Tending to Endings

Oh my goodness, what do I say about Idaho by Emily Ruskovich? Some books are both novels and poems. I flip through the book that’s cover makes it look like a nature guide, and whose title made me take a step back and say, really, a book named Idaho—and read a random sentence or two: “One day in August, the whole family got into the truck. Wade at the steering wheel, where Ann is sitting now, Jenny next to him, their daughters, June and May, nine and six, crammed in the back with a jug of lemonade and Styrofoam cups, which they carved pictures into with their fingernails.” These sentences are on page five and they are all the things that make up a good story character and scenery and voice, and (as is revealed later in the novel) plot. And the language is, well, gorgeous.

I am not a poet, and I do not know how to describe why the language is gorgeous, but it is not like most books, which have moments of this coming together of sound and image and meaning. In this book, each sentence is elegant and lovely even when it is describing something horrible like Alzheimer’s or guilt or Styrofoam. In this book, “Meaning is like music; it catches and is carried. It returns.”

Here is another, and seriously, I just opened to any page, landing on168. “The chins always glow yellow. That’s the trick: There’s always a secret. Everyone has something she doesn’t want told.”

Now granted, I’ve read the whole novel, so I am aware of how each of these sentences holds the whole story. And I mean in both passages I included here. It is remarkable.

Idaho is a book about memory and young siblings and marriage and second marriages and murder and home and so many forms of loss. It is a book that would seem to be about too many things, except that the language and the structure make it hold. It is less about Idaho than it is about the places and the people that—in a pinch—we fashion into home.

Laura Stavoe

Here are the books I loved this year. Many of these were published earlier, but I got around to them this year. The categories are loose, meant to give some shape to the list, but many could fit in multiple categories. The format is just how I read them (kindle, print, audio), of course they available in the other forms. I considered annotating this list, but a one-sentence quip would not do the books justice and more would require surpassing my self-imposed blog word limit. So I will just leave the list here. Feel free to ask questions. I love talking about books.

Favorite Novels (Gorgeous Story, Characters, Language)

Swing Time, Zadie Smith (print)

Idaho, Emily Ruskovich (print)

Spirituality and Philosophy

Upstream, Mary Oliver (print)

Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, John O’Donohue (print)

Superb writing in books with emotionally difficult content

Salvage the Bones, Jessmyn Ward (audio)

The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen (audio)

Pop Culture

The Nix, Nathan Hill (audio)

Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng (audio)

Short Stories

Dear Life, Alice Munro (print)

Anything is Possible, Elizabeth Strout (audible)

Historical Fiction

A Gentleman from Moscow, Amor Towles (audio)

The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah (audio)

Magical Realism

The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto, Mitch Albom (print)

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Lisa See (audio)

Autobiographical

What Happened, Hillary Clinton (audio)

You Don’t Have to Say you Love Me: A Memoir, Sherman Alexie (audio)

Biographical

Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow (Audio)

Young Adult

Turtles all the Way Down, John Green (kindle)

Change Your Life

The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron, (re-reading, print)

Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker Palmer (print)

Other books I read this year and would recommend: 

This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz (kindle)

LaRose, Louise Erdrich (kindle)

Euphoria, Lily King (print)

The Nest, Cynthia Sweeny (print)

Moloka’i, Alan Brennert (audio)

The Secret History, Donna Tartt (audio)

My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (First three Neapolitan Novels), Elena Ferrante (audio)

Rules of Civility, Amor Towles (audio)

TransAtlantic, Colum McCann (audio)

Still Alice, Lisa Genova (audio)

I knew I’d probably love Alice Munro’s, Dear Life. Her Selected Stories is one of my favorite to reread, one of my favorite gifts to give. But the newer book has been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years. I don’t know why I hesitate to start short story collections. It seems they would involve less commitment, not more. But I see short works as requiring more attention—the way a poem requires even more still—and I think I have to be in the right frame of mind. I don’t trust a short story to pull me in the way a good novel does.

