Falling Off in the Middle

Apple Blossom Time
photo by Amy Brandon

“Outside was quiet.  Light clear as water created shadows of leaves curled and minuscule on the ground.  She looked at the sky as she walked, a passionate blue.  Cloudless.  In the grove by the far apple orchard the apple trees were in shadow.  The sun postured along the curvature of canyon and illuminated the walnut trees starkly….  The sun on the porous bank near where she stood was lit up, incandescent, the minerals glittering and the dull mud peculiar and particular even in its dullness.  Each pore and streak and detail was washed and brought forth as is a person’s face by the light.” From The Orchardist

 The last two books I have read I loved until half-way through.  I still liked them both at the end, but lost some of my feeling for each of them for different reasons.    The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin succeeded in evoking its time and place and in investing me in the characters and their lives.   The main complaint I have about the novel is that half-way through, the plot starts to drag out a bit.  I felt like the story could have been told a little more succinctly.  I also ended up fairly disliking the character of Della.  I wanted to like her, and naturally, I pity anyone who grows up like she did.  I just lost patience with her.   To be fair, however, I will have to say that I have no basis for understanding her kind of misery.  The older I get, the more I see, every day, evidence of how truly messed up a person’s upbringing can make him or her.  I’d say the contrast between Della and Angelene exhibits this point perfectly.  Regardless of the dragging middle part and the irritation I felt with Della, The Orchardist is definitely a book worth reading.  The descriptions of the land and the people and of how they are tied to the land, the family saga and the harshness of people’s lives, and the feeling of place and time in the novel reminded me of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which is one of my favorite novels.

After The Orchardist, I read The Fault In Our Stars by John Green.  The first chapter of this book is almost perfect, and I loved the brilliant, quirky, highly improbable dialogue, which was very entertaining and laugh out loud funny sometimes.  There are so many themes presented worth exploring and considering:  existential angst, living your best life anyway, how small people and small infinites matter too.    The last part of the book, however, was so difficult for me to read that I don’t feel like I can say I loved the whole book.  It needs to be read, deserves to be read, but was not an easy thing for me to get through.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

Too Many Books Too Little Time

Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus
 Piazza della Signoria, Florence
Photo by Amy Brandon

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve read The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and Holes by Louis Sachar.  I read Holes because I was reading it aloud where I volunteer.  I enjoyed it but not as much as some of the reviews indicated I should.  It seemed a little over-hyped to me.    

I found The Song of Achilles to be very entertaining, and as I read, I researched some of the myths I was less familiar with, so it was educational in that way.   I enjoyed the story being told from Patroclus' point of view.   The point of view and the narration type brought freshness and immediacy to a story we all already know.  It's a good quick read if you're looking for some light entertainment.

I’m still chipping away at Les Miserable and Beowulf, and I am half-way through The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin, which I am absolutely loving.  Within the first twenty pages of The Orchardist, I knew it was going to be one of those sagas that would sweep me up into its world.  I do love a novel that transports me so completely.   The OCD part of me is not happy being in the middle of so many books and not completing them, so now it’s time for some lunch reading!

Tempus Fugit

photo by Amy Brandon

"Walk without a stick into the darkest woods." Cheryl Strayed

 

Three of the stories Cheryl Strayed tells in Tiny Beautiful Things haunt me.  One is about her mother’s last gift to her, and it haunts me because it happened to me. Her mother’s last gift to her was a coat.  In 1993, when I was five months pregnant with my first child, I went to visit my mother in the hospital.   Her cancer was advanced enough that she begged me to pray for her death and told me she planned to wear the dress she wore to my wedding to her burial.  I was hurried, harried, overwrought, overworked, confused, and not wanting to hear anything she had to say about her death.  It was February.  I breezed into her hospital room coatless, because I’d finally reached the point where nothing I owned fit my growing belly.    Even in the midst of her death, she noticed my lack of a coat, forced cash on me, and made me go to the mall to buy a coat I could fit into.  I kept that coat, ugly and out-dated though it was, until last year. 

