B. Morrison's Blog, page 61

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

This compulsively readable novel is about a handful of people at a small college in Michigan whose plans, dreams and ambitions are thrown off course. Mike Schwartz is more than the captain of the baseball team; he is its heart. Acting as the assistant coach the school can’t afford, he pushes his teammates to do more and better than they ever thought they could. He discovers shortstop Henry Skrimshander at a summer Legion game and, impressed by the boy’s astounding fielding ability, engineers...

The Sleeping Dictionary, by Sujata Massey

The Sleeping Dictionary is the best sort of historical fiction: an absorbing story with plenty of detail to immerse you in the time, all supported by an historically accurate framework. Set during the turbulent last days of the British Raj, this is the story of a child who is orphaned when a tsunami sweeps away her village and her family. We follow her struggles to make a place for herself in a world that is not kind to women or to Bengali peasants.

Our narrator’s name changes with her circum...

Harvest, by Jim Crace

Two fires disrupt harvest time in an isolated village, one on a nearby hill where some outsiders have camped and the other at Master Kent’s dovecot, which rapidly spreads to a barn. The latter is a bit of mischief by a couple of village lads that got out of hand, while the former “says, New neighbors have arrived; they’ve built a place; they’ve laid a hearth; they know the custom and the law. This first smoke has given them the right to stay. We’ll see.”

The narrator, Walter Thirsk, arrived w...

Myth of the Welfare Queen, by David Zucchino [1]

Zucchino is a journalist who in this extremely well-written book sets out to explode the stereotype of the welfare queen that Ronald Reagan promulgated to persuade the public that all welfare recipients were cheating the system and driving around in gold Cadillacs collecting checks to which they were not entitled.

This was also the motive that drove me to write a memoir of my time on welfare, Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother. I closed it with an epigraph from George Herbert: “Povert...

Myth of the Welfare Queen, by David Zucchino

Zucchino is a journalist who in this extremely well-written book sets out to explode the stereotype of the welfare queen that Ronald Reagan promulgated to persuade the public that all welfare recipients were cheating the system and driving around in gold Cadillacs collecting checks to which they were not entitled.

This was also the motive that drove me to write a memoir of my time on welfare, Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother. I closed it with an epigraph from George Herbert: “Povert...

The Stone Carvers, by Jane Urquhart

Last week I wrote about a rural family where a girl leaves home—because of restlessness and a desire to see the world, as we are led to believe—while her brother stays and tends his orchard. In this story as well, set some decades later, we have a sister and brother, but here it is the brother who has the wandering gene.

In a remote village in Ontario in the beginning of the 20th century Klara and her brother Tilman are taught how to carve by their grandfather, who emigrated from Bavaria as a...

The Orchardist, by Amanda Coplin

This stunning debut novel was my book club’s selection for this month. William Talmadge’s life is a quiet one, tending his apple and apricot trees, selling his produce in town. His movements as he inspects his trees, grafts a branch, fixes coffee are slow and deliberate, well-suited to the pace of life in rural Washington State at the end of the 19th century. When two girls show up, both pregnant and starving, he feeds and protects them. They are feral, too fearful to come close, grabbing the...

The House of the Dead, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky [2]

There are not enough hours in the day (or night) to read all the books I want to, as evidenced by the TBR (to be read) stacks threatening to take over a corner of my study. Reading one book leads me to read others, as The Rings of Saturn which I blogged about a few weeks ago sent me searching for a copy of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial.

One area where my attention has been deficient is the Russian authors. I somehow missed reading them in school and, apart from Nabokov, never got around to read...

The House of the Dead, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There are not enough hours in the day (or night) to read all the books I want to, as evidenced by the TBR (to be read) stacks threatening to take over a corner of my study. Reading one book leads me to read others, as The Rings of Saturn which I blogged about a few weeks ago sent me searching for a copy of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial.

One area where my attention has been deficient is the Russian authors. I somehow missed reading them in school and, apart from Nabokov, never got around to read...

The Black Narrows, by S. Scott Whitaker

This poetry chapbook from Broadkill Press caught my attention at the CityLit Festival last week at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Black Narrows is an oyster shack town on an island in the Chesapeake Bay, an island slowly being submerged by the rising water level and the erosion of its edges. It is a fictional island, but based on actual islands now lost beneath the Bay.

Whitaker’s spare and strong poems describe the people of Black Narrows, and a way of life that has almost disappeared.

At...