Like many of you, I’m reluctant to buy books for myself. Here on Vancouver Island, the Regional Library service is excellent. I can find what I’m interested in reading but I enjoy receiving books as presents. (Are you listening Father Christmas?) Here are some suggestions for your friends. ( or to share with friends)
Tell Me Everything
Elizabeth Strout’s latest, Tell Me Everything, is set in the fictional Maine town of Brunswick. In her piercingly accurate, simple prose, told from multiple points of view, the reader inhabits the ordinary indignities, failures and temptations of her character’s lives. There is a murder story woven in too.
As Bob and Lucy visit the bench where Bob can sneak a cigarette without Margaret knowing, the reader wonders if they will choose a future together. Will Bob leave Margaret? They are surrounded by a rich cast of extended family and players with their problems, including a re-appearance of Olive Kitteridge.
What are the costs of cumulative betrayals by a loved one? Is reconciliation the same as forgiveness? And why bother? Are relationships the linchpins that hold us together? And how do we nurture our souls? How many of our damaging choices are made because we were poorly nurtured or abused in our childhood? There’s a lovely passage where a healthy soul is likened to a billowing, flashy, coloured spinnaker. (paraphrasing) This book would make a great present and book club choice.
Your Body Was Made For This
In the CanCon section, I enjoyed Debbie Bateman’s linked short story collection, Your Body Was Made For This. And yes, Debbie, parts of this book are screamingly funny. The ten stories address the realities of owning, operating and accepting a female body in the hostile environment of societal binaries. Bodies that leak milk, blood or pee—too much or too little at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. Characters struggle with fertility–wanted and unwanted, body size and shape, and power struggles with partners and parents. The collection examines misogyny and competition from all genders. It questions the societal expectation of female caregiving at all life stages, at the expense of self.
Breasts—the character, Brianna, points out after her bilateral mastectomy. “The breasts are not a vital organ.” The middle-aged body is a “renovation project…off schedule and over budget,” but still the currency for acceptance. Join these characters making perogies with their mother’s recipe, surviving ectopic pregnancy, pumping iron in the gym, training for a marathon and struggling for power and acceptance in their lives. Sounds like another great present and book club choice.
All Fours
I have to say the title of Miranda July’s latest novel, All Fours, put me off. I imagined a collection of graphic passages of off-putting, violent sex, with little regard for the pleasure of the “bottom” person. When visiting a friend, I pulled the book off the bookshelf and settled in for a nearly non-stop read. It’s a quest story, a road trip but not a road trip. It’s funny.
You may remember her 2007 short fiction collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You. My first encounter with her writing was reading her 2017 story, “Metal Bowl” in the New Yorker.
All Fours may fall into the scantly populated category of perimenopausal literature but it is so much more. It validates and honours female sexuality and desire in all its forms. (yes, many descriptions of female masturbation) But there is much more that the forty-five-year-old protagonist is struggling with. It’s funny and unabashed as it tackles the challenges and conflicts of being an aging woman in our society. I’m wondering how the Sally Rooney crowd finds it. A way to understand their mothers?
Notre Dame
If you are despairing of humanity with the impending holiday season and the state of the world, console yourself, with the triumph of the successful rebuilding and restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris over the last five years. Now there’s a story.