“Life is too short to read bad books.” I’d always heard that, but I still read books through until the end no matter how bad they were because I had this sense of obligation. That is, until this week when I tried (really tried) to read a book that is utterly boring and unrealistic. I had to stop reading. Do you read everything all the way through or do you feel life really is too short to read bad books?

Once upon a time, I plowed through every book, no matter whether I liked it or not.  But as I get older, I feel less compunction to finish books I’m not enjoying.  Life is too short, and there are far, far too many books waiting to be read (and re-read!)  Particularly now, since nearly all my books come from the library, I don’t have the added onus of feeling as if I’ve wasted money by not finishing. 

I have occasionally been surprised by a book – pushed on past the point where I might have set it aside only to find it’s suddenly become quite interesting.  And the opposite has happened as well – a book that starts out keen can suddenly flounder along the way. 

So, yes, I do occasionally say, “Bah!” and toss the book aside.  It’s a bit painful, I’ll admit…but after all, I don’t go on eating a pile of Brussel sprouts (which I detest!) simply because they’re on my plate.   There are far too many things in the world one must do no matter what the feelings are.  At this point in my life, reading is one of the few things over which I still have a modicum of control.  So, I’ll exercise that control, and dismiss a book I don’t like.

There are always lots more to choose from.

Visit Booking Through Thursday for other responses to this question

In a slight twist to the Teaser Tuesday meme, where readers are invited to pick up their current read, turn to a certain page, and share a random paragraph, I  like to take a moment on Tuesdays and share a meaningful passage from the book that’s currently propped open on my bedside table.

Psychological suspense thrillers aren’t known for the kinds of meaningful passages I like to share with you, so I thought I might be hard pressed to find something from Hurting Distance, by Sophie Hannah.   But lo and behold, the very last sentences of the book grabbed my heartstrings.

He leaned over and ran his fingers across the sundial’s smooth stone surface.  “I’d chosen my motto, you know, for the sundial I wanted. Depresso resurgo.”

“Sounds a bit depressing,” said Charlie.

“It isn’t.  You don’t know what it means.”

How could she not ask, with him sitting there like a schoolboy who’d done his homework, evidently so eager to tell her? “Well?”

He gulped down the remains of his tea.  “I set, then rise again,” he said, keeping his eyes on Charlie as he lifted the wet bag out of the cup with his spoon.  He held it up, a gesture of triumph.  “I set, then rise again.”

Appropriate, really, as I sit here in the quiet morning, the room growing incrementally brighter with the sun’s rising. Appropriate as well for the sense of renewal I’ve just begun to feel, a sense that a long period of sadness in my life may be coming to an end, a tingling of hopefulness for good things waiting in my future.  For certainly, like the sun, there are times in the course of  our trajectory that we dwell in shadow.  Inevitably, if we stay strong, the shadow can be pierced through, and we can rise again.

Depresso resurgo, my friends.

Depresso resurgo.

Memoir has become the new “black” in publishing, hasn’t it?  Seems everyone and their uncle has a life story worth telling, a perspective they feel the world needs to know.  We have memoirs about life as drug addict or schizophrenic, about growing up with abusive parents, about growing up Mormon or Buddhist.  Memoirs about our pets – cats, dogs, pot-bellied pigs.  But don’t get me wrong – I’m something of a memoir-aholic.  I’m fascinated with people’s lives and what they make of them. 

But a memoir must inspire me to reflect on my own life, strike a compassionate chord, illuminate some aspect of life in general that is meaningful.  I believe every persons story can touch us, can teach us, and a good memoir does all that in an entertaining and insightful way.   Doris Kearns Goodwin, noted biographer, writes that “every now and then a memoir is so well written that readers are able to find elements of their own life story in the chronicle of the writer’s life.”

So when TLC Book Tours offered me the opportunity to read and review John Grogan’s memoir, The Longest Trip Home (newly released in paperback, and just in time for holiday stocking-stuffing), I was ecstatic.  Grogan’s previous memoir (Marley and Me) made his name, and for good reason.  I came to The Longest Trip Home with high expectations.  Let me assure you, I was not the least bit disappointed.

Grogan’s memoir is especially refreshing because it’s about a happy, normal, childhood.  No abusive or alcoholic parents, no incestuous relationships, no shameful secrets hiding in the closet.  As Grogan puts it, “Life was safe and warm and good.  I had parents who loved God and each other and us. I had two brothers and a sister to play and run and fight with.  I had a house and toys and my own beer carton in which I could carry anything I wanted.  It was a dreamy, wondrous time.”

I admit it – I’m a sucker for happy families.  Like Grogan, I was lucky enough to have one.  And, oddly enough, he and I were growing up within a stone’s throw of each other here in southeastern Michigan in the 1960’s.  So it was even more fun reading his story, and being very familiar with the places and times he wrote about.   He took me back to a particularly idyllic period in my life, and it was like balm to my sore spirit.

Grogan, the youngest of four children, was definitely the “Marley” in his family, and he has no qualms about sharing exploits that range from being expelled as an altar boy for quaffing the last of the Communion wine to blasting out his neighbor’s picture window with firecrackers.  His good Catholic parents are sometimes at their wit’s end, but young John knows he will always have their undying support.  And so it is with especial poignancy that he writes of the one conflict he has with his family – his inability to embrace their Catholic faith with the deep devotion and committment his parents, particularly his father, demand.   Even far into his adulthood, Grogan continued to portray the role of practicing Catholic, until one day he finally faces his parents with the truth.

“Tell us the truth,” Mom interjected.  “Do you still go to church?”

I looked at her for a long moment.  Studied her face, the face I had lied to so many times over so many years.  “No,” I said.  “Not for a long, long time.”

My mother acted as if she had taken a hit to the chest, knocking the wind out of her.  She rested one hand on the chair back and stared out the window as if studying something far off on the interstate.  “Oh,” she said.  “I didn’t know that.”

We stood in a circle, saying nothing.  “Look, I need to get going,”  I said.  I was opening the door when Dad’s voice boomed after me.

“John!”

I froze, then turned back.  As I did he threw himself against me and buried his face in my shoulder, locking me in grip so tight it was as if he would never let go.  I felt him shaking, his chest lurching against me.  The man I had never seen shed a tear, my Rock of Gibraltar, was crying in my arms.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured, unsure if it was loud enough for them to hear.  I was sorry, nor for my actions, not for failing to embrace those beliefs my parents embraced.  But sorry for how much pain I had caused them.  Sorry for the years of deception and now for the sucker punch of revelations that had so quickly shredded, like shrapnel to the heart, all they had allowed themselves to believe for so long.  Sorry for the gaping rift our religious differences had torn in the fabric of an otherwise loving family.

Grogan has a gift for bringing feelings to life on the page.  He did it with Marley, his four-legged hero, and he does it superbly with his family.  In writing so honestly and frankly about his relationship with his parents, and with such affectionate humor about his own formative years, Grogan invites the reader directly into the bosom of his family. 

The Longest Trip Home is a wonderful, affirmative tale about the power of family and love. 

It is memoir-able indeed.

I’ve always loved “fall back Sunday,” the day we set our clocks back one hour to mark the end of Daylight Savings Time.  In effect, we get an extra hour in the day, and for someone as perpetually time starved as I, it’s a real gift.  My 25 hour Sunday always seems luxuriously long, and that extra one hour sometime gives me the most expansive feeling – as if I’ve all the time in the world.

Alas, even 25 hour Sundays come to a close, and it’s nearly that time already.  I had high hopes for the day and the things I wanted to do in it.  Some of them were fulfilled, other not…apparently even 25 hours in a day is not enough. Now it’s quite dark, and I’m sitting at my desk with a glass of wine and a small crystal bowl of Goldfish crackers, thinking about the book I’ve been reading.

Consequences, it’s called, and it’s by Penelope Lively, an author whose restrained yet very perceptive writing has come to be one of my favorites.  The novel starts out with a young couple who meet by chance in a park outside of London, circa 1935.  They fall deeply in love, and despite their very different backgrounds (she’s society, he isn’t) marry and begin a life together. 

It’s that life, and all its consequences, which make up the  narrative of the book.  The story speeds along, through the War years, into the fifties and sixties, and barrels right on into the eighties.  It seems to pick up speed as it goes, much as life does when you’re living it, so that what started out as a rather elongated and elegiac tale of Lorna and Matt in their primitive cottage, races through their daughter Molly’s adulthood, and blasts into the modern world with their granddaughter Ruth and her family.

As you’ve probably guessed, I’m quite in love with this book.  It’s about the very subject that fascinates me most – legacy – the connection between generations.  It’s a subject I’ve been preoccupied with so much these past few months, coming to grips with the loss of two important members of my family and reflecting on their legacy.  How do we get from one generation to the next?  What propels us through time, which actions and consequences become part of the maze of life that leads from one generation to another?

