Mr Rogers was awesome

The Fallback Plan

If you’ve ever been asked what you want to be when you grow up  well after you’ve graduated from college, if you’ve ever found yourself living in your childhood bedroom as an ostensible adult, or if you’ve ever just wondered what those experiences might be like, because you were so together, I direct you to  the wonderful novel The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein.

At the center of the novel is Esther.  She finds herself a college graduate with no plans for the summer – or after that.   After a lifetime of academic and artistic achievement, Esther wrapped up her college career on a disconcerting note that threatens to set her adrift.  At first, Esther views her return to her parents home as a temporary setback – one that will surely be overcome in short order.  A description of Esther heading out on the town with old friends nicely captures her veneer of optimism:

We walked outside with the bravado of soldiers during peacetime.

The veneer soon wears off.  Esther sinks into despondency and begins to imagine possible avenues out of her parents’ home into the world at large. She imagines herself beginning a career as an author, and she pictures her first screenplay as a retelling the Chronicles of Narnia with pandas in the roles of the Pevensie children.  Things are not looking good for Esther’s future prospects.

Esther eventually has a job thrust upon her by her mother in an effort to shake her from her sleeping-in cereal-eating funk.  She becomes a nanny/babysitter for the cool young couple that she had met at one of her parents’ neighborhood parties.  The family has been recently shaken by a tragedy that upends all of Esther’s expectations of what a hip, “together” household can be.  Over time, Esther comes to realize that “adults” don’t hold some mysterious keys to succeeding at life either.

On a bike ride through the neighborhood, Esther reflects:

I’d always thought that if I completed the right steps, in the right order, each step would magically reveal itself to me…I got good-enough grades, I got into a good-enough school, where I got more good-enough grades, I made the plays, I graduated.  I had learned so much…yet I was prepared for nothing.  I didn’t know how to shift bicycle gears.

Slowly, it becomes apparent that Esther may have begun to shift gears on her own life.  Through trial and error, and a healthy dose of failure, Esther begins to become prepared for life.

Slacker novels have been around since at least Holden Caulfield’s day, if not earlier. What is rare, as far as I can tell, is a the placement of a young woman as the anti-hero.  Welcome, ladies, to the slacker fold.  Leigh Stein’s Esther is a memorable character and The Fallback Plan is a welcome addition to the coming-of-age canon.  I recommend checking it out.

Bonus material: 

Leigh Stein wrote a coming-of-age syllabus for Bookforum that I think highlights some of her inspirations for The Fallback Plan.

She also prepared Electric Literature’s January Mixtape.

Butterfly in the Typewriter

John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces is a very polarizing book that carries a lot of baggage.  Some people think it’s one of the greatest American novels ever written and captures the spirit of New Orleans better than anything before or since, and some think it’s the most pointless, wandering, contrived piece of garbage they’ve ever read.  Coupled with the known fact that the novel was published a dozen years after Toole committed suicide on a roadside in southern Mississippi, it all makes for plenty of drama and speculation and fodder for discussion.

Cory MacLauchlin’s Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces attempts to tell the story of Toole’s upbringing, his creation of the book, his death, and the machinations that transpired following his suicide and upon the eventual publication of his work.  The challenge that MacLauchlin faced was that there wasn’t a whole heck of a lot of data or evidence for him to rely on to try to tell Toole’s tale, particularly with regard to Toole’s early life.  For this reason, much of the early portion of the book seems to reflect MacLauchlin’s effort to construct a narrative around a single quote or reported incident, and to this reader it was pretty clear that he didn’t have a lot to go on.  Nevertheless, what he doesn’t appear to do is make stuff up or overly dramatize the facts.  And when he gets into the later periods of Toole’s life, he relies on first-hand accounts from those who were close to Toole to build the story.

What a sad story it is.  For those of us who’ve read A Confederacy of Dunces, most of what we think we know about Toole comes from the foreword written by Walker Percy, to whom Toole’s mother Thelma personally delivered the manuscript in an effort to get it published (after Toole had unsuccessfully tried to have Simon & Schuster publish it, eventually giving up and putting the manuscript in a box).  The story would appear to be: (i) young man writes book; (ii) young man can’t get book published; (iii) young man commits suicide; (iv) young man’s mother gets book published; (v) book wins Pulitzer.  The end.  But there is so much more to Toole’s life than that foreword can possibly convey, and MacLauchlin has done an incredible job of sifting through the available resources to share the details as objectively and truthfully as possible.

