December Reading

I'm posting this before the end of December because I know I won't be finishing any more books before the end of the year.  The following are the books I finished in December:

The Night Woods by Paula Munier

The latest in the Mercy Carr mysteries, this one finds Mercy very pregnant with her first child which does not stop her from solving three mysteries with her dog Elvis.  The first mystery involves the murder of an academic who was visiting Mercy's friend Homer in his remote cabin.  When Mercy and Elvis come upon the body, Homer and his dog Argos are missing.  The second involves a missing billionaire from a nearby hunting preserve. Are they connected? The third mystery is a mysterious drawing that is left on Mercy's front door. As usual I loved all the dogs that show up in the Mercy Carr books. This book was heavy on references to Homer's The Oddysey which I didn't mind. 

My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand

Whew. I chose the audio version of this memoir (narrated by Barbra herself) so that I could listen while I was making meals or cleaning my house. At over 48 hours I figured it would take me about a month and 1/2 to finish it. In fact I finished it in less than 30 days and my house was very clean because I always wanted to get to the end of a chapter. Streisand seems to go through every minute of her long life, analyzing herself, her politics, her movies, her TV specials and her music.  She doesn't hold back. I admit that I found the last few chapters a bit of a slog as she got into all of her political activism but maybe that was the result of reading it right after the election. Fortunately for her she kept a journal that she could refer to, although she seems to have very specific memories of every piece of clothing she ever wore. She is very up front that she wants to set the record straight on all the things that people have gotten "wrong" about her throughout her career (including the Streisand Effect). I don't know if she will achieve that but I was entertained. 

Held by Anne Michaels

Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet who also writes novels. This is a beautifully written novel that isn't for everyone. When I first heard it was a multi-generational novel I thought - oh no, this isn't for me. Those are usually huge and involve a lot of drama but may skimp on the character development. But I also heard that it began during WWI and I'm a sucker for WWI novels. So I thought I would give it a try. It's hard to describe the structure of this novel. I won't say it is a series of linked short stories because it isn't - and that was good because I don't really care for short stories anyway. It is more a series of vignettes, or even pictures, of various characters in different time periods who are all linked in some way.  And even within a chapter, the story is often told in little snippets of pictures (photography is a recurring plot element in the novel). As I said, this is not a novel for everyone.  If you like a linear storyline this isn't for you.  If you want to know every detail of a character's back story, this isn't for you. This is a beautifully written study of the effects of trauma, war, and love on individuals across generations.  It is definitely going on my "best of" list for 2024.  I wish there had been time to re-read it immediately but it was due back at the library and there was a long wait list. Although I read it digitally I think it would be best read in hard copy so that the reader can easily flip around figuring out how the characters are related to each other. 

French St. Louis:  Landscapes, Contexts and Legacy edited by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey and Peter J. Kastor

No one who isn't, like me, interested in French colonial North America will need to pick up this book although if you do you will find 10 well written essays about the colonial legacy of St. Louis.  This book arose out of a symposium at the Missouri History Museum in 2014 when the City of St. Louis was celebrating the 250th anniversary of its founding.  I did not attend (and I'm not sure why since I was VERY interested in all the celebrations that year).  It is divided into five parts:  (i) Fashioning a Colonial Place:  (ii) St. Louis between Empire and Frontier; (iii) St. Louis and New Orleans, a Regional Perspective; (iv) Visualizing Place:  New Sources and Resources for Telling the Story of St. Louis; and (v) Maintaining the French Connection of St. Louis.  All were interesting to me.  It was helpful that the essays were not written in too much of an academic style.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

This was a BlueSky read-along for December. I had read some Vonnegut before but not this one. I can see why some people really like it because it is funny (in the usual Vonnegut absurd way) and you can't really disagree with his underlying message (dour though it is, as usual). But it also came off as very dated especially with respect to the characters that were people of color and women. I didn't really care for it but I'm not sorry I read it. 

