Sam is a woman my age who makes an impulse buy – a house. An adorable old house in the middle of Syracuse; she will live there alone. I.e., she will leave her husband. For the house. For the chance to live in this lovable house alone.

Intrigued by this appealing dream-I-will-never-actually-live, I picked up this novel eagerly, but was disappointed. Sam is just so unlikeable. I mean, I’m unlikeable too, but she is super vitriolic, self-pitying, and self-aware only to the extent that she realizes she’s self-pitying and it makes her more self-pitying. C’mon, I’m not THIS bad, am I?

Also, it turned out to be heavy on the mother-daughter stuff that doesn’t interest me.

My weird predilections aside, being as objective as I can be, I think the book really does suffer from its central character’s unlikability, and weird digressive way of wrapping things up. Thumbs down.

by Dodie Smith

This was my second read. Particularly the first five or so chapters, the book is strongly carried by our wonderful narrator, Cassandra Mortmain, a 17-year-old who calls a centuries-old castle in England home. She lives with her highly eccentric family – a famous author father who hasn’t written anything in years; his much younger artist-model wife christened Topaz (though “there is no law to make a woman stick to a name like that”); Cassandra’s slightly older, beloved, but exasperating sister Rose; their slightly younger brother Thomas; and a hired helpmate about their age, though they haven’t been able to pay him anything in years. In fact, they haven’t been able to afford to pay anything or anyone in years; they’ve been selling off furniture bit by bit and scrounging together a living based on that, and when we meet them, they aren’t sure what they’re going to do next.

Then, a la Pride & Prejudice (deftly referenced by the narrator), a nearby property is suddenly let to a single man of means (who, it is a fact universally acknowledged, must fall in love with one or both of our heroines by book’s end).

I do feel that once characters started falling in love with each other, the story got worse. But it’s quite a piece of work nevertheless.

by Ursula LeGuin

This is a re-read for me for book club. I first read this back in the early 90s on Aunt Alice’s recommendation. She thought I would get a kick out of the genderlessness. I had a lot of gender eShoes back then.

But I had not remembered anything about it other than the central conceit, so I went in fresh. It started out badly, for me. I’m not a fan of classic sci-fi. It always feels so pretentious. All the laborious exposition. I’m just not into the high concepts. & this one started out with a lot of politics which I found inscrutable.

It took off in the second half. The earthling and the alien bond during an arduous polar trek.

So, for those who DIDN’T have an aunt to introduce them to this classic and hence may not know the central conceit: the beings on this planet are hermaphroditic. For most of the month they are neither male nor female; then they enter “kemmer”, or heat, and take on one or the other gender. The main character is from our planet or some semblance thereof and is an envoy trying to get them to join an interplanetary alliance. He’s put off by the weird gender-bending, and starts out as annoyingly misogynist. But he gets woke.

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Honestly, this book literally put me to sleep more nights than not. It’s very hard to keep all the nuns straight and the story just meanders. A convent is founded in 1163. We begin following it in earnest in the 14th century, through a multitude of prioresses. A main character and constant throughout is Sir Ralph, a passing beggar who for reasons even he doesn’t understand passes himself off as a priest, and lives as the convent priest for the rest of his life. This at least provides a unifying thread through all the cast of nuns who die as frequently as they are introduced.

Couple of good sample quotes:

“To be traveling through this landscape so full of plenty and variety was like turning the pages of an illuminated psalter.”

“But no summer is so long, so wide, as the summer before it. Time, a river, hollows out its bed and every year the river flows in a narrower channel and flows faster.”

by Beuna Coburn Carlson

Memoir of growing up on a Wisconsin farm during the depression. A bit repetitive. I liked hearing it from the horse’s mouth.

by Annie Dillard

“My God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it.”

That sums it up well. I’ve always been curious to read this one, but I also feared it would be dry nature writing. In fact it is rarely dry and is heavy on philosophizing. Dillard seems to walk through the world in a constant state of astonishment. She will notice a bug seeming slightly askew, and drop to the ground and stare at it for 45 minutes. She is in awe, awe at the profligacy of creation. She also gets herself into a state of high dudgeon over: the seeming waste of life represented by the sheer number of individual creatures who live nasty, brutish, short lives with only a few of their species living to propagate; the amount of general suffering that goes on in the natural world; and the teeming masses of creatures who are parasitic, noxious, or just disgusting.

I don’t find interesting everything that she finds interesting. But I do like philosophy. In addition to the sheer wonder Dillard brings to the table, she also holds forth on what it all means relative to our own place in the universe.

“Thomas Merton wrote, ‘There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.’ There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.”

“I have often noticed that even a few minutes of self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.”

“Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place?”

“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“You figgered I went back on you. Now there’s a thing ever’ man has got to know. Mebbe you now it a’ready. Twan’t only me… Boy, life goes back on you.”

I was mesmerized. I never wanted it to end.