Years after, she would think that you do not so much make decisions, as stumble in a certain direction because something tells you that that is the way you must go.  You are impelled, bu some confusion of instinct, will, and blind faith.  Reason does not much come into it.  If reason ruled, you would not try, for fear of failure; you would not love, in case it hurt.

Years later, that time has lost all chronology; it is a handful of scenes that replay from time to time.

You might think a novel of this depth and scope would be a huge tome – but it’s a mark of Lively’s skill that she tells this tale in less than 300 pages.   She is a masterful writer, with economy of word and phrase, yet still terribly evocative of emotion and place.

Lovely book, for a lovely, long day.

Now tell me, if you had an “extra” hour today, how did you spend it?

So often in my reading I come upon passages which speak to my heart.  Even in books where you least expect it (like a cozy mystery, for instance) a line or paragraph jumps out, prompting a giant “aha!” or “oh,yes!”  So in a slight twist to the Teaser Tuesday meme, where readers are invited to pick up their current read, turn to a certain page, and share a random paragraph, I would like to take a moment on Tuesdays and share a meaningful passage from the book that’s currently propped open on my bedside table.

Here we go~

She went to her room.  Luisa’s door was closed. No one stopped her.  She sat at her desk but did not reach for her books.  She felt suddenly happy.  A strange, unfamiliar feeling.

Wonderful.

~~~~~~~

Wonderful, and not to be defined.

What is happy?

-I am moderately content, Camilla thought, – but I’m no longer sure what being happy means.  Did I really know, all those decades ago when I first met Mac? Is happiness only for the very young? Maybe being content is enough.

from A Live Coal in the Sea, by Madeleine L’Engle

The two passages are separated by years in the narrator’s life – the first when she is a college student, the second, when she is nearing 60.   She strikes at the heart of this thing we call mid-life, I think, the feeling of lost happiness, the poignancy of recalled youth, the dulling of the senses that turns buoyant delight into dullish contentment.

So, tell me…what stage are you in?  Are you “happy?” or “merely content”?  And is being content enough?

I had such good intentions about writing a Sunday Salon post today.   I took the morning off from church (I confess, I’ve been taking most Sundays off from church lately), got up early, did my 30 minutes of aerobics (have I told you how addicted I’ve become to my morning workouts? surprising, really…), then ate a healthy breakfast and took the dogs for their walk.   It was a glorious fall morning here, and it actually stayed sunny and bright all day long, in contrast to most of the days we’ve had this month where the sun makes a brief appearance first thing in the morning and then disappears for the rest of the day.

But then, things started going awry.  As soon as we returned from our walk, Molly decided to perfume herself in something quite nasty.  If you have a dog, you’ll know what I mean.  If not, then I’d best not go into detail, or you’ll never get a dog, and I really think everyone should have a dog, no matter that they do occasionally do rather disgusting animal-like things.

At any rate, her little adventure meant she had to be bathed, which is quite an ordeal when you have a dog with long, silky hair.  I was rather worn out at the end of it, not to mention I had to hold my breath for the entire first half of the bath so as not to be stunned into olfactory distress.

Then it was lunchtime, and Jim needed to eat ASAP as he was rushing home from church and then dressing in his tuxedo for a concert this afternoon.   I had promised him lunch on the run, and the emergency dog bath had rather interrupted my plans in that direction.

At last  he was fed, handsomely attired, and on his way.  Molly was huddled on the bed, shivering, because she’s afraid of the hair dryer.  I collapsed into my favorite chair and munched on a sandwich.  Somehow, I no longer felt like writing.

And anyway, what does all this have to do with books?

Only that my morning reminded me somewhat of the book I’m reading right now. 

It’s The Longest Trip Home, by John Grogan (who wrote Marley and Me, a rather popular tale about another dog who likes to get into mischief).  This book is a memoir about Grogan himself, who, incidentally, grew up not far from me here in southeastern Michigan.  As a matter of fact, he and I were born in the same year, and so many of the experiences he recounts in the book seem very familiar.

Grogan’s book (which came to me by way of TLC Book Tours , and will be properly reviewed here on November 3, 2009), is a delightful look at the life of a normal midwestern boy, growing up in a middle class Catholic family.  It’s full of the stuff of ordinary life, written in Grogan’s trademark colloquial and humorous way. 

In the wake of some rather traumatic happenings in my life this summer, it’s comforting to read a book like The Longest Trip Home.  And it was actually comforting to have just a normal Sunday morning around here, with a dirty dog being the biggest disaster.

I hope your Sunday was equally satisfying.

Whenever it comes time to review a book I love as much as I loved Admission, I find myself terribly anxious.  On the one hand, I want to tell the world how wonderful this book was, how much I wanted to crawl inside and follow Portia Nathan around Princeton, peer over her shoulder at the hundreds of college applicant admission forms she perused in her role as an Admissions Officer, sit at a battered table in Small World and sip a latte while we commiserated over the horrible way her lover of 16 years had deceived her, walk beside her through the leaf-strewn avenues as she talks, perhaps finally sharing the painful secret which she has admitted to no one else.

On the other hand, I’m afraid I can’t possibly do the book justice.

Jean Hanff Korelitz has written a spectacular novel in my estimation, and it’s one that will likely fly under the radar, but one that deserves to be read and savored by everyone who craves strong characters confronting complex and interesting situations.   Of course, I’m a sucker for stories about college life, and this is one of those.  I’m also a sucker for tales of brilliant teenagers who find themselves floundering in the “normal” high school experience, and it’s also one of those.   But most of all, I’m compelled by tales of strong, intelligent women working their way through devastating dilemma’s and emerging stronger, wiser, and on the course to a promising new future.  Admission is most definitely one of those.

Portia Nathan, 38 years old, has immersed herself in the rigorous life of an Admissions Officer for an Ivy league school for the past 16 years.  The admission process is fascinating in itself, and Korelitz knows whereof she writes, having recently spent two years as a part time reader for Princeton admissions.  Portia’s fervor for the applicants is surprising and fierce, and she treats each of the hundreds of supplicants who come before her on paper (and some few in person) with dedication and honor. 

Very quickly, however, the reader senses the unease in Portia, in the way she holds herself back from life outside the confines of her office and even from the home she shares with Mark, a Princeton English professor.   There is something eating away at her, some secret pain that has affected her life in ways she’s not admitted to anyone, not even herself. 

So yes, the book is all about the Admission Process…and much as the students come before her, putting their best face on the world, so does Portia go through life putting on a good front.  Until one day, at a small, experimental school in upstate New Hampshire, Portia comes face to face with the aftermath of a life-altering decision she made years ago, and she must admit the ways it has shaped her life so far, and how it will force her to re-invent herself in the future.

She was suffused with shame, drenched with it, riddled with it like something metastasized.  Her bones kept it erect and her muscles made it move and her skin contained it, and everything she had ever felt or thought or done since that morning seventeen years before…had been felt in shame, thought in shame, done in shame.

Now it felt as if the shame were leaking from every pore of her, leaking and leaking as the first day passed, and then the next, and then the next.  The bed was soaked with it, and the blankets and duvets made a damp tent to huddle beneath.  Her body claimed not to understand the logic of this.  There was, it seemed to her, no end to the backlog of weeping.

