I Guess I Need a Book Club

If I am ever going to have any hope of reading another book again, I must write about this one.  The characters have moved into my head.  Brought their knapsacks and their dishes.  Heck, brought their own futons and set up house in that crowded, cobwebed maze that calls itself my brain.  They throw house parties.  Invite their friends, strangers, other characters.  I won’t be surprised to find Lizzie Bennet throwing a glassful of water in Furo Wariboko’s face.  They have infested my being and will not let me be.  So I must write about this book.

Blackass---I can hear my mother’s “ahem,” with its pushed-out air emphasizing the m.  It’s the opposite of what I imagine that African term “sucked his teeth” to be.  I could try to call it Blackvampire, but that hardly works.  It is in fact Furo Wariboko’s bum that is black.  His other ass-ness however, the part that could be described as vapmire-ness, is all white.  Oyibo white.

Furo Wariboko is the main character in this Kafka allusion.  I guess it’s not really an allusion as the author, A. Ignoni Barrett, acknowledges Gregor before we meet Furo, acknowledges his tribute to Metamorphosis.

Like many American high school students, I endured Metamorphosis.  Endured is the right word.  I did not endure Blackass; I devoured it.  And then it devoured me.

Furo Wariboko awakes to find himself transformed---expressed far more eloquently than that---into a white man.  An oyibo man in Lagos, Nigeria, in not-so-well-off, Nigerian’s Lagos, Nigeria.  And his adventures begin.

In an inverting of my Americanah experience, I struggled to picture Furo as a white man.  His physical appearance was described frequently as he discovered and rediscovered and was reminded of himself.  Yet I kept picturing a Nigerian man.  Until Furo’s insides began to match his outside.  As Furo accepted his whiteness, as he adapted to, embraced and abused the privileges suddenly in his possession, the Furo Wariboko in my head more and more matched the description in the book.  As Furo’s soul became oybio, so did the vision of him.

One of the reviews on the back of the book says “it will scorch your fingers and singe your eyelashes.”  The reviewer is not lying.  There is so much more I want to say about this book, but I cannot without leaving hoards of spoilers armed with pitchforks.  I need more people to read this book so I can talk about it!  Be one of those people? Pretty please, with sugar on top, and a black ass?

 

P.S. The use of Twitter in this book is amazingly delightful.  I tried to follow one of the character’s handles from my phone and was surprised to receive their last tweet, a tweet saying goodbye to the author.

Born on a Tuesday; Read on a Wednesday, and a Thursday, and a Friday…

After months of waiting for it to be available in the U.S., I have finally gotten my hands on Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday, and I do not want to let go.  I like the way it feels, the texture of the cover.  Often, I sit and rub my hand along it, over the smooth almost flesh-like page. Gripping the back and front together around the spine, feeling all the sides at once. 

Sometimes, I need to close the book and grasp the supple tome just to remind myself that I am real and I am here, in a chair in my apartment, at an airport, on a plane, in a hotel, wherever I might be reading.  That I am here, and me, and born on a Sunday, not on a Tuesday.

It is not glossy.  It is not like the dust jacket on a hardcover or the plastic-y coating on a mass-market paperback.  It is soft, though firm.  It is as though the paper was coated like the wax print wrappers Nigerian women wear.  Like even in its international printing and distribution Nigeria seeps through, out of the book, and into you.

I like the way Elnathan John does like Adichie and puts phrases in English right after they appear in another language.  I like even more that he only does it sometimes, leaving us to get the meaning from the context and emotion of the situation instead of doing it in definitions of words we know carrying their own heavy connotations and histories in our lives.

There is much in the book that is difficult, but anything that makes us face our own empty humanness is difficult.  So are things that tie tongues in knots.  There’s a lot of Hausa and Arabic, and I cannot tell one from the other, written out in Latin script.  There are phrases I recognize from working with colleagues on the Arabic Creative Commons licenses---insha Allah---and phrases I know from Ziriums’s songs and Malcom X’s biography---salamu alaiku; alaiku wasalam.  But there are many others unfamiliar that I cannot even stutter out in my head.  How does one pronounce a g, h & f all together in a row?  It’s like playing scrabble with Cat.  No wonder Dantala thinks English sounds “soft and easy like one does not need to open one’s mouth a lot or use a lot of air or energy.”  Imagine if he ever heard Italian!

