lives her life jumping between years, all out of order. You could go deep and ask questions about whether you’d want to change events if you already knew the outcome, or you could just let easy books stay easy. Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; Out of Time; Free to Be You and Me. 

 

Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie: This novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, and I first read it in 1993. So this was a second go-round for me. The story focuses on two American professors as they embark on a sabbatical in London. It’s about roles and faking and hiding and acting and obscuring and crafting an image of yourself based on expectations. Squares where this book could work for me: Long Trip; Made It Big; Free to Be You and Me; Always Meant To.

 

The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh: This was an intensely powerful memoir of a Korean American young woman whose parents left her to fend for herself at age 14. She connects her personal experience of this trauma with the long history of trauma of her female relatives in Korea. This history alternates with actual letters her mother sent her during their separation. The letters are in multiple languages, and she explains how translation became part of her sense-making of her place in her own story. Squares where this book could work for me: Spring Chicken; Might Sting a Little; Free to Be You and Me; Truth Be Told.

See how easy Bingo is? Don’t overthink it. Just play! Please tell us about what you’re reading and which square(s) the book might fulfill. 

 

I will end by sharing one final question from a reader: What do I get if I do this? 

 

First of all, I appreciate your mercenary approach to Bingo. I’m guessing you want a pony. Unfortunately, I can’t afford postage on a pony. But if you play along, you might get some good conversation. You might make a new friend. You’ll get some camaraderie during a time of isolation. And one lucky whole-card-finishing participant will win a book at the end of the year. It might even be a book about ponies.

Blogtastic!: The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Today I’ll be writing about the fourth square on my 2017 Leaning Stack of Books Diversity Challenge bingo card: Book By An “Award Winning” Author of Color. I read The Round House by Louise Erdrich not because I wanted to, but because my high school aged sons were assigned to read this in class.  And I knew from reviews --EEK, the subject matter! And I don’t think this is a spoiler because it happens in Chapter 1:

The main character’s mother is raped, and the bad guy tries to set her on fire.

This struck me as a shocking topic for a tenth grade discussion until I realized that it’s probably the plot of half of the mass market thrillers on bookstore shelves. But still, trigger warning for this entire book!

The main character is a Native teenager who, as his family struggles with this crime, has to confront the idea of justice. And the crime happens at a place where location matters – will it be subject to United States federal law or tribal law? The question of rights and authority is literal, but it is also philosophical: can there ever be real justice for indigenous groups?

The other thing that is striking about this book is that it is a coming-of-age story. So much of this book did resemble novels that I had to read in high school: The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, etc. It is the terribleness of the crime that sets it apart, and the fact that a young boy has to live with that kind of violence. Is the reason that I was so shocked at this content because people like me (white, economically stable) can assume a protected childhood? Is this belief just another facet of privilege? There’s a connection here to Between the World and Me, in which Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writes a letter to his son about what it means to be young, black boy today. The message: The world might be safe for some people, but it’s not safe for you.

What would Holden Caulfield say about the fact that adults made an online quiz about him to help kids get good grades in school?

I also saw a connection with Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (#4 on my Best of 2017 list). That book has coming-of-age elements (main character is a teen boy coming to understanding about his family), and it also confronts the idea of whether justice is possible for the characters. There are cultural ghosts in both novels that tether the current day story to history. I can imagine a fantastic book club discussion with the three books together (Erdrich, Coates, Ward) – assuming, of course, that your book club wants to dive into deepest literary sadness.

The Round House won the National Book Award in 2012. Erdrich’s 2009 novel, The Plague of Doves, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.  Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Award in 1984.

The internet just told me that Erdrich owns Birchbark Books in Minneapolis. It’s an independent bookstore that focuses on Native literature and community. So if you’re there for the Super Bowl, go check it out!

Here’s a 2012 New York Times interview with Erdrich about The Round House. And here’s a new one from Elle magazine. The interviewer is Margaret Atwood!

The Top 5 of 2017: #4

I generally don’t like books that feature ghosts, and this is a novel about hauntings. But the ghosts in Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward are the hauntings of injustices, and they explain the legacy of deep racism on a particular family in a particular place. On the surface this is kind of a road trip book – a family goes to pick up their father from prison in Mississippi. But while most road trip books are about the freedom of the open road, the family here isn’t yet free. The significance of the journey from small segregated town to prison is brutal.