And though it might be a bit of a spoiler, the book is also about another subject near and dear to my heart – motherhood – and the ways it can become perverted but never lost completely.  Portia’s rather distant relationship with her own mother – a radical feminist from who conceived Portia with a stranger on a train, and spent her life fighting social causes -is also at the core of the story, and the way Portia has handled many of the circumstances in her own life.

 Admission  is one of those rare novels that engages the reader on multiple levels, and, even at 447 pages, left me wishing for more.  

Read it.

You’ll be very glad you did.

When’s the last time you weeded out your library? Do you regularly keep it pared down to your reading essentials? Or does it blossom into something out of control the minute you turn your back, like a garden after a Spring rain?  Or do you simply not get rid of books? At all? (This would have described me for most of my life, by the way.)

And–when you DO weed out books from your collection (assuming that you do) …what do you do with them? Throw them away (gasp)? Donate them to a charity or used bookstore?  SELL them to a used bookstore? Trade them on Paperback Book Swap or some other exchange program?

I’m one of those rare gardeners who enjoy weeding.  I love grabbing those nasty, spiky clumps and jerking them out by the roots.  Soothes my inner beast, I suppose. 

Weeding one’s library is not nearly so satisfying.  Alas, it must be done on occasion, if only to make room for more books to blossom on the shelves.  It’s always difficult to part with books, so I’m only willing to do it if I know they’re going to a good home.  

Most of the books I pull from the shelves go to our library book sale. ..and often end up on the library shelves to be borrowed by others…

Occasionally I donate books to the small lending library within our gated community in Florida…

Some books I loan to friends, with permission to pass them along to whoever they feel might enjoy them…

Some go on offer to Book-moochers…

Some get traded at Books Connection, our local independent used book store…

Weeding is a necessary evil, in the garden and in the library.

The matriarchs grow old, my models, women who were women when I was a child.  Who will be left to call me “Faygele” when they are no longer there?  With no one but me to recall my childhood, who will validate the memories?  They will carry pieces of me when they go.  How much of their strength will they bequeath to me?  The years pass, and the distance between us collapses in fan folds; one day I will be standing where they are now…”   A Leak in the Heart, by Faye Moskowitz

Little did I know when I was reading this passage just a few weeks ago that one of my own “matriarchs” was so near being lost to me.  My great-aunt, whose husband died just three months ago, became ill suddenly on September 16, 2009, and passed away last Saturday, just nine days later.

The day I first read the essay which begins with the passage quoted above, I spent the afternoon with my aunt.  She and my uncle were childless, and many of the tasks normally undertaken by daughters and sons have fallen to me.  It’s right, really.  I lived just across the street from them for my entire childhood, and was in and out of their house as if it were an extension of my own.  They became an extra set of parents to me, another pair of grandparents to my son.   All summer, I’ve been helping her sort through the business re-arrangements necessary upon the death of a spouse.  So we had made (another!) trip to the bank, and stopped off for lunch at her favorite neighborhood restaurant.  Her appetite had been very poor since my uncle’s death, and I was pleased to see her tuck into the mound of mashed potatoes on her plate. 

“I sure don’t know what I would have done without you to help me,” she said.  “I just could never have gotten through all this stuff by myself.”

“I bet you could have,” I answered, although I know it would have been difficult.  My aunt was the baby in her family of seven siblings, and as such, was spoiled by parents and older sisters alike.  My uncle picked up right where her family left off, and until he became ill with Alzheimer’s disease five years ago, she had never so much as written a check.   But she has managed their finances quite well during the last few years, and all bills have been paid on time, her check book was balanced, the car insurance and registration up to date.  

I think my aunt had a reservoir of strength she never really tapped into, for her life was relatively easy, with very little heartache or sorrow.  In just these last years, caring for my uncle as he descended ever deeper into dementia, she was forced to summon resources she’d never used before. 

I never thought much about birthdays, and my 30th and 40th passed by easily and with little compunction.  My 50th birthday, three years ago, brought a certain amount of angst with it, for I knew in my heart that the decade between 50 and 60 would be marked by many deaths.  It’s inevitable, really…all my “matriarchs” – my aunts, my mother, even a couple of my closest friends - are  in their 70’s and 80’s.  In the past 12 months alone, I’ve lost three of them – two aunts, and an uncle.  And yes, they’ve “carried pieces of my childhood” with them. 

But in their lives, and in their deaths, they teach me.  Grief etches lines and wrinkles on my face, but it also builds steel in my spine, making me breathe a little deeper, and stand a bit taller in my own life.   A few years ago, I might have considered myself as living a rather charmed life – my worries were few and minor, my blessings many.   After this year I have to think differently, for the world weighs heavily on my shoulders these days, and I would give much to turn back the clock a decade or two.

The days whirl by in a rhythm of their own, free-wheeling, out of my control.  I grab at the nights with my fingertips and cannot hold on.  Be productive, I tell myself, not certain any longer just what my quota is.  I write, I teach, I mother and wife, I eat and drink and read.  But my shadow shortens and threatens to catch up with me.  I look to the matriarchs for their secrets and see they are falling.  They speak to me with words that echo Eliot’s Wasteland.  HURRY UP, they say.  HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.

A Leak in the Heart, Tales From a Woman’s Life

by Faye Moskowitz

Published 1985

by David R. Godine, Publisher

This Thursday BTT asks: What’s the most enjoyable, most fun, most just-darn-entertaining book you’ve read recently?

I was suprised by Cathy Alter’s Up for Renewal, and found myself laughing out loud more than I thought possible, considering the current state of affairs in my life.  Alter’s life is in a state of upheaval as well, when, at age 37, she finds herself divorced, working in a dead end job, and engaging in one hopeless relationship after another.

So, she does what any intelligent, creative young writer would do…she creates her own Self Renewal program, using magazines as her textbooks.  With a year’s subscription to all her favorite glossies, she sets out to learn everything from how to get rid of upper arm jiggles and neck wattles, reduce her credit card debt, redecorate her apartment, and – of course – land the perfect man.

Alter is a freelance writer, and has written for many of the magazines she chooses as her guide for the ultimate makeover.  She’s witty, funny, and self-deprecating in a completely lovable way.  Her memoir-ish style book was great fun to read, and definitely renewed my interest in reading magazines.