A Lively Month, BookMarks Update July, 2023

Read My Review

Friends: July was a lively month in two senses. Our daughters' families including our four grandchildren ranging in age from 1 to 8, were with us for a wonderful, lively week of Camp Epstein and then we enjoyed two of the grandchildren one at a time for another two weeks. As a result, between family and gardening, not to mention Vermont's terrible rains and flooding, the opportunities for reading were limited. Enter Penelope Lively who kept the month's reading engaging and fun. More on her later.

Here are the books I read in July.

The best book of the month was Kathryn Schulz's memoir, 'Lost & Found'. Schulz, a staff writer at The New Yorker, writes of her father's death as the focus for the section on Lost and of her meeting her future wife as the focus for the section on Found, moving out from those sentinel events in ever-widening circles of superb prose to explore how losing and finding provide perspective on our place in the universe. The final section on the ampersand '&', is the most thought-provoking, and that section ends with this paragraph: "To all of his happiness, loss, which seems to only take away, adds its own kind of necessary contribution. No matter what goes missing, the object you need or the person you love, the lessons are always the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience urging us to make better use of our finite days. Our crossing is a brief one, best spent bearing witness to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep." This is a beautiful and thought-provoking book that warrants reading as well as re-reading.

Rebecca Mead's memoir of returning to London after living in the U.S. for 30 years is another fine piece of writing by a New Yorker staff writer. Here, too, sharing with you the final lines of the book will provide you with a better sense of Mead's work than any summary I might provide. Mead writes "I have a fleeting fantasy, glimmering like sunlight on water between passing clouds, of reclaiming my childhood home. For a brief moment, I imagine the house remaining as it is now: the garden always tended, the rooms warm and lit and welcoming, my mother moving within them more carefully and determinedly each day. I picture the place enduring without both my parents, as if it could be stilled in time---as if, even emptied of them, the house itself could go on meaning what it has meant to me for fifty years. Fifty years is nothing. All of this is still before me; but today it's mild and peaceful and quiet, and pleasant to sit and let my mind wander over the broken stones and the buried dead. Here in the leveled churchyard, I have no idea what is coming down the line." Again, superb writing devoted to exploring a life about to change, looking back on the wonder of childhood and forward to the unknown which is sure to contain both losing and finding.

Jennifer Egan's 'The Candy House' was named one of the New York Times' Ten Best in 2022, but I didn't love it. Although it's a dazzling demonstration of skillful plot and character development, its dystopian story of how big data and social media morphed in some unspecified future into a collective memory of the past with its implications for the loss of free will was not what I needed in this already fraught and dangerous time. Call me old-fashioned, but I like a linear time line, characters with whom I can empathize or at least understand, and a plot which doesn't add to my already generous dollop of daily anxiety.

Enter Penelope Lively! Along with Jane Gardam and Hilary Mantel, Lively is my favorite contemporary British women novelist, and her three books that I read this month raised my spirits and gave me moments of joy. I had read several of her books in the past---novels, short stories, and a particularly delightful book about her garden---so it was with great anticipation that I found these three hard back volumes in a corner of the used book sale tent at Woodstock, Vermont's annual BookStock festival last month. Lively writes with sensitivity and without sentimentality about falling in love and also does a fine job with adultery and divorce. She manages to provide suspense, humor, and insight into the human condition while spinning engaging stories. Among her works, my first choice would be 'Moon Tiger' which won the Booker Prize in 1987 and was chosen as the Best of the '80's Bookers as well.

My second choice would be this month's 'How it All Began', a delightful romp through London of the late 20th C with a dozen or so characters whose lives are turned upside down when a 70-something year old Charlotte Rainsford is mugged, losing her purse and breaking her hip. Like the proverbial butterfly in Peru whose wingbeats affect the weather in New York, Charlotte's encounter reverberates far and wide. It's a delightful read with one of the best descriptions of why one reads I've ever come across as follows: "Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life hs been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenent, for instruction, even. She has read to find out how sex works, how babies are born, she has read to discover what it is to be good, or bad; she has read to find out if things are the same for others as they are for her—then, discovering that frequently they are not, she has read to find out what it is that other people experience that she is missing….Thus, has reading wound in with living, each a complement to the other. Charlotte knows herself to ride upon a great sea of words, of language, of stories, and situations and information, of knowledge, some of which she can summon up, much of which is half lost, but is in there somewhere, and has had an effect on who she is and how she thinks. She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.” . As I hope you can tell from that bit of writing, Lively is an artist worth experiencing.

Her first book written back in 1977, 'The Road to Lichfield' is another fine book in which the history of a place and the history of relationships intertwine. Like the works of Schulz and Mead, there is a strong element of the impact of famlly, especially a father, and like 'How It All Began', there is a beautifully wrought story of an emerging love affair. I plan to work my way through the remaining 18 or so works of fiction by this 90 year old Brit.

The Poetry Tree on the Charles this month is devoted to four poems cited by Kathryn Schulz in 'Lost & Found' to illustrate her observations about loss and recovery/discovery. Bishop's poem has long been a favorite while Robert Frost is our local Vermont and New England poet laureate. Szymborska who died in 2012 won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.

And here, once again, is this extraordinary quote from Lewis Thomas that has elicited a great number of comments.

"Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely out-numbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

Even more astounding is our statistical improbability in physical terms. The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond....

Add to this the biological improbability that makes each member or our own species unique. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surfaces of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing."

Good reading and good travelling!