The reviews on the back of the book compare Elnathan to Achebe.  But Born on a Tuesday feels far more accessible to an outsider than Achebe.  Perhaps I just know Nigeria better than I did.  I hope, though, that it is more accessible, that it is read widely, and that those of us whose story this is not see how easily it could become a story that is ours.  And that they---we---make it so that it never is.  Insha Allah.

“I am not sure if it is the hope of money that lures them or the fact that the [ ] movement is something new.  Everyone likes something new.  Eventually people get tired and some other new things takes over.  It isn’t grounded.  Something that has no roots and springs up with leaves and branches everything is bound to crash from the weight.  They can’t see this now.”

– Born on a Tuesday, pg. 89

Born on a Tuesday, Elnathan John; Black Cat 2015

Revisiting the tear-stained sun

“Her books are very emotionally difficult to read.”  It’s a phrase I say nearly every time I’m recommending one of Chimamanda Adichie’s books, most often for Half of a Yellow Sun or Americannah.  I know it to be true.  I spend a great deal of the time with my head buried in her books also with tears streaming down my face, an angry growl churning in my stomach, my face glowing beet red.  I always assumed it was the subject matter.  Her works contain a lot of violence, sexual abuse, domestic abuse; I mean, it’s war, and difficult relationships, and oppression and such.  It’s not supposed to be easy.  But that’s not the reason.

The subject matter isn’t what makes Adichie emotionally difficult to read.  What makes Adichie emotionally difficult to read is her writing.  She cruelly uses our humanity against us, her readers, plays with and preys upon our propensity to hope.  She presents something to us, makes it familiar, comfortable, happy even-- A calabash providing solid comfort to a terror-stricken young woman on a dilapidated train overcrowded with fleeing refugees; a bouncy baby girl that arrives into our view only a few pages after the characters who have become endeared to us decide together that they want to have a child; the expectant young relative whose joy and excitement is brought to us through seemingly excessive side-jaunts to her far-off village.  But the calabash holds a young girl’s head; the baby is only one of theirs; and the pregnant women are raped and sliced open before they are killed.

Adichie uses our innate hope for the good and beautiful, presenting a world to us that we do not even know is veiled, until we love what we think is there; and she pulls off the veil, daring us simultaneously to love the hideous reality and to hate the beauty we’ve already internalized.

And I simultaneously hate and love, her.  As I turn another page with tears streaming down my face, wishing the book were over, wishing it would never end.

Reflections upon finishing Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga

Sometimes I just hold the pen above the page and wish that it were possible for raw emotion to spill onto it without the need for words or letters or sounds or coherent thoughts.  I suppose artists can do that.  I am not an artist.  I am only human.  An empathetic human fighting to save her soul from the destruction of the masses.  Fighting to find truth despite “the way it is.”

Tears ring my eyes.  The soft patches underneath, beginning to droop with the signs of ma age and lessons of life, are hard with dried salt from tears that escaped some time ago.  Humanity—is anything but.  Cruelty.  Justification  Righteousness for us.  Condemnation for them.

If you want to kill someone, the first thing you do is make them “something.”  Savage.  Negro.  Jew.  Terrorist.  Enemy.  Fetus.  Animal.  Anything but “human.”  Anything but us.  And it is so easy to do.  So easy to draw a line.  So easy to say “me” “not me.”  “Me.”  “It.”  “Me.”  “Those things.”  And once it is done, once the line is drawn, once the leap is made, there is no barrier to the fierceness, the destruction, the uncaring, the harming, the ability to bring pain.

*     *     *

Pain.  Pain.  Pain.

It hurts.

It hurts to receive pain.  It hurts to recognize the immense depths of giving pain of which you are capable.

