A Life of Restless Energy and an Energetic Read

Title: On the Move: A Life
Author: Oliver Sacks
Host: Chris at Open Book

After an initial hubbub caused by changes to the Loft Literary Center's book club room policy, we settled down to the energetic business of revisiting the amazing life of Oliver Sacks. Before reading this memoir, which Sacks characterizes as autobiography, each of us had known at least something about Sacks. But that limited knowledge had prepared none of us for the arc of his life and the sheer magnitude of his experiences.

Insights and Opinions

+ What is remarkable about this book is Sacks' incredible generosity with the reader. He was willing to write, to share everything, to reveal his flaws, and to let us really see him.

+ Unlike other books we've read, which we sometimes race through to get to the end before our book club conversation, many of us found ourselves slowing down to really savor it. The writing is superb, and his descriptions of his work with neurobiology and color perception opened a whole world about which we knew very little.

+ Sacks seems to have never thrown a thing away. All of his letters, journals, letters he received from others -- he saved everything, and then used it in this book. Shirley wondered if this compelling need to record everything, including thoughts as they came to him, the writing of which he didn't necessarily remember doing, could reveal savant tendencies or perhaps a place somewhere on the autism spectrum.

Oliver Sacks, M.D., called "the poet laureate of medicine"
by the New York Times.

+ We were all uniformly amazed at the breadth of his experiences. How many lives would include chapters as a body builder, a biker dude, a drug addict, and a leading scientist of perception and the mind? And to be part of a family that included Al Capp and Abba Eban as his uncles? To have W. H. Auden as a best friend?

+ Sacks died just days before we talked about this book, and the memorial coverage exposed his knowledge that death was near, and his acceptance of its inevitability. Yet his life story is infused with an incredible will to live. He should have died many times, between the unsafe homosexual sex, the risks he took on his motorcycle, the drugs, the time he was found unconscious in an Amsterdam gutter -- and at the same time, he was recording this elegant writing, and making an incredible contribution with his work.

+ Chris admires the workings of his brain -- to be so unendingly curious, to keep poking, poking, poking. Shouldn't we all aspire to this?

+ Sacks came up scientifically during a period when scientists still shared their work with each other while doing it. Reading about these exchanges is fascinating, and adds historical detail that fleshes out our understanding of his discoveries and how he got to answers.

Oddments and Telling Details

We spent a little time talking about what we have all been reading beyond our book club selections. For those of you who want to know what this remarkable group of readers has been up to, here is the list of "recently read."
+ All the Light We  Cannot See (Vickie)
+ Life After Life (Liz)
+ Fates and Furies (Joanne)
+ Academic books on early modern literature (Shirley)
+ Short Loves That Last Forever (missed the reader of this one)

A Reckoning with Personal History Against a Tumultuous 20th Century Backdrop

Title: Old Filth
Author: Jane Gardem
Host: Blanche at Open Book

Let's start with a bit of a plot summary,  just to ground ourselves in the discussion that follows. Here's how the publisher describes our monthly read.

"Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar.

Yet through it all, he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life.

He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away."

This is the first volume in a trilogy, which includes The Man in the Wooden Hat, which tells the story from the perspective of Feathers' wife Betty and Last Friends, which describes the marriage of Edward Feathers and Betty seen through the eyes of Betty's lover Terry Veneering.

Insights and Opinions

+ Feathers' past is revealed slowly, through his present-day musings and some overheard conversations, and through flashbacks to his early life. It takes some time to adjust to what Chris called the "back-and-forthing," and since we haven't actually met any of these characters in the early pages, it's a bit of a challenge to track with names and what's really happening now, what happened then, and what may be Feathers' imaginings.

+ Joanne, who had tried to read it in interrupted chunks, found that method impossible as you really need to sit with it and concentrate on it in a continuous flow. After finishing, she picked it up again to reread it, and couldn't put it down. On the second read, you appreciate everything that is being foreshadowed and which you missed on first reading.

+ Chris read the beginning, then skipped to the end, and then came back to the middle. "I felt like there was no order to this book, so why should I read it in order?" On the other hand, Chris enjoyed the writing if not the order of the book. But Blanche thought the slow reveal of people and events were the main strength of the book.

+ Liz found it fascinating that Feathers' seems to be two entirely different people -- one, the elder and entirely closed down Old Filth, and the other the young Eddie full of life and curiosity. His remoteness later in life is the understandable result of events in his life, and Gardem demonstrates a remarkable ability to make us understand the stiff upper lip of English gentry during that time period. Everything about his early life was designed to shut him off from other people. When we meet him, he is completely closed. Yet, he doesn't regret or even seem to notice this. His musings about Betty after she is dead are the first indication that he is capable of feeling love.

+ Vicky felt like the author must have had a good time writing this book -- being able to incorporate all of the historical elements, the war, the queen -- and then placing Eddie in the middle of them. "It really is wonderfully told," she said. "She does go outside of his point of view, but she does it kind of Virginia Woolfe-ish. There is a very skillful writer here. It's just spectacular."

+ Margy felt that Feathers' failed effort to write his memoirs "without statement or judgment" -- finding the task impossible -- summarizes the whole structure of the book.

+ We all agreed we would like to read the second book, which is told from Betty's perspective, as it's clear that Feather's views on Betty are entirely inaccurate -- a classic case of unreliable narrator.

+ The fact that this is a trilogy is perhaps reason enough for the slow reveal, but the book does stand on its own.

Go Set Your Watches: October is All Harper Lee

In a departure from our usual measured one-book-club-book-per-month pace, the Book Club Sisterhood (so named for one night only since Steve wasn't there) has broken with tradition to assign two books -- maybe three -- for October.

Yes, You Heard That Right

The publication of Harper Lee's novel Go Set A Watchman is the literary event of the decade. Maybe the century. We need to be part of it. So, for October, we will be reading both Go Set a Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird. And, if you have the time and appetite, you may also choose to read Marja Mill's account of living next door to the Lee sisters, The Mockingbird Next Door.

You are only required to read one of these books. Or, you may decide to read two and maybe three. Then, we'll gather in October to discuss whatever we have read. It will be mayhem.

To whet your appetite, we provide these links to articles:

The Harper Lee I Knew, Washington Post

Harper Lee's Lingering War Ghosts, Salon.com

Mixed Reviews and New Controversies Surround Harper Lee's Second Novel, Minnesota Public Radio

Next Up: H is for Hawk and On the Move

Being unusually organized, we've chosen books for the next two months. Here's what we will be reading.

August Selection

Title: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Date: August 17
Host: Steve

To whet your appetite, read this excerpt from the publisher's blurb: "When Helen Macdonald's father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer … she'd never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk's fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own…Heart-wrenching and humorous, this book is an unflinching account of bereavement and a unique look at the magnetism of an extraordinary beast."

September Selection

Title: On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks
Date: September
Host: Chris at Open Book

From the publisher: "When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.' It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California where he struggled with drug addiction and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life."


Let's get reading, people!

A Timely Look at Race Through the Eyes of Compelling Characters

Title: Americanah
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Host: Lois and Vicky at Open Book

Joanne pretty much summed up our response to Americanah when she noted "When something is this good, it's almost hard to discuss it." But discuss it, we did. Adichie took us on a broad exploration of the issues and experience of race, providing a deeply personal experience of what it's like to step into a culture so different from everything one has known, to be treated so differently, to completely lose status on the basis of race and culture. The protagonist, discussing the Nigerian experience, notes " I never felt black until I came to the U.S."

Insights and Opinions

+ Adiche takes her readers to a dinner party, where American whites -- and even middle-class blacks -- claim to understand what would drive refugees escaping from war or desperate privation to leave their homelands. But, like us, it's clear they have no clue about the pain of leaving to find a different life in a place where things are happening and where change is possible, driven by hunger for choice and certainty. The Nigerians we meet in the pages of this book are well fed and watered, and seem to lack for nothing. Except choice. Except certainly. They are looking for a life they can shape to their own wills and desires.

+ We read the Nigerian children's childhood as basically pretty good although dead-ended, even for those with good educations. Adiche expertly shows how even well-educated immigrants to First World countries are ground down by external factors of race and custom.

+ Your scribe (Lois) didn't note who said it, but one of us stated that on page 417, where a writer discusses her planned memoir and the opinion of her editor who says it isn't subtle enough: "When you write about race…you can do precious…or pretentious…you have to make sure it is so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race…all watery and fuzzy. Adiche's book is neither watery nor fuzzy. She takes it right out there, and we all felt very much as though we were reading about her own life "like a sword to our bones." She puts it all out there, unvarnished, and we love her characters anyway, identifying with aspects of several of them. But we hated that when we grew to love these characters, they all disappeared by part 7.

+ We agreed with so much of what Liz had to say in the email she sent, since she couldn't be with us in person, particularly that Adiche "Spent too much time on one too many boyfriends, working her way through 'types:' the rich American white boyfriend wanting an exotic girlfriend, the educated African American boyfriend 'type,' and the African boyfriend 'type.' While Liz thought the book might benefit from the expungement of about 200 pages and maybe by having the white boyfriend disappear (and some agreed), others thought he and his friends and family brought a richness to the narrative that we'd miss.

           

+ Liz wrote:  “Her considerations of race were fascinating and sometimes hilarious. My particular favorite is her riff on being Hispanic:  “ . .Hispanic, an American category that was, confusingly, both an ethnicity and a race, and she would remember Alma when, years later, she wrote a blog post titled ‘Understanding American for the Non-American Black: What Hispanic Means.'  Hispanic means the frequent companions of American blacks in poverty rankings, Hispanic means a slight step above American blacks in the American race ladder, Hispanic means the chocolate-skinned woman from Peru, Hispanic means the indigenous people from Mexico. Hispanic means the biracial-looking folks from the Dominican Republic. Hispanic means the paler folks from Puerto Rico. Hispanic also means the blond, blue-eyed guy from Argentina. All you need to be is Spanish-speaking but not from Spain and voila, you’re a race called Hispanic.” Liz said she passed this passage along to her “Hispanic” colleague Ruben, who is from Columbia. He found it too perfect for words and promptly posted it to Facebook.”

Thinks we are happy about

+ Vicky's new chapbook What Can Be Saved was published in January by Red Bird Chapbooks. For more information and to purchase, go here. 

+ Book Club food was exceptional this week, with Vicky's cupcakes from Wuollet’s and savory shortbreads from Lois. For those of you who asked for it, here is the recipe.

Savory Shortbread (from Closet Cooking)

INGREDIENTS (base recipe)

1 cup Stilton, gorgonzola, or Parmesan cheese, room temperature and crumbled

Please note the fancy signage

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, room temperature

1 cup flour

1/2 cup cornstarch

1/4 teaspoon salt

DIRECTIONS

1. Cream together the cheese and butter.

2. Mix in the flour, cornstarch, and salt, as listed below, followed by the nuts and/or herbs

If using gorgonzola:

Add 1/8 teaspoon cayenne, 1/3 cup pistachios, chopped, and 1 teaspoon lemon zest.

If using Stilton:

Add 1/2 teaspoon coarse grain pepper and 1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary

If using Parmesan, add 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, 1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme leaves, and 1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary

3. Shape into a roll about 1 inch thick. Chill in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.

4. Slice and arrange on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake in preheated 350° oven until shortbreads just starts to turn light golden brown, 8-14 minutes. Remove and let cool. (Note: the shortbread will still be rather soft when it's done, but will crisp up as it cools.)

The Imagined Lives of Virginia Woolf and Her Sister Vanessa Bell

Title: Vanessa and Her Sister
Author: Priya Parmar
Host: Liz

Just to keep the whole "Virginia Woolf thing" going, we chose this book as a follow-up to last month's reading of Woolf's The Waves. Having read, but perhaps not entirely mastered, that difficult book, we were in the mood for this fictionalized telling of the unusual relationship between Woolf and her sister, artist Vanessa Bell. In this glittering novel, author Priya Parmar imagines that Bell kept a diary, into which she committed her most intimate thoughts, including the abject betrayal resulting from Virginia's real-life "affair" with Bell's husband, Clive Bell.

Accustomed to the undivided attention of her sister Vanessa, Virginia is driven wild with jealousy after Vanessa gives birth to a child. To win back Vanessa's full attention, Virginia begins a flirtation with Vanessa's husband, which he takes seriously but which she never acts upon, but the damage between the sisters is done and irreparable.

Insights and Opinions

+ Steve found Parmar's book "breathtakingly beautiful," both for the prose and her insights into human nature. Lois agreed, observing that Parmar gives Vanessa Bell the "voice of a painter," a stunning achievement without actual access to real diaries from which to quote.

+ The work does include many letters from the real-life players in this story, taken from the historical record. Parmar skillfully uses those letters as the platform from which to leap into what might have happened.

+ Because this is a book about artists, and the self-absorption that can come with that package, the conversation turned to a rhetorical question: of the many members of the Bloomsbury Group and the many characters in this book, which two characters would you characterize as the most decent (since decency seemed in short supply)? Most everyone agreed they would be painter and critic Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey, the writer who is said to be the inspiration for Neville in Woolf's The Waves. (Strachey is also known for saying, at the moment of death, "If this is death, then I don't think much of it.") Fry was chosen by us for the decency award because he stands by his mentally ill wife, and Strachey because he is funny, but cares about everyone.

+ Liz thought the story paints Bell in a very positive light and Woolf in a very negative light. Per Liz: "No matter how thin you pour the pancake, there are still two sides." Margy noted that, throughout the story, Vanessa tells the reader frequently how Virginia can make people love her. Yet we never see this on the page. Ultimately, we end up disliking Virginia and feeling sorry for Vanessa.

+ Early in life, Vanessa is put in the position of caretaker to Virginia because she is special. This focus on her specialness makes her more ill.

+ Shirley suggested that perhaps this book would be a fun companion read for students who are studying Woolf.

+ We all agreed this is a fine work, bringing together fascinating characters, an important era in literary history, and elegant prose it is a pleasure to read.

In Lieu of the Actual Food

Not what we ate at book club

Since no pictures were taken of the actual book club food (and of course, we need that for the public record), we are using this picture of beignets and chicory coffee, taken at Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans, at a time just before our book club session. Photo credit goes to yours truly, who discovered that you can't talk while eating beignets because you can die from inhaling powdered sugar.

Waves of Confusion Morphing Into Delight

Title: The Waves
Author: Virginia Woolf
Host: Linda

The Set-up

Forgive me for plagiarizing from Wikipedia, but this seemed a good summary, so I purloined it:

First published in 1931, The Waves is Virginia Woolf's most experimental novel. It consists of soliloquies spoken by the books' six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jimmy, and Louis. Also important is Percival, the seventh character, though readers never hear him speak in his own voice. The soliloquies that span the characters' lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to sunset.

As the six characters speak, Woolf explores concepts of individuality, self and community. Each character is distinct, yet together they compose…a gestalt about a silent central consciousness.

Insights and Opinions

+ This is no easy book to read. Linda, a Virginia Woolf scholar, admitted to having tried twice before. Book club was the goad to finish it on this ultimate read. Joanne started it, couldn't keep the characters straight, decided that it didn't matter if she finished it, and just as she was about to bail out, said "all of a sudden it grabbed me, and I absolutely loved it. It's one long poem." Liz read it slowly at first for meaning, but felt judged by her Kindle app with it's little "learning speed" note in the lower corner, than tried to read it in a rush in case that would make a difference, then settled back into "learning speed," which was the right speed. You must read this book in a new way, and finally, you will catch on and ride with it.

Linda's impressive V. Woolf collection

+ The book's structure is intricate, with the only indication that the reader is moving into a different character being the addition of "…Bernard said" at the close of a sentence. As the title suggests, it is a series of continuous waves, and the reader best not fight against it but must just be carried along.

+ Shirley wasn't convinced, finishing it, but never being caught up in it. "I kept thinking there must be more to this than I'm getting, so I went to read Phyllis Rose, and found my own attitude….'takes one's breath away…but the overall effect is tedious…." Works like this one, and like those by Joyce and Faulkner, require a lot of effort -- an effort she's not willing to take anymore.

+ What kept Faith reading was Woolf's tenderness toward her characters, whatever their frailties.

+ Woolf is so sensitive to input and sensation, her descriptions are so poetic and odd, her metaphors and similes so strange, that Liz wondered how Woolf could get through her day. Both Liz and Faith agreed that the effort to write those sentences, each one so fully packed, would be exhausting. Intoxication and rapture seem to be how she writes, almost as if she wrote this in a fugue state.

+ While the characters merge and separate and merge again, they eventually emerge as distinct characters. Some felt they were distinct beings. Others felt they were all aspects of a single consciousness.

+ Percival stands out as the one character who never speaks for himself. Does he even exist outside of the perceptions of others?

+ Both Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster considered this to be Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. We all agreed that, in writing this, she was well ahead of her time.

Oddments from our non-book-related conversation

More than other months, our pre- and post-book discussion was quite random, including expected and unexpected topics, including:

+ Grandchildren and how swell they are

+ Whether we should all get hearing aids prophylactically

+ Tattoos as a good strategy for covering up wrinkles

+ If stress tests to measure your heart health can actually kill you

+ Whether growing weed in the basement can make your house blow up

Next up

For our April book, we will read Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar. Just to keep the whole Virginia Woolf thing going for awhile. Liz will host.

On Being Perfectly Imperfect

Title: Let Me Be Frank with You
Author: Richard Ford
Host: Faith

A Prelude to Our Discussion About This Month's Book

Last month, we read and discussed Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, a book so engaging to the group that we spent the first hour of this month's meeting in continued conversation. To refresh, Gawande, a practicing surgeon, lays out the "ultimate limitation" of his profession -- the ability of medicine to make a person's last weeks or months of life rich and dignified. Our assignment was to bring to this month's meeting our personal list of the three things each of us would require as a minimum in order to prolong our lives.

The Question: What are the three things you would need to want to prolong your life? At what point would you want no further medical intervention?

+ Joanne:  No chemotherapy, to be able to read, and to be healthy.

+ Steve: To be able to recall memories, to be able to express love to the people I care about, and to be able to eat and breathe without tubes.

+ Liz: Daily exposure to nature -- to be able to get outside, something to care about and be engaged with, and one friend.

Since I forgot to take a picture of the food, I submit this,
which seems relevant.

+ Linda: To be alive when I die (curious and alert), to hang on until my kids come, and to be able to love and have memories. (Linda also contributed a relevant quote without attribution: "Age resistance is a futile kind of life resistance. We can't live outside of time."

+ Faith: To have family and friends and to interact with them, to have books and writing, and painkillers, including Scotch.  "If you are 85, you really have to think about these things. If I were 45, well then yes, hook me up."

+ Lois: To be able to breathe and eat without assistance, to be able to see or hear so I can have books and stories, and to be able to visit with people. (Painkillers also are on Lois' list, but that's a fourth item, so it's here in parentheses).

+ Chris: (from afar): To have her curiosity intact and list of interests growing -- not just "taking up air," as her dad would say; able to motor on her own with no forced support, and able to give, receive and be aware of love.

In Which We Become Even More Frank with One Another

Our consideration of these final wishes made for a good lead-in to discussion of this month's book selection, Let Me Be Frank with You by Richard Ford. In four nearly free-standing stories, Ford's Bascombe openly and frankly admits his post-retirement process of closing down, his jettisoning of what he considers to be unimportant in this later chapter of this life -- friends, unnecessary niceties, striving; in fact, most things he considered critical to a good life early on.

All taking place in the recent aftermath of Hurricane Sandy on the east coast, Let Me Be Frank with You overlays the physical wreckage of Bascombe's community with the unsettled pieces of his personal life. Hilarious and irreverent, Bascombe thinks and does the things we are all too embarrassed to admit to think and do. He is, as the title suggests, entirely frank with us.

+ Ford is a masterful writer whose skill, in Steve's view, makes up for the main character's "jaded point of view." His keen insights into human nature are both truthful and a little painful.

+ Lois, on the other hand, feels that the character's innate cynicism lends a wonderful sharpness to his observations. Bascombe feels entirely free to offer his cynical point of view.

+ Liz felt that each of the four stories was a study in Bascombe's inadequacy as well as profound disconnection from other humans in his life. "In every story, I expected him to become a better person, but he never does."

+ Joanne and Faith both disagreed entirely.  Both connected to Bascombe, recognizing that as one's energy diminishes, what you care about shifts. "He's not that wonderful, and I'm not either."

+ None of us really understand Frank Bascombe's concept of his "default self," which is a face he adopts in his interaction with others. But is it the real face? Or protective coloration? We weren't sure. Steve felt it meant making himself invisible and staying out of trouble. Joanne and Faith both felt he was too young to have a default self.

+ Linda pointed out that the end of each story contains the title of the next story, something others of us hadn't noticed. She notes that the Bascombe character is not unhappy with himself, nor is he unhappy. In his own words "We are how we are because we like it that way."

+ While she enjoyed the reading, Liz disliked the main character, feeling that reading him was reading a continuous interior monologue of superiority. Joanne and Faith disagreed. Joanne: "He is empathetic to himself." And, Faith: "He understands his own shortcomings." And, finally Steve: "Isn't that the challenge for all of us? To accept the weird creatures that we are?"

Next Up

For our February meeting, we will read A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, and we promise to table the conversation about death and dying, at least for the moment.

Next Up: Let Me Be Frank with You

Date: Monday, January 19
Host: Faith

From the publisher: "A brilliant new work that returns Richard Ford to the hallowed territory that sealed his reputation as an American master: the world of Frank Bascombe and the landscape of his celebrated novels The Sportswriter, the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner winning Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land.

In his trio of world-acclaimed novels portraying the life of an American generation, Richard Ford has imaged one of the most indelible and widely discussed characters in modern literature, Frank Bascombe. Through Bascombe -- protean, funny, profane, wise, often inappropriate -- we've witnessed the aspirations, sorrows, longings, achievements and failings of an American life in the twilight of the twentieth century.

Now, in Let Me Be Frank with You, Ford reinvents Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurrican Sandy. In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity. It is a moving and wondrous and extremely funny odyssey through the America we live in at this moment. Ford is here again working with the maturity and brilliance of a writer at the absolute height of his powers."

Here is a terrific interview with Ford from Fresh Air.

Interview with Richard Ford