2014 reading highlights

Best of reading lists are not my strength; I always forget something even with reading journals both physical and online. But here are some highlights from 2014:

Middle Grade Fiction

The Fourtheenth Goldfish by Jennifer Holm

Holm pays tribute to her science forebear in a funny, wise and non-preachy book about parents and children, grown and not grown-up, when the new kid in Ellie's class turns out to be her grandfather. His experiment worked and he's now a 6th grader.

Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy by Karen Foxlee

Ophelia does not believe in magic in this novel inspired by The Snow Queen. But when her sword historian father takes on a job in a museum in a city where it never stops snowing, and she meets a boy in a locked room who has been waiting for her to rescue him, Ophelia has some rethinking to do.

YA Fiction

Don't Call Me Baby by Gwendolyn Heasley

The teen daughter of a mommy blogger does not appreciate having her whole life bantered about on the internet. And now her teacher wants everyone in class to blog. An entertaining coming-of-age story when those moments with your family are now things everyone online knows.

Nonfiction

Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow (memoir)

The New York Times columnist's memoir recounts his childhood in rural poverty, his mother's incredible hard work, his confusion over his sexual identity and his college years. I loved reading his gentle words about hardships, and his honesty with grace toward others.

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

Mead relates the importance of various aspects of George Eliot's wonderful novel to various aspects of her own life in a book that is part literary criticism, part biography of Eliot, part memoir and wholly entertaining.

Literary Fiction

Benediction by Kent Haruf

Haruf's Plainsong introduced me to quiet, heartfelt midland fiction. Haruf, who died this year but finished one more novel, wrote here about the end of life of a good man who didn't always do the right thing.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

One of two books by Americans on this year's Man Booker list for the first time, Ferris's novel about a self-absorbed dentist is wild, wide-ranging and was a complete blast to read. Especially after I wondered if I was the right reader for it. A terrific book.

 

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

The other Booker nominee is about Rosemary's family, including her very special sister Fern. What I thought at first was a gimmick is instead a marvelous way to talk about how families relate to each other, how people relate to each other and how people and animals relate to each other.

 

History of the Rain by Niall Williams

A dreary story of a dreary Irish family where the rain makes everything look dreary. Except that it is not dreary. Bedridden Ruthie Swain tries to find her father through stories and it is transporting. Another Booker nominee.

 

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Another reason for me to love Murakami and his translators. A young man traces what went wrong as a teenager with the friends who formed a tight circle, and what happened when they grew up. His work is wistful.

Most Grateful to Have Read:

Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

Pete Snow is a social worker in western Montana in the 1970s. He tries to help the son of a survivalist, Jeremiah Pearl, who sees the era as the start of the End Times and has hidden his family in the woods. At the same time, Pete's family has fallen apart -- his wife has left, taking their daughter. When the teenager runs away, Pete experiences the helplessness on he saw in the families he tries to help. Henderson knows the people, he knows the land and he has written a complex, thoughtful and devastatingly honest work.

Biggest Regret:
A long list of books not yet read and other online reviews and critiques not read or properly lauded.

Review: 'My Life in Middlemarch'

My Life in Middlemarch
By Rebecca Mead
Memoir/literary criticism
January 2014
Crown
ISBN: 978-0-307-98476-0

Some books are too full, too layered and so rewarding that they cannot be reduced to a blurb. That's true of George Eliot's Middlemarch, which will enrich a reader in different ways through a lifetime of re-reads. It's also true of Rebecca Mead's look at Middlemarch, its author and the ways they have affected her life in My Life in Middlemarch.

Middlemarch is one of those novels that can capture a reader and never let go. The ups and downs of the fate suffered by the first main character we meet, Dorothea Brooke, so determined to do the right thing and so blind as to the downfall of her own impulse, the way the novel doesn't focus only on Dorothea but takes up the stories of other residents of the bucolic town, the way things don't necessarily turn out the way a reader would suspect but rarely ring false -- Middlemarch is a huge, sprawling, heartfelt and wise book.

Mead, a writer for The New Yorker, encountered the novel while young and fell under its spell. For anyone else who has done the same, her deep love for the book will set off an echo of memory for any sympathetic reader to the first time those pages were opened. The feeling of being where I was when first I read Middlemarch has been hard to shake off for days, and it's because Mead took me there with her own memory. That is powerful writing.

Mead does a wonderful job of reporting on her own reactions to the novel at different stages of her life, noting the ways in which what has happened to her have changed the way in which the book resonates for her. This is a wonderful sort of memoir because it shows that how a person changes can affect other aspects of life, such as the way in which one regards a revered part of one's life (and, yes, devotion to a book can indeed be that strong).

There is more to the novel than the ways in which a reader reacts to it, and there is much more to Mead's book. She also weaves in parts of Eliot's life and philosophy to specifc parts of the novel. And Mead is a discerning literary critic in comparing Eliot's goals with how they can be seen in her writing. She even makes cogent connections between Virgina Woolf and Eliot, which matters because Woolf's review of Middlemarch is the one that is still most often-quoted -- as the book being "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".

Mead also puts Eliot squarely in the novelist's own time and shows how she was regarded during her lifetime and afterward. The way in which Mead brings this back to herself and her life to conclude My Life in Middlemarch is so satisfying that it's hard to decide which to do first -- read Middlemarch again or read My Life in Middlemarch again.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Sunday Sentence: George Eliot

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without added commentary:

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. ... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

-- George Eliot, The Natural History of German Life as encountered in Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch