West With The Night by Beryl Markham

Here is the reason why I love to be in a book club:

Someone picks a book they love, or thinks they’re going to love, and then they put it out there, and hope we share in their excitement. This month I read West with the Night. I had heard of Beryl Markham in a vague sort of way; basically I knew she was an aviatrix. The book is not new (written in 1942), but I had never heard of it. And, if it weren’t for my book club, I probably would never have read it. Instead, I got a copy at the library (still have those 84 books to read on my shelf), and, since the cover did not seem compelling, I waited quite a few days before finally cracking it open. (Full disclosure – I finished ten minutes before I left for the meeting).

I loved this book. The woman was amazing. I wanted to be her. She fought lions, trained horses, flew airplanes. Who wouldn’t want to be her? I think it should be required reading for teenage girls who feel they are not given the chances they deserve. Beryl Markham had no mother, and was raised in East Africa by a father who preferred to consider her his contemporary as opposed to his daughter.

Her writing is, in most places, pure poetry. The closest thing I can compare it to is Toni Morrison’s, but Morrison's writing was just too beautiful for me that it became a distraction. The writing also reminded me of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, and even more, Wind, Sand and Stars. I don’t know if it’s the similar topic of flying, or just writing about the thing you love. Do not read this book if you are looking for romance. She apparently had plenty of that, but this is not a book for that subject. This is, according to critics, the utopian view. Which brings me to the next part,

Here is the reason I hate the internet:

Because I read the book so late, I was lucky in that I avoided any google searches on this topic. It is apparently a hotly debated one, whether or not Markham even wrote this book herself. You can do your own research online. I refuse to come down from the high I got reading this book. I say, just let it be. This is not James Frey lying about rehab. Nobody got hurt, and it happened too long ago to interview the witnesses. Supposedly her third husband wrote it. So what? Maybe he loved her, and wanted her to look good, so he gave her adventures the words she did not have. I am tired of snopes! Let’s be naïve and trusting for a little while longer. This is an amazing book, a complete delight; a story of adventure that will give you chills. How could you not enjoy this, as she begins her historic solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean:

“We are bound for a place thirty-six hundred miles from here — two thousand miles of it unbroken ocean. Most of the way it will be night. We are flying west with the night.

So there behind me is Cork; and ahead of me is Berehaven Lighthouse. It is the last light, standing on the last land. I watch it, counting the frequency of its flashes — so many to the minute. Then I pass it and fly out to sea.”

If you need more than that, take Ernest Hemingway’s word for it, not mine:

"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true . . . I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book.”

One Day by David Nicholls

I picked this up for my summer “beach read”, and it was that and a little bit more. As I was reading, I couldn’t get past the idea that this was sure to be a movie soon, and the quote from Nick Hornby on the cover seemed to confirm this. This idea produced the odd effect of me casting the characters as I read.

It’s true, you can almost hear Hugh Grant’s voice every time Dexter Mayhew speaks. (You know it’s a beach read with a name like that.) Emma, of course, could be Renee Zellweger, or whatever young actress is considered the new Renee Zellweger these days. Ok, I guess Hugh Grant is too old too, but can Bradley Cooper do an English accent?

Dex and Em meet cute — and a little sheepishly — on the night they graduate from the University of Edinburgh. Emma Morley, the brainy, working class girl, is way out of Dex’s league, but he is attracted to her, and we are heartened that the privileged cad is kinder than we thought. We are not really given all of the details until later, but we assume that they’ve gotten drunk and spent the night together, perhaps, as Emma hopes, chastely. Dex, despite his initial instincts, does not run away the morning after. They spend what turns out to be an awkward and yet wonderful day together (July 15^th), and then they part, not sure whether they will see each other again. Their paths cross in different contexts over the next twenty or so years, and the letters they send echo the strange friendship they have developed.

What sets this book apart from the typical “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back” formula is the device the author uses to give us glimpses of their relationship. Each chapter takes place on July 15^th, in each of the subsequent years. Sometimes we learn about what has happened in the interim, but more importantly we see specifics about that particular day; where they are, what they are doing. As time passes, the day develops a deep significance to both of them. I liked this format, though it did make me wonder how it would translate into what I believe is the inevitable movie.

The book has many flaws, but the banter between the characters is wonderful. You feel their pain in their constant sarcasm and deflecting comments, but they are hilarious at the same time. No two people could possibly have this many great comebacks, but I don’t care, it’s a novel. Plus, I love to read the words “posh”, and “does he fancy me” and pretty much any other cute expressions that you would find in a novel that takes place in England. Read this one for a fun story that may even surprise you.

Surfer's Code: 12 Simple Lessons for Riding Through Life by Shaun Tomson

So I surfed this summer. Yup, when I signed the kids up for a week of surf camp I decided to try it myself, 5 straight days of getting up and falling down... I don't think I have a bucket list but if i did this one would be on it. Very fun and in another writing forum I plan on putting together my own 'lessons i learned while surfing' piece. In the meantime I picked this book up in a surf shop in Newport.

The author was a world champion surfer in the late 70s when the sport struggled to fix its image, to legitimize what most folks thought of as something airheads did while between drugs and sleeping around. He and a group of fellow surfers formed a world tour, traveling around the world competing against each other and turning surfing into a worldwide sensation.

His writing won't win any awards and if I hadn't tried surfing myself and found it to be a pretty spiritual experience, none of this would have kept my interest. But he has some lines that hit home for this 'cool mom' surfer:

'Part of the appeal of surfing is that you never really know what you are going to get... surfing is all about uncertainty. That feeling of taking a risk, that leap of faith every time I jump into the ocean, that paddle among things unseen - all of these things make surfing special.'

'There is something very special about riding on a board while surrounded by moving water...'

'Surfing builds confidence. It builds confidence in the beginning stages, when young surfers paddle through those lines of white water and make it out to the lineup on their own; when they have the control to sit on their surfboards without falling off; when they learn how to judge approaching swells; and when they finally catch a wave and stand up for the very first time.'

'I learned to trust in all the steps that have gotten me where I am. The result is that I feel better about myself, and I have a lot of fun pushing myself into more challenging situations."

If nothing else, the experience taught me that old dogs can learn new tricks!

Island Light by Katherine Towler

This is the third book in a series by Towler where the main 'character' is a place called Snow Island, which happens to, in fact be Prudence Island, right across the bay from Jim's family house in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. I so enjoyed reading the first two books, where Towler brings this small island community to life. What it's like when the summer folk leave in September and the Islanders battle winter and loneliness.

In this third book the magic was gone for me. I'd already gotten that it's difficult living in a town with only a few dozen people, one store, lots of secrets, not much new happens... in this new book she tries to liven it up, perhaps a bit too much, with 2 new inhabitants, each there for different reasons. One, a woman in her early 30s, there to check out the Inn she inherited from her aunt, the other, in her mid 70s on the island to decide whether to tear down the home her deceased husband had started to build decades before.

Both women just happen to be lesbians and Towler mixes things up a bit with some pretty explicit bedroom stuff with these women and their partners, as well as another island inhabitant, Nick and his married lover Rachel.

Didn't enjoy it this third time around. Not enough Rhode Island quohogging around the lighthouse details, too much lurid detail! Not what I wanted from this particular island read.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

This book was on my to-buy list for so long, that when I actually purchased it I was a little afraid of reading it, since by then it couldn’t possibly fulfill my expectations. I finally picked it up this week at the lake, and I was not disappointed. From the beautiful cover design on the paperback (by one of my favorite children’s book artists, Matteo Pericoli), right through to the heartbreaking end, I loved this book.

I will give one caveat – I was not real keen on the author interview at the end. For me, the book was not a about politics, as much as a perfectly realized interpretation of a moment in time that, in contrast to today, makes a more subtle political statement than McCann does in his interview after. I do not really care about Colum McCann’s political views; and I certainly don’t read his books to hear them. In other words, Colum McCann being “interviewed”, by his friend and collaborator Nathan Englander, took away from my satisfaction at the end of the story. Maybe I should have just finished the story and slept on it, saving the notes at the end for another time.

Ok, so back to the book. If you haven’t heard about it already, Mccann uses the event of Philippe Petit’s walk on the high wire between the World Trade Center towers to tell the story of a large cast of characters. He doesn’t just pluck the characters from the scene beneath the walker — in some cases their involvement in the walk is only incidental. When I first read about the book in the NY Times book review, they noted that the plot is very much like the movie “Crash” in that one event brings all of the people together; but it is a bit different, in that the event is really just a common thread, they don’t necessarily interact with each other. It is a bit six-degrees of separation; two people from different worlds meet, then one of them goes out and is involved with a third, etc.

Through the characters we recall the many tumultuous events of the time: soldiers returned (and not) from Vietnam, the increasing poverty and high crime in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, the struggle between classes and the awkwardness that follows someone trying to prove it doesn’t matter. Philippe Petit is also a character in the story, but McCann never calls him by name – he is just the walker – mischievous, bold, and ethereal. He doesn’t walk on that wire, he hops, he dances, he lays down on it. His walk, for a brief moment in time, lifted us all up into the clouds. And, despite what people at the time may have thought, he made those towers beautiful.

The Film Club by David Gilmour

The concept of this book had intrigued me enough to fork over the $3.98 from the Barnes & Noble bargain bin, but, I hate to say this, I wanted my money back when I finished. (Ok, my husband said that after I made him read it, only because I knew he would like the movie trivia and could finish it in a day.)

The concept seemed intriguing. The author is an unemployed film critic, formerly the host of an award-winning interview show in Canada, and his 15 year old son is failing in school. He offers him this deal – drop out of school and live rent-free in his home (the parents are divorced), but watch three movies a week of his choosing. Week by week they watch a wide variety of classics and obscure films. Reading it, I felt ignorant of most of what they discussed, but, despite the interesting trivia, my practical side could not let me get caught up in the story.

First of all, this was not, as I first thought, a year to get his act together – the father and son are still watching movies together, with both of them only sporadically employed, until he is 19. There’s no mention of difficulty with his school allowing this sort of thing, and I just kept thinking this is not a poor urban kid trapped on a dead-end path, this is really a story about a middle class spoiled brat. It’s one thing to have a troubled kid and want to do everything you can to help them, but it’s another thing entirely to coddle them the way this kid was coddled. (Gets up every afternoon after nights of drinking and smoking with his friends to watch his movie, moons over girlfriends incessantly.) He eventually does drugs (originally against “the rules”) but there are never any repercussions. This father is so over-involved in his kid’s life it’s embarrassing to read. I kept looking at the photo of them on the back cover and thinking, really? He got all these hot chicks?

Seriously, I already wrote too much – this book is about two self-absorbed people – so self-absorbed, in fact, that the acknowledgement at the end includes a note about his daughter. What? He has a daughter? Oh, and a first wife? (As opposed to the second and third.) I like to hope that the daughter was just too smart to get involved, but that’s just me.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

When I picked The Children’s Book, there was a brief sigh as the other to-be-read books on my shelf (ok, shelves) all spread a bit, enjoying the new space left by this 700-page hardcover. We were going on vacation, and I was ready for a multi-generation type epic. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really thinking about the reality of lugging it around the lake, but it was worth the effort.

I will say that this book is not for everyone. I think I was especially predisposed to like it having recently seen the movie “Fairy Tale, A True Story”. The movie covers pretty much the same time period (late 1800’s through the turn of the century and World War Two). The movie and the book also take place in England, where people thought the concept of fairies, the study of Theosophy, and various other political idealogies were serious business. In other words, there were many who believed. Olive Wellwood, the matriarch in The Children’s Book, writes stories of hidden worlds and magical creatures, and she enchants everyone around her.

There are just too many characters in this story for me to give an accurate summary; there are several families involved, and their lives cross and uncross as they grow and change. But the book has everything – large happy families (where tragedy always strikes), true love, adultery, class struggles, women’s rights, and politics. There were clever plot twists, and truly beautiful images of an almost wonderland. Ironically, despite its length, I felt the ending was rushed. It seemed that a decent amount of the large cast of characters were killed off in the last hundred or so pages, in a kind of rush to wrap it up. I still didn’t care, it was a pleasure to immerse myself in this strange and lovely tale, if only for a little while.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

Postscript to last week's review of Slow Love by Dominique Browning... Tonight, our last night here in Little Compton, RI the kids and I were at our favorite surf shop in town, buying hats and t-shirts and enjoying our ice cream cones when who should walk in the door looking for swim fins but Ms. Browning herself! I recognized her voice right away, introduced myself and we had a lovely little chat!

Anyway, 2 words for "Major Pettigrew" as I'm in the throws of packing, laundering and sweeping before we leave tomorrow:

Lovely book!!


See you all at home next week!

Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas and Found Happiness by Dominique Browning

This book was interesting on a few different levels. First off I became aware of it because the author, a former editor of House & Garden magazine has a house in our summer town of Little Compton, RI and a few weeks ago my sister, sister in law and i went to hear her give a 'book talk'. She writes extensively about her home and the town.

Browning, a well known magazine editor, was fired from her job (when the magazine folded) leaving her, as a divorced, working mom of 2, without a job. H&G was part of Conde Nast publications where I also worked at Self magazine for several years after college (she is not kind to the higher ups at the publishing house here). (Another connection to her was that her sister rented the house that we've been in for 23 years for part of the summer a few years back so when she mentions that her sister 'lives nearby, in town, a few miles away'.. that was sort of a kick.)

This is the story of how Browning went from going 100 mph day after day with a fabulous high profile editorship to being unceremoniously dumped. She goes through a depression, eating and drinking too much and finally ending an affair with a married man who after years of being together still remained married to his wife. When she makes the decision to leave NY behind and move up here to RI her life beings to slow down, she creates a beautiful garden, learns too cook, and takes the time to 'get to know herself' and appreciate her new life.

Her musings about being the editor of such a prestigious high end magazine and her preferred comfortable way of living was interesting and amusing: "Before I got into the home-decorating racket, I was more capable of making a home for myself, of knowing, instinctively, what made a house feel like a home. And that had nothing to do with professionalism; it had to do with a simple, effortless accumulation, over many years, of habits of living. My basic decorating rule of thumb is to create as many lovely places in which to sit and read as possible. By this time in my life, I need a certain kind of chair and a certain kind of table nearby, a place on which to prop my feet, and a kind of light that suits my eyes. I like a certain color palette. I need a kind of comfortable clutter. I like to rest my eyes on things, to remember the times I found them or the people who gave them to me. And when I'm tired of them, I box them up for storage, so that when I unpack them years later, they can surprise me once again."

Love that..