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

I love Louise Erdrich's writing and I don't think she has written anything that I haven't enjoyed. I purchased this book as soon as it was published but I saved it to read toward the end of the year. (I like to end the year on a high note if possible.) The novel starts after the 2008 financial crisis and has as its main characters three teenagers living in a small farming town near the Red River. At first I admit that I found the story hard to get into because I just wasn't in the mood to read about teenage angst. But as the story developed I found myself engaged, especially with the adults and their problems (including worrying about their teenage kids).  As the story moved into the problems of farming, especially beet farming, with industrial herbicides I (surprisingly) found myself engrossed. There is a section where a character is working in the fracking industry and I found it nerve-wracking because it is so dangerous. If you want great writing, Louise Erdrich is for you. If you want deep character development, Louise Erdrich is for you.  If you need a galloping, page turning plot, she probably isn't for you - but there IS a plot and she does build suspense. Most of her novels take place in the same general vicinity and there are usually Easter Egg references to characters from other novels - she's sort of the Upper Midwest/Native American version of William Faulkner in creating a sense of place that extends through all her novels. This is not my favorite Louise Erdrich novel but as usual I enjoyed it tremendously.  

The Mistress of Bhatia House by Sujata Massey

This is the fourth in the Perveen Mistry series set in Bombay (Mumbai) in the 1920's. Perveen is the first woman solicitor in Bombay but she is not allowed to act as a barrister (appear in court) because she is a woman. This series is interesting because although it is set in colonial India (and there are so many books that are set during the colonial period) Perveen and her family are not Hindu or Muslim, they are Farsi (Parsi) and live by a different set of rules. I find that background interesting and Massey certainly creates a deep sense of place in these novels. I like Perveen as a character and the mysteries are fine. It isn't my favorite mystery series but I enjoy it and I was pleased to discover this fourth book. 

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Another BlueSky read-along, this ghost story has been filmed so many times that I found myself distracted by remembering film versions of the story and I couldn't even remember if I had ever read the original. When I reached the end I was positive that I had not read it before. The Victorians liked to be told ghost stories at Christmas (think A Christmas Carol) and so I tried to think like a Victorian. But I truly don't get the enjoyment of ghost stories at Christmas unless they involve Christmas. It is an interesting story because James purposely explains nothing and it seemed as if almost every sentence was ambiguous.  And the end came out of nowhere! I listened to the audio book for this reading which may have influenced my reading because I was very aware of just how impressionable the governess was (and also the reader made every sentence out of the little boy's mouth creepy). I enjoyed reading it but I think in the future I will stick to my annual re-reads of A Christmas Carol.

Murder at La Villette by Cara Black

I've always enjoyed Cara Black's Aimee Leduc mysteries. She sets each one in a different arrondissement in Paris, but each takes place about 20 years in the past. She says this is because that is the time period she lived in Paris and remembers well. I've always enjoyed the sense of place in this series. One thing I don't like in a mystery series is when the author apparently runs out of crime ideas and starts having the detective and his/her family be the targets of the crime. It just seems so unlikely to me. And that is the direction this series has been going in for some time. This time Aimee is accused of murder and must find the real murderer in order to clear her name. The part that I found most unlikely is that her close friends wonder if the accusation is true.  This is a short book, about one hundred pages shorter than her usual mysteries and I think it's because there isn't much there. Mostly Aimee runs around Paris noting well known sights.  So, unless you are already invested in this series I don't recommend it. 

PS: 

I am adding a book to this post that I read in August while I was on vacation.  As I was drafting my end-of-year summary of reading I realized that I had neglected to include this book in any blog post. 

Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein

Set in Trinidad in the 1940's this is the story of cultures existing in a period of change. This story centers on the island's minority Hindu population. Hansraj Saroop lives with his family in the "Barrack", a dilapidated shelter that houses multiple families. His wife wants him to purchase land in the village for a real house and that leads to him taking a job as a night watchman at a local estate where the wealthy husband has disappeared leaving a wife behind. But to me it was the peripheral characters who made this novel come to life. There is a plot but it seems secondary to Hosein, who draws vivid pictures of all the characters in this novel. This novel won the 2024 Walter Scott Prize for Fiction and, while it wasn't my favorite historical novel this year, I did enjoy it. 

