Month: August 2024

A Thousand Ships–a view of post-Trojan Wars

A Thousand Ships

By Natalie Haynes

Published 2019

Read April 2022; May 2024

Natalie Haynes has been a stand-up comic, a print, radio, and TV journalist, and has published several non-fiction and fiction books.  She studied The Classics at Cambridge and has spent much of her career enabling the public to engage with and enjoy the classics. 

In this book she tells tales about the Trojan Wars—through the perspectives of the women involved.  This reader was quite enchanted by this book.  When unfamiliar with a particular god, goddess, or story, this reader consulted Wikipedia to get a little background which enabled great appreciation for Haynes’ witty and often cutting take on the story. 

Thank you, Natalie Haynes, for breathing life into these stories and inducing me to learn more about them.

Tom Lake—another Patchett great

Tom Lake

By Ann Patchett

Published 2023

Read July 2024

This reader has read many, but not all, of Ann Patchett’s books including her essay collection, These Precious Days. Once again, this reader is impressed with Patchett’s ability to weave a story unlike any of her previous stories.

This story is set in the spring of 2020 during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic when avoiding others was the primary source of prevention.  Lara’s three daughters in their twenties are back on the family fruit farm near Traverse City Michigan as a result of this state of the world:  Emily, the oldest and who lives on the property, works with her father, and fully intends to continue the family farm for another generation; Maisie, a vet student who is helping neighbors with their animal problems in a social distancing way; Nell, a theater student who desperately wants to be an actress and fears this pandemic is taking away precious years from her career.   The usual crews who helped the Nelsons pick their sweet cherries are mostly not working this year because of the pandemic so it’s up to Lara and the three daughters to pick the sweet cherries which require hand picking. While they pick, they pry from their mother her story of a summer at Tom Lake, a nearby summer stock theater, where she played Emily in Our Town and had a steamy summer romance with Peter Duke who is now a famous TV and movie actor.

Patchett moves between Lara’s narration of her story and the present day to day goings on at the farm.  Patchett opens the book when Lara (then Laura) was in high school and was roped by her grandmother into registering people for auditions for her New Hampshire town’s production of Our Town.  Lara decides to audition and wins the part of Emily.  She’s uncertain about what to do with her life so attends a state university and ends up getting the part of Emily again for her college’s production of the play.  She acknowledges she has a very lucky break when the uncle of another cast member attends a performance and decides she’s perfect for a part in a movie he’s producing in Hollywood. After the movie is completed and she’s done a few commercials, it’s suggested she takes advantage of another lucky break—the actress playing Emily in a summer stock theater (Tom Lake) has abruptly left and a replacement is desperately needed. 

The structure of the book is pleasant.  The reader gets some feel for the large amount of human labor involved in raising cherries near the Lake Michigan shoreline of Michigan, gets a look at Lara’s family, and gets a glimpse of summer stock life and Lara’s steamy romance.   Some critics have complained there isn’t much that happens in this book.  Well, this book is about life and most lives don’t have lots of extraordinary events in them, but most lives do require decisions to be made now and then that influence the course of that usually ordinary life.  That’s mostly what we get in this book although Lara acknowledges the lucky breaks she had and one unlucky break she had that helped her decide a course that she clearly doesn’t regret. 

Lots of themes in this book despite the lack of any major calamity:  family, friendship, love, loyalty, honor, ambition, regret, personal bravery, loneliness/connectedness.  We see a couple of actors/actresses trying to make it in their dreadfully challenging career path and we wonder if Nell will be able to make it. The COVID pandemic provided a device for the structure of the book and fortunately doesn’t otherwise get in the way.  It’s possible its use will “date” this book more than others she’s written.  But it’s really the multiple interesting characters we get to know in depth or at least a bit that make this book the joy that it is to read.  As usual this reader looks forward to more from Ann Patchett. 

These Precious Days

These Precious Days

By Ann Patchett

Published 2021

Read Jan 2023

This is the first non-fiction book of Anne Patchett’s read by this reader.  It’s a series of essays about people she knows/knew, most of whom she loves/loved.  The author is honest about her age-57 at the time of writing- about her decision to not have children, and her lack of flinching when another writer told her a writer can’t be good unless they’ve had children.  After helping a friend clear out her father’s home of many decades, Patchett decides to start clearing out her own—she’s reached the age of disposition after having passed the phase of acquisition.  She poses the project to her husband as “pretend we’re moving” when she’s really approaching this as she prepares to die—not now hopefully but inevitably.  Interestingly she reveals she always worries she’ll die before finishing whichever book she’s in the process of writing.  Mortality is definitely something that’s often on her mind.  Maybe that’s why she’s so good at writing about people and having them feel very real. 

A good part of the book is about writing and publishing books—what to ask for from your publisher etc.  That part was somewhat interesting to this reader.  A large section is devoted to her relationship with Tom Hank’s assistant whom Patchett invited to stay with her during her chemotherapy during the Covid pandemic shutdown.  Although this essay apparently went viral when it was published in Harper’s, this reader didn’t find it among the most engaging but it certainly told much about Patchett’s willingness to meet new people and invite them to stay in her home, even if she wasn’t going to be there.  A sort of amiable way of interacting with multiple stories not her own.

A very important aspect of this book was that it left this reader with the desire to write down some of her own stories, whether anyone else would read them or not.  Writing is what makes the content real and subject to review by the author—is this the intended message or not.

This reader will likely read more of Patchett’s essays as her writing can be so engaging and often witty regardless of the topic. 

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Caste

By Isabella Wilkerson

Published 2020

Read Jan 2023

This reader devoured Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns” before this website was started.  Wilkerson was a journalist working for the New York Times when she wrote it and her use of stories of three real people who participated in the Great Migration of blacks from the south to the rest of the county was remarkable and effective.

This reader began reading Caste shortly after it was published.  The first section of the book was somewhat confusing to this reader and led her to put the book down for awhile.  When the book was selected for this reader’s book group, this reader restarted the book and was once again awed by Wilkerson’s ability to teach with stories, many of which told of her own experiences.  Wilkerson proposes that a caste system was developed in this country, starting with the earliest settlers who used white and black indentured people to serve their masters and enable their wealth.  Elites, poor whites, then blacks making up the coarsest caste levels which still exist more that we’d like to believe despite the changes in laws that make all citizens with, supposedly, voting rights.

Wilkinson compares and contrasts the various caste systems—India, Nazi Germany, the US.  It was difficult for this reader to learn that Nazi Germany looked to the US for guidance for their own caste system and thought that the US’s version was more draconian than they were comfortable invoking. While there have been a variety of reactions to this book—her “solution” too utopian; her analysis right on or not deep enough, ect—it is a book well worth reading.  It will invoke new ways of thinking about the societal problem that still exists and is likely growing as new “non-white” immigrants continue to flock to the US and its stated ideals.