openpalm

what do I think?
what do you think?
what can we know?
what’s moving our way?

Today, looking again at my tab on 1001 books, I want to know if “I saw the movie” counts.

When I first went through the list I thought I’d only bold the names of books I’ve reread now. Today I bolded a bunch that I’ve read before.

I’m wondering what I’m about here.

It’s the last day of summer vacation for me. Waaaaah.

MaryMom recommended Keeping Faith by Jodi Picoult to me more than a year ago. I couldn’t read it then, but have now, and Wow! is it good.

This story is about a non-practicing Jewish family, in the middle of divorce, faced suddenly with their 7-year old daughter seeing God, then showing the ability to heal, then stigmata. Why her? why then? why them? is it real or a hoax? A bevy of priests, newsmen, rabbis, and crowds of the pre-faithful (with agendas), and the very hopeful, all flock and fly around the family seeking their own salvations. This is a fast-paced, moving, often funny, insightful and very readable book.

It’s also a love story. About man and woman. About unlikely alliances. About parents and children. About expectations and the endless stream of surprises that comprise relationship and of the adjustments that true love must make.

There’s a great grandma in this book, and a mother who is never sure minute to minute what being a good mother looks like and whether, knowing she can never finally and actually protect her child, tries anyway.

At the core of this book is, as indicated by the title, the issue of faith. Faith in ourselves, in others, in life, in whatever we call god.

On what is hope based? How much of belief is based on what we think, and how much on what our community or The Community thinks? How do we get through the day? What signs and portents do we need to believe in a better tomorrow? Where do we stand when things fall apart, don’t make sense? And what miracles can shake us, when we’ve retreated, back to the living?

Keeping Faith is a very good read.

thanks thanks to Fiona for recommending What the Stones Remember, by Patrick Lane. This is a beautiful, surprising book. Published by Trumpeter Books, an imprint of Shambhala Publications, it’s a memoir full of noticing and joyful, gentle, embarrassed, painful, poignant self-discovery.

Lane mixes observations made while gardening, with memories from his 62 years, with speculations about what might be available and true for him now, several months into sobriety.

The writing is remarkable. I read the first few pages and thought I wouldn’t be able to stay satisfied with this level of detail. I don’t use bookmarks (some perverseness I’m sure, akin to wearing a hair shirt) so I always have to guess, read a passage, adjust, read a passage. In a story with a clear plot this works easily. I didn’t think it would work here. To my amazement, and now filed into my knowledge about writing that works, I find that his descriptions - because they are so careful — have all the character of, well, characters. I recognize each passage even weeks after reading it.

Here’s a taste,

The seedpods of the foxglove have been growing, each in succession, as flowers have bloomed one after another up the long stalk. The lowest seedpod is already mature. A gentle touch ticks the mariachi sound of tiny seeds rattling inside. When the pod splits, the seeds fall into the warm crevices of earth. It is the same for all the flowers of spring now that summer is here. The day lilies blossom and fade in their twenty-four hours of grace, the feverfew sends out its last flare in a thousand white blossomes, the cosmos swings its many shades of cream through deep magenta, and pillars of yellow ligularia blossom in the modest dark of the shade garden.

I begin to understand that when things fall apart it doesn’t mean they’re broken, it means they are forming themselves into other things. The intense confusion of the past eight months has left me feeling nothing would ever be the same again and, of course, why should it be? Things change and I am changed…

Careful observation, exact not fancy words, honesty, time to think deeply. And something here that I’ll call cadence. The rhythm of his sentences somehow mirror his mood, and also the importance not of the author, but of his subject.

See Love, for Patrick’s wonderful contribution on the topic…

There’s a new post on Love …

Think British Airways.
Think stopover in Heathrow.
Think Madrid.
Think adventure.
Think new sights, smells, tastes.
Think my friend since I was 1 year old.
See her standing at the airport.
See us smiling.
Think 2 weeks with my son in a foreign land, but at home in my “sister’s” house.

Blessings abound.

Don’t miss this!

Where the Hell is Matt? 2008

Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love is on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. It has prompted me to start a new page. See the new tab above, Love

Like McEwan, I want — need really — to think about love. To better understand it. To reclaim it if I can.

Enduring Love uses clean, straightforward language to investigate the layers and layers of married love.

What happens to a good relationship when it is put suddenly under exreme stress?

What happens when the norms that have bounded our lives require us to create new non-habitual responses and we become new and strange to each other?

What are the subtle elements that comprise trust?

How much do we take credit for controlling reality? And believe that our partners control reality? And at what point would we rather blame and abandon ourselves and our partners than entertain the thought that reality may not in fact be under control?

This story demonstrates immediately that it’s written by a true writer. It quickly became so compelling that I could not put it down.

I stumbled across this list posted ubiquitously in the blogosphere. I admit to being hooked…

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (ISBN 0-7893-1370-7) is a literary reference book compiled by over one hundred literary critics worldwide and edited by Peter Boxall, an instructor of English at Sussex University, with an introduction by Peter Ackroyd….
The list contains 1001 books and is made up of novels, short stories, and short story collections. There is also one pamphlet (A Modest Proposal), one book of collected text (Adjunct: An Undigest), and one graphic novel (Watchmen).

So hooked, in fact, that you’ll see a tab to the right of this one…labelled 1001. Here’s the list. Another blogger has gone through her instance and bolded the titles she has read. Looking down the list I’ve read a bunch, but so long ago I think it would be cheating to bold them now. I’m going to bold them as/if I read them henceforth.

And by the by…my goal as a writer is, like Ian McEwan, to appear on a list like this not once, not twice but EIGHT times!

P.S. I just finished Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love which I found pretty stunning… more on this in a bit.

On page 215, King writes

Someone — I can’t remember who, for the life of me– once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this. I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of a story, the writer is thinking, “I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?” For me, that first reader is my wife, Tabitha.

This passage caused me to stare off into space for quite a while.

For 16 years, the person I imagined listening as I wrote was my husband. Now my ex-husband. I didn’t know until he was gone that it was for him that I did all my writing. I thought it was for me. But underlying all the words was my need for connection, conversation, discourse. For a sympathetic someone who actually wanted to hear what I had to say. I had the courage to write because someone who really knew the most revealed me, still loved me.

With divorce, my poems and stories have dried up.

Writing for me is a solitary business but not a solo endeavor. I relish the time alone to let thoughts rise and to chase them around until I think they’re ready to hit the page. But that process, alone, isn’t quite enough. Someone needs to see it. Hear it. It doesn’t have to be today. But someday.

Before divorce was a third party in our shared universe, I blithely told my ex that I would be a terrible literary executor. That no matter how much I like someone’s work, I couldn’t imagine myself publishing and peddling it after the author was dead.

[Note to the world, we were talking about the pros and cons of my saying "yes" to a friend who had asked me to be literary executor. It was a conversation more abstract than it might seem.]

My ramblings were not what my husband wanted to hear. At the time I was surprised by his shocked and negative reactions. Thinking back, it seems that he had put his own emotional eggs into a basket labelled, “History will discover my importance later.” Here I was smashing those same eggs in a single heartless backhand swipe to the floor.

I didn’t realize that I was not his Ideal Reader. It wasn’t enough that I liked his work. He had made his peace with getting published rarely by thinking readers would find him in the future.

We’re divorced now. (I guess I already said, that…) I suspect “literary executor” was worth several nails in our coffin.

I don’t think I believe anything different now. But I would say it with more care and regard. With a better sense of the risk. After years of thinking I was his strongest support, this five-minute conversation may have signalled the end of us.

He has since called me arrogant. That day I was just irritated, overwhelmed, and feeling bit used.