The second story Strayed tells that haunts me does so because nothing like it ever happened to me.  She tells of her mother’s buying a child’s dress at a yard sale years before Strayed ever thought of having a child and how her child eventually wears that dress.  This haunts me because my mother never bought either of my children anything, because she never had the opportunity.  Strayed speaks of how quotidian it is to some people to dress their kids in clothes their grandparents bought and of how shimmeringly beautiful that one dress her mom bought was because it was the only thing her mom ever bought for her child. 

The third story haunts me in a good way, because it makes me understand that I am not alone.  She advises a motherless woman’s fiancé to accept the emptiness that is part of the woman he loves and to accept that it will never be ok that her mother died when she was young.  She says that when you lack a parent, it’s like walking around with empty bowls in your hands that you can never fill.  I learned a long time ago that we learn to live around the voids left in our lives by death.  The best way I can honor my mother is to live the hell out of the life she gave me and to love my children the same way she loved me, like there was never anything more beautiful in the history of the world.

Finally Free From Freedom

Why My Reading Time Is Scattered
Photo by Amy Brandon

"All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off.  Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli."

 Walter Berglund in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

After two months of back and forth reading, I finally finished Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.   I struggle with books like these because it seems like I spend most of my life needing an escape from reality, rather than an inundation of it. I'm not arguing the brillance of Jonathan Franzen, but I'm not sure passively and reactively shedding light on the ills of our society is necessarily the most productive way to improve it.  Almost every aspect of this book microscopically picks apart the general malaise and some of the more specific sicknesses of the modern American family.  If you're looking for an escape hatch in your reading, don't pick up this one. 

Last week, I attempted to read Swamplandia by Karen Russell.  It became one of the few books I did not finish.  I could find no redeeming qualities to compel me to waste any more time that a few days on it. 

This week, I've started Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed and The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner.  We'll see if I have any better luck with these.

Know Thyself

This is Me.  The Real Me.
Photo by Anna Reavis

"Our burdens are here, our road is before us, and the longing for goodness and happiness is the guide that leads us through many troubles and mistakes to the peace which is a true Celestial City." Mrs. March in Little Women

I've had cause this week to contemplate judgement, forgiveness, and condemnation among people.  I was in the midst of thinking through the issue of why people are so willing, eager even, to tear other people down when I happened to catch Justice Sonia Sotomayor say to Gwen Ifill:  "If you try to find the best in people, they'll usually rise to your expectation.  If you try to find the worst, you'll find it."   Often, the people who are the most judgmental and critical of others are those who are unwilling to see and accept their own faults.  Condemnation is a fool's game, though, for we are all transgressors, only the details differ.

During the week, while I was considering this pervasive judgment of others and attempting to comprehend its appeal to so many people,  my daughter and I began another co-reading project, this time of Little Women.  Toward the end of Chapter One, the girls and Mrs. March discuss dealing with one's own personal burdens.  Mrs. March reminds the girls of their old habit of playing Pilgrim's Progress wherein one's burdens are in bags on one's back and after much trudging through "extremities," those bags full of burdens slide off and fall as they climb up the stairs toward "heaven."  

I think probably one of life's most important lessons, but also one of the hardest to learn, is to forgive yourself.  Refuse to carry your faults around as burdens.  Acknowledge them and let them go. Deal honestly with yourself.  Life is a beautiful mess.  Wade through it as best you can.  You may end up dirty and rumpled, but dirty and rumpled is when authentic people are at their happiest.  At the end, you want to be content to claim your life as your own beautiful mess and to feel as though you lived your best possible life.  Let those bags fall off.  Better yet, burn them.