 

Sister Francis Xavier

I just started reading the fifth (and last) book in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.  It's called The Last Olympian and Riordan dedicated it as follows:

To Mrs. Pabst, my eighth grade English teacher, who started me on my journey as a writer

A couple of things struck me about that dedication.  First, that no matter how old you are the taboo against using a teacher's first name is hard to ignore.  I was at a meeting the other night and my 11th grade English teacher was part of the committee.  I usually end up calling her nothing because I can't bring myself to use her first name.  But, second, I thought this was a wonderful dedication and I hoped that Mrs. Pabst was still alive to appreciate it.

It made me think about my eighth grade English teacher, Sr. Francis Xavier, who is no longer alive.  She was a nun, a School Sister of Notre Dame, and she took no prisoners.  She wore a full habit even when the other nuns were moving to the short habits with the half veil.  During mass (which we went to every day) she would stalk up and down the aisles monitoring everyone (not just her class) and if she didn't feel we were singing the hymns loud enough she would hiss "ssssssing!" at us. 

She was also one of the best teachers I've had in my life. 

I had Sister for English from sixth through eighth grade.  Twice a week she would write the beginning of a sentence on the board and our homework assignment was to go home and write "a paragraph" using that as the opening.  For instance, she might write "Today, while I was brushing my teeth ..." and we would have to write something beginning with that phrase.

It wasn't really a paragraph, it was both sides of a sheet of paper (the special "control" paper that was assigned to sixth through eighth graders).  But she always referred to it as "a paragraph".  I think she was trying to make it seem as if it was not that big of a deal to write something.  You didn't have to write a whole story, just a paragraph.

The next day, before we turned in our work, she would look at her class roll and call out a name.  The lucky student would trudge to the front of the classroom, stand behind the podium and read his or her paragraph to the class.  Sister would say thank you and check his or her name off the list.  We would spend the entire class period listening to the work of our peers.  If you weren't called on during that class period you would be called on the next time.  Or the next.  We had forty-two kids in our classroom so you could never tell when you might be up again.   (Yes, forty-two).  And sometimes she'd cheat and call someone early, just to keep us on our toes.

We never earned anything other than a checkmark for our work, but the mere fact that we knew we could be called on to read our work out loud made everyone work hard to be somewhat entertaining.  You could tell if your classmates were impressed.  They nodded or laughed or occasionally gasped.   Usually Sister would just say thank you, but occasionally she would ask a question if the student had written about something factual or, if the student had written about something personal, she might express some appropriate emotion.  But mostly she just listened along with the rest of us.  If, however, the student used improper grammar (which of course happened often) she would stop him or her in mid-sentence and what followed was the equal of the Inquisition.  She didn't rest until everyone understood what was wrong with the sentence and how it was to be corrected.  But she did it all through questions and answers - law professors using the Socratic method could have learned a thing or two from Sister's technique. 

Reading paragraphs was two days out of our week.  Two other days were spent diagramming sentences.  She would write a sentence on the board, we would diagram it ourselves on our papers and then she would look at her class roll and call someone to the board to diagram it on the board.  if the student got lost she would look at the class and we would raise our hands to help out. 

Today, over at So Many Books, Stephanie comments upon an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that a professor at Trinity College is teaching a class on diagramming sentences because the students asked for it. 

They start off with easy sentences and build up to complex ones, their final assignment for the class asks them to diagram 120 lines of their favorite poem. The class also thrives on a little competition. At the end the 30 students are broken up into two teams. Each team has a week or two to write a sentence for the other team. Then on competition day the sentences are exchanged, the stop watch starts ticking and they have something like 40 minutes to diagram the sentence. The teams work at the same time each on their own blackboard. Each team starts off with 100 points and get deductions for errors. The team with the most points after deductions wins.

That sounds like something Sr. Francis Xavier would have liked.  She was a hard taskmaster and the class lived in fear of her but we learned from her.  Oh, did we learn.  The character that Meryl Streep played in the movie Doubt reminded me of her.  But, unlike that character, she was never the principal and I don't think she actually wanted to be the principal.  And it truly would have been a shame to remove her from the classroom.

