2020 Reading–August
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood is a historical
novel about a woman involved in a double murder. She is spared hanging because
of her age, but is imprisoned for life, although some think she is insane and
should be treated. Apart from the day-to-day lives of Grace (who works in the
warden’s home as a servant and goes back and forth from her cell to the house
under armed guard) and the psychiatrist who is studying her (who is a resident
of a shabby boarding house and also corresponds with his whiny mother about
money and marriage), the narrative unfolds as Grace tells her story to the
doctor. She came to Canada from Ireland with her abusive father (the mother
dying during the crossing and being buried at sea) and worked in various
servant positions from a very young age before coming into service for a
gentleman and his housekeeper, the victims she is said to have killed. How
reliable is she? That’s not clear, but she builds a persuasive case that the
laborer on the farm did the killing and also that the housekeeper was something
of a madwoman herself.
[image error]How the South Won the Civil War by Heather Cox Richardson
How the South Won the Civil War by Heather Cox Richardson isn’t
quite what I thought it would be. Instead, it’s a history of Individualism and
the Cowboy Mentality—both somewhat mythical—that still divides the country. I
would have suggested a different title, because that war is still being fought,
but these are significant issues and I learned a great deal from the book about
the attitudes that shape the battle. I’m not sure the author gets at the cause
of the divide, though. The cowboy myth is an outgrowth of the cult of
individualism, which was always based on a lie, but where did that start? She
ties it to the oligarchy that developed in the south, built on the foundation
of slavery, which makes sense, and the conquest of the West was in part an
attempt to extend that domination over more land and more people. The book is
very readable, but I would love to have it brought forward to the present
attitudes of the Tea Party, Libertarians, and Trump’s GOP. I’m told that’s the
subject of her next book.
[image error]Other People’s Pets by R.L. Maizes
Other People’s Pets by R.L. Maizes is a novel about La
La, a veterinary student who is the daughter of a burglar (and, nominally, a
locksmith). When her father is arrested after his latest job, La La drops out
of vet school and starts robbing houses, a skill her father taught her, in
order to raise money to pay his legal fees. As the book progresses, we learn
more about her childhood in which she robbed homes with her father after her
mother abandoned them, and how he took the rap for her when she carelessly let
slip to some shady friends what they’d done. What also makes her unique is that
she’s an animal empath. She doesn’t seem to know what human animals are
feeling, but she does sense the discomfort of pets, which is what steered her
toward veterinary medicine. She even rationalizes her robbery because she
treats the pets in the homes she robs. But the robberies create a rift between
her and her fiancé, and life gets complicated when she tries to find her
mother. The book is beautifully plotted and clever.
[image error]The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds
The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds is a collection of
poetry first published in 1987. I’ve also read another collection by Olds, Stag’s Leap, that I loved, but this one
put me off for some reason. The whole last section of the book is about her
children, and those poems did little for me, and I failed to connect with a
great many other poems in the book also. Some were just borderline offensive
(“The Pope’s Penis” for one, “Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change
Doctor” for another), and others, such as the many poems about her parents and
their problems felt either too personal or not personal enough.
[image error]Machiavelli by Patrick Boucheron
Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching
People What to Fear
by Patrick Boucheron (translated from French by Willard Wood) is a collection
of essays about Machiavelli that the author did (and read) on French public
radio. Machiavelli is an interesting figure from the early 16th
Century who is often misunderstood, and I’m not sure this slim book really
clarified him for me. Most of us learn that his book, The Prince, was a guide for authoritarians, but others argue that
it was more satirical and descriptive than prescriptive. But he wrote other
works as well. Boucheron refers to the interesting Stephen Greenblatt book, The Swerve, about the importance to the
early Renaissance of the rediscovery of an ancient book by Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, which I read
recently, but not to Leonardo da Vinci, who was prominent at the time also.
[image error]The Book of Jeremiah by Julie Zuckerman
The Book of Jeremiah by Julie Zuckerman is a novel in
stories about a man who goes from being a mischievous prankster as a child
(releasing a bunch of frogs at his mother’s carefully planned Passover seder is
one example) to respected professor of international political economy. The
stories are not arranged in chronological order, which I actually liked, so the
story about his childhood pranks, which begins the book, is followed by one
about his retirement, and then we go back to fill in the blanks. The writing is
crisp and Jeremiah is sometimes amusing, sometimes infuriating, like a male,
Jewish Olive Kitteridge. Particularly funny is one story where Molly, his wife,
tasks their son Stuart, with calming their father down before the wedding of
Hannah, the daughter. Stuart gets the great idea of feeding him pot brownies
and it does the trick. It’s a terrific book that enjoyed reading very much.