It hurts to look evil in the face and recognize yourself.  As much as it hurts to look at the broken lying in a heap and see your pain.

I am the broken and the breaker.

I am the shame and the shamer.

I am the victim and the victimizer.

We are.

We all are.

And we call this “humanity.”

And we justify the doing, even as we lick our own wounds.

And there is no end.  Only a new sense of us and them.  Only a new line drawn, even as we express horror at the old one’s place.

Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga purports to be an account of a young man exhibited in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in the early 1900s, but it is so much more than that.  It is an unabashed look at global race relations, America’s role in the rise of eugenics and the influence of her preeminent scholars on Adolf Hitler, a gasping account of King Leopold’s horrors in the Congo, and a brave attempt to make an “other” one of “us.”

Life After Life in my life

So I finished the book.  The book I didn’t like.  I can’t say I liked it by the end.  I also can’t say I hated it as much by the end as I did in the middle.  And somewhat begrudgingly, I have to admit it is sticking with me in a thought-provoking life-contemplating sort of way that isn’t wholly disagreeable.

I’ve sometimes wondered how my life would be if I’d done x instead of y.  Most often, if I’d kept the extension I received in the Peace Corps and moved to Livingstone instead of Nashville.  But I’m far more of a fate-ist than Ursula or Kate Atkinson. I  believe things happen for a reason, even if I don’t understand the reason at the time.  And, I believe the big things will work themselves out the way they’re intended to be despite my smaller (or even bigger) choices.

God has a path for me.  Sometimes I see it clearly.  Sometimes I don’t.  Sometimes I’m not even sure where the next step goes and I stumble around for awhile.  But in the rearview mirror, when I look down that path, even the stumbling makes sense.  Sometimes I need to be further down the path than other times.

So Ursula’s many lives in some ways have me thinking again of what ifs.  But rather than having regrets or dwelling on the past with anything less than appreciation, Ursula’s effect is to make me feel calmer about the future.  As I tell people who ask I’m not scared about doing this thing or that or some circumstance they think is crazy, “God’s got me.”

When eh’s turn to grrrrr’s

***Spoiler alert*** I’m going to winge on about the plot. If you have any interest in reading the book, don’t read this post.

So I’m still reading Life After Life.  Surprisingly pretty far into it; it is a fast read.  I’m still not feeling it.  In fact, this week, the book went from tiresome to loathsome.

Ursula is finally the main character, but her character is constantly something different.  I suppose this could be part of the point of the book – different choices lead to different character development – but it comes off more as different character leads to different choices.  Sometimes the difference isn’t even her choice; it’s some other character’s.  That all leaves a very eh feeling in my throat.

The downgrade of my opinion of the book happened rather quickly.  I was sitting on the cramped bus as we slowly and not-at-all smoothly jutted and lurched down the road to the Metro station.  Ursula was going up the back stairs of her house for a handkerchief when her brother’s friend comes down the stairs, pins her to the wall and rapes her.  Excuse me?  Besides the logistics of this – in 1920’s clothes, standing, on the stairs – what the?!?  You don’t just plop that down on someone in the middle of their morning.  It took me a couple hours, a few walks around the hallway, Twitter friends, and a concerted effort to throw myself into my work to function.  Bedtime, hours – and now years in the novel – removed from the event, brought nightmares.

The plot line gets more ridiculous from there.  Rather than allowing Ursula to find strength in this experience or recover, or anything, anything at all encouraging, she winds up being beaten to death by an abusive husband.  One can never triumph over their ills, huh? 
It only gets more infuriating.

The whole “thing” about this book is that Ursula dies and comes back and makes a different decision that allows her life to go better.  So, after her husband kills her, she comes back and starts again.  I’m hoping the author gives her a shot to overcome this ordeal – come on author, you can do it.  But no, in order to not wind up murdered by her husband, she has to not be raped.  To achieve this, she punches her brother’s friend in the face when he tries to kiss her, months before the encounter on the stairs.  Last time, she didn’t stop him from kissing her.  This made me even angrier than the surprise logistically implausible stair scene.  It makes what happens on the stairs her fault.

