B. Morrison's Blog, page 76

Liebster Award

I was delighted to hear that this blog has been given a Liebster Award by Bonnie J. Vesely. Her blog Right Livelihood, Just Ventures is here and is certainly worth a read.

The Liebster Award is a way to showcase a blog you think deserves merit and more followers. There are a few responsibilities:

1. Thank the one who nominated you by linking back.

2. Nominate five blogs with less than 200 followers.

3. Let the nominees know by leaving a comment at their sites.

4. Add the award image to your sit...

The Spanish Game, by Charles Cumming

After a disastrous operation six years ago, a disillusioned Alec Milius left MI6 and has been living under the radar ever since. He believes that both MI6 and the CIA, who figured in his last op, are looking for him, so he employs all the counter-surveillance techniques he learned as a spy: multiple phones, multiple email accounts, always on the watch for a tail. He’s landed in Madrid where he’s built a new life for himself, working for a banker, Julian Church, whose wife is Alec’s mistress.

...

Suburban Myths, by Sam Schmidt

Recently I reread Kerouac’s On the Road for a book club and was surprised to find only brief flashes of the sense of adventure that filled my memory of reading it in my teens, and even these flashes were overwhelmed by the sadness and yearning that made up the bulk of the story. I am not so old that I do not remember the feeling that life—real life—was going on somewhere else, like a party or distant music whose location I couldn’t quite pin down. I remember the occasional wild night with lou...

Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner

As the novel opens Larry recounts waking up in a cabin in northern Vermont, part of a family compound where he and his wife, Sally, have been coming for many years. It is Larry’s voice that tells this story of a friendship between two couples. Larry and Sally meet Charity and Sid when Larry takes up his first teaching job in Madison, Wisconsin, where Sid also teaches. In an extended flashback we learn about that magical year in Madison, where the couples become friends right off, one of those...

Memory's Wake, by Derek Owens

In this extraordinary memoir, Owens delves into his mother's past, into the childhood memories that suddenly began to surface when his mother is in her fifties. While properly skeptical and examining the controversy around recovered memories, Owens comes to believe in the terrible abuse his mother, Judy, suffered at the hands of her mother. This woman, deserted by her husband and left with a detested five-year-old, takes out her frustrations on the child. Confronted later by Owens's father...

Believe in Me: A Teen Mom's Story, by Judith Dickerman-Nelson

I met the author recently when we appeared together on a panel at the Virginia Festival of the Book. Although her book is designated a work of fiction, it is closely based on Dickerman-Nelson's own experience of getting pregnant at 16 while attending a Catholic school. We quickly found common ground between her experiences and my own, described in my memoir Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother. We also had a similar motivation for writing our books: to dispel or at least try to...

Vermilion Drift, by William Kent Krueger

I think I've read all of Krueger's mysteries featuring Cork O'Connor. A long series like this gives me a chance to see a character change over time. In each book O'Connor is changed, of course, but over the course of these dozen books the changes are cumulative. After as tint in the Chicago PD, Cork returned to his hometown in Tamarack County, Minnesota, where at the beginning of the series he is the sheriff, although now he is working as a private eye.

One thing that draws me back again and ...

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

I was amused at Barnes's cheek in using the same title as Frank Kermode's influential book on the theory of fiction, and even more amused when I saw a reference to it on the first page ("tick-tock"). Having just read Barnes's remarkable nonfiction book, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, a meditation on how to live with the idea that we will eventually die and disappear, I was also moved by the title and thought of Kermode's description of "our deep need for intelligible Ends." Kermode goes on to s...

This Möbius Strip of Ifs, by Mathias B. Freese

The author asked me to read and review this book, which he described as "a kind of Bildungsroman of my psychological life as a writer, psychotherapist, spiritual seeker, and teacher". Intrigued, I agreed.

The book is a collection of short essays in three parts. The first and longest part is indeed about the life described above. The essays in the brief second part are mostly about films and actors, while those in the third part are mostly about members of his family. Contrary to my...

The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka

Otsuka's book gives us the lives of Japanese picture brides starting with their journey to the U.S. in the early 20th century. Contrary to the prosperous images promised them in letters, the men they married were mostly farmworkers, usually older and less attractive than the photographs the women had pored over before and during the journey. These women worked in the fields, as did the children they bore, and, later, as shop clerks and maids in the homes of the wealthy. We stay with them...