Pillars, Magic Lanterns, Bird Cloud, and Food Matters

Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth
What a book! Over a thousand pages of intense historical fiction, riveting characters, dynamic plotting, and a satisfying ending. This is a wonderful story you can sink your teeth into, especially if you want to sink them in for a long time. After reading this, you will have no problem understanding why this is still a top seller in Germany, the UK, and the US.

Rachel Polonsky's Molotov's Magic Lantern
I was very excited about this book, but was dismally disappointed. I am a huge Russian literature and history buff, so I assumed that this would be right up my alley. The book jacket suggests that MLM investigates the lives of the authors who wrote some of the books in Molotov's library. Molotov was a henchman of Stalin's, and signed the death warrants of many of the intelligentsia and writers, some of whom had written the very books Molotov collected. The irony was intriguing, and I was excited for an exploration of the Stalin era from a literary perspective. Though Polonsky touches upon this topic, she doesn't delve deep. This book is part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part literary criticism, but it doesn't do any of these well. The lack of contextualization and the overwhelming number of topics makes this feel like a slog through a scholar's notebook, rather than an informative read about a unique time and place. Critics seem to like this book, mostly because of its aim and language, but it falls short in the readability category, and I'm sorry to say that I can't recommend it.

Annie Proulx's Bird Cloud
Annie Proulx's first nonfiction book in some years details her experiences building an eco-friendly house in Wyoming on a piece of land she aptly names Bird Cloud. This is a subtle memoir, one that relies more on the beauty of the language, rather than the story to keep the pages turning, but it is nonetheless interesting to read about the challenges of building in such a beautiful, desolate place. She clearly loves Bird Cloud, and by the end of the memoir, you can understand how this type of place could offer spiritual sustenance to a person's soul. The final chapter, in which she describes the lives of the birds living in the neigborhood is particularly resonant and charming.

Mark Bittman's Food Matters
Another food book making an age-old argument to a society obsessed with meat, starch and sugar: eat more plants. Bittman comes to this philosophy through a deeper understanding of how meat production affects the environment and his own challenges to maintain good health. He advocates eating like 'food matters' with a greater emphasis on plants and grains, without completely eliminating meat or processed food. The latter two should be seen as icing on the cake, rather the main performers on the plate. This is not a diet, but a way of thinking about food that is better for the environment and for the waistline. He includes 77 recipes that will encourage anyone to be more mindful about including plants in their diet.

Reynolds Price 1933-2011

This is a tremendous loss. When I was at Duke, I took a class with him. We gathered around a small table in an oblong room and talked about the Gospels, storytelling, creating characters, the impact of religion on literature, and many other expanding topics. It was a wonderful experience. He was a truly great person: kind, talented, encouraging. He will be missed.

Read more here.

Friday's Catch

A few links for you today. I am knee-deep in a Russian history/literature nonfiction book (that really defies categorization) called Molotov's Magic Lantern. I appreciate it. I can't say yet if I like it. I want to like it, but it's a bit like knocking about in the mind of a scholar, and just as random. Am also knee-deep in Pillars of the Earth, which is absorbing, entertaining, and long enough to keep my mind off what ails me. It's not the most well-written novel I've ever read, but it's a great story, and occasionally that's enough. (See link to Singer's speech.)

Latin American authors are cool.

Isaac Bashevis Singer's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which, among other things, argues that a the author's first job is to entertain.

Books made for foodies.

What the world looks for at Amazon.com.

The burdens and beauties of readership.

Further justification for the notion that we should stop texting, calling, emailing, twittering, blogging, or facebooking when trying to make connections with people and start taking them to coffee.

Costas

I loved The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell, but her recent book, The Hand that First Held Mind, is presumably much better, though I have yet to read it. According to critics, this novel marks a shift from O'Farrell as a writer of fiction directed towards women to a writer of literary fiction. It also just won the Costa Award for best novel of the year. As good as it may be, though, it will probably not win the big Costa - the best of the five top categories - as its up against The Hare with Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal, a book I have read and really loved. Read more here.

English Country Houses: Inheritance and Wait for Me!

The "if you like this, you will also like this" feature on Amazon was incredibly useful in helping me find these two books. After reading The Hare with Amber Eyes, I was interested to find other similar memoirs, and though Inheritance by Robert Sackville-West and Wait for Me! by Deborah Mitford are quite different from Hare, they are similar in their nostalgic evocation of different time.

Inheritance charts the familial history of Knole, the giant pile of a manor house in Kent, England. It is perhaps most well-known for its association with Vita Sackville-West a prominent author in her day and the lover of Virginia Woolf (who also loved Knole and whose novel Orlando is an homage to that very place.) The early chapters of Inheritance are appealing in their tangential referencing of English history, as the history of Knole and its family, the Sackvilles, is essentially a history of England - spanning 400 years - but the vignettes about the family itself are not excessively entertaining. Thomas Sackville was given (as a the story goes) Knole by Elizabeth I, and Sackville was immediately anxious to renovate the house to display his power and wealth. Knole was originally the home of an Archbishop, and Sackville built upon the existing spaces to create a giant, rambling building, a house that Vita Sackville -West described as more of a village than a single dwelling. Indeed, it is huge and purports to be a calendar house (though there is some ambiguity here, as I am assuming that it is difficult to actually count every room in the house?). In any event, a calendar house boasts 365 rooms, 52 staircases and 7 courtyards.

The Sackvilles themselves are are difficult to distinguish from each other, and there is a parade of dukes and lords with brief sparkles of brightness (mostly provided by wives and lovers) until the narrative reaches recent history and things get fascinating. The most absorbing sections of the book begin in the 19th century with Vita's mother Victoria who loved Knole enough to marry her cousin, and heir to the house, in order to stay there. She turned Knole into a fashionable, comfortable destination - bragging that it was as comfortable as the Ritz, in fact - for the most important people of her day. The house was taken over by the National Trust in 1947 and the current Lord Sackville, the author of the book, lives in a section of the house.

This is a charming look into aristocratic England and a unique chronicle of a stately family home, an inheritance unlike anything we would know about in the States.

Along a similar vein as Inheritance, comes Wait for Me! by Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire. Everything about this memoir is polite, but DD, as she refers to herself, doesn't shy away from presenting her hardships. Her miscarriages, husband's alcoholism, sister's betrayal of another sister, is all mentioned, but nothing is dramatized or labored over. These things happened, the memoir staunchly says, and then dealt with. There is a little room for melodrama. Her asides about the differences between her young adulthood and the young people of today are amusing, and one gets a sense that we have come quite a long way in the 90 years of her life. In this regard, the memoir stands as a unique lens through which to see the evolution of the 20th century, as DD lived through many of the major events. Yet, this is not a memoir intended, we can assumed, to stand as anything but a story of one woman's life, and, as interesting as it may be to those of us who didn't live through World War II, are not aristocratic, and did not live in Chatsworth, hers was a life - with its ups and downs - that was not that much different than anyone else's. Her work, her home, and her family distinguish her, and she explores these aspects with keen insight.