I don't remember what we did on our fifth day in class.  I don't think there was a set regime, I think she mixed things up a little on those days.  I remember sometimes she would have us read things written by professionals and pull them apart.  Not for meaning but for grammar and structure.  (We had a different teacher, Mrs. Kearns, who taught "Reading" which was really the English literature class.)

Sr. Francis Xavier is long dead.  She taught me at the end of the baby boom when class sizes were enormous and when nuns were expected to "serve" without pay, just a convent to live in and food to eat.  Unlike the priests in the rectory, they cleaned their own homes and did their own grocery shopping and laundry.  And they did that after a long day teaching in classrooms crammed full of elementary school children .  Some of them were not very good teachers.  Some of them were not happy people.  Some of them were, frankly, downright mean.  But others, like Sr. Francis Xavier, were great teachers who were not appreciated nearly enough.  

I don't know if any of her students ever became a professional writer and dedicated anything to her.  But she certainly deserves such a dedication.

Derecho

A Yahoo News headline about the bad weather in the southern states  caught my eye today. It included a link to find out what a 'derecho' is. I didn't need to click it,  but I did  anyway and boy did it bring back memories. 

Derecho: 

"... a widespread and long lived windstorm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms."

Three years ago I didn't know the word derecho.  I knew what a tornado was, of course.  You can't grow up in the midwest and not be familiar with tornados. 

Midwesterners treat the possibility of tornados with an odd combination of deep respect and offhandedness.  A Midwesterner can walk outside and "feel" that its tornado weather.  And when the sky starts turning a particular shade of green, a Midwesterner starts to look for shelter even if no one has told her to.  On the other hand, it is possible for the tornado sirens to be blaring away and for people on the streets to be paying no attention.  A look at the sky, a sniff of the air.  It can tell you that the bad weather isn't near you.

Tornado sirens go off over the entire city, but the city is a big place.  A few times in my life a tornado has touched down in the northern part of the city while we in the southern part enjoyed nothing more than a rain shower.  I recall one day walking into the St. Louis County Administrative building only to be told by the guard that I either needed to leave or go to the basement.  Didn't I hear the tornado warnings, he asked?  Well.  Yeah.  But there was no bad weather within miles.  I could see that and feel that.  St. Louis County, however, treats EVERY tornado warning like the warning it is (which is only right).  So I went to the basement with the county workers, the sheriff's department and a bride and groom who were on their way to the courts to get married.  We hung out for about 20 minutes until the all clear sounded and then moved on about our business.  I don't recall anyone being the least bit nervous.

When I was a kid the tornado sirens were the old World War II air raid sirens. They hung on the telephone polls and when they went off they started off slowly, beginning with a deep bass and whirring slowly to a steady baritone.  There was one about 100 yards from our house and that sucker was LOUD.  You couldn't miss it when it went off.  We always went to the basement - although sometimes if my mom wasn't home we'd stand in the garage with my dad watching the weather get nearer until he'd say "it's time".  Then we'd head downstairs.  It was a real pain when they went off in the night, waking us from a sound sleep.  But better safe than sorry.   Now they have newer sirens but I think they are harder to hear and although I've always woken in the night when they go off I sometimes fear that some night I'll sleep through them.

But the day we experienced the derecho?  We had no warning.  None whatsoever.

It was three years ago.  July 19, 2006. 

It was a hot day.  A really hot day.   A St. Louis heat wave day.  It had been a year of bad weather.  I remember going to the basement in the middle of the night a couple of times that spring and summer.  But that day was sunny and clear but very, very hot. I remember that when I left my office in mid-county I could tell that they were getting some weather to the north of the city, I could see it in my rear view mirror as I drove south.  But overhead it was clear.  

I got home from work about 6:30 and changed and ate something.  Then I went upstairs to my office and was straightening up some things. It was maybe about 7:30 by this time.  It was still quite light out, in July it stays light until almost 9:00. I was thinking I should turn on the radio and listen to the Cardinals game; they were playing the Braves that night.  They were in the new stadium that year. 

