Non-Fiction Rules, BookMarks November, 2021 Update

Read my Review

Friends: The days are short; the temperatures have dipped to the single numbers; the ground is snow-covered-----what better time than now to open a book and settle into a comfortable chair by the wood stove.

And that's what I did in November, a busy and fruitful month for reading. My Top Picks are two non-fiction books which are beautifully written, powerful, and informative. . One moved me nearly to tears while the other renewed my respect and awe for writing---the process of transferring one's joy and struggles with the world into words on the page so the reader can share those experiences..

Saidiya Hartman's book, 'Lose Your Mother' is a personal exploration of both her life as a Black woman in today's America and her experiences in Ghana where she tried to understand the realities of enslavement. Suffused with phrases like 'the other', stranger, dispossession, isolation, severance, negation, extraneous, this is a story of 'not belonging' in either today's America or in post-colonial Africa. Replete with information about the slave trade and the Middle Passage, its most powerful impact is to bring a sense of what being Black in America is like today to those of us not living that experience. My take home sentence from this book is her description of racism as determining the 'social distribution of death' in our time, the afterlife of slavery. This is an important book which helped me begin to grapple with the BLM movement, racism, white privilege, and other elements of this critical contemporary discussion.

In contrast to the sadness and outrage I felt in reading Hartman's book, I delighted in Ann McDermott's volume filled with clever observations, fine phrases, and the 'agony and the ecstasy' of the writer's craft. The chapter on the importance of the first sentence of a novel or short story includes a list of her favorites, and she leaves it to the reader to identify the books. Great fun! At its heart, McDermott believes that writing fiction is a declaration of the writer's love for being alive despite mortality, suffering, and intractable time and that both writing and reading lead to a truer sympathy for the human condition. She describes the writer as a reader who has gone karaoke! This is an entertaining and delightful book for any reader and writer.

The rest of the month's reading was perhaps even more eclectic than usual. Donald Hall and James Rebanks have written books about growing up with grandparents on small farms. Though written 60 years apart with one situated in New England and the other in old England, both write with nostalgia and love of family and land in a moving way. Mystery fans can enjoy an old Simenon, an even older Agatha Christie, and a recent Peter Heller thriller, while fans of literary fiction should read the Nobel Prize winner Ishiguro's 'Klara and the Sun'. The George Perec book is vintage Oulipo and will appeal to those readers who love 'constrained writing'. After a several month absence, I returned to play reading with Hudes' Pulitzer Prize winning drama about addiction, poverty, and the saving power of human connection. It was a powerful experience and one I'd like to see on the stage.

Here are November's books:

This month's Poetry Tree features Wallace Stevens, one of the great American poets of the 20th C., as well as two contemporary young poets. All the poems deal with the familiar themes of time, aging, loss, memory, and death. Just about summarizes poetry, doesn't it?

Good reading!