Summer Reading List 2019

To me, June signals the beginning of summer reading season. Last summer I set myself the goal of reading 20 books between June 1 and September 1. This year I don’t think I’ll be quite as ambitious; maybe I’ll read that many books and maybe not, but I am not going to be so focused on the number. Here are some of the titles I have stacked up for my summer reading.  As usual, I will mail a box of books to Maine and then, inevitably, buy a few more books here and there at my favorite independent bookstores.  Plus I already have some titles on my Kindle waiting to be read.  So, here goes!

What titles are on your summer reading list? I’d love to have you share a title or two.

FICTION—More Serious or Literary

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson. A debut spy novel that deals with race and gender.

Beartown by Fredrik Backman. Backman is a very popular Swedish author and this book was a recommendation from a good friend.

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler. I never got to this novel last summer so this year I will.

Exposure by Helen Dunmore. A much praised author whose work I’ve never read.  This novel is set in London in 1960.  Dunmore died fairly recently.

Florida by Lauren Groff. I don’t often read short stories, but, I live in Florida, so I thought I should give this highly praised collection a try.

The Huntress by Kate Quinn. I thoroughly enjoyed Quinn’s earlier historical novel, The Alice Network, and expect this one to be equally riveting.

Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford. A New York Review classic originally published in 1989.  Bedford was born in Germany in 1911, but lived in several different countries including briefly the U.S.  She died in 2006.

Middlemarch by George Eliot. A classic I’ve had on my list awhile now to re-read.  Originally published 1871-72.

FICTION—Mystery, Crime, and Beach Reads

The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow. I’m aiming to shake up my reading selections and this novel of the drug trade was on a list I saw.

A Question of Trust by Penny Vincenzi. Women’s fiction for sure, and the last novel by this very popular British author whose earlier books featured power-hungry men, love-seeking women and lots of romance, conflict and affairs.  Vincenzi died last year.

Shadows on the Lake by Giovanni Cocco and Amneris Magellan. A mystery translated from the Italian set around Lake Cuomo that was on one of the many book-related e-mails to which I subscribe.

When We Left Cuba by Chanel Cleeton. Continuing my novel reading about Cuba.  This is the sequel to Cleeton’s  Next Year in Havana.

In Havana

MEMOIRS

Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir by Ruth Reichl. Reichl’s account of her time as editor of Gourmet Magazine before its demise.

She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons:  A Life in Novels by Kathleen Hill. My regular readers know I am a big fan of memoirs. This one looks like it combines the personal with a love of books.

Notes: All text ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved). Header photo of reader couple from www.nymcpl.org.

Manhattan Moments: Eating & Reading

Via Carota

For us, no visit to New York would be complete without at least one meal, and preferably two or three, at Via Carota.  This temple of rustic comfort food in the West Village doesn’t take reservations so we find ourselves eating at very unfashionable times.  We tried to have dinner here on a recent Saturday night, but it was Saturday, a lovely afternoon, and folks were out, so no luck even right at 5:00 when the menu changes from lunch to dinner.  Instead we opted for lunch another day and being early (before 11:30), we easily got a table.

Grilled artichokes with lemon and aioli

Some menu items are de rigeur; that means we began with grilled artichokes (exceptionally sweet and lovely this season) accompanied by a newer treat, ramps and prosciutto over a square of grilled polenta (perfect!), and followed by an all-time great, roasted chicken with lemon and herbs. 

Ramps, prosciutto and polenta

 These dishes beg lots of chewy bread and a crisp Italian white.  It’s a somewhat indulgent lunch with most everything bathed in olive oil, but life is short!

For another take on this marvelous eatery, here’s an exuberant essay from the New York Times’ Magazine about their towering green salad, which we’ve also enjoyed a time or two.

RECENT READING: MAIN LINE CLASS

The Beneficiary:  Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father by Janny Scott

If you lived in the Philadelphia suburbs in the 1980’s and 90’s as I did, you’d be hard pressed not to have read about Robert Montgomery Scott and the family’s palatial estate, Ardrossan, on the Main Line.  The house was storied and Scott descended from a family legacy of wealth and distinction marked by both achievement and failure.  

