Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

Warning, spoilers.

Niamh is an Irish immigrant whose family all perishes in NYC, so she’s sent west on an Orphan Train. She has various miserable placements but comes out all right. The story of her youth is juxtaposed with a modern-day story where the 91-year-old Niamh, now Vivian, connects with a troubled teenager.

This is a lightweight story where the characters are either Good or Evil, and you see everything coming from a mile away. Except one thing – although you knew that Niamh would reunite eventually with Dutchy, a boy she met on the train going west, I did NOT expect her to literally go to bed with him within hours of their reunion. I mean, I thought they’d go for a drink or something.

The story of Niamh’s loss after loss culminates with the biggest loss of all: she has a baby and gives it up for adoption. This lets the book end with a mother-child-grandchild reunion where everyone is wonderful and looks like each other. Swelling violins, please.

I read this because it was a gift from my step-mother-in-law. I kept reading it because I did want to follow the Niamh story. As always tends to happen with books that interweave two very different stories, however, there’s always one I like better; and hence the other one keeps cropping up as a mere annoyance. Old Lady Vivian of course is attached to all her old keepsakes and of course she and troubled Molly eventually achieve a deep bond. I didn’t care, I wanted to see how the orphan turned out. ( )

PS  I think it’s time for some more Jane Austen.

Fibershed by Rebecca Burgess with Courtney White

Nice photographs, and an immensely interesting topic – doing the “locavore” thing for textiles. But the text! I admit I skimmed a lot. I just could not focus. I was consistently amazed at how the authors could make such a fascinating topic such a dull slog of a read. Growing flax for linen, naturally colored cotton, natural dyestuffs, alpaca cooperatives – every time I turned to a new chapter about something I thought “now THIS is finally going to get interesting,” nope. Another page of text I could not get through.

Too bad, because it is a fun topic. As someone who raises fiber animals and makes yarn and loves weaving, I could be and should be the first to be all gung-ho about local textile production. But there seem to be lots of reasons it’s different from food, in terms of the future of truly localized sourcing and production. Reasons they didn’t really get into in this book. Or maybe they did. Honestly, I can’t be sure. ( )

Vanishing Fleece by Clara Parkes

Clara Parkes buys a 676-pound bale of raw wool and sees it through to the finished yarn stage, by means of several differing mills and dye shops. Kind of the Michael Pollan of yarn. Basically, this book should have been titled, “Hey, Chris, Over Here”.

Clara buys her wool on shearing day from a farm in New York state. She sends some of it to Bartlett Yarn in Maine, some to Blackberry Ridge in Wisconsin, some to a big mill called S&D, some to a precious-sounding two-person natural dye studio in California, some to a big chemical dye company in Biddeford, Maine. It’s FUN!

The mills and shops are all wildly different, and give her wildly different results, almost all of them wonderful. Bartlett gives her a pleasing yarn she describes as being like “oatmeal,” in contrast to the lovely yarn Blackberry gives her, which she compares to “jasmine rice.” I thought those were knockout descriptions.

Clara’s excitement is palpable. On the floor of one vast spinning mill, she says she feels like she’s been shrunk to miniature size and let loose inside her Mom’s Singer sewing machine. Another great description!

I liked that Clara is based in Maine and visits places I’m familiar with, like the dyeing company in Biddeford – haven’t visited them per se, but I do think I was in a brewery next door last summer.