She’s died again since then.  Several times.  There have been some other versions of the story, but in none of them – so far – does the stair scene happen again; she always fends him off at the kissing scene.  Now, she’s hanging out in Bavaria with Eva and Adolf in the 1930s.  Um…. ok….
Yet, still reading.  (But seriously eyeing up that new copy of International Intellectual Property on my shelf.)

A Lunchtime Visit to Kenya

I didn’t particularly like her story, the one that won the Caine Prize.  I guess it’s good I’m not the judge.  It’s not that I didn’t like her writing – I was rather ambivalent, in the American sense of the word, about it.  But, I didn’t care for the topic.  It was depressing, gruesome, death-filled in its ghost and background characters that were nearly ghosts.  She was going to be reading from that story, and I knew that, but I went anyway.

Some small part of me hoped that hearing the story in the author’s voice would make me like the story more.  The rest of me, well the rest of the part that had caused me to get up from my desk and clip through the dangerously smooth tunnels under the old buildings, justified it as “how could I not go?”  What an opportunity, to take a lunch hour, a common daily happenstance that nearly everyone has, to listen to authors, scholars, intriguing people from all corners of the globe, talk about their passions.

So here I sat, in the Africa and Middle East Reading Room of the Library of Congress, listening to the 2014 Caine Prize winner, Okwiri Oduor from Kenya reading a story I didn’t care for in a dull unpoetic voice.  She would say later in the interview portion, “I used to fancy myself a poet, but now I know better.”  I agreed, and simultaneously felt connected to this young – younger than Munchkinhead – African woman with a style simultaneously flamboyant and subdued echoing of Whoopi Goldberg, thick twists and nose ring with Keds and dreary faded navy capris.
The interviewer started with “When did you start writing?”  Why do they ask this question.  Is there anyone who does not write as a child, anyone who has access to paper and does not take to it with a writing implement?  Of course, Okwiri gave the expected “as a child” answer and then continued.  She spoke of her muses, her influences, her hopes, her reality:  Africa is bustling with young writers and burgeoning support systems, reading groups, writing groups, publishers, etc.  She spoke of rediscovering Swahili literature.  She spoke of the continent, not of Kenya, finally effusing emotion as she expressed her desires for unfettered visa-free travel and the equivalent of “in-state tuition” for all Africans at any country's universities.  A true pan-African.  I shall check back in a decade.  I’ve known many Pan-Africans in their 20s.  By their 30s, they view this idyllic panacea of Pan-ism as foolish.

By the end, I still had no love for “My Father’s Head.”  However, I had found an interest in Okweri as an author and imagine I will seek out her future work, particularly if she returns kuandika kiSwahili as she did years ago.  And I’ll look for her kiSwahili translation of “The Last Wave.”


She’s about to start a writing program at the University of Iowa.  I really wonder how this shy, Afri-centric, bold woman is going to survive in Iowa City.  I expect she’ll find herself rather bored and lonely with few familiarities.  I wanted to hug her and tell her she’s brave for going.

Page After Page, eh.

I’m reading this book called Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.  The front of the book is six pages of glowing reviews.  It’s a National Bestseller, etc. etc.  I’m not feeling it.  By page 164, the best way to describe the book is “tiresome.”

It’s like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure, except when you do something stupid and die – like standing under a tree in a thunderstorm – you don’t have to back up and choose a different option because the author does it for you in the next chapter.

Supposedly, the main character is Ursula, though for the first third of the book she does little more than keep dying.  Her mother, Sylvie, seems far more the main character.  Now that Ursula’s living a little longer each time, there’s at least something happening.   I keep reading because I don’t like leaving books unfinished.  But so far, definitely not impressed.

The skinny white fat Nigerian in my head

Note: I usually do a book review post when I finish a book.  But I decided to do something different with Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah and instead share thoughts and comments in a pseudo-real time.

The protagonist is a fat Nigerian.  We know this within the first page or two of the novel.  But the image in my head is a faceless slender white woman.  The same image I’d have for Elizabeth Bennet.  I realize this.  I try to change it.  I try to think of one of my larger Nigerian friends, a well-off woman who I can’t call fat because she’s lived abroad enough to consider it an insult coming from an American.  It doesn’t work.

I keep reading; the image changes.  As Ifemelu grows, the image in my head flushes itself out.  It begins with Ifemelu’s flashback to her school days in Lagos.  The image begins to take the form of a slender African teenager, drawing on any number of the girls in my Zam-fam, my village, or around the neighborhood in Abuja.

When Ifemelu immigrates to America, when she’s new and lost and navigating the strange straddling world of her aunt who has already been in America for some time, the image grows.  It becomes easy to fit each new bit of her into the image in my head.  Her clothes change.  Her attitude changes.  Her hair changes.  She relaxes her hair; she practically shaves her head; she grows and afro.  These changes manage to stick -  although for some reason she has a blonde afro – not white girl blonde, dyed honey blonde.  This protruding of my subconscious strikes me as odd again.

As the scenes pop back to the present, the Ifemelu in the hairdresser’s chair becomes a large, Nigerian woman with black hair being put into braids, puffs of unbraided hair sticking up in front.  An Americanized Nigerian woman who’s become bitter and condescending in ways that would probably surprise her young self (but fit perfectly into the developing image in my head). 

It takes at least half the book before this Ifemelu, the one described on page two, can finally take shape in my mind.

It bothers me a bit, that I cannot take a written description and make an image of it; that my defaults are so ingrained that it takes 200 pages, 200 pages of slow growth and character shaping, to get to something close to the written description.

 

… For some reason, I did not have the same trouble with the male lead character, Obinze.  Perhaps because my first introduction to him was as a school boy.  By the time he showed up as an adult, he’d morphed into a melding of Kevin Hart and Idris Elba.  I’m guessing the combo is because Obinze is described as not tall.

 

Apparently Lupita Nyong’o is going to play Ifemelu in the film.  I’m having a really hard time picturing that.  She’s so tiny and doesn’t look at all Nigerian.  At least the actor they have for Obinze, David Oyelowo,  is Nigerian, even if not Igbo like the characters.  Of course, they’re both such stellar actors, they’ll probably pull if off splendidly.

More Characters for Kaki: Book Review of Where the Horses Run

It was nice to read a Kaki Warner novel that didn’t have rape and murder in it. - I recently finished her latest, Where the Horses Run. - I guess it was because this one takes place in England rather than the wild American West. 

Where the Horses Run is part of the Heroes of Heartbreak Creek series.  The characters from Heartbreak Creek all make an appearance, even if only in the words of another character.   Ash and Maddie, the main characters from Colorado Dawn as the prime auxiliary characters in this book.  They travel to Scotland and England with Thomas Redstone, who has been an important character in all the Heartbreak Creek novels. 

Thomas is sort of Heartbreak Creek’s Mr. Spock.  never primary, always a large role and a clear outsider who’s half insider.  Thomas is a Cheyenne Indian whose grandfather was white and who sometimes serves as deputy sheriff, a very white role, but very much with his Cheyenne personality.

The Kirkwells – Ash and Maddie – also take with them a new character, Rayford Jessup, who is this book’s male love interest.  Along the way, he meets Josephine, the book’s female protagonist.  She loves horses; he’s a horse wrangler.  There you go.

Where the Horses Run is a much slower paced book than Warner’s others.  I, for one, appreciated that.  I could put it down and come ack later, but still found it enjoyable and a good read.  there were no horrible stomach knots this time and no tears. 

There also seem to be fewer lusty scenes, which is just fine by me.  Though I was disappointed by the ones that are here.  they felt like words instead of emotions.  Ruth Okediji’s descriptions of steps the World Intellectual Property Organization can take to reposition itself in Balancing Wealth and Health were more emotionally resonant than Kaki Warner’s intimate scenes in this book.  There must be other adjectives to describe nipples besides “puckered,” which isn’t a very pleasant sounding way for nipples to be – sounds course, hard and painful.  How about alert? dancing? robust? apprehensive? peaked?  I don’t know; I’m not a romance novelist.  But puckered made my nose squinch up in discomfort and distracted me from connecting with the words on the page.

Josie is a delightful character.  Strong yet feminine and although she’s got a history to make her interesting, she’s not broken and doesn’t need fixing.  Rafe is broken.  Rafe has an interesting history, too, but we never really get the whole picture.  Maybe that will come out in a future story.  Some great fan fiction could be written about his past.  There’s just enough bits and pieces given.

Thomas’s character is continuously flushed out throughout the Heartbreak Creek novels, and it works well.  Because of this, he has more depth than any other character and it’s about to pay off.  The next book will focus on him and Prudence Lincoln, the half sister of the first novel’s protagonist (Edwina Brodie in Heartbreak Creek).  I can’t wait!

 

Other Kaki Warner book posts:

1. Pieces of Sky
2. Open Country
3. Chasing the Sun
4. Heartbreak Creek
5. Colorado Dawn
6. Bride of the High Country

Book Review: A Layman Looks at the Lord’s Prayer

I got this book out of a pile.  When my church in Cali merged with the church whose building we were using, the new combined church leadership cleaned out the building.  There were stacks of books along the wall in the sanctuary; books for people to take.  This particular book looked intriguing.  I mean, come on, how can someone walk away from a cover so fabulously 70s?

A Layman Looks at the Lord’s Prayer was published in 1976.

I was also interested to see what the layman’s take on the Lord’s Prayer might be.  The book breaks the prayer down into 12 chapters.  Each chapter looks at one phrase of the Lord’s Prayer.  - Although the last chapter seems more of a mouthful than that, “For Thine Is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, for Ever. Amen.”  I sort of expected “Amen.”  to have its own chapter.

I was super excited to see that the book used the debts/debtors version of the prayer as that has always resonated more strongly with me.  I have lots of debts and fairly often have debtors.  I rarely have trespassers to worry about forgiving.

The structure of the book was pretty neat, and I imagine some of the content probably is, too.  I couldn’t really tell.  The text is so repetitive my mind kept wandering off and before I knew it I’d have read 3 pages without a full sentence registering in my head.  Then I’d scan the pages for about 5 seconds and get the gist.

I was paying enough attention to realize that some of the book was quite critical of “other” Christians.  I don’t really know who these others are, only that they misinterpret the Lord’s prayer and do their relationship with God wrong, according to the author. 

The author showed good knowledge of scripture and often worked hymns into the text, too.  That was neat, but not neat enough for me to sing this book’s praises.  I’ll reserve those for Our Father.  It seems there’s a series of A Layman Looks at books.  I don’t think I’ll be looking at any others.

Runaway Brides all Found

On Sunday, I started the last book in Kaki Warner’s Runaway Brides trilogy.  On Monday, I finished it.  The final book, Bride of the High Country, is a wonderful read, back in Mrs. Warner’s original style of Heartbreak Creek and Pieces of Sky.   As you can tell, I had a hard time putting it down.

Bride of the High Country does have its sex scenes, but they’re far more romantic and less raunchy than those in Colorado Dawn.  Bride of the High Country is first and foremost a love story, and then a romance novel.  It’s also the story of strength, softening and survival.

The final novel in the Runaway Brides trilogy tells the story of Lucinda Hathaway, the New York society woman first introduced in Heartbreak Creek as a fellow train-passenger headed West with Maddie, Edwina and Pru.  The first novel was Edwina’s story; the second, Maddie’s.  Now it’s Lucinda’s turn, and the story starts back several years with Lucinda as a 12 year-old orphan in New York’s Five Points area.