For fourteen years, Scott was president and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art which put him regularly on the society pages.  And his mother, Helen Hope Montgomery Scott, was considered by many to have been the model for Katharine Hepburn’s character in the film, “The Philadelphia Story.”  Janny Scott’s memoir is a depiction of a monied American upper class in its heyday with multiple properties, horses, a multitude of servants, exotic travels, and an affinity for British manners and mannerisms.  Their grand mansions are almost as important characters as the individuals.

Beneath the polished surface, however, this is a generational saga riddled with alcoholism, suicide, and affairs.  Janny’s father was an alcoholic, but the extent to which this dominated his entire life, was something she only fully realized when she read his secret diaries. He bequeathed these journals to her, but they were stowed away and their location undiscovered until some years after his death.

Ms. Scott researched the family’s history, interviewed numerous relatives, and has written their collective story with tenderness and a clear eye.  She doesn’t sugarcoat reality, but she also states when she doesn’t know or what she didn’t appreciate at a particular time.  I found it all fascinating and very much appreciated the family tree at the front; with names repeated in successive generations this aid helped me keep straight which Edgar or which Hope was meant. (~JWFarrington)

Notes: Robert Scott photo from nytimes.com; other photos by JWFarrington.

The Season of Lists

Some of us make lists all year long:  to-do lists, grocery lists, shopping lists, and the like.  I am an inveterate list maker, always have been.  As was my mother so I suppose I inherited this tendency as did at least one of my sisters.  It’s satisfying to create a list and then check off items as they are completed.  And if one is debating an important decision, such as a job offer, making a list of pros and cons can be helpful in weighing the options.  

But the month of December represents the epitome of lists.  ‘Tis the season.  Ten best-of-the-year lists of movies, books, and music CDs populate newspapers and social media.  Daily book critics write columns about their favorite books, while the Wall St. Journal solicits short statements about the books they liked from celebrities, politicians, actors, and authors. And that behemoth Amazon supplements its best books of the month in various categories with its own best books of 2018.  While these lists reflect the tenor of the times, they are also a retail tool, designed to generate sales.  As an avid reader and in a spirit of competition with myself, I pore over several book lists—looking in part for any overlap between them, but even more to see which of the year’s best titles, I might have already read!

Lisa Halliday’s novel, Asymmetry,which I read and blogged about, is on both the New York Times Book Review’sand the Wall St. Journal’s lists as is David Blight’s biography, Frederick Douglass.  The novel, Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, appears on both the WSJ list and the Washington Post’s, perhaps an indication that I should add it to my personal to-be-read list.  I was  pleased to see that Westover’s bracing memoir, Educated, made it onto the NYT list and was also Amazon’s #1 pick of its top twenty books of 2018.    On the WSJ list, the other title I’ve recently read is biographer Claire Tomalin’s memoir, A Life of My Own.  

And just in case, you don’t end up with enough new reading material, there are the notable book lists; the New York Times named 100 notable books. while the Washington Post published its 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2018 along with a companion list of notable nonfiction.  

I also checked to see if my favorite west coast newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, had a 2018 list, but it appears that it won’t be published for another week or so.  Likewise, the Los Angeles Times.

As December winds down, I’ll be thinking about my favorite or best book of the year and looking ahead to what I’ll be reading in 2019.  What was your best book of 2018?  I’d love to include your choices in my first blog of the new year.

Here are several of the 10 Best Books of the Year lists for 2018.  I included the WSJ titles since they have a very robust paywall.

New York Times Book Review

Washington Post

Wall Street Journal

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday 

Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts 

Cloudbursts by Thomas McGuane 

The Consciousness Instinct by Michael Gazzaniga 

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight 

Godsend by John Wray 

Lamentfrom Epirus by Christopher C. King 

A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin 

Patriot Number One by Lauren Hilgers 

Season of the Shadow by Léonora Miano 

Tidy Tidbits: Memoirs and Movies

READING MEMOIRS

 As my regular readers know, I am fond of reading memoirs.  I am also fascinated by the dynamics within a marriage and intrigued by the nuances and tensions within romantic relationships in general.  Here are two new memoirs touching on these and other issues.

The Victorian and the Romantic:  A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship across Time by Nell Stevens.

I included the full subtitle here because this little book is so much more than a memoir.  It’s an enchanting, frustrating, and somewhat curious account of this young academic’s struggle to find her place in the world and to fulfill what she views as her rightful female destiny.

Nell is in love with Max, an aspiring American writer, and employs all sorts of economies and part-time projects to fund trips from her home in London to his in Boston.  She even signs up for several research studies, including a sleep one that requires her to spend 14 days in a lab and be awake for 40 hours.  At the same time that she’s angling to visit Max, she’s grappling with the topic for her Ph.D. dissertation.   Eventually she settles on Elizabeth Gaskell and the several months Gaskell spent in Rome socializing with a group of noted writers and artists.

Elizabeth Gaskell (tattonpark.org.uk)

Although I occasionally had too much of Nell’s troubles, I found the sections on Gaskell in Rome and her relationship with Charles Eliot Norton delightful and creatively imagined.  As Stevens makes clear in her short introductory note, her memoir is based on true events, but is not truly accurate; so, reader, take heed and apply salt as seems appropriate!  One result is that I now want to read or re-read one or more of Gaskell’s novels.  (~JWFarrington)

 

Strange Paradise:  Portrait of a Marriage by Grace Schulman

What goes on inside a marriage is always something of a mystery to those outside it, no matter how close they are to the couple.  Poet Schulman came of age before careers for women and multiple roles as professor, wife and also mother were widely accepted.  She felt that her own mother had been compromised in her aspirations and her abilities in her marriage, and she, Grace, feared a loss of independence and freedom for herself.  Nonetheless, she and Jerry Schulman, a medical doctor and virology researcher, wed in 1959 and were mostly together for more than 50 years.  This is her account of their continuing love despite some years living apart and his long decline due to illness.  But it’s also about her friendships with other poets and writers and her years as poetry editor for The Nation and coordinator of literary programming at the 92nd Street Y.  As she writes, “the phrase, ‘happy marriage’ is a term of opposites, like ‘friendly fire’ or ‘famous poet.’  My marriage has been a feast of contradiction.”  Informed by her poetic sensibility, her book is both bracing and poignant.  (~JWFarrington)

 

WATCHING FILMS

In this new age of content available on iPads, smartphones and other screens, we rented these two films online and watched them on our own large screen TV.  Cheaper than the price of one movie ticket, and you can make your own popcorn!

(Image from imbd.com)

Three Identical Strangers   

How would you feel if you arrived at college for the first time and lots of students were greeting you warmly as if they knew you and then called you by another name?  For Bobby, this is a strange and unnerving experience, as he discovers he has not one, but two other brothers.  All three were adopted and each was raised by parents of a different socio-economic class.  What is the role played by heredity versus environment in one’s development, the old nature vs. nurture question, and why were these three boys separated at birth?  A film that starts out joyful unfolds to a more serious and somber set of issues.  A bit repetitive at points, but well worth seeing.

The Children Act

The Children Act by Ian McEwen is probably my favorite of his novels that I’ve read.  I was predisposed to like the film and, with Emma Thompson, a favorite actor, and Stanley Tucci, in the lead roles, how could it go wrong?  It’s a superb film and, with McEwen’s screenplay, the equal of the novel.  Judge Fiona Maye handles cases relating to children’s welfare.  She and husband Jack have hit a bad patch in their marriage which comes to a crisis just as Fi gets a difficult case involving a 17-year old young man.  He’s a Jehovah’s Witness, who needs a blood transfusion to treat his leukemia, but his parents are refusing it.  How this case plays out and its impact on Fiona and those around her is the crux of the film.  Thompson is wonderful in the role with the right combination of judicial dedication and exactitude mostly masking her inner feelings.  Definitely an Oscar-worthy performance!

Note:  Header image of Emma Thompson in The Children Act is from an article in the South China Morning Post.