Books – Page 35 – …on the B.L.

The Mockingbird Next Door

January 30, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: 278
Quick Review: Marja Mills is one of the few people who knew Harper Lee intimately. She tells her tale of moving in next door to get to know the aging reclusive author.

Nelle Harper Lee penned one of the greatest American novels: To Kill A Mockingbird. Fame came swiftly to the small town woman. After a few years in the limelight, a Pulitzer Prize, and an Academy Award Winning film, she withdrew from public. She refused interviews and autographs. As the decades passed, she became an enigma.

Marja Mills wandered into Monroeville, Alabama on an assignment for her Chicago newspaper. She knocked on Nelle’s door expecting it to never open or to be sent away. Instead, she met Alice Lee, Nelle’s older sister. What happened in the following minutes would altar Mill’s life and the world’s perspective on a beloved author. Mills met Alice Lee, close family friends no one had access to previously, and eventually Harper Lee. For some reason, Lee liked and trusted Mills from the beginning and allowed her unprecedented access. Over time, their relationship grew from acquaintances to close friends. Mills had health problems, which caused her take time off from her job in Chicago. She used that time to get to know Harper Lee and her life.

I wasn’t expecting the book I read. The title The Mockingbird Next Door made me think it would be about Harper Lee. Instead it was Mills memoir about her time spent with Lee. As wonderful as Mills is, I would love to learn all the secrets of Lee’s life. I did enjoy the book for what it was.

It is evident from the beginning, Mills has a deep affection for the Lee family. Lee never opened up to anyone outside of her close family and friends. There’s the sentiment that Mills can barely contain her excitement she was let into the close circle of friends.

Mills writes authentically. She tells the story of Harper Lee honestly. There is a lot of reverence for the great author, but Mills makes sure the reader knows the humanity of the author.

Memorable Quotes
“Methodist or Baptist, Alabama fan or Auburn. These things mattered. They determined who your people were.”
“And that was something she cares about, deeply: the ability to live her life on her own terms. She answered to nobody.”
“How does anyone live up to the mystique that had grown up around her?”

Title: The Mockingbird Next Door; Life with Harper Lee
Author: Marja Mills
Publisher: The Penguin Press (Penguin Group)
Copyright: 2014
ISBN: 9781594205194

Books

Edith Wharton

January 28, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: No
Length: 869
Quick Review: A thorough and insightful look into the life and writing of an influential, female author.

Edith Wharton is an author known for her realistic social critiques of the American upper echelon’s wealth, morals, classicism, and more. Her use of language captured a way of life that was both disappearing quickly and unattainable to the majority of Americans. Wharton had a unique insight into the New York City aristocracy because she was born into high society.

Wharton is one of my favorite authors and has been for a long time. I first fell in love with her writing while reading House of Mirth and Age of Innocence. They are both wonderful and classics. One thing I didn’t know about Wharton but learned is her love for dogs. She cites receiving her first dog as a child as a pivotal moment in her life. As a dog mama, I completely and totally identify with this sentiment.

Edith Wharton was born in New York City in 1862. She was much younger than her two older brothers, which caused her to view her childhood as one filled with solitude. Between the ages of four and ten, she lived in Europe. Upon returning to New York City, she could never shake the feeling of otherness, which would often crop up in her work thematically. The feeling of being an outsider would eventually allow her to critique the aristocracy so poignantly. Wharton was a writer from the very beginning. She began publishing work in her teens but disappeared from the publishing world for many, many years. At the age of 23, she married Edward Wharton. After 28 years of marriage in 1913, they divorced. She didn’t begin publishing until the later years of marriage that Wharton began publishing. Wharton would spend a great deal of time in France and spoke French fluently but with a heavy accent. She passed away in 1937 in France, her preferred home.

Hermione Lee explores the life and work of Edith Wharton in a mere 870 pages. Edith Wharton was extensively researched and written with precision. Lee relied heavily on Wharton’s work for biographical clues and sites lengthy passages from her work. Lee sites so much of Wharton’s work that the book feels more like a textual analysis than a biography. Vast majority of the time, it was difficult wading through all the passages and analysis to find out about the historical information about the woman who penned the words originally.

I can understand why Lee cited Wharton’s work so heavily. Much of Wharton’s life is a mystery because she was incredibly private. She destroyed her correspondences and asked for the recipients of her letters to do the same. In her autobiography and memoir, she was not always truthful in her self portrayal. Turning to Wharton’s work is an obvious and helpful way of circumventing the research challenges.

Memorable Quotes
“The gift of her first small dig at the age of three was evidently as life-changing an event as her first publication, or her first car, would be.”

Title: Edith Wharton
Author: Hermione Lee
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 978037540009

Books

All the Single Ladies

January 26, 2018November 4, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: 339
Quick Review: An in depth look at the transformation in status, perception, and participation American women have undergone in society through the centuries.

20180115_111033(0)-01.jpeg — All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister had me hooked when she stated, “I always hated it when my heroines got married” within the first few paragraphs. All the Single Ladies is a look at modern women and where we have come from.

All the Single Ladies is a fun yet in depth look at the history of women with a focus on American women. There are tons of statistics, but you won’t drown in them. The statistics serve a purpose to educate but are still interesting. Traister utilizes her own single life as well as friends, colleagues, and others’ experiences as single women. One thing Traister conveys more than anything else is that singledom is incredibly diverse looking different for everyone.

Traister is not anti-marriage, anti-male, anti-woman, or anti-single. When she began her journey writing this book, she was a single woman living in New York City. At some point in her life and book journey, she met a man. She is now a married woman with two daughters.

This has been on my reading list for awhile since I am a single lady. For as excited as I was, I was also a touch tentative. Rebecca Traister is a white woman. There is nothing wrong with this. When looking at a subject, there is the tendency to look at people similar to oneself. I was worried there would be a deficiency of inclusivity and diversity of perspective, socio-economic background, race, etc. I was pleasantly surprised. From the beginning, she states that she sites more white, New Yorker writers than most of us probably know. Throughout the book, she does a good job of talking about all women and not just those she identifies with. She spends a great deal of time discussing the disparity between white women and women of color, poor women and middle class/wealthy women, and more. She explores the fact women of color and poor women have enabled wealthier classes of women “freedoms.” How there is a dependency between the two discrepancies. How white women have lead change by co-opting opinions and actions of women of color.

Traister spends a lot of time emphasizing the complexities of women’s issues.

Nothing Traister wrote was groundbreaking. At least, it wasn’t ground breaking or remotely shocking to me. I spend a lot of my time listening to women’s stories and reading about the history and complexities of women’s status in society. If it’s not something you have spent a great deal of time lingering on, there will be lots of information packed into a fairly short book.

(I have fun finding mistakes, and she had one mistake on page 153: the date should be 1938 but reads 1838. Oops! Only off by 100 years.)

I highly suggest this book. It’s interesting and fun. Personally, it rejuvenated my love of being a single woman in America. I would love to hear Traister’s opinions about women’s status post the 2016 presidential election.

Buy on Amazon || Buy on Book Depository

Memorable Quotes
“…these single American women have already shown that they have the power to change America, in ways that make many people extremely uncomfortable.”
“Any time women do anything with their lives that is not in service to others, they are readily perceived as acting perversely.”
“When people call single women selfish for the act of spending on themselves, it’s important to remember that the very acknowledgement that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary.”
““It takes a lot to qualify a man as selfish”” Amina Sow
“The state must play its role in supporting a population that no longer lives and dies within a family unit.”
“at the heart of independence lies money.”
“When it comes to female liberty and opportunity, history sets an extremely low bar.”
“women’s maternal status is often treated as the singularly interesting thing about them”

Title: All The Single Ladies; Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Author: Rebecca Traister
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 9781476716572

Books

Go Set A Watchman

January 20, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: 278
Quick Review: Jean Louise – Scout – Finch is no longer the little girl we know and love. She is a grown woman returning home to her beloved Maycomb, Alabama.

Published in what could be called a scandal, Go Set A Watchman became accessible to the public 55 years and three days after the publication of To Kill A Mockingbird. Nelle Harper Lee wrote Go Set A Watchman, but revised it into an entirely different book most every American has read, which won a Pulitzer. It would be hard to imagine Harper Lee as a public figure, but in her early years she was. Due to the drains of fame, she receded from the public eye never to publish again. In her old age, Go Set A Watchman was published under a great amount of scrutiny as to if this is what she really wanted. The reviews flooded in quickly. They were mostly skeptical and rarely glowing.

I never read To Kill A Mockingbird in high school. I read it one summer in college. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it the way others do. It took me over two years before I bought Go Set A Watchman because of the circumstances it had been released. Its blue spine sat untouched on my shelf for several months before I finally picked it up to read.

I understand why people didn’t love this second Lee book. I, however, did. I wish I could talk about Go Set A Watchman without talking about To Kill A Mockingbird, but they are intrinsically linked not only by their characters but by the integral part To Kill A Mockingbird has played in the landscape of modern Americana.

Scout is no longer a little girl; instead, she is a grown, college educated woman of 26 living in New York City. She is known as Jean Louise, and she’s going home to Maycomb for two weeks. A lot has changed in her hometown. Atticus has gotten older, but he has stayed the same. Jean Louise is an adult on her own in the world. Go Set A Watchman is a coming of age story. The kind that is rarely told: the difficulty of separating one’s identity from that of their idol’s. As people, we all go through it in one way or another.

I can understand why so many people have a hard time with this book. They’re comparing it to the first. It’s easy to do. The characters are present. The setting has only been phased by the passing of time.

The narrative of To Kill A Mockingbird flows forward through time; it’s easy to follow. Go Set A Watchman has a completely different rhythm. Jean Louise isn’t living in the present. She bounces between the past and present as memories are triggered. The book is well organized but anecdotal. It is a completely different reading experience than what one goes in believing it will be.

Atticus is a hero to Scout in a way he is a hero to everyone who has read him. He’s even, educated, fair, loyal, true, just, kind, and more. He is an ideal of a person we strive to become someday. I always found him to be too perfect. I didn’t love him because he seemed flat. Too good to be true, in a way. I want my heroes flawed, human. Go Set A Watchman rips holes in the perfect man. Lee portrays him as human, as a man of his time, a good yet flawed man. All the while, Lee portrays Scout as a young idealist with grit. Scout stands up for what she sees to be right under the most difficult of circumstance: she doesn’t back down when her hero disagrees. It becomes tenuous when Scout compares Atticus and Maycomb to Hitler and the Russian communists saying, “You just try to kill their souls instead of their bodies.” (Ouch!)

Scout replaces Atticus in our mind’s eye. She is the one who will go out into the world working to create a better and more just place for all. She believes in equality and opportunity for all, in helping, in tearing down walls based on gender or class or sex, that silence is support, and more. Jean Louise is no longer six years old; she is a young woman coming into her own in a world being torn further and further apart.

I think in many ways, Go Set A Watchman is more relevant today than To Kill A Mockingbird. We live in a world torn by intolerance and hate based on so many things, and sometimes the impact is felt most acutely in our own homes. As unfortunate as it is, many of the scenes playing out in front of Jean Louise’s eyes are familiar to the ones I see today. The relationship Scout has with her father is incredibly similar to the one I have with my father today. Many can relate to feeling betrayed by those we love when we find out their views fail to reach the standard we have set for them while failing to realize they are human too.

Go Set A Watchman has created waves. Many people do not feel for it the way they feel for the predecessor. I think this is a large part of its magic. It dares you to see a character and a book in a new light, no longer through rose colored glasses. Atticus is seen through the eyes of a child in To Kill A Mockingbird, but he is seen through the eyes of an adult in Go Set A Watchman. As children we see the world one way and another way as an adult. Lee makes us return to a favorite with the eyes of an adult.

Memorable Quotes
“Integrity, humor, and patience were the three words for Atticus Finch.”
“The course of English Literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower”
“They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn’t make them subhuman.”
“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”
“You just try to kill their souls instead of their bodies”

Title: Go Set A Watchman
Author: Harper Lee
Publisher: Harper (HarperCollins Publishers)
Copyright: 2015
ISBN: 9780062409850

Books, Fiction

The Autobiography of Santa Claus

January 15, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: 289
Quick Review: Santa Claus wants to tell his side of the story, so he chronicles his life and the events he’s seen through the centuries.

The first book in the Christmas Chronicles trilogy. Santa asked Texas journalist, Jeff Guinn, to commit to paper for posterity the true story of how Santa Claus came to be the celebrated, beloved, and mythical figure he is today.

Santa was born a few centuries after the death of Jesus in modern day Turkey. He became a highly revered bishop in the Catholic Church. As he grew to an old age, he wanted to end his days helping the under served populations of the world. He left his church one night with money in his pocket to help those in need. He soon realized he did not age and could travel at heightened speeds. He spent his years giving gifts and gathering close friends he met along the way to help with his mission. Nicholas was eventually canonized and became known as Saint Nicholas.

Guinn is an acclaimed journalist and author with an eye for history. He uses Saint Nicholas as an avenue to discuss major aspects of world history focusing on Christian and Western European history.

Santa Claus is a beloved figure known for kindness, love, and generosity. Throughout much of history, there are examples of intolerance and cruelty made in the name of God. Santa is an observer of history, who comments about how saddened he is by the unfortunate choices people make around him. The Autobiography of Santa Claus is not only an amusing history review but a lesson in tolerance and acceptance.

Santa is known by many names throughout the world and time. Notable names are Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, Père Noël, and more. These names all originated from Saint Nicholas in one way or another. Guinn makes sure to mention the history behind the linguistic evolution of Santa. Another thing he makes sure to cover is why Santa doesn’t visit every house throughout the world.

It’s a quick read and perfect for the Christmas spirit or post Christmas spirit, in my case. The narrative is sweet, well informed, and interesting.

I highly suggest it. It would be a wonderful read for family time with kids.

Memorable Quotes
“Life is never as uncomplicated as we’d prefer.”

Title: The Autobiography of Santa Claus
As Told To: Jeff Guinn
Publisher: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin Group
Copyright: 1994
ISBN: 9781585422654

Books

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

January 10, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: 212
Quick Review: Lizzie has been fat since adolescence. Her body has shaped how she is seen, and more importantly how she sees herself.

Lizzie grew up in suburban town, where she was known as the fat girl.

I had a hard time picking up this book because of the title. Without even reading the synopsis, I knew it would be a heartbreaking tale but an important tale nonetheless. It’s an issue women (and people) face. Size. We are a society that judges based on appearances. The world treats women (and people) less the more space they take up. It is unfortunate fact today.

Thirteen chapters told from varying perspectives. Sometimes, Lizzie tells her own story. Other times, people around her tell her story. In all of the narratives, her physical size is an important. Lizzie starts out as a young teen. As the novel progresses, she changes in size. As her size shifts, so does her name. Removing the name she was known by, does not remove her memory of herself. Even when she becomes an incredibly in shape twenty-something, all she can ever see herself is as the fat girl. She is so obsessed with her outward appearance, she ceases to live.

Awad describes society’s consumption with physical appearance through one woman’s story. It is consistently heartbreaking yet witty. Awad is unafraid to dive deep into the emotional abyss that is self-image.

It is a short novel, a quick read, and a huge punch. I set it down with a sigh. As a living woman, it is impossible not to identify with so many sentiments depicted in the book.

Memorable Quotes
“Never the doughnuts because we agree that a fat girl with a doughnut is too sad a thing.”
“…like her thinness was a punch in the gut, the air of heaviness around her that will never leave.”

Title: 13 Ways of Looking At A Fat Girl
Author: Mona Awad
Publisher: Penguin Books (Penguin Random House)
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 9780143128489