Toole was an interesting fellow, and it seems pretty clear that he would have been fun and interesting to hang out with.  He was fascinated by the culture of New Orleans, where he was born and raised, and New Orleans instilled in him a tendency to closely observe everyone and everything around him; this keen ability to notice details and personalities carried over into his writing.  From MacLauchlin’s telling of Toole’s story, it seems very clear who the people were in Toole’s life that formed the basis or inspiration for many of the characters in Confederacy.

Sadly, though, it also seems that there was a rather bizarre relationship between Toole and Thelma.  She was very possessive of him, perhaps even more so after his death.  And while writing his book Toole evidently spiraled into depression and paranoia that sound absolutely devastating.  Following his suicide, Thelma went off the deep end herself.  The last portion of the book makes a compelling case that insanity ran in the family, and both Toole, his father, and his mother all demonstrated behaviors that support that theory.

In the end, whether you liked Confederacy or hated it, there is no denying that this is a tragic story.  And if any elements of Toole’s life or his work interest you, you will be fascinated by this book.

Book Time with Meg: 02

We had so much fun recording our new podcast with my daughter Meghan (8) last week, that we decided to do it again. This time around, we’re talking about Dan Gutman’s The Genius Files: Mission Unstoppable.  There may be a spoiler or two.

 
Book Time with Meg: 02

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Friday Links

Baseball season is finally here, which puts The Millions in mind of this excellent excerpt from The Art of Fielding.

It’s also Passover.  There is a new book out about General Grant’s expulsion of the Jews from Kentucky during the Civil War. It happened.  The episode also featured prominently in Dara Horn’s excellent novel All Other Nights.  (See my review of All Other Nights and my interview with Dara Horn about the novel.)

In other Passover news, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander co-edited The New American Haggadah.  I have a copy, and it’s beautiful.  Foer wrote about the project in The New York Times.  BGB contributor Nicole’s rabbi gives it a mixed review, calling it “the Mad Men” Haggadah.  Which may only make it sell more copies.

e-books may be increasing reading among adults.  Here’s more on the study.

Time has an excerpt of the second book in Colin Meloy and Carsdon Ellis’s Wildwood Trilogy, Under Wildwood.

News that made my week, Carrie Brownstein inked a deal for a memoir.  Yes, please.

Click here for that Game of Thrones visual guide that you’ve been looking for.

List: 67 Books Geeks Should Read to Their Kids Before Age 10.

Another list: Three Magical Myths for Grown-Ups

The list that begs the question – Have book lists jumped the shark?:  Top 10 Present Tense Books

Like Game of Thrones?  Like English Premier League Soccer?  Then check out the Game of Thrones to English Premier League Converter.

Chip Kidd @ Ted

Rock star book designer Chip Kidd gives a stirring TED talk about book design and the lasting thingy-ness of printed books.  This is excellent.
 

I have no idea what’s going on with his glasses.

Atmospheric Disturbances 2

Atmospheric Disturbances, by Rivka Galchen, came fairly highly recommended with great enthusiasm from this very blog (see 2 part interview with the author in the side bar) and was based on an intriguing premise — a man comes home one day and is convinced that the woman in his home is not actually his wife Rema, but rather a “simulacrum”.

In his quest to get to the bottom of this mystery, our main character, Dr. Leo Liebenstein, assumes the identity of Tsvi Gal-Chen [the author's father's name], a meteorologist [the author's father's occupation] with the Royal Academy of Meteorology.  He also enlists the unwitting aid of Harvey, one of the doctor’s mental patients, who believes he can manipulate the weather with his mind.

Somehow our protagonist’s journey leads him to Patagonia and to his wife’s mother, as well as an assignment with the Royal Academy.

I was hooked by the concept, and had been meaning to read this one for a while.   Unfortunately, while I think Ms. Galchen has a natural talent for writing, her ability to translate that skill into a comprehensible story seemed to elude me.  I couldn’t quite figure out what was real and what was fantasy, and I can’t profess to understand the ending of the story [much like my reaction to The Angel's Game, as noted in another post].  Feel free to take a stab at it, and by all means shoot me an explanation if you figure it out.

What Kids Are Reading 2012

Renaissance Learning has issued their annual report called What Kids Are Reading, 2012.  If you are unfamiliar with the company, they provide reading services to schools and parents.  Their AR Book Finder helps parents find reading-level appropriate books for their children.  They also provide in-school testing to help determine students’ reading level, and they provide at home/in school comprehension tests on books that students have read to help gauge understanding.  My daughter’s school uses the service, so I was interested in learning more.

I found out about the report through an  an alarmingly titled article in The Huffington Post called American High School Students Are Reading Books At 5th-Grade-Appropriate Levels.  The slide show at the bottom of the article lists the Top 20 books being read by students in grade 9-12.  There were a few things that surprised me.  I was surprised that The Lightning Thief (reviewed by second grader yesterday) is on the list.

I was also surprised that among the novels that are deemed below grade level that contribute to this 5th grade reading average include Animal Farm (7.3), To Kill a Mockingbird (5.6), Of Mice and Men (4.5), The Great Gatsby (7.3), Elie Weisel’s Night (4.8), The Outsiders (4.7) and The Lord of the Flies (5.0).  All of those books have been on high school reading lists for forever it seems.  Is the problem with the kids?  The list also includes books in the Twilight (4.9), Harry Potter (6.9), and The Hunger Games (5.3) series.  (For quick comparison, Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1400+ pages) only gets you a grade-rating of 10.1. )

The report itself includes commentary from authors and education experts about what children should be reading. A them of supporting kids runs throughout from “our goal as parents is to respond to their interests without judgment and to be ready with a new book in hand” to  ”adults bear the responsibility and the privilege of welcoming readers…into the brave new world of literature not just by gauging what young people read but also by engaging in the reading itself, as well as in discussion of the choices and motivations that lie behind that reading.”  There is some excellent food for thought in the report for how parents and teachers should go about engaging children about books and guiding them towards more complex reading.

I’m a methodology nerd, so I want to know where the many lists in the report come from.   My guess is that the data is mined from the schools that use Renaissance Learning’s tools, which includes “24,465 schools in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.”  That’s a lot of data from a lot of students.  It’s data that is largely student driven, however.  It is the students, at least second graders at our school, that keep track of their books read and take the corresponding tests.  It would be interesting to know how well the students did, on average, on the comprehension of the novels at various grade levels.  I’m also curious to know how representative the lists are of the books actually read by the students.  Does it include assigned reading?  Are the lists representative of all the books that the kids read, or does it represent the books that they thought that they could pass a comprehension test on?

If you are a parent or teacher, do read the report.

Book Time with Meg

I’m excited to kick off what I hope will become a regular feature here at BGB – The Book Time with Meg podcast.  Each episode will feature an interview with my daughter Meghan about a book that she’s read.  Meghan turns 8 tomorrow and is in second grade. In this inaugural episode, Meghan talks about the first book in the Percy Jackson series, The Lightning Thief.  She is way more polished than I am.

Book Time with Meg: 01

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Friday Links

The Sisters Brothers wins the Tournament of Books!

The NYT discusses raising an e-reader, as in a reader (child) that reads electronically.  Interesting takes.  A teacher says,  “Old books don’t really cut it anymore,” she said. “We have to transform our learning as we know it.”  And then someone who actually studies learning says:

“Right now, the state-of-the-art, in terms of research-based practice is: read traditional books with your child,” said Julia Parish-Morris, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied e-books and how children interact with them. “We don’t have any evidence that any kind of electronic device is better than a parent.”

Good. My job as a parent is safe. For now.

Your Brain On Fiction – the neuroscience of reading stories.

An excellent overview of how big a deal the appearance of the Harry Potter series in e-book form is for JK Rowling.  Even cooler, the author is making the series available for digital loan from libraries.

The assclown that wrote a book about being manly that came out two weeks ago says that adults shouldn’t read YA books.  Ever.  He says, “I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.”  Laurel Snyder, Atlanta author of books for children says:

When adult authors suddenly write Op-Eds that disrespectfully stir the Kidlit/YA pot, they are FLACKING THEIR OWN BOOKS. Please ignore them.

— LaurelSnyder (@LaurelSnyder) March 29, 2012

Uh oh.  Facebook is asserting copyright claims over the word “book.”

Ian McKellan and Stephen Fry swoop in to rescue a pub called The Hobbit from copyright police.  The pub may have actually gotten off easy.

An interesting read about the lost original manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces.

The e-book reader of the future – as imagined in 1935

This is not the official Baby Got Books tote bag, but it ought to be.

A friend sent me this article – “Ann Arbor man punched during literary argument.”  I’ll bet the guy who got punched wouldn’t shut up about Atlas Shrugged.  Totally justified.

This is awesome.  How a book is made.  The paper kind:

All My Friends Are Still Dead & Hilarious

Remember our enthusiasm for the dark comedy gold of All My Friends Are Dead?  Imagine how psyched we are to learn about the sequel, All My Friends Are Still Dead.

Women

In the long list of “people I think I’ve heard a lot about and therefore think I know what they’re all about despite having no actual interaction with them”, add Charles Bukowski.  I’ve heard enough references to him over the years that I think I’ve even taken it upon myself at times to refer to a thing or two as “like Bukowski”.  But I had never actually read anything by him.

So I decided to indoctrinate myself to him via his novel Women, published in 1978.  What I find fascinating is that, while reading one of his novels in many ways showed me that I didn’t actually know a thing about him, in some ways I feel like I knew him all along.

In terms of what I guess I knew all along, assuming this novel is at least semi-autobiographical (which I believe it is), Bukowski was essentially a selfish, self-centered, drunken lecher.  His character, Henry Chinaski, was a Los-Angeles-based poet who begins to achieve minor fame for his poetry and makes his living doing readings, often traveling across the country to do them (and being reimbursed).  All the while, all he seems to think about is drinking and having sex with every woman near him.  This is further exacerbated by the fact that friends and acquaintances often call or just drop by with beer, and women begin to write him and call him wanting to meet him and be with him.  And he never received an offer he could refuse.

This is a pretty filthy book.  It is base and demeaning in the way Chinaski thinks about and treats women, and it features raw sex scenes.  But it is also honest in the sense that Bukowski didn’t have any problem shielding his thoughts.  What was news to me in reading this book is that Bukowski writes with the most simple prose I think I’ve ever read.  Unlike other writers that I had sort of lumped him in with in my head (Kerouc, Burroughs, etc.), Bukowski’s writing is not extravagant whatsoever; he uses small words, short sentences, and straightforward storytelling.  And this novel/memoir is essentially just a series of anecdotes told sequentially, almost all of them involving Chinaski, booze, and women.  Bukowski (at least in this book) is not heavy on deep thoughts.  About the deepest he gets is a nugget like this:

That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink.  If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

Other than a few observations like that, there’s not a whole lot here that’s immediately rewarding.  I think with Bukowski, much like the other authors I mentioned in my parenthetical earlier, and like others who have dedicated their lives to creating stories they could write about (e.g., Hemingway), the whole is more than the sum of its parts; like a concept artist, Bukowski appeared to have led his life knowing that it was all the subject of his writing.  That’s a form of dedication that most other self-centered drunken lechers can’t rely on to try to excuse their behavior.

History of Books

For homework, my second grader is working on a project concerning how communications have changed over time.  She decided to do her project on the history of books.  Her brainstorming session for research ideas looks like this:

We had a great discussion this afternoon, but I can’t stop researching the topic for my own edification.  I’ve stumbled across some cool web resources as a result:

• Wikipedia has a nice overview
• What this U Penn web site lacks in pizzazz it makes up for in thoroughness
• This page hosted by UCSD (also lacking in utlilization of 21st web design) has some great info
• This page, on the History of Graphic Design site, is beautiful and well done
• History of Information’s info is very nice, too
• UNC-Pembroke has resources on the history of books “from cuneiform alphabets to Curious George”
• This History of Visual Communication website has nice chapters on The Art of the Book, The Printing Press, and The Master of Type

Friday Links

When I heard that this was a parody of Jay-Z and Kanye West song, I went to check out that song (the one with the unsavory reference to the gents in Paris).  I don’t like that song so much.  But this, this is pretty great.

The folks at St Martin Press had a package addressed to someone who doesn’t work there with 11 pounds of pot inside.  No one knows who is responsible.  Definitely wasn’t the stoner in the mail room.

Doubleplusgood?  A new film version of 1984 may be in the works.

Goodreads wrote an interesting article about discovering books on Goodreads and other places.  Interesting pie chart.  Mmmmm.  Pie.

This seems inevitable.  There is apparently a booming business for people to write positive book reviews of your book for you on Amazon.  The going rate seems to be $5.

When my daughter sees this, we’re going to have to pack our bags for London.

Cool:  Monks defaced illuminated manuscripts with complaining marginalia.

16 things Calvin and Hobbes said better than anyone else.

Are you still keeping up with The Tournament of Books?  My early pick, The Art of Fielding was eliminated this week, but it appears to be poised to return in the Zombie Round.  My new favorite book, The Sisters Brothers knocked off Swamplandia!, and I think it could be the dark horse to win it all.

And don’t forget to listen to Christopher Walken reading Where the Wild Things Are.

Rin Tin Tin

(Another guest post by our friend Debbie in San Francisco. :

I never saw the TV show “Rin Tin Tin”. Never saw a single film starring Rin Tin Tin. Never owned a dog. And yet, and yet….Susan Orlean’s opus to the showbiz dog told me all that was necessary to know about the story of this beloved canine character. The book tells a story, wrapped up in a story, wrapped up in yet another story.

The first story is a plastic figurine of Rin Tin Tin that the author’s grandfather keeps in his office. He does not let the children touch or play with the beloved item (more on that later). The next story is the author feeling compelled to share the story of this wondrous showbiz dog and how she became compelled to do so. Then of course, the next story is of the dog itself, and the man who created the legend. It doesn’t end there. Yes, there is another story, and that is of the continuing parade of dogs that keep the Rin Tin Tin legend alive and the dramas as they are pulled into service to share with a rapturous audience, both on the large and small screens. Then the final story is the denouement, the aftermath….and like many things in life, it fades to black.

While all this sounds convoluted (too many stories?) it is not. Orlean is a master at weaving compelling narrative, and she helps the reader make sense of it all. She is a generous writer, in that she is explanatory and helps us all keep things straight in our minds as we’re turning pages.

The tyranny of the years is sadly apparent in this book, as I was hoping for a little more emotive narrative, a la “Seabiscuit”, which made me cry. I did not cry in one place in this book, which surprised me, as I was prepared to do so. Those of you who are interested in Hollywood history will enjoy this book, as “Rinty’s” story could not be told without sharing the underbelly of the entertainment business at the time. With a bit of Kismet, the quasi-silent “The Artist” has won an Oscar this year. We learn a lot about the migration of Rin Tin Tin films from silent to dialogue-filled “talkies”. The author has some beautiful prose about the magic of movies and the emotional spell they cast on audiences. I was riveted.

This book is a life story. It’s a life story of not one dog, but of a character, an idea and a celluloid creation. The idea keeps a number of people happily employed, and we learn of their sagas in turn. When the last pages are unfurling, the reader feels a sense of joy for having known the story of Rin Tin Tin.

p.s. at the end, the author shares that her grandfather had a momentary lack of judgment/generosity, and lets the kids play with the Rin Tin Tin figure he treasured. Guess what happened to it?

The Book Club Cookbook, Take 2

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a contributing member of a book club. Or a non-contributing member for that matter.  I like to read books, and I like to talk about books, but I just haven’t gotten it together to merge the two.  At one point, I thought it might be fun to start an US magazine book club, where all us moms could drink yummy cocktails and talk about sparkley dresses and reality shows that I don’t even watch, but really I would just want to have the drinks and chat.  Yet somehow, the gods of free books found it in their hearts to send me a copy of the coolest book club book ever.  Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp, creators of bookclubcookbook.com have come out with a revised and updated second edition of The Book Club Cook Book: Recipes and Food for Thought from Your Book Club’s Favorite Books and Authors.

I missed it when the first edition of this book came out, but I have loved pouring over this second edition.  Even the Table of Contents is fun; each book title is paired with a recipe title so you can search for your favs and decide if you’d want that recipe.  Ahab’s Wife (by Sana Jeter Naslund) comes with a seafood chowder recipe (of course), Bel Canto (by Ann Patchett – when do I get to go to her Nashville bookstore?) is paired with eggplant caponata, and The Great Gatsby has you drinking mint juleps.   The titles and food ideas are endless!

After you check out how many of these books you have already read (most), it’s fun to see what has been written about them.  Each entry includes a brief synopses of the book along with the recipe, but the book club gals have also included discussions with many of the authors about why certain foods or recipes were included in the story or their own reasons for choosing particular recipes. So, sometimes the author’s family recipe for, say, vanilla kipferls (crescent cookies), thank you Markus Zusak, show up because the author has shared that that was what he remembers his own grandmother baking and savored those memories while writing about life in World War II Germany (The Book Thief).  The Novel Thoughts sections after the recipes and the More Food For Thought sections after that include even more information about the books as well as interviews with specific book clubs about their own book/recipe pairings.

When asked about the creation of The Book Club Cookbook, the authors share that each of them discovered a connection between books and food in their own book clubs, a specific pairing of certain books with particular foods, and then a realization that most authors included descriptions of food based on cultural, ethnic, and familial traditions.  Because food figured prominently in their own book club experiences, the authors ‘…thought it would appeal to book club members to have delicious, thematically appropriate recipes at their fingertips…”. It sounds like book clubs around the country really get into connecting what they’re reading to what they’re eating.

I’m not real sure I’ll get to experience this book the way the authors have intended, as I have read most of these books already, do not participate in a book club, and lack the ability to plan ahead.  But, I do hope to at least try some of the recipes (ahem, Demetrie’s chocolate pie, sans poo poo), and I will definitely continue to enjoy reading what the original authors as well as the Book Club Cookbook authors have to say about their books and their food. If you happen to belong to one of these clubs and you still haven’t read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, go buy this book and start working on some glogg to enjoy with your Swedish meatballs.

Ten Thousand Saints, Take Two

After reading blogmaster Tim’s glowing review of Eleanor Henderson’s novel Ten Thousand Saints, I had to dive in at my first opportunity.

I’m not sure why, but this was a slow read for me.  Not because of any complexities in Henderson’s prose, or any funny business with flashbacks or other tricky literary devices; it just took me a long time to read.  Perhaps it was my failure to identify with the characters (a condition that has impacted me on countless otherwise fantastic reads), or perhaps it was my inability to choose sides in the conflicts that developed between the characters.  I don’t know, but I’ll assume it was something that wouldn’t affect other readers.

The story starts in a small town in Vermont in the 1980′s, centering on two best friends, Jude and Teddy.  They are high school students that live in the margins, not part of the mainstream in school, and both come from broken homes (using that term generously).  There’s a complex and depressing history surrounding each of them involving adoptions, divorces, drugs, abandonment, and general oppression.  On New Year’s Eve they meet Eliza, Jude’s estranged father’s girlfriend’s daughter, who has taken the train up from New York City, and at a party to which they were not invited, bad things happen.  The story takes off from there as various characters try to cope in the aftermath.

We are introduced to various subcultures as the story unfolds, from small town Vermont to the straight-edge scene in NYC’s East Village, from high class uptown Manhattanites to the homeless in Tompkins Square Park, from hippie pot growers to upper middle class jocks.  And what I guess I struggled with was that the characters in the story seemed to be so passionate, but I couldn’t really figure out where that passion was directed; I couldn’t really identify their motives or what they were fighting so hard to achieve.  Maybe that was the point.  Maybe Henderson was trying to illustrate that everyone has their struggles and their goals, and there’s no objective measure of the worth of what drives people.  Not to say that there aren’t fundamentally important and meaningful themes here — death, substance abuse, unwanted pregnancy, class war, AIDS — it’s just that she seemed to set the stage for them against a backdrop far from what you might expect in “classic” literature.

This one made me think a lot — that might be what took me so long to read it.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Those Who Save Us

Germany during WWII is such a horrific part of history, why do I continue to become engrossed in this time period?  Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay remains one of my all time favorites. Why do I torture myself?  Since I don’t feel like digging into the self-help books to find out, I’ll just continue reading this genre because even after turning that last page I never stop thinking about them.    Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum is no exception.  Ms. Blum took me on another emotional ride through this part of history.