You become immersed in the world of the Baxter family – Penny (Pa), Ory (Ma), and 12-year-old Jody. They live post-Civil War in the Jacksonville area of Florida on a small clearing where they subsist growing corn, sweet potatoes, cow-peas, and cane sugar; augmented by a dairy cow and plenty of hunting. Their nearest neighbors are their frenemies the Forresters, a rough crowd of four or five grown men with their Ma and Pa. Jody has a special relationship with his Pa; not so much with Ma, who is hardened by having buried too many of her babies. Half the book goes by until the main plot commences – Jody finds Flag, an orphaned fawn he adopts, after having longed for years for some little creature he could care for and call his own. You know how it ends.

These people know their land so intimately, they know their game, their predators, their weather, in a way like I imagine most people today have no idea.

It was absolutely beautiful. I love coming-of-age stories. I’m partial to those with girls, and this is a boy’s book through and through, but it was still about that magical portal between child and grown-up.

“Ever’ man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. ‘Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but ’tain’t easy. Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down again. I’ve been uneasy all my life.”

by Simon Baron-Cohen

Simon Baron-Cohen is a psychology professor and author of six hundred scientific articles and four books. He is proposing a theory of Systemizing vs. Empathizing brain types, with the former associated with both autism (well established) and inventiveness (his new theory). Chapters were most interesting when discussing the brain types, and autistic and intensively systemizing people in particular and in general. There were less interesting chapters about how early we can date true inventiveness on the part of homo sapiens; and whether animals can invent. These things did not seem relevant to the theory to me. Baron-Cohen passionately calls out for better accommodations in society for autistic people – they need remunerative work, and to feel valued, and to have friends. These passages made me want to go out and befriend an autistic person. I guess that proves I have an Empathic side of my brain after all. That’s just a joke – he emphasizes that the “empathy” skills that autistic people lack are not those of “affective empathy” – feeling compassion and a sense of justice for others; but “cognitive empathy” – able to put oneself in another’s shoes, commonly called “emotional intelligence”. There are tests you can take in the appendices to see whether you rate as a Systemizer, an Empath, or a “Balance” of the two. I think there was an error reversing the legends of the axes of the graph in Appendix A, however, so I am not sure if I am something of a “Systemizer” (though I am definitely not an extreme one) or a “Balanced” individual. Another appendix lets you quiz yourself to see how many autistic traits you have. I rate about six; so does my husband; this puts us on the “low” end of being “high” in autistic traits.

I was originally mildly surprised that he wasn’t rating more “systemic” or more “autistic” than me; but upon further reflection, I buy it – I think we are both true Systemizers, but in different ways. He has some spot-on spectrum traits – zeroing in on the details all the time, seeing flaws, seeing how things are constructed. Me… my favorite thing in the world is to apply a system and see how it turns out. I am that person who “follows recipes slavishly”. I love cooking and have tried to study those books who teach you how not to need recipes anymore; but, I LIKE following recipes. I do them to the letter as well as I can, and I don’t peek at the ending. Likewise I follow knitting patterns slavishly. I don’t try to adjust my recipes or patterns as I go along; I am totally non-intuitive, because that is what I LIKE. I want to apply the system, apply the rules, see what I get. Something I used to do when I was a kid was come up with a wacky system for coloring a picture: all the things that begin with “A” will be this color, “B” will be this color, etc. I would end up with something nutty, but the point was not to end up with a beautiful picture – though it would be awesome if that happened – but just to see what would happen. I also used to pick colors at random a lot. I still like randomizing my life. Can’t describe it any better – I just like to see what happens – and the more I think about all the aspects of my life, the more this seems to apply: I like to have systems and apply them.

by Donella Meadows

Recommended to me by a coworker. Tries to teach you how to view problems not in isolation but as systems – interactions of many variables at once. Tries to help you identify the likely leverage points – places where you can most efficiently effect changes in the system, hopefully in the direction you want (not guaranteed).

Another Ramona re-read for me. Ramona is back in second grade; and her father has lost his job. Ramona faces her usual grade-school trials and tribulations, but this time her troubles are driven mainly by family dynamics. Everyone is short-tempered, and the cat doesn’t like the cheap cat food, so he eats the jack-o-lantern. Beezus fights with the parents, which makes Ramona cry. She’s reassured repeatedly that the family will get another pumpkin to carve, but that’s not the issue. “Didn’t grown-ups think children worried about anything but jack-o-lanterns? Didn’t they know children worried about grown-ups?”

It’s not all down. Ramona and her friend Howie make coffee-can stilts and delight in stomping all over the sidewalk belting out “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” It takes them all through the evening through a rain shower, but they make it from 99 down to 1. Huzzah! I love the young Ramona who delights in noise.

And the final episode, where Ramona participates in the church nativity scene dressed in a home-made ragtag sheep costume, is priceless. Ramona Forever!