Notice

Hello dear friends,

I am suspending my blog after posting weekly for 10 years. It has been a fun ride. I have had books on my mind every day since I began accepting advanced reader copies.

 I have spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to gracefully end the endeavor, and I finally decided that I would just have to quit. 

Thank you for your kind attention. I hope that you have enjoyed my meanderings. Best Wishes. Miriam

A Good Neighborhood

By Therese Anne Fowler
St. Martins     2020
311 pages     Literary

 Well this is an interesting conundrum. I really wanted to like A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler. I tried extremely hard to like it. Here is a synopsis of the book. In Oak Knoll, a verdant, tight-knit North Carolina neighborhood, professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is raising her bright and talented biracial son. Xavier is headed to college in the fall, and after years of single parenting, Valerie is facing the prospect of an empty nest. All is well until the Whitmans move in next door—an apparently traditional family with new money, ambition, and a secretly troubled teenaged daughter. Thanks to his thriving local business, Brad Whitman is something of a celebrity around town, and he's made a small fortune on his customer service and charm, while his wife, Julia, escaped her trailer park upbringing for the security of marriage and homemaking. Their new house is more than she ever imagined for herself, and who wouldn't want to live in Oak Knoll? With little in common except a property line, these two very different families quickly find themselves at odds: first, over a historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers.

 I was so intrigued by the structure. In the book, the neighbors in that “good” neighborhood serve as a Greek chorus, and just like all neighbors in “tight knit” communities, they seem to know the details before anyone else. (Frankly, that is why I moved out of a small community.) And, I might add, as the storytellers, the neighbors are proud to know the details and to be telling the story. This is a neighborhood much like mine—middle class, established, fifty to eighty year-old homes, educated population, pretty much white. The Book Page reviewer says of the structure: “Throughout, a chorus of neighbors intrudes to speculate and offer background information, an intriguing mix of omniscient narration and gossipy lamentation. Although the transitions between the chorus and the other perspectives aren’t always seamless, this structure adds depth to the sense of Shakespearean tragedy ... fast-paced and thoughtful.”

Fowler excuses herself in the acknowledgement as a white woman trying to speak from the perspective of the two African American residents—mother and son. She says that she did her homework, as was recommended by author, Zadie Smith. At the same time, the characters all seem to be one-dimensional and to a certain extent to be caricatures. Particularly Brad Whitman, who bandies around his success as a businessman for all to see. He is a creepy step-father to Juniper, the teen-aged daughter of his wife, Julia. He thinks that he can have her in the same way that he can have a fancy car, a huge house, and six television sets. He appears as a character without depth, as does his wife Julia, although Julia, in the end, shows some guts and leaves the man.

Xavier, the bi-racial teenager is a striver. Yet, he can never get beyond the fact that his mother is black and his deceased father was white. And Juniper, the teenage girl in the story has to deal with her own stigma—that her parents made her take a purity oath when she was fourteen. Please!

Yeah, I didn’t like any of these characters. Didn’t like the plot. I think basically all I liked was the structure, and I kept reading because the structure fascinated me. The reviewer in the New York Times, Kiley Reid, who is the author of Such a Fun Age, helped me put into words what I was feeling. After having been burned by the negative cultural reviews of American Dirt, I perhaps was extra sensitive to the cultural inferences and assumptions in A Good Neighborhood, so I was receptive to what Reid wrote. Reid says, “’A Good Neighborhood’ is a pitch-perfect example of how literary endeavors. . .can limit a novel’s understanding of human behavior.” Her review is quite scathing, and frankly, I had to agree with it. She also says, “But her novel breaks the promise of its premise, revealing weaknesses in both craft and conviction. In the same way that activism cannot be sold for $26, black characters cannot be bought when they lack depth and accessibility.”

Read A Good Neighborhood if you are interested in reading a book about good intentions, good development, but very poor understanding of cultural norms.

Wow, No Thank You

By Samantha Irby

Random House     2020

311 pages     Humor/Essays

Discovering Samantha Irby is like being transported to humor heaven. Filled with zingy one-liners about all facets of life, Irby is in rare form in Wow, No Thank You. The essays in the book cover an enormous number of topics, from Crone’s disease, to marrying a woman with children, to house repair, to being an introvert,  to urination and poop. Nothing is taboo to Irby, and everything in life can be a source of humor.

