"This was the season, people said, that Nikki Eaton broke into pieces. To me, it felt like the season I put myself together, stronger than I'd been"

Missing Mom - J. C. Oates

You know how certain books are hard to get into when you start reading them and are kind of heavy all the way through, even if you're lucky that they turn out to have an interesting ending? And then there are books like "Missing Mom" that you just ease into with no effort at all and it captures you at the very first page. For me the interest developed already with the opening quote :

"Last time you see someone and you don't know it will be the last time. And all that you know now, if only you'd known then. But you didn't know, and now it's too late. And you tell yourself  'How could I have known, I could not have known .'
You tell yourself.

This is my story of missing my mother. One day, in a way unique to you, it will be your story, too. "

The novel is Nikki Eaton's recollection, told in her narrative voice, of the first year after her mother died. Nikki is a single girl in her early thirties who works as a journalist. In contrast to her older sister Claire who is married with two kids, Nikki is a typical party girl who appreciates her freedom and independece more than anything and refuses to settle down. Their mom, Gwen, lives alone in their old family house after her husband, Nikki's dad, passed away. One day when Nikki visits the family house she finds her mom dead in the basement, with 33 stab wounds on her body. The killer is found soon after but that doesn't help Nikki and Clare's sorrow.
This sudden loss leaves deep marks on their lives and we get to witness their grief process and their transformation to completely different individuals than those we met in the beginning of the book.

The book is slow-paced but deeply candid and intimate and thus interesting to read. It contains everything that I would imagine one's grieving process after a loved one would look like:  blaming and guilt, unresolved issues, happy memories of the times you have spent together, and looking for ways to once more feel that person's presence.

It just goes to show that no matter how old or how independent you are, without your mom you are still just a lonely, confused little kid who has to find a way to move on and find his place in the world again. 

“Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.”

"Blonde"- Joyce Carol Oates

It has been a while since I've read such a well-written and well-constructed novel as this one. This is the first book  that I've read by Joyce C. Oates, but I have to give it to her for her imagination and the skills to transfer it to paper. "Blonde" basically tells the story of Norma Jeane, a.k.a Marilyn Monroe's, life from her early orphan years, to the invention of the famous/infamous Marylin Monroe, and later her death. However, the novel isn't to be read as Marilyn's biography. The backbone of the novel is built on the well-known facts, as well as rumors about Marilyn, while Oates cleverly fills the gaps in between. Norma Jeane is a complex character with many conflicting traits: She is portrayed as a sweet, naive girl while at the same time she is a sex symbol; she yearns for a man who will love her, and yet she sleeps around; she desperately wants a baby, but keeps getting abortions; & she is depicted as an acting genius but that same genius contributes to her breakdown. What was most touching for me while reading the novel was how much Marylin suffered and the fact that nobody was able to help her stay alive. 

Because Marilyn Monroe's life was so public and a lot of people know plenty about her, the excitement with this novel isn't what is going to happen, but rather how it is going to happen. And, besides, you don't have to be a fan of Monroe's to read the book, it's an interesting piece of literature even if you don't know anything about her. Despite having 700 pages, which takes quite a while to read, this book is just as mesmerizing and seductive as Marilyn Monroe herself was. 

"A teacher affects eternity, he can never tell where his influence stops."- Henry Adams

Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom

Tuesdays with Morrie is a life-changing book. It’s a true story about Albom finding his way back to his favourite college teacher, Morrie Schwartz, who is suffering from ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Morrie spends last fourteen Tuesdays of his life sharing with  Mitch his thoughts on love, marriage, feelings, forgiveness, the modern culture, and the  inevitable- death.  

      Things Morrie says are so right that one can't help but wonder about one's own life and the choices one has made. While reading the book I was fascinated by Morrie's personality. After being diagnosed  with ALS he doesn't crawl into his room and wait for death to come, complaining and being bitter. Instead he finds positive sides to his condition, he gives love more than ever before, and is determined to keep teaching by sharing his experiences with anybody who wants to listen. Furthermore, the contrast between simple, concise sentences and the deep, meaningful thoguhts that are conveyed throughout the book is remarkable. 

      Tuesdays with Morrie confirmed my convictions that some teachers have teaching only as a profession, where as others have that special something- For them teaching comes fromt the heart, and they dont need a classroom for it.

      At the end of the book the author asks if , "You [have] ever really had a teacher? One who saw you as a raw but precious thing, a jewel that, with wisdom, could be polished to a proud shine? If you are lucky enough to find your way to such teachers, you will always find your way back." I have had the luck of having great teachers througout my education so far, and I'm happy that some of them are still in my life, offering their guidance and support whenever I need it, and I will always be thankful for their friendship. 

Here are some quotes from the book that I found memorable :

-          “We need to forgive ourselves...For all the things we didn't do. All the things we should have done. You can't get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened.”

-          "So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning."

-          “When you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”

"If I had my way, I'd keep them in order with a whip. "

The Grass is Singing - Doris Lessing

At first I couldn't understand why Doris Lessing's first novel The Grass is Singing has brought her such fame because the book didn't seem all that special, since there are a lot of books about Africa and the way blacks were treated. But after giving it some thought I realized that Lessing's success is in writing a book one can't stop reading despite having no likable characters the reader can sympathize with and despite revealing such a revolting, hateful side of human beings.

Mary grew up in South Africa as a self-confident, independent woman. After reaching the age of 30, and still being husband-less, people started talking behind her back. Out of despair she married Dick Turner, a poor, unsuccessful farmer. The book is partly about her years living on the farm, the way she changes into a frustrated and depressed woman, and after that, her slow descent into madness. This was quite painful to read because Lessing depicts a real woman, not just a character, and it is a reminder to all of us who know similar pathetic, depressed women that we feel sorry for, in our environment, that they perhaps used to be vivacious and ambitious before life delivered them harsh punches.

Furthermore, Lessing offers insight into the racial struggles in the colonial South Africa: the way the "natives" were treated, the way they were spoken to and thought of, which she picked from her own memory since she grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The thing that struck me most was how Lessing depicts Rhodesia as an evil machine which makes people horrible and doesn't give the natives even the slightest chance for progress. This is because even though people who come from England to South Africa,"were brought up with vague ideas of equality", and , "were prepared to treat [the natives] as human beings", they  "could not stand out against the society they were joining" and it didn't take long before they too started treating the natives like cattle. But beside all this, Lessing makes their characters admit their fear of blacks, which she saw as underlying the white colonial experience of the country she grew up in.

However, in contrast to the pathetic sad characters, descriptions of the African nature are beautiful and one can sense her pride and feel her love for that country.

I highly recommend the book because apart from being well-written and interesting, one can also learn so much from it.

For the end, here is a little something about Doris Lessing, an amazing woman:


Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She did not graduate from high-school but made herself into a self-educated intellectual. 
In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. 

In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.
During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer. She received a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.

(http://www.dorislessing.org/biography.html)

Can you be gay for one person?

By Nightfall - Michael Cunningham

I knew before starting to write this post that I am going to regret it because my words can't do justice to this book.

Two weeks ago I picked up By Nightfall at the city library because I noticed the writer was Michael Cunningham who also wrote The Hours, which is one of my favorite books. Living in a small town in Sweden, it's not the easiest thing in the world to find a good book in English at the library, so I decided to give it a try.

And here is where the hard part comes- describing the plot :
The book follows Peter Harris, an art dealer in early forties, who seems to be living a peaceful and content live with his wife Rebecca in Manhattan, New York, living in a nice big apartment, attending social parties, knowing influential people and so on. The reader is allowed to enter Peter's mind and read about everything he thinks and feels. He mostly thinks about the routines : going to work, replying on all the emails, answering the calls, setting up exhibitions, going back home and having sex with his wife, which portrays him as quite an ordinary guy. Cunningham mostly uses run-on sentences to show the stream of consciousness which sometimes makes it hard to follow Peter's train of thought, but I think that we can all  identify with having an internal monologue, starting at one point but ending up thinking about something completely different, and asking ourselves all kinds of silly side-questions that pop-up as out-of-nowhere. This adds a comic element to the book, as I'm sure other people would laugh if they could hear what you were thinking about.

 However, when Rebecca's younger brother Ethan, who has been using drugs for a couple of years, comes to stay with them, Peter starts having strange feelings towards him, feelings that cannot exactly be classified as "falling in love", but are more like a mix of admiration for his charisma, attraction for his rugged good looks, yearning for the passed youth and appeal towards Ethan's other-worldliness - like nothing in this world is worth enough to keep him alive. These feelings have such an enormous effect on Peter that at one point he is ready to abandon everything, his wife, his job, his whole life, and run away with Ethan if he had asked him to. However, after the climax Peter gets a reality check and realizes that Ethan has been playing tricks on him, but what's even worse, he realizes how unhappy his seemingly-satisfied wife has been in their marriage and how trivial his life has been. And for me there is nothing worse than the recognition that one has been living an average and trivial life.
Thus, as you can see, it's hard to describe the novel's plot because it isn't an event the book is about, rather it's about ordinary people and their life experiences that can't always be neatly classified and clearly explained. In my opinion Mirsha Berson  perfectly captured the novel's central theme in a review for The Seattle Times saying that it is about " Beauty, in it's infinite variety and its power to transfix and seduce and delude". 

Among many questions that are raised throughout the book, one that popped out for me was if it is possible to be gay for only one person ? Hmmm....

Yes, one could say that Peter had a short midlife crisis and nothing more.I personally think that there is a lot more to the book's characters  than that...Although, if everyone feels unhappy and confined in their lives, then maybe it isn't anything extraordinary, I don't know...I will leave it to you to judge for yourselves when you read the book.

Would you settle for a pig's head on Christmas?

Angela’s Ashes   by Frank McCourt 

This book was recommended to me by my English teacher, and it was one of the best books I have read. The three books Angela’s Ashes, ‘Tis, and Teacher Man are Frank McCourt’s memoirs that describe his life-struggles from begging for food in Ireland to moving to America and becoming an English teacher.  The book was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1997.

     Angela’s Ashes depicts McCourt’s childhood in Limerick living in an impoverished one-room  apartment  with his mother, a number of siblings ( most of which die at some point) and a father who is a drunk and who rarely brings any money home to feed his family. The book is capturing because it is written from a child’s perspective with all the silly wonderings and questions we have had as children, some of which we never dared to ask adults and so they remained unanswered, but nevertheless questions which expose the irony and hypocrisy of adults around us and “their “ world. McCourt’s narrative style is straightforward which makes the book easily-read, but at the same time it is multi-layered since it contains many witty comments and observations. 

     But besides being interesting because it reveals a whole new world to us: a different culture, a different mentality and such poverty and non-human conditions most of us could never imagine living in, what makes this book truly exceptional is knowing that these are real people, that these were their real lives, and , most importantly, that Frank McCourt survived. 

Therefore, if you have got a day or two with nothing to do, go to your nearest library, pick up Angela’s Ashes and read it. I promise you won’t regret it. 

bookworm?

Hi everybody,

I myself  love reading a good book when I have time. However I often find myself hesitating to start a new book because I'm not sure which one to choose and if it is going to be worth my time. So, with that in mind, I started this blog as kind of a guide to those of you who need help deciding which book to pick up when you catch some free time.