Much like Jessica in Pieces of Sky, Lucinda is running from painful memories in her past.  Running towards an unknown destination that takes her to America’s post-Civil War Wild West.  Of course, one can never out-run the past and Lucinda is forced to face hers.  The story is well-told and beautiful – though I do have some qualms with the author’s decision to have Lucinda reveal her painful past to her friends on her wedding night.  She could have waited a day!

As the novel progresses from the heartbreaking beginnings in Five Points to the beautiful ending in Heartbreak Creek, it crosses over events from the other novels.  These events are often summed up quickly.  What took pages of suspense and agony in the prior novels are covered by the new main character as if they were rather inconsequential.  Having read the other novels recently, I found myself skimming these passages, “yeah, yeah, I know what happens here, let’s get back to the new story.”  Yet I can see these portions being important for keeping the three novels together as one story. 

Because the trilogy novels overlap in time somewhat, it’d be really neat to read all three of them put together into one book with the perspectives switching around.  Perhaps a bit confusing, but still neat.

Of the three Heartbreak Creek novels, Bride of the High Country is the best-written and most engaging.  It keeps the love story high, the sex scenes tasteful and the death to a minimum.  I’m glad I didn’t let my disappoint with Colorado Dawn dissuade me from reading this book.   And even though this book contains some spoilers for the other novels, I’d actually recommend reading this one first.

Now, what Kaki Warner series to explore next…

When Powderpuffing was Good and we had Couches

This week, I finished a very delightful book, The Working Girl in a Man’s World: A Guide to Office Politics by Jan Manette.  Jan’s a pseudonym, which aside from being cute is relevant here because Jan’s my great-aunt.  That’s why I decided to read this book.

The Working Girl in a Man’s World may be nearly 50 years old – published in 1966 – but it is still very relevant.  And I’m guessing more useful than a lot of this woman-navigating-man’s-world stuff we get fed now.  The reason I say that is Working Girl focuses as much on good business practices as it does on anything gender specific.  It just places those business practices in a female context.

In fact, Working Girl’s age is actually a strong point for the book.  The author tackles a lot of issues that are no longer discussed, things that have been thrown out over time as either not allowed to be relevant or not allowed to be true, yet they are very true. 

For example, Working Girl discusses the affect a woman’s biological cycles can have on her day-to-day life, including her productivity, how she’s feeling, etc.  This has become a taboo field in workplace considerations even as women’s cycles have become more accepted general conversation.  A woman has to always be as a good as a man, so her monthly issues simply cannot be an issue.  Yet that’s not really true.  I like that Working Girl acknowledges the issue, presents it as accepted by both men and women and  discusses how to deal with it.  And by the way, I want couches in ladies rooms again!  How awesome.

Another topic that wouldn’t be accepted today but that is skillfully discussed in Working Girl is men’s need to feel important and needed.  The past fifty years have pretty much banned men from being allowed to feel this way, or at least acknowledging it, and personally, I think that’s the most damaging part of the women’s movement.  We all know you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and we all should know you get further building people up than putting them down.  Working Girl reminds readers to build up their coworkers and superiors (male and female) and offers some pointers on how to do it.

The chapter on sex in the workplace is fantastic.  “What can a married man get you?  He can get you (1) pregnant and (2) fired.  And then where’s your career?”  There’s also chapters on working through tough times at the office, what to do if you decide you don’t want to climb any higher, and helping those coming along below you.

Luckily, there’s still copies of Working Girl available.  If you know a working girl, pick one up for her.

The Second Runaway Brides Novel

It’s been awhile since I finished the second book in Kaki Warner’s Runaway Brides trilogy, Colorado Dawn.  I guess what really sums up my feelings about this book is that I didn’t order the final book in the trilogy until yesterday, months after I finished Colorado Dawn.

Colorado Dawn focuses on Maddie Wallace, one of the town-ladies met on in the first novel.  She had married a Scottish officer some years ago and, felling abandoned by him, had fled Scotland for the US with a new career as a professional photographer.  Now, her husband has finally tracked her down and come after her himself.  His perspective on who abandoned who is a little different.

