B. Morrison's Blog, page 75

The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

Selected by one of my book clubs, this is not a book I would normally read, although I like science fiction. First published in 1996, one of the parallel storylines takes place twenty years later (which is not too far off from where we are now), when a young engineer in Puerto Rico intercepts signals from a distant planet that are recognisably music. The news is leaked and the world blazes with curiosity about this new culture. While the U.N. dithers, the Jesuits—famous for their explorers an...

Family Constellation, by Margaret S. Mullins

Although I’ve met Margaret Mullins, I’ve read little of her poetry. Therefore, I was thrilled to see this new chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Inside the striking cover resides a set of poems that look at the charms and tragedy of daily life and the “deeper forces” that “churn below.”

For example, “Elizabeth Kenny Polio Institute 1953” captures “one quicksilver moment” when a roomful of adolescent girls in iron lungs joke about where they are off to that evening. The poem captures the scen...

The Forever Queen, by Helen Hollick

Okay, this is embarrassing to admit, but I picked up this book at the library book sale simply because I liked the cover. Because, just to be clear, I liked the colors used on the cover. They match my bedroom. Such an admission is almost as bad as revealing that when I first started buying wine, I chose bottles based on how pretty their labels were. But these days I’m no longer a novice oenophile, or bibliophile for that matter.

Much to my surprise, this big novel about Emma, Queen of Saxon E...

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

This popular book, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize along with many other awards, was my book club’s selection for this month. It’s a highly experimental book, moving back and forth in time and introducing new characters with each chapter. Since we rarely return to any of the characters from the previous chapters, Egan’s challenge to herself is to create a cohesive narrative out of these fragments.

In her reader’s guide she says:

I began A Visit from the Goon Squad without a clear plan, fo...

The Tale of Murasaki, by Liza Dalby

Very little is known about Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji. Genji, completed probably in 1021, is often considered to be the first novel, and while there is some question as to whether Murasaki herself wrote all of the chapters, she is generally celebrated as the author. The story goes that she was inspired to write the Genji stories by gazing at the full moon during a religious retreat to Ishiyama Temple.

However, far more likely is the scenario Dalby dreams up for this fictio...

The Narrow Road to the Interior, by Kimiko Hahn

A few years ago, writer Christine Stewart led a workshop on applying the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi to the writing of poetry, wabi-sabi being the appreciation of the beauty of unfinished or transient things. I thought of that workshop while reading this book, which looks like a collection of fragments of poetry and prose. However, brought together these scraps create an ever-changing collage, one where there is space for the reader’s imagination. I read this deeply moving book three time...

Free Enterprise, by Michelle Cliff

This mesmerizing 1993 novel revolves around two nineteenth-century women. An actual historical figure, Mary Ellen Pleasant is a free black woman, a business owner and an abolitionist. A fictional character, Annie Christmas, is a mulatto who walks away from a privileged life in Jamaica to fight slavery. The two women meet in 1858 at a speech by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper on “The Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race” where Annie speaks up against the notion of the Talented Tenth, s...

The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith, Edited by Michelle Cliff

Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a writer of extraordinary power and an activist who refused the roles pushed on women of her time. Raised in Florida, she lived the rest of her life, aside from school in Baltimore and three years teaching in China, in rural Georgia. In her novels, essays, and lectures, she dissected her Southern culture and with clarity and passion laid bare the effects of segregation on both black and white. Her most famous novel is Strange Fruit inspired by Billie Holliday’s r...

Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel alternates between two stories. In the present day (1970s) Lyman Ward, confined to a wheelchair by a bone disease that is gradually fusing him into a statue, has taken refuge in his grandparents’ old home in Grass Valley. His wife having deserted him with the onset of his illness, he is cared for by Ada, the third generation of her family to work for the Wards, while being pestered by his son to move into assisted living. The retired historian refuses, choosi...

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand

My book club selected this book primarily because Hillenbrand is also the author of Seabiscuit. Most of us had seen the film though, unusually for us, no one had read the book.

Unbroken is a nonfiction account of Louis Zamperini, a former Olympian who went down in the Pacific during World War II. He survived a miraculous 47 days in an inflatable raft before being captured by the Japanese. Although he is treated well at the first place he is taken, given food, tea and medical care, it isn’t l...