Ward deserves all her notoriety, which includes two National Book Awards (including one for this novel) and a MacArthur Genius Award.  She approaches storytelling like a poet -- there is not a single word in her book that doesn’t matter.  Spoiler Alert: This idea will be a contrast with my Best of 2017 #s 3-1. Stay tuned!

So, basically, I knew this book would be stunning when I sat down to read it. And stunning it was, though I will admit to being more captivated with 2011’s Salvage the Bones. Reading a Ward novel is like going to a restaurant with a master chef. Every bite is meaningful and flavorful and packed with goodness. There’s no extra fat or additives, and you don’t feel bloat at the end. Her writing is, simply, brilliant.

And I’ve been struck this year how we’ve come to associate brilliance and good ideas and smart people and intellectual development with either snobbery or dullness. “Charisma” has come to mean, for the lack of a better word, shouty. I wonder what our world would look like if we read Jesmyn Ward interviews in People magazine and heard her thoughts on CNN – rather than, well, the folks that we do.

This is for sale at zazzle.com. Yay, captalism?

You can read more about Ward here and here and here.

Review of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, is stunning. It really deserves a second read to see all the images and layers and questions, but there’s no way I’m jumping back into this harrowing story right now. Of course, one of Whitehead’s points as he takes his reader on a journey away from slavery is that this story is also the present. The reader should be devastated about this past and also about what we’re doing in our contemporary world.

The book follows Cora, a slave who escapes a Georgia plantation. The first 50 or so pages of the novel is straight-up historical fiction, but then Whitehead creates an alternate world in which the underground railroad is an actual railroad, with stations and trains. Moreover, he gets fancy with time periods. For instance, Cora leaves pre-Civil War Georgia and lands in a version of South Carolina that has skyscrapers and elements of history from the early 20^th century.  The train travels to other states, too, and all of them incorporate different elements of social relations, racism, and the historical record. 

This book has all the terrible elements you’d expect from a story about slavery – so be warned that this will be a difficult read. I had a particularly interesting moment about two-thirds of the way through the story that reminded me of my experience reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. When I read that novel, I was struck by how much of a hopeful reader I am. I really need to believe in the possibility of happily-ever-after. It became increasingly clear in A Little Life that I was going to need to change my expectations. In The Underground Railroad, I also had a prick of awareness that “the North” might not be the magic terminus of this railroad and this story. And that is part of Cora’s experience here, too.  Hope drives her along but her experiences provide evidence that the hopefulness might be fruitless. (Discussion question: Is this ultimately a hopeful book?)

The Underground Railroad is the second terrific novel I’ve read this year about slavery and its legacy. Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, is also brilliant. It would be interesting to read these two books together and discuss the authors’ different approaches and interpretations. However, I’d sandwich a book about rainbows and unicorns in the center, because otherwise your heart might not be able to handle it.

You can find an good interview with Whitehead here (some spoilers included). The Underground Railroad is the current Oprah Bookclub pick and a 2016 National Book Award finalist.

Review of Another Brooklyn By Jacqueline Woodson

Another Brooklyn is Jacqueline Woodson’s new novel – but is it a novel? I don’t know. Woodson is queen of the “prose/poem,” and Another Brooklyn strikes me as a genre-blending work. It is short – just 173 pages, with brief sections of text and wide margins. The language is spare and unflinching.

My first exposure to Woodson’s work was with 2014’s Brown Girl Dreaming. That memoir earned her the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Another Brooklyn is marketed as an “adult” novel, but it is a reasonable choice for older teenagers, too. There is sexual content and some serious themes, but this coming-of-age story will still appeal to younger audiences.

The novel is a snapshot of growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s. The main character, August, describes her friendship with four other girls, pulling the reader through the emotions of being  teenagers grappling with family tragedy, first love, religion, and betrayal. In this sense, this book has an “every girl” quality about it. But it is also a story particular to African Americans growing up in this particular time period. August is navigating her family’s journey from the rural south to the urban Northeast. She is navigating issues of class in the African American community. She watches her neighborhood experience white flight and the effects of segregation.  The strength of the story lies in Woodson’s ability to pull the universal and the particular together in a seamless way.

But if I’m honest, I wish that Woodson had put the meet some more meat on the bones of this work. I wanted her to fill up the pockets between the lines. There’s a distance that the prose/poem style creates that I wanted to bridge. I wanted to fall into this story, and the beautiful-ness of it pushed me away.

Critics don’t seem to share this concern. Another Brooklyn was recently longlisted for this year’s National Book Award.

Here’s an interesting interview with Woodson, where she addresses Daniel Handler’s infamous watermelon joke at the National Book Award ceremony. And here's her “By the Book” interview in a recent New York Times Book Review.

Thoughts about Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine is a multi-form examination of the ways in which white Americans dehumanize African-Americans in small, daily, escalating ways.  The forms in this book include poetry, short essays, and visual art. Rankine begins with small stories of micro-aggressions  -- friends who make “just” an off-hand comment about race, service professionals who come to conclusions based on race, strangers who shift away on public transportation. All these “small” events collect in the life of the African-American narrator. Then the book turns to larger, more sensational events (e.g. Hurricane Katrina, the killing of Trayvon Martin, the “Jena Six” assault…), which Rankine writes as “scripts.” (And what are scripts? Part of a performance? A pre-written story? So much to discuss!). Photographs, paintings, and other images connect the different poems and essays.

One of the more arresting images from the book -- "Jim Crow Road" by Michael David Murphy. You can google the street in Flowery Branch, GA. Of course, Rankine's point is that this street is everywhere.

Some of you know that I teach classes about education policy. Much of the conversation in these classes centers on the achievement gap, which is the space between white and more affluent kids’ test scores and the test scores of minority kids and kids who struggle with poverty. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that my students’ increasingly relentless and well-intentioned focus on test score data has yielded an unfortunate consequence: they are not really talking about children as human beings anymore. Take out the word “child,” and substitute “growth rate.”

Quantitative data is important. It certainly lets us look at different variables across time and space. It lets us compare contexts. But when data becomes the end goal, it is easy to forget that real people exist under the numbers. And when we don’t think about real people – when we separate physically and emotionally – it becomes easier to dehumanize. 

Please listen to This American Life's "The Problem We All Live With, Part 1" episode if you haven’t already. There’s also a compelling Part 2, but Part 1 knocked me to the floor. That is what we get when we dehumanize. That is the society we create.

What I love about Citizen: An American Lyric is that it asks the reader to sit down and listen. Really listen. Citizenship is a common project, and we owe it to ourselves to take this critique seriously.

You can find interesting interviews with Rankine all over the place. I liked this one. I also liked this essay she wrote in the New York Times.

Review of Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

I have had Charming Billy by Alice McDermott in my stack forever, so I decided it would be a great addition to my 2015 TBR PILE Challenge. One note about my 2015 TBR PILE Challenge: I am very behind.  I have only read four of the twelve books I promised to read, and it’s already July. I’m thinking that I might have to write a future post on Bookish Procrastination – though it’s likely that I’ll never get around to it.

Here's the TBR pile I promised to read

Little did I know when I picked up Charming Billy that I would be reading yet another book about grieving. Other books I have read recently that consider this theme are A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman, The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood, and Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín.

Charming Billy is more than just a story about grief, however. It’s also a story about faith. And I’d argue that it’s more specifically about how faith works as part of Irish-American cultural identity. The book’s plot– if you want to call it that – involves a gathering of friends and family at Billy Lynch’s funeral. As they mourn together, they grapple with whether Billy died of alcoholism or of the effects of a broken heart. The reader learns about both conditions – his drinking and his loss – as the narrative jumps around in time.

At the center of Billy’s life is a romantic loss. When he finds out that the love of his life has died back in Ireland, he is devastated, and that devastation goes on to influence all of the decisions he makes. But it turns out that perhaps Billy does not know the whole truth about his love’s death – in fact, he has been told a story about her that is not real. McDermott is asking whether comforting stories help or harm. And with that, she is asking questions about the function of religion as an organizing feature of this particular community’s world.

This book won the National Book Award in 1998, and it has many of the features of a lot of award-winning contemporary literature. The writing is gorgeous and subtle, and the ideas it plays with are big and profound. I’m glad I finally read it. But I will stress that this the kind of book to read when you’re feeling cozy and contemplative. It is not a page-turner, and I was surprised how long it took me to get through this slim volume. 

This is definitely a good novel to check out if you’re interested in Irish American ethnic culture or identity. The characters’ traditions, the way they care for one another and offend one another, the way they celebrate and self-destruct, and the way they communicate seem particular rather than universal. It would be interesting to pair this with a novel about another American cultural group and do some literary comparison (hint: book club idea!).

You can find a good interview with Alice McDermott here.