But I forgot how adept Alice Munro is at writing a sentence in such a way that you immediately drop in—not only to a story— into a particular character’s version of it. (You may have noticed that this blog will be more love letter than critique. Who has time to write about books they don’t like? And why?) Take this first line, “Once Peter had brought her suitcase on board the train he seemed eager to get himself out of the way.” Or this one, “‘It isn’t a good thing to have money concentrated all in one family, the way you do in a place like this,’ Mr. Carlton said.” And, one more, “At that time we were living beside a gravel pit.”

None of these use the trick that has turned into gospel in the magazine world—of making the first sentence so exciting or controversial that no one could possible stop reading. Instead her first sentences and all that follow are just so real that the world is already erected around you by the time you get to the end of the first paragraph. Reading Alice Munro is effortless.

Having read these stories in Dear Life, I am now aware that each of these sentences is the loaded gun in the Chekov quote we all learned about in fiction writing class, paraphrasing here: Remove all that is not essential to the story; if you introduce a gun in scene one, it must go off by act three. Only, Alice Munro did not have to tell me it was a gun to hold me. She reminds me that our attention is what makes life and people vivid and interesting. Thank you dear Alice.

Laura Stavoe

Sometimes I wonder about this desire I have to write. There are so many writers in the world already. What would I have to say that is new? I think of an author who is so incredibly talented—say, Rebecca Solnit or Ann Lamott—and I think, I want to say a lot of the same things, but I wouldn’t be nearly as wise, nearly as funny! I will just read an Ann Lamott book, instead.

Then, on Tuesday, I was most of the way through John Green’s, Turtles All the Way Down, and I found myself staring at the Pacific and crying. It was a scene with mom as she watched her Aza struggle, trying to talk herself out of fixing it. Knowing she couldn’t fix it. I’m not even sure how Green accomplished that—the story is definitely Aza’s—but I knew exactly how that mom was feeling.

I found myself grateful all day that John Green is on the planet. He is one of those people I will never meet, but who has helped me to shape my own thoughts. He writes things I swear I’ve been trying to put into words for decades and puts them in a teenager’s voice and makes them sound obvious and true. “Maybe, the old lady and the scientist were both right…the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.”

There are certain authors I keep wanting to send thank you notes to for helping me to get so much more out of this beautiful and harrowing life. I feel that way about Mary Oliver and Toni Morrison and Parker Palmer and Ann Lamott and Rebecca Solnit and Naomi Shihab Nye. And John Green. I’ve spend so much time with the words of these authors that it really is hard for me to believe they don’t know me, too. I feel so connected.

And so maybe the goal of writing is not to say something new, but rather, to create the opportunity for connection, in which case, I’m in.

Laura Stavoe

Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeline was my first favorite book–or at least the first one I remember as my favorite.  I knew it by heart before I could read. I remember the cadence in my mother’s voice as she read it to me, and my grandmother’s too, and how each of us would have a lilt when we came to the line, “And the smallest one was Madeline.”

It was the sound of the words and the ideas too, that I loved about the book–the crack on the ceiling that had a habit of looking like a rabbit. Or the way all the other girls wished they could get their appendix out too. (Who didn’t want crutches and a cast when they saw the attention a friend got?)

I still love books that do that–bring sound and ideas together in such a way that creates both rhythm and meaning, and ultimately something I connect to, even if I have never been to Paris and have no first hand knowledge of a boarding school.

My grandmother has been gone for 35 years.  But I can still hear voice and the way she would speed up the pace as Miss Clavel, afraid of disaster, ran fast and faster. And something else familiar was in her voice, too, that I know now (but didn’t know then) was irony. She knew what was coming.

I’m visiting my parents in Maui, and this morning we went to their favorite breakfast place Longhi’s and I asked my mom if she remembered Madeline. She said, “every word,” and we tested my dad, leaving out the last word of each sentence the way she always did for me when I was young.  “To the tiger in the zoo, Madeline just said, ___.”

I have had many favorite books since Madeline, but I still know this one by heart.

Laura Stavoe