Various and Sundries

Windows in Paris
photo by Amy Brandon

I've read three books and made headway in three others since I last blogged.  I don't find that I am able or willing to write an entire post about every book I read.  Number one, this would take away too much reading time, and number two, not every book deserves a post.  I read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley because I liked the title and because I'd seen other bloggers reading it last year.  Almost the entire time I was reading it, I was trying to figure out when the story was actually going to begin, even at the end.  Not one of my favorites.  I followed that up with The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin, which I so thoroughly enjoyed that I ordered the sequel from Amazon as soon as I read the last (infuriating!) paragraph.  During the weekend that I was reading The Winter Queen, I watched North Carolina Bookwatch with DG Martin and caught his interview with Sheila Turnage, so I ordered her new book, Three Times Lucky.  It's marketed for kids, and it's definitely an easy read, but it's worth any adult's time who needs an afternoon's entertainment.

For the last several months, I've been picking up and putting down and plowing my way slowly through Les Miserable.  I first started the book on Kindle because of its physical size and the difficulty of holding up the novel, but I found that I had trouble getting swept up in the digital form, so I ordered the beautiful Penguin cloth-covered hardback classic and am now reading it.  Since I've switched, I've discovered that part of the problem with the Kindle version I had was the clunky, unappealing translation.  The Penguin, while causing carpal tunnel, is much more appealing all the way around.  The shocking news is that I am a 45 year old literature major who loves musicals, and I DO NOT know the plot of Les Mis at all!  I know, I know... where have I been?  It's fun to read it for the first time at this age, though.

I am also reading Natasha's Dance:  A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes, in preparation for some more Russian reading, which I am loving, and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, to which I am having a mixed reaction.  Franzen can definitely write, and Freedom grabs you on page one and doesn't want to let go, but I get overwhelmed and impatient with whiny, self-absorbed navel-gazers in my every day life, so I have to take this one, which seems full of these people,  in small doses.  It feels a lot like reading the thoughts of too many people I know and don't like.  Franzen does have that uncanny ability of good novelists to suck you into his time and culture, which unfortunately is also my time and culture.   As I said, his writing is really the star of this one.

So, with all that covered, back to Les Mis and the Battle of Waterloo.  Reading time, finally. Yay!

Opening Pandora's Box

photo by Amy Brandon

"I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild."  Cheryl Strayed

There are parts of who I am and of who I have been that I block and avoid like the plague because they are dangerous to me.  Sometimes it is impossible to think about the person I have been.  Sometimes it will break me to reflect on who I once was, and the only way to keep from crashing is to become someone else.  When I chose to read Wild by Cheryl Strayed, I had no idea I was about to spend a month inside the dangerous, wild places of my mind I actively choose to avoid.


I marvel at how lost we allow ourselves to become without the outside world even knowing we are lost.  Only recently have I realized how starved for affection we can become when we go too long without it.  I would not posit that having a mother is the only way to avoid this.  I know that some mothers do not fill this roll for their children, and I know that it is possible to be loved by someone else in such a way that you feel sated and full, instead of starved and alone, but to be motherless damages you in an unnameable, pervasive way.  To those of you still with mothers who want to pass judgement here and say “get over it,” I would answer that this view is easy to take when you are still mothered.  Some of you never had real mothers and so I’m sure will think I was lucky to have had what I did.  I agree.  And almost all you who read this, because you only know me through this blog, will not know that this issue is not a crutch or a well-wallowed bog for me.  What I have realized fairly recently is that I am who I am because I lost my mother when I did.  I am fiercely independent and alone and just as fiercely lonely and at odds with the choices I’ve made that have made me this way.  Repeated detachment subtlely shapes you into an island of your own.  You end up choosing to destroy normal just to keep yourself from falling into it. 

I can be in the middle of a perfectly quotidian day, and one sentence can, as reading Wild often did, lead to this:  how hard it is not to have one person who loves you anyway, loves even the unlovable in you, is on your side justifiably or not.  And then someone will ask me, “What’s wrong?” and I will have to say “nothing” because “everything” is too much.  

You can’t out run, out drink, or out dance the truth, so you may as well calm down and deal with it, and become who you were meant to be.