Trudy is a college professor embarking on a study of Germans who lived in Germany during World War II.  She questions them about their lives during this time, what they saw, how they acted etc…. she encounters some very interesting people.  In reality, she is using these interviews as a means to understand her mother.  Anna, her mother, isn’t talking.  She and Trudy moved to America from Germany and although Trudy was a little girl during this time she doesn’t remember the details about how they survived.  Frankly, Trudy has no idea about the truth of her existence.

Ms. Blum keeps the story moving even as she alternates between Anna and Trudy’s current life and their past life in Germany.  The story begins with Anna as a young adult who takes care of her father in their home.   She doesn’t get out much but when she does she encounters a Jewish doctor with whom she ultimately falls in love.  The war begins and life drastically changes for the worse.  Anna manages to hide her lover in a crawl space in her house.   He is ultimately discovered by Anna’s father who promptly turns him over to the authorities and throws a pregnant Anna out of the house.

Anna takes refuge with the local baker, who is still able to keep baking, thanks to subsidies from the German government.  More unfortunate events occur while the two women raise Trudy and then very unexpectedly, Anna finds herself running the bakery alone.  A Nazi officer enters the bakery one day, likes what he sees (in Anna, not the bread) and proceeds to make weekly visits taking what he needs from her (in the upstairs bedroom).  Anna figures out quickly how she can use this officer to keep herself and Trudy alive.  Her neighbors look at her accusingly and want nothing to do with her.   At the end of the war as her neighbors yell profanities, calling her a traitor, she is saved by an American soldier who marries her and brings her and daughter to America.

Interspersed between Anna’s story, we take an emotional journey with Trudy as she learns more and more about herself and her mother while conducting very painful interviews.  Through these interviews, she meets a man who knew her mother in their German town and her history begins to unfold.

A quote from the Nazi soldier sums up all the characters in this story:

 “Do you know, you alone save me. Your purity, your values – our shared values – they elevate me above the filth that surrounds me every day. You are my savior, he says. After all, if not for you, I might have been pulled into Koch’s decadence [reference to an unethical commander], and then I too would have been removed from my post. We might never have met, Anna! I often think of that.  As do I, says Anna.  As do I.”

In retrospect, every character in this book is being saved by someone and is saving someone else from something –  from emotional issues or frankly, from death.   The relationship between the Nazi officer and Anna is the most thought-provoking one to me in this story.  I’m a sucker for mother/daughter stories.  Obviously, Anna wouldn’t have chosen to be involved with this man, especially knowing that if the truth was revealed about her daughter’s father.  Having been involved with a Jewish man in this manner could have been death for them both.  But Anna had her sweet little girl.  If you’re a mother you know that you would do anything and everything in your power to keep your baby alive.  I can only imagine the mixed emotions Anna lived with every day – the sickening feeling of having this man force his way into her life, but his actions equal survival for them both.

Fiction? Supposedly.  But Jenna Blum herself is of  Jewish and German descent.  I imagine that much Those Who Save Us is based on her own family history.  If you are also intrigued with this genre or heart wrenching mother/daughter tales, then add Ms. Blum’s first novel to your list.

Happy St Patrick’s Day

What says St Patrick’s like a leprechaun-eating Ulysses-reading cat?

(Photo:  Journopal, Brooklyn, NY)

Friday Links

My new favorite blog: Least Helpful.   The site serves up a steady stream of the least helpful customer reviews on Amazon.  Hilarity.

Finalists have been chosen for the NYC Public Library’s Young Lions Award

The Children’s Choice Book Awards have also announced their finalists

The Wall Street Journal examines what women read…when no one can see the cover.   Us dudes, on the other hand, are all Proust, all the time.

Check out this awesome US literature map from the thirties.  Back then it wasn’t all Brooklyn.

Gandalf comes out in support of pub against copyright bullying

List of the best novels of all time. Hasn’t this been done?

Kids’ books that take the scary out of science

Author parleys with the e-book pirates

Don’t forget to check in daily at the Tournament of Books now underway