Category Archives: Great Reads

From Dee Abrahamse after our 55th:

I loved “Citizens of London”, and many thanks to Bette for introducing it to us.

Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver

In most of her novels, Barbara Kingsolver explores the intersections of people, culture, and the natural world.  In Flight Behavior, the main issue is climate change and its potential impact on the environment and the creatures living there.  She also works in dysfunctional families, educational bungling, xenophobia, non-investigative news media, poverty vs. comfort, environmentalists vs. opportunists, superficial religiosity vs. internalization of religious precepts, and more.  Kingsolver’s way with words and her insights into human character enhance the story line(s) delightfully.

The action is set in present-day rural Appalachia, where the protagonist Dellarobia Turnbow lives with her husband and two children on a failing farm.  An (otherwise) intelligent young woman, Dellarobia got pregnant and married at seventeen; for the ensuing ten years she has entertained fantasies of flight.  As the novel opens, she is heading into the nearby hills for a tryst with a potential lover, but is waylaid by a vision of the forest aflame without being consumed (she left her glasses at home), and returns home.  Gradually, the “fire” is recognized as a large colony of monarch butterflies hundreds of miles off course and out of season.  As the news leaks out to her family, church, town, and the larger world, everyone has an opinion of what this means and how to deal -or not- with it.  Dellarobia’s horizons are greatly expanded by her contact with the scientists, journalists, migrant workers, amateur environmentalists, and curiosity seekers attracted by the monarch phenomenon.

The preconceived assumptions of the community and the various outsiders lead to interesting and conflicting interactions.  Among the migrant workers (“foreigners”), for instance, is a Mexican family that used to guide tourists through their hometown, a wintering place for monarchs for centuries which was wiped out in a giant mudslide a few years ago.  Looked down on by the community, the family’s knowledge gets recognition from Dellarobia and the scientists who come to study the monarchs.  The cash-strapped Turbow in-laws, who own the forest where the monarchs have roosted, want to clear-cut the area for the money; the thought of charging tourists  gives them second thoughts.  “Sophisticated” TV crews try to catch locals being stupid.

In the course of the novel, by engaging a wide spectrum of individuals and groups, Dellarobia acquires the self-confidence for creating a richer future for herself.  Her first non-waitressing job is for the scientists, collecting and measuring data and recording it.  Her salary  allows her for the first time to buy a few extras.  Her piqued curiosity not only pushes her to learn more, but ignites her son’s scientific curiosity.  Of course, this means that her whole life changes in unexpected ways; the novel’s climax (no, I won’t give it away) underscores that.  A good read!

Reviewed by Frannie Blair

From Jane Shaw Dietrich:  A book I just finished and liked a lot is At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails, by Sarah Bakewell; I had read her earlier book on Montaigne.  I realize now that, as little as I thought I knew about existentialism, it was in the air in our teenage and college years and seeped into my life without my being altogether aware of it.

From Barbara Sutton:  Make Your Home Among Strangers, a first novel by Jennine Capo Crucet, is about a young girl who gets herself from the Cuban community in Hialeah to Rawlings College in upstate NY. The culture shock, her conflict with her home community and her family who have no idea why she wanted to go to college, let alone to the north, really interest me. We’ve had so many of our A Better Chance scholars face this dichotomy between home and school over the years. It was compelling for me to try to get in the inside of one of these young women’s head. It might not be for everyone, but I liked it a lot – especially the first 1/2 or so.
We heard an interview with Crucet on NPR. She actually went to Cornell.

From Katherine Snelson, January, 2016:  I have read the first three Ferrante books and started book four.  After those many pages and hours, I would say it is not worth it.  I don’t really care about any of those people and it took way too many pages to describe Naples and its transitions over decades.
If you want good reads, try Dead Wake by Eric Larsen, The Boys in the Boat, Anything by Ross King, The Signature of all Things…Being Mortal by Atul Gawande for examples.

From Judy Kennedy:  THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt, just published and weighing in at 800+ pages — a real reader’s read that’s been called “Dickensian in scope and tone” and is on all of the critic’s lists as one of the Top Ten books of the year.  It fact it was #1 on one of the NYTimes regular book reviewers list, and I think #1 on one of the New Yorker’s lists as well.  It’s the story of a 14 year old in NYC who is “orphaned” by a father who just up and leaves and a mother’s subsequent death at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she and our hero have gone to see the the painting of “The Goldfinch” (an exquisite  Dutch masterpiece that I had never heard of but which exists and has a wonderful back story).  A terrorist bomb goes off in the gallery that houses “The Goldfinch” while they are there, killing the mother, and through a totally credible but extraordinary experience doesn’t touch our hero who ends up walking out of the rubble with the painting in hand with the sole purpose of saving it.  And thus begins a tale of life, romance, friendship, crime, and salvation . . .  Editor’s note:  Do not get this in audible form.  It is some 33 hours of awful!

Posted by Betsy Karch Wilson

I have read Magggie’s Seating Arrangement, and will look forward to this one!   She  does paint very colorful characters!  I  just finished another great new book .     It is All the Light We Cannot See  by Anthony Doerr.    It is a novel about WWII, and centers on two young people, a blind French girl whose father carefully measures her paths, first in Paris and then in Saint Malo, and constructs models for her to follow, and a German youth who is an orphan and a brilliant radio engineer, and thus one of Hitler’s Youth Corps at a very young age.    Doerr’s writing is fabulous, his descriptions unbelievably beautiful…even and especially about war…his similes are magical.   I never cease to be amazed at how so many writers that are new to me can come up with such descriptive language.   I want to read it again, but I know someone at the library wants it next!   I may get it on my Ipad so I can just keep looking at it.    Just the things he has to say about life in general are worth reading over.      Here’s to lots of good summer reading!   

Submitted by Dottie Smith Mann.

I just finished the section called “Old Age” in Penelope Lively’s book with the unwieldy title “Dancing Fish and Ammonites:A Memoir.”  I don’t know if I can possibly enjoy the rest of the book as much as this first section, written, so it seems, especially for and about me.  What a kindred spirit!  What a delightful perfection of word, phrase, image to sum up where we are now in life’s journey.  I could underline whole sections in order to return to them later, but lack the IPad/Kindle skill to do so.  …if any have read it please chime in.  And I certainly recommend this first section, at least.  As she observes, we do seem to have an enhanced ability to appreciate at our age.

Any and Judy enjoyed Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and decided that there must be something creepy about them for loving it.