Catching up on Reading

Book Award Books

When Karen and I were preparing to help at the Times Book Awards at the end of April, I bought a lot of the books. It will take me until next April to finish them all. This book, soldier's heart, was the winner for current events. We got a chance to talk with the author. I wish I had read it before the ceremony. This is a wonderful book.

Ms. Samet teaches literature at West Point. She has done this since the late 90's. As she would say, she's been there before war and after the start of the war. Her job is to help prepare her students to go off to that war and be thoughtful enough to understand ambiguity, among other things. Her students are very interested and interesting. I wish I could have had one of her classes in college. Most of my friends were English Majors. None of them discussed books like they do at West Point. She selects her books very carefully. I plan to note a few and listen to/read them with a more analytical mind.

Out Stealing Horses was nominated for fiction. It did not win. The author is Norwegian. It has just recently been translated into English. I liked this book a lot too. The story is not linear. It begins with a 60+ year old moving out into the woods to live his retirement. Living there causes him to remember a time in his childhood when he lived with his father in the woods. Meeting a new person reminds him of other things. Planning some projects reminds him of others. This is not an action-filled book. It flows. It is thought-provoking. I didn't want it to end, but I wanted to know all his life's secrets. That doesn't happen, but the book is a rewarding read anyway.

Short Stories

I've started 3 books of short stories. The one at the left is filled with short articles or parts of books that John McPhee wrote some time ago. I like them very much. It's called The Second John McPhee Reader. I think I read the first one back in 1977. These are all non-fiction stories, the book was published in 1996. There are two stories from the book that currently are running through my mind. The first is about what must have been the first farmer's markets in the US. They started in New York. As a person who loves farmer's markets, this is a great story. You get a sense of what it's like to be on the green grocer's side of the scale.

The other story is about a man and his restaurant. Another of my favorite things. This chef's love of creating good food is wonderful to read about. I think I liked these stories a lot because they are based in reality and cover very different topics (one man's airplane exploded and he alone got out before the plane went down. Not food related.)

One of our favorite writers in Tobias Wolff. Karen sat next to him on a Book Award's bus. He's written, among other things, This Boy's Life and Pharoah's Army. I read one a long time ago and just finished the second. Those are both memoirs; in other words, non-fiction. This book, Our Story Begins, is fiction. Karen and I have listened to this off and on. What we found was that every story was the same. Maybe we missed something because the book got very good reviews in Amazon. Since we has become me (Karen is flying home soon) I will try to finish this book and learn if his stories are

really all the same.

Speaking of all the same, Unaccustomed Earth was written by the same woman who wrote The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies. I picked this up on the cruise, in their very well stocked library. I only read two of the stories and then I went on to read one of the many other appealing books. Ms. Lahiri writes well. She always writes about Bengalis living in the United States. They are all clearly different people. Their stories are different. Yet. They are the same. I listened to Ms. Lahiri on one of the podcasts I get about books. She rejects the fact that she only writes about the Bengali-American people. She is wrong. That is all she writes about. If I owned this book I would have continued to read the stories. But I would have paced them over a longer period of time. No scanning this book.