by Richard Russo

This was so ridiculous. The character of the girl who disappeared was paper thin, and the explanations of all the things that happened to her piled one on top of another were ludicrous. (  )

Wow, this was even more amazing than I remembered. I think it had been over 20 years since I read it. I had read more recently HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER – and boy, I thought that I loved that; but I only loved one of the two plots of that story, whereas this was 100% amazing through and through.

I had to look up the year that child actress Anna Paquin starred in the TV movie version of this – 1997. I found that movie too literal, and Paquin cast too young; she was so small, and Frankie was supposed to be so tall. The scenes with the solder were VERY disturbing when played with such a small girl. That said, I’ll never forget her performance in the climactic scene.

I did not recall how close to the end of the book the wedding happened – i.e. how little “happened” afterward, or rather how crammed all the “after” was into so few pages, as was the wedding itself. Which is part of the writing’s power. I think McCullers is just amazing in how she brings her stories to a head, making the payoff as good as the journey, which is not a common thing in a modern novel. Usually you get a really good bunch of pages but summed up with kind of an anti-climax; or, you get a real whopper of a narrative arc and ending, but don’t enjoy the journey so much. MEMBER OF THE WEDDING is flawless – maybe being relatively short at only about 150 pages is a help. Modern novels probably just go on too long.

I won’t bother with much of a plot summary. Southern eccentricity, lots of mood and pictures of intimacy; 12-year-old Frankie spends the dog days of a deep-South summer in anticipation of her big brother’s wedding. She’s on the cusp of big change, and at times truly manic in her passions and her desire to quit town for good. There’s something very powerful in stories about girls this age that always draws me in. McCullers is the best.. (  )

I didn’t know exactly what to expect from a book all about addresses, but I was still disappointed. I feel it lacked focus. I mean, it was all over the map. HA HA HA

I was pulled in by the story of the efforts to give everyone in West Virginia an address – how hard it was to find people, as apparently roads don’t have names outside of a few major cities. And darned if the guy whose job it was to name all the roads didn’t dang run out of names long before he was through!

I think my favorite quote was about some elderly Chinese immigrants who referred to streets that their new tenant didn’t recognize. “Mulberry Street, with its many funeral homes, had turned into Dead Person Street… Division Street was Hatsellers Street, Rutgers Street was Garbage Street, and Kosciuszko Bridge, named after a Polish leader who fought in the American Revolutionary War, somehow became ‘the Japanese Guy Bridge.'”

I’m gonna call it that from now on. (  )

Floating Coast by Bathsheba Demuth

I am so glad I read this. I don’t have any particular interest in the Bering Strait, but this wasn’t a typical history. Demuth is an exquisitely thoughtful writer. Her “environmental history” is what I would call spiritual.

The book is not devoid of historical facts and narratives. Frankly, much of it could even be a bit of a slog. In chronicling “Beringia”, the land masses which border the Bering Strait, Demuth covers both USA and USSR history. After a while, reading about the fox farming and reindeer farming booming, then crashing, then booming; the quotas on whales being this high, then that low, then this high again… put me into a lull.

But when Demuth is poetic, she is sublime. Most of these moments came towards the beginning and towards the end. Tastes:

“[T]he world is not what we make of it; it is part of what makes us: our flesh and bones, and also our inclinations and hopes.”

“An ecosystem is the aggregate of many species’ habits of transformation, their ways of moving energy from its origin in the sun across space & condensing it over time. To be alive is to take a place in a chain of conversions.”

“We all live in more than one time… The evidence is all around us, in the layered world: a mossy, decaying mission store in Gambell, built near an ancient whale-butchering place, across from a row of tidy new homes… [A] house with Soviet concrete walls, but a roof made of walrus hide so fresh, it smelled.”

Finally:

“Fossil fuels freed the use of energy from human toil, allowing human history to seem separate from the rest of time… This made possible a new idea of liberty, released from the constraints of the matter that made us, and from the precariousness of being.”

That does sum up for me where we find ourselves. (  )