I may try more of her books – she seems like a super-fun fellow-wool-traveler! ( )

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

In 1927, an 86-year-old ex-slave living near Mobile AL tells his life story to interviewer Zora Neale Hurston. His words are recorded as heard, in local southern dialect. Cudjo Lewis was born Kossula in West Africa; captured and sold into slavery, and transported across the ocean in the famous ship Clotilde. Yes, America had abolished the slave trade decades before; this was all done hush-hush. Kossula lived over 5 years as a slave; then freed by the Civil War he built a house, and lived with a beloved wife and six children – all of whom predeceased him, each parting more tragic than the last. While this is undeniably a painful tale to read, the fascination of hearing first-hand the experiences of a black American of that time period who was African-born and can remember and relate his childhood experiences, his capture, his transport, his time enslaved, and his experiences since, makes the read a powerful and moving experience and more than just a sad slog. ( )

Cosy by Laura Weir

A cosy [sic] little book of all things comforting – British style. This is not to be confused with hygge, which is Danish style, and way too concerned with interior decorating. I like Weir’s definition of cosy – how you live when nobody is looking. A celebration of grilled cheese, warm jumpers, hot tea, a crackling fire, and a fabulous little read like this to curl up with before winter disappears. ( )

Hate, Inc. by Matt Taibbi

This is one of those rare books that changes my thinking, and for more than just the length of time it takes to read.

The title and the cover are unfortunate, and not because Rachel Maddow is shown (Taibbi feels he needs an entire appendix to justify why). “HATE, INC.” and a picture of two political talk show hosts, angry mouths agape, makes it sound like one of those “why we’re polarized” books. But it’s not about why we’re polarized, although some theories are obvious by book’s end; it’s about the media.

The main point is this, caps his: THE NEWS IS A CONSUMER PRODUCT.

Other important points:
YOU DON’T NEED TO WATCH THAT MUCH NEWS.

And:
[THE MEDIA] ARE NOT INFORMING YOU. [THEY] CAN’T, ACTUALLY because the world is COMPLEX, and the news by definition is, like, everything in the world.

Highly recommended.  ( )

My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum

If you read a favorite author deeply enough, and if she’s written enough books, you will eventually hit a dud. These are dated essays which don’t hang together well. I already know about what Daum is trying to share here, through her other, better books and essay collections. ( )

Vacation means books.  (And being at home means books too, but vacation means backlogs of book reviews.)

If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now by Christopher Ingraham

Ingraham manages to write “how we traded the DC suburbs for a remote county in Minnesota” without a) making me hate him or any member of his family, b) talking down to, or dismissively around, any Minnesotan, or c) treating it all like some kind of miracle. That’s an achievement!

I’ll recap the plot here, because it is such a great story: Ingraham crunches data and writes gee-whiz pieces for WaPo. He finds some data about the most pleasant counties to live in across the US, in terms of geographic features, weather, and things like that. Since every county in the country is ranked, not only are some places best, but some are inevitably the “worst” places to live – where were those places? Well, bottom of the list turned out to be Red Lake County, Minnesota. After Ingraham points this out in his article, he gets some hate mail – Minnesota style, which means understated and not very vitriolic – and invitations to come out and see their “ugly” county for himself. Which he does. And he likes it.

And he moves there!

Very interesting to me on a personal level is that Ingraham contrasts Red Lake County not just with the Baltimore/DC area, but with other places he and his wife have lived as well – including my county in Vermont. And Vermont doesn’t come off very well. Vermonters aren’t as welcoming as the Minnesotans; the Ingrahams made some friends, but never felt part of a community like they do in Red Lake County. I believe it. We’re pretty standoffish round these parts.

“If there is one thing – one sole, solitary piece of information – that I can convey to you about rural America it’s this: rural America is not a nation apart. The people here are just as complex and fallible as people anywhere else. They consume the same media, cheer for the same sports teams, fight over the same political issues, and have the same dreams for their kids.” I like that. ( )

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

It kept me reading. I liked the coy refusals to name any company, making us feel like we might be living in a similar but other world: the “social network everyone hated,” the “search engine,” the “litigious corporation based in Seattle.” At one point she not-name-drops my favorite blogger, “a libertarian economist” and describes him in a not altogether flattering light. I wrote to tell him about it, and he responded, yes, “the book is fiction in a number of respects.” She’s not the only one who can be coy. My interest waned a bit when I realized that nothing was really going to happen. ( )