B. Morrison's Blog, page 51

Heart Mountain, by Gretel Ehrlich

February 19 is the anniversary of the day FDR signed Executive Order 9066 which took over 11,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans from their homes and businesses and sent them to concentration camps for the duration of WWII. One of those was the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp in Wyoming. Ehrlich’s novel is based on these true events. She imagines—based on her research—what life must have been like for those in the camp and those in the surrounding communities.

McKay is a young man...

Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, by Barbara Hurd

I loved this book so much that the person from whom I borrowed it actually gave it to me (thanks, Anne!). Reading it, I was reminded of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book about encountering the natural world and the human condition, a book that stunned me. So much so, now that I think of it, that the person from whom I borrowed it gave it to me (thanks, Jill!).

Stirring the Mud is a slight book, only nine essays, but I’ve been reading and rereading it for weeks, pondering the im...

Nora Webster, by Colm Tóibín

Newly widowed Nora doesn’t want to answer her door. In the Irish town of Wexford in the middle of the 20th century, it is customary for people to stop by the home of someone in mourning in the evening. Without phones there’s no way to call first to see if they are welcome, so they just come and knock on the door.

Despite her yearning to be alone, Nora always opens the door. To a neighbor who commiserates with her, she says, “‘They mean well. People mean well.’”

Bound by convention, missing h...

Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England, by Tom Wessels

Tom Wessels’ book helps me understand what I’m looking at when I examine the woods that come almost up to my porch. Although I live in the mid-Atlantic, we share the same type of forest as southern New England, one of seven types in the U.S. Ours is called the Central Forest. There are differences, but the trees I see from my porch are those I saw in Massachusetts: oak, maple, white pine, honey locust, maple, ash. We also have sweet gum and black walnut, which are not found up north, or at l...

The Likeness, by Tana French

In this second mystery from Tana French, the murder of a young woman drops like a stone into the world of her four friends, and of the detectives investigating it. Ripples spread, unsettling all of their lives and certainties and waking deeper currents.

I read this book and French’s earlier one, In the Woods, a few years ago, long enough ago that the details have faded but my memory of liking them hadn’t. That made them a good choice for listening to in the car on a couple of long trips: the...

A Thousand Resurrections: An Urban Spiritual Journey, by Maria Garriott

In 1980 a pair of newlyweds, fresh out of college, left the suburbs to begin an urban ministry in a blighted neighborhood in Baltimore. Naive and earnest, already expecting a child, they wanted to bring hope to at least a corner of this city where great wealth and great poverty existed side by side.

I, too, moved to Baltimore in 1980, moved back, despite my vows never to return after leaving in 1968, the year Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were killed, the year Baltimore erupted...

Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, by Terese Svoboda

How could I have never heard of Lola Ridge before? A central figure in Modernist poetry, she seemed to know everyone: from Robert Frost to Amy Lowell to H.D. Praised by people like Stephen Vincent Benét and Louis Untermeyer, she was considered one of the top American poets. Her fiery poems describe the real life of immigrants and others struggling to get by. A lifelong anarchist, she was devoted to the ideal of personal and artistic freedom. She worked for years with Emma Goldman and partici...

Best books I read in 2015

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. These are the twelve best books I read in 2015. Although I read much fiction, I’m a bit surprised to see how many of the books I’ve selected are nonfiction. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of each book.

1. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, Essays by Jane Hirshfield

The nine essays in this book contain much depth and beauty. In them, Hirschfield explores the magic of poetry, pulling back the curtai...

The Opposing Shore, by Julien Gracq

There’s an ongoing debate among book folks about literary versus genre fiction. Some people complain that literary fiction indulges a love of language at the expense of plot, leading to boring tomes with beautiful sentences and striking imagery but where nothing happens. Others complain that genre fiction is mindless entertainment, bound by strict genre rules, with little intelligent content.

Still others—people like me—really only want stories. Lists of books I’ve loved inevitably include b...

Father Christmas, by Raymond Briggs

My young friend brought this award-winning children’s book along on a recent overnight at my house. I hadn’t heard of it before and, reading it aloud at bedtime, was thoroughly enchanted.

In the format of a graphic novel, the story follows Father Christmas through his most demanding day: December 24. There are no elven worker bees, no Rudolph, no North Pole. Instead we have a seemingly ordinary man waking from a dream of sunning himself on a beach to find that it’s Christmas Eve. No wonder h...