Here are the first lines of the six books plus
one essay I finished reading in June.
Book 1
I shouldn’t have come to this party. I’m not
even sure I belong at this party.
Book 2
When I was a kid, my aspirations were simple.
I wanted a dog. I wanted a house that had stairs in it—two floors for one
family.
Book 3 (okay, this is the essay)
It had been like dying, that sliding down the
mountain pass. It had been like the
death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the
region of dread.
Book 4
Late one evening toward the end of March, a
teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the
gun to someone else’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.
* * *
This is the story of how we got there.
Book 5
The beach is not the place to work; to read,
write or think. I should have remembered that from other years. Too warm, too
damp, too soft for any real mental discipline or sharp flights of spirit. One
never learns.
Book 6
"Hey! You! Macaroni Boy!"
Mike Costa whirled. He'd
recognize that voice anywhere - Andy Simms, the worst kid in the Strip. And I have the rotten luck to have him
sitting right next to me in Sister Mary John's sixth- grade class.
The titles and authors revealed:
Book 1
The Hate U Give by Angie
Thomas.
This is a Young Adult novel which I found quite
effective at getting to the heart of one African American family’s will to
simply survive in 21st Century America. That struggle has got to be resulting in
PTSD. It includes some comic relief in the form of
discussions of food and culture. I recommend this
book.
Book 2
Becoming, by Michelle Obama, © 2018.
How Michelle Obama made her way in the world,
raised her children. Ample evidence of
the nastiness of politics and the long-term effects of Jim Crow.
A quote:
My
grandfather, born in 1912, was the grandson of slaves, the son of a millworker,
and the oldest of what would be ten children in his family. A quick-witted and
intelligent kid, he’d been nicknamed “the Professor” and set his sights early
on the idea of someday going to college. But not only was he black and from a
poor family, he also came of age during the Great Depression. After finishing
high school, Dandy went to work at a lumber mill, knowing that if he stayed in
Georgetown, his options would never widen. When the mill eventually closed,
like many African Americans of his generation he took a chance and moved north
to Chicago, joining what became known as the Great Migration, in which six
million southern blacks relocated to big northern cities over the course of
five decades, fleeing racial oppression and chasing industrial jobs.
…
the big
factories in Chicago regularly hired European immigrants over African American
workers. Dandy took what work he could find, setting pins in a bowling alley
and freelancing as a handyman. Gradually, he downgraded his hopes, letting go
of the idea of college…
Reading it made me appreciative of what the
Obama family gave of themselves for our country.
Book 3
“Total Eclipse” (essay) by Annie Dillard, in
the collection The Abundance © 2016. Essay
originally published in 1982 in Teaching
a Stone to Talk.
You can read Dillard's essay at this link. Her depiction of a total solar eclipse as
mind-blowing is reinforced in this more recent account of an eclipse.
Book 4
Beartown, by Fredrik Backman, © 2016
(originally published in Swedish in 2016 as Björnstad) ; English language translation copyright © 2017 by Neil
Smith.
Ugh. Had to slog through it, but I did
finish. I did it for the team, ha ha,
that is, for book club. It’s the story
of a violent incident in a violent small Swedish town but mostly about a
violent sport – hockey. If I have to
read one more sentence about how hockey demands everything… That said, I think it is hard to write about
teenagers for a non-teen audience, but Backman’s teen characters seemed
believable to me.
Book 5
Gift from the Sea, by Anne
Morrow Lindbergh, © roughly 1955, renewed in 1975 and 1983.
This is a treatise on the author’s philosophy
of a woman’s life cycle. It seemed odd to
me that Lindbergh wrote of the fruits of feminism, in 1955. (It’s not clear if she updated the book in
1975, or just wrote a new preface/postlude.)
Had feminism produced big gains by 1955?
Some excerpts:
- Every
person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some
part of each week, and each day. How revolutionary that sounds and how
impossible of attainment.
- The
problem is more how to still the soul in the midst of its activities. In fact,
the problem is how to feed the soul.
- Mechanically,
woman has gained in the past generation. Certainly in America, our lives are
easier, freer, more open to opportunities, thanks—among other things—to the
Feminist battles.
I counted this in the “beach read” category in
the library’s Bookshelf Bingo.
Book 6
Macaroni Boy, by
Katherine Ayres. © 2003.
Children’s lit. Taking place in Pittsburgh during the Great
Depression, this book is about a 6th grade boy confronting a bully. Includes a banana warehouse explosion that
happened in real life. It was a pleasant
and unusual experience to read a book that takes place in our area.