I had been enjoying Kaki Warner’s books as fun historical fiction with a bit of romance and adventure.  Colorado Dawn seemed to hop the fence to full-blown romance novel.  That’s not really my thing.  I just found it incredibly hard to believe that in the late 1800s, a young lady sitting at a dinner table with all her friends would have her hand under the table playing with her husband’s junk.

So, yeah, the descriptions get a lot more vivid, which sort of takes away from the rest of the story.  But, it is still neat to follow the main characters from Heartbreak Creek, and there’s still a good story in the book.  The new lover introduced in this book is straight from Scotland so it’s fun to parse through his thick accent. 

The action isn’t nearly as nail-biting as any of the other Kaki Warner books I’ve read, but that’s ok by me.  It was in some ways a nice break to be able to put the book down and go to sleep when bed time came.   We’ll see if the third book is more along the lines of the Blood Rose Trilogy or this book.

Starting a New Kaki Warner Trilogy

Another Kaki Warner book devoured in about three days.  When I get my hands on these things, I just can’t put them down.  I may be addicted.

I recently finished Heartbreak Creek, the first in her Runaway Brides series.  The four main characters of the series are introduced in this book.  What’s interesting, is that the series has four main characters, but only three books.  In some ways, this book was about two of the ladies’ stories, but only one of the stories really had an ending.  I wonder if the other lady’s story will continue through the other books.

In Heartbreak Creek, we meet a young Southern belle, widowed by the Civil War and now family- and plantation-less who decides her only escape is a new husband.  So she becomes a mail order bride for a Colorado rancher looking for a sturdy farm woman to help him raise his four children.  This poor woman can’t even cook!  That provides plenty of amusement.  Lucky for everyone involved, her half-sister goes along for the ride and is an excellent cook and has many other useful skills she’s able to share.

It bothers me a bit that the character who doesn’t seem to have her own book is this half-sister, daughter of this book’s main character’s father and mammy.  She does play a very important role in this book for most of the story, but her own love life is left unresolved.  I’m hoping that’s not the case by the end of the series.

As usual, I found myself laughing frequently during the story, gripping pages tightly in nervous anticipation and fighting to put the book down at 3am when I really needed to go to sleep.  No tears this time, but that’s fine by me.

Having read all of Kaki Warner’s Blood Rose Trilogy novels, I was expecting the same sort of plot line here.  I was pleasantly surprised.  While the novel does have a big climatic life-or-death scene like her other works, it doesn’t feel as much the main focus as in her other books.  This book feels far more about the love story and the everyday hardships of throwing yourself into a completely new world.  And, the adventures aren’t just physical safety fights, especially when someone suddenly winds up with two wives!

I enjoyed this book more than the last two I’ve read – and I liked those well enough.  I don’t know that I’ll ever find any of her other works as intensely, emotionally infiltrating as Pieces of Sky, but I’ve already ordered the next in this series.

Last of the Three: Book Review of Chasing the Sun

I was finally able to read Kaki Warner’s third book in the Blood Rose Trilogy, Chasing the Sun.  This book focuses on the youngest of the three Wilkins brothers, Jack, and his love affair with a saloon singer from Canada/San Francisco.

This isn’t Warner’s best book in the series, but I still devoured it in about three days.  By the third novel, the reader is pretty familiar with the general plot lines.  Different danger, different bad guys, different lovers, same general outcome.  There’s also now so many characters – all the main characters from the first and second books plus a few more – that the protagonist characters seem to get less depth than their forerunners.

The historical setting is excellent and well-researched, as always.  This novel takes place in the 1870s, after the Panic of 1873 and after the US has stopped using silver to mint coins.  This sets a background for the Wilkins family to encounter some financial issues as their silver mines become nearly worthless and debts they incurred for investments in the mines come due.

A nice surprise and change from the other novels, Chasing the Sun starts out in San Francisco rather than on the Wilkins ranch.  Much to my delight, San Francisco is accurately depicted as a cold and grey place bustling with a wide variety of people crