Dear Adele

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard.  I tried to read this book years and years ago and could not get into it, but after my recent reading of Dillard’s brilliant An American Childhood (see below), I gave Pilgrim another try.  At over 50 pages in, I was finally there, but it took awhile, maybe because I’m damned tired all the time and this is not the thing to be reading if you’re a sleep-deprived parent, or maybe because Dillard’s meditations here are enormous in their scope.  Life, death, cruelty, suffering, the creator–all discussed through beautiful writing about the lives and death of insects and various creek animals Dillard studies through years of observations and science texts.  Dillard has the cajones to tackle these sorts of themes–directly and boldly–and the intelligence and breadth of knowledge (from entomology to philosophy to literature to theology) to make me think about them in new and astonishing ways.  I learned more from this book than anything I’ve read in… well, maybe ever.  But it’s a tough read.  If you don’t take every sentence slowly, you’ll miss something.  It wore me out.   But I hold bugs now.  I look at them, I study them.  I appreciate my grass, I appreciate leaves on the ground, I am grateful that I wasn’t eaten by my mother after I was born.  This all sounds trivial, I know, but it isn’t.  This is the purpose of the book.  Read it and you’ll understand.

Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. A book of long short stories about a variety of very successful and intelligent Bengali immigrants to the United States who live in and around Boston. Most of the characters have something to do with Harvard. If these sentences don’t inspire you to read the book, then maybe this one will: the book is beautifully written, and the people that Lahiri creates made my heart ache with… you know, that longing that fantastic writing makes us all ache with, and made me want to hold my children, and made me want to look at the sky for a while and figure everything out. Her stories are all about ephiphanies and relationships and healing and death and fleeting meaning, and I could not stop reading the book once I was a few pages in. I also learned a lot about Bengali culture–especially its women.

An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard. Hardly ever do I read anything–a book chapter, an article, a story, whatever–that makes me so inspired and amazed and panting in wonder that I read said thing again. This book is an exception. Of course I’ve known who Annie Dillard is for years and years, but this is the first book of hers I’ve ever read. (If you’re a writer, don’t make this mistake. Go read her work now. Right now.) The first sentence was an awakening: “When everything else has gone from my brain–the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family–when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.” She has this trope she returns to all the way through, of this tinged awareness she’s had since childhood that she was watching her own existence. Could be I’m so stunned by this because this speaks to me–I know exactly what she’s talking about–but doesn’t this concept–how we watch ourselves–speak in some way to everyone? Which is what stellar writing is, I suppose. Dillard lived a life of tranquil, intellectual privilege–I’m not accustomed to reading such a memoir, nor would I have chosen this, necessarily, as something I’d be interested in. But Dillard’s mind, the way it works to churn out this heavy, meaningful, beautiful prose, is amazing. I think, too, it’s a terrible shame that studying bugs and artifacts in museums and pondering the reeds in a pond is, in our world, a luxury. I’m guessing Dillard does as well.

Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison: Transforming Breast Cancer Stories Into Action, by Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman. This book tells the breast cancer narratives of Rachel Carson, the environmentalist who changed public policy because of her work; Betty Ford, who went public with her breast cancer and started conversations that brought it to the forefront as an issue; Rose Kushner, who chose to defy doctors and elected to have the surgery she thought was best and went public with it all to change the brutal standard practice of the Halstead radical mastectomy; and Audre Lorde, who tied her battle with breast cancer to the ones she took on with Apartheid and institutional racism in the United States and the medical community. I learned a lot about breast cancer and politics from this book–I especially learned from the conclusion, which put breast cancer into a world context, something I don’t see much other writing about.

Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Greg Mortenson gives back to the Balti cultures he encounters as a climber in Pakistan by buying a tiny mountain village a school. Ten years later, he leads an organization that funds schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Central Asia Institute; after September 11, he adopts the concept that building these schools is a more effective way to fight terrorism than anything our government or military is doing. His work also proves that educating women and girls is an effective way to eliminate poverty and terrorism. Mortenson is the real thing; a fascinating, giving, unselfish philanthropist with no money of his own. I had a hard time getting through the book, though, because Relin’s writing is I think pretty cheesy and cliched, so I found myself annoyed as I read. But it’s worth every bit of frustration to learn what I did about Muslims, Islam, Pakistan, politics, climbing, love, terrorism, and war.

Midnight, by Sister Souljah. Is her narrator, Midnight, a fantasy, or are we supposed to take him seriously, or is Souljah hoping for this to be a movie, or what? This book is a prequel to The Coldest Winter Ever, which was good–Winter is a real, interesting, character (she was in love with Midnight), and the writing in that book is tight. Midnight tells us where the character from TCWE came from (Sudan) and all about how he’s a devoted, very real Muslim, warding off temptations from the American ghetto. But I was bothered by how perfect and mature Midnight was–surely he’s supposed to be a role model for black boys, but he just wasn’t believable–or is supposed to be a more mythical kind of figure? I realize (daily) how white I am, but I was consistently puzzled as to how I was supposed to read this book. I also didn’t like the pictures of the characters sprinkled throughout–they just made me think Souljah was hoping for a movie deal–and I thought the sex scenes between Akemi (perfect Japanese girl in Gucci) and Midnight (god-like 14 year old boy) were silly. However, I did learn about Islam and Sudanese culture, and I liked the way Souljah wove things together–a basketball team, a dojo, a fish store, a book shop, a Sudanese wedding. You ever try to write a novel? Weaving settings and plot together is hard to do, and she does it. Well. A lot better than I could.

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Classic, conventional, creative nonfiction in the likes of In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song. LeBlanc shares the most intimate details of several linked Puerto Rican families in the Bronx. All are poverty ridden. Men and women are in and out of prison, girls have babies, everyone is powerless. It’s depressing and shocking, so much so that the first 50 pages were tough for me to get through. I kept waiting for LeBlanc to explain something, introduce herself, give me something to go on–why were things this bad? Why do people choose to live this way? What the fuck was going on? Then I realized that this explanation was not coming, that the lack of explanation was the point, and I became totally engrossed in the book. Tremendously informative, depressing, moving, and thick with more detail than anything I’ve read in a long time. LeBlanc recently won a MacArthur Genius Grant. I can see why.

Rain of Gold, by Victor Villasenor. Um, I cannot keep reading it. I’m 100+ pages in, but the writing style is so flowery and… condesending to the characters, or something? It really isn’t like me to put a book down like this, but I just have so many other things I want to read and the tone of the thing makes me literally cringe. I have a lot of respect for writers and for Villasenor, and I’m sorry. I just can’t do it. I’m sure it’s a wonderful wonderful book.