The other day, my sister said to me, “You laugh inappropriately, you know!” Well, I have to tell you I did a lot of inappropriate laughing while reading Wow, No Thank You. Frankly, my favorite people are those who don’t take themselves too seriously, and if there is one thing that can be said about Samantha Irby is that she doesn’t take herself too seriously.

My favorite essay concerns her move to Kalamazoo. Wait??? Kalamazoo??? I live in Kalamazoo. How did I not know about her? Then, as I looked closer, she started to look familiar to me. Had I actually met her sometime? She describes herself as a “middle-aged depressed lady with chronic diarrhea.” Well, many of my friends are middle-aged depressed ladies with chronic diarrhea. Finally, when I watched an interview on You Tube, I realized that while I hadn’t met her, I instantly identified with her work and her views on life. On the other hand, I think that I may have met her wife, who is a Kalamazoo school social worker and works part time at our neighborhood bookstore, Book Bug. Actually, the book launch was supposed to happen at the Book Bug this week. By the way, you can buy an autographed copy of Wow, No Thank You at This is a Bookstore, which is part of the Book Bug.  Kalamazoo friends, run, don’t walk, over there. Grab a copy before they are gone. They will curbside deliver it to you.

One of her favorite topics is her introversion. She says that she used to party a lot. “The only reason I stopped is because I got too old to do it right.” Being an introvert has become her theme for the interviews that have come since the book was released on Tuesday of this week. Because of Covid-19, she hasn’t been able to do any book launch events. Therefore, there are many, many online interviews. Here are a couple of interviews that I found especially pleasing: a written interview and a video interview.

When asked about how she was surviving being housebound for the past few weeks, Irby mentioned  that she is the master of social distancing, so being stuck at home was not a problem for her. What being housebound offered for me was the opportunity to revel in Irby’s crazy humor, quirky thinking, and downright gross musings. Would that I had the kind of verbal guts Samantha Irby has! You gotta love her! The New York Times reviewer absolutely adores her writing.

Irby says that she has had trouble making friends in Kalamazoo. Samantha, I want to be your friend. Find me on Facebook.

The Hope of Glory

By Jon Meacham

Convergent Books    2020

112 pages     Spiritual

The historian and author, Jon Meacham, is a frequent speaker at Episcopal churches. In his book, The Hope of Glory, these meditations on the final words of Jesus were presented at Good Friday services in Meacham’s church in New York City. The book contains a prologue telling about how Meacham came to write these sermons, or meditations. In the prologue, he also describes how the words purported to come from Jesus came to be important in scripture and in the foundations of the Christian church.  He says, “I am sharing these meditations in the hope that a sense of history and an appreciation of theology might help readers make more sense of the cross in a world too much given to the competing forces of hostile skepticism, blind acceptance, or remote indifference.” He is interested in “illumination, not conversion.”

Meacham then devotes one meditation to each of the seven phrases or sentences that Jesus spoke from the cross. He outlines the traditional historical reasoning for why each of those phrases were spoken and why these particular phrases are included in the scriptures. Within each meditation, Meacham elaborates on what he considers to be the theological meanings for each phrase.

I read each of the chapters as a daily meditation, and found that Meacham has a very similar outlook to his faith as I do. At one point, he acknowledges “that we cannot know everything does not mean we can know nothing.” He also suggests that “for the thoughtful believer, then, there is nothing more certain than the reality of uncertainty, nothing more natural than doubt, which is perhaps thirty seconds younger than faith itself.”

I found myself underlining many of Meacham’s thoughts as I pondered these last words of Jesus. By reading some every day, I was able to really think through his ideas and come to my own understandings. Beyond Meacham’s meditations on Jesus’ words, I was able to have a Lenten time of growth in the midst of anxiety and mountains of bad news. As Meacham says, “Light can neither emanate from, nor enter into a closed mind.” For this time of meditation and insight, I am extremely grateful.

A couple of other things. When I was a girl, my Good Friday always included a presentation of the oratorio of The Seven Last Words of Christ by Theodore Dubois. My father, a tenor, always sang the tenor solos, wherever we were. A very fond memory. Here is a beautiful YouTube presentation from a church in Texas.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that the Kirkus reviewer complained that the theology of The Hope of Glory  is very Episcopalian, and said that the book was a “middling contribution to Christian studies.” I, on the other hand, found the book to be insightful and thoughtful, and I could see it being used for a Lenten study series or a book discussion for “progressive” Christians, as the Publisher’s Weekly writer suggests.