My home office windows face south and east.  To the south the view was blue sky and the beginning of a golden evening light.  To the east it was also blue sky.  I don't remember now why I went into my guest bedroom but I did.  It has a window that faces north and I could see really dark clouds far to the north.  I didn't give it much thought.  They were moving fast but they were northeast of me.  Weather here moves from west to east, sometimes from north to south, often from south to north but NEVER from east to west.  These clouds were already moving into the northeast so they were passing us by. 

About ten minutes later I went back into that room for something, looked out the window and did a double take.  Was the storm moving towards me?  That didn't seem possible.  For that to happen, a storm that had been heading east would have to stop, change direction and start to come in from the northeast.  How likely was that?  Not very. But I stood at the window and watched.  It was moving fast, a wall of dark clouds, deep dark gray and some almost black.  And yes it WAS headed my way.  The storm had turned. 

Well, that was weird.

But there were no tornado sirens going off.  I went back to my office, flipped on the TV and flipped around stations, but  I couldn't even find a T-Storm warning.   I headed back to the other room.  Good grief that storm was moving fast.  Really fast.  It was now over the near northern part of the city heading southwest and it was massive.  The wind in front of it was starting to blow a little but the sky was bright blue where I was. 

I stood at my second floor window and watched it roll in, watched the wind start to swirl debris around, watched the wind start to blow the trees in my back yard.  The old flowering crab that was half dead looked like it might fall over.  My wooden fence was starting to sway back and forth.  I began to wonder if it would make it through the storm intact.  The branches on the old soft maple trees were now whipping back and forth and the black clouds were only a mile or so away. 

It's weird that there are no tornado warnings, I thought.  And then suddenly I thought - what the hell are you doing standing in front of this glass window in winds like these (it's the flying glass and debris that will kill you in a tornado).   I walked away and thought, maybe I should go to the basement.  But there were NO tornado sirens going off.  I (stupidly) went back to the window and looked out.  The wind was now, if possible, blowing even harder and I thought to myself, that crab tree is going to be uprooted and the wind is going to bring it right into this house.  Get the HELL away from the window.

The sky wasn't green, there was no tornado "weather" smell and there were no tornado sirens.  But I flew down two flights of stairs to the basement, stopping only to grab my sneakers on the way down (you should always wear shoes during a storm so you don't step on broken glass) and my little portable black and white TV.  My basement isn't the most comfortable place to cower during a storm, there isn't any comfortable furniture down there, but there is a radio and flashlights.  But I wouldn't have been comfortable even if there had been furniture.  

I turned on the little TV and finally (FINALLY) the weather people were on telling everyone to take shelter as fast as possible.  But there was still no tornado warning. 

I had an old-style glass basement window on the north side of the basement and I realized I needed to be as far away from it as possible.   I could hear the wind getting even louder.  How was that possible when THERE WERE NO TORNADO SIRENS?  I finally decided to open the door to my walk-in cedar closet and stand in it.  In a tornado you should always go to an enclosed space with no windows  and that was the best I could do in case the storm blew out the basement windows.  I've never done it before; I've never done it since. I stood in the cedar closet with the door not completely closed, listening to the storm.  I've never been as scared in a storm as I was right then. 

And then it was over.   The wind stopped.  I went upstairs and I could see blue sky peeping out in the north.  I'm not even sure if it rained, all I remember is the wind. 

I still had electricity.  For about 5 more minutes.  And then it was gone.    It was the largest power outage in our history, more than 1,200,000 residents were without power.  Some people didn't get power back for three weeks, all the while the temperature was hovering at about 100 degrees.  They called out the national guard to go door to door helping people.  You couldn't buy ice at any price.  People who had old fashioned phones that plug into the wall and don't need electricity were the only ones with phone service after the cell phone batteries lost their charges. I was lucky, my power was back in four days and my parents never lost power so I had a place to go that had air conditioning.

What the hell was it that went through that day?  It was like nothing we had ever seen before.  The weather people kept insisting it wasn't a tornado. But there had been 80-100 mph winds.  So what was it?

Finally they told us that it was a derecho.   I hope I never see another one in my lifetime.