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: 'Fourth of July Creek'

Fourth of July Creek
By Smith Henderson
Literary fiction
May 2014
Ecco
ISBN: 978-0062286444

The American West has long been a haven for people who want to be left alone and those who despair of society. But loners and misfits aren't always alone. Sometimes they have families and those families have children -- children who may be loved or who may be barely endured, but either way, they can be children who are not cared for.

Pete Stone is a social worker assigned to a vast territory in the northwest corner of Montana, of sparsely settled pockets not of civilization, but of people. He's like a lot of those people. His marriage is broken, his teenage daughter is sullen and doesn't get much attention from a father with a demanding job, and he drinks. A lot. His successes trying to help children and listen to the adults purportedly caring for them are few but he still plugs away at it.

Between other hard-luck cases, Pete is called when a wild child appears at a school one day. Even in the pre-computerized days of the late '70s and early '80s, the dawn of the Reagan era, it's unusual for a boy in such a state to have no records. The boy, Benjamin, doesn't consider himself neglected. He and his pa live in the woods off the land. Headed up toward camp, Benjamin's father warns Pete away, obviously willing to shoot him.

That father is Jeremiah Pearl, who knows the end times are coming. His dearly loved wife saw the signs coming and had the whole troop of Pearls, including all the babies, leave Indiana and head for the woods where they might have a chance to survive.

Pete leaves foodstuffs and clothes in a niche in the woods. Sometimes things get taken. The distrustful Pearl gradually doesn't quite trust Pete, but accepts his help and then him. In between spells when they spend some time traipsing through the land, Pete's wife leaves Montana for Texas, where there is a chance of a man taking care of her and their daughter, and their daughter realizes she's got nowhere to go. So she leaves. And it's about as blandly dire as one would think.

The sections where Pete tries to navigate the system through several states, trying to find a young runaway daughter, shows how easily children fall through the cracks of a social system set up to protect them, and shows the heartbreak of parents who love their children but don't know how to take care of them. So do the sections where that daughter, Rachel, becomes a child of the streets.

Whether it's parents who can't handle being parents, children forced to grow up and fend for themselves, people who believe what they are told or people who don't believe the evidence in front of their faces, Henderson's debut novel is filled with innocents who wonder about what has happened to them or who cannot handle what they see going on. Most of the people in the novel feel helpless about what they see, whether it's a small-town judge heartbroken when Reagan wins, a female social worker who was an abused child or a federal agent who regrets the choices he has made.

About the only people who don't feel helpless are Pearl and his son. Pearl is a combination of just about every paranoid, black helicopter-fearing loner who have inhabited the crannies of Northwest empty places for decades. He's also far more than that, and the dull despair that sometimes enshrouds Henderson's people is a great contrast to this character who searched so hungrily for something to believe in, and chose wrongly.

Henderson's novel earns its humanizing, heartfelt climax and coda both because the scope of the characters' journeys are so well-drawn and because the little details are so right. This is a highly political and social novel that is tightly anchored to its characters and setting. To have carried this off with no preaching or screeching is a remarkable achievement, and an uplifting reading experience.

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

Sunday Sentence: Fourth of July Creek

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without further commentary or context. Except to mention that it was difficult to find just one passage.

A hospital visit was supposed to happen just after the morning shift change, but a teacher had broken up a huge fight in the local high school parking lot, and by the time everything was sorted out Debbie's appointment had been scotched. She asked to go to the ER once, but it was a faint request made to a cop shop full of a dozen sullen high school wrestlers and officers calling their parents. She went to lie down. No one saw her spasm or heard the jouncing of the springs under the thin mattress as she had the heart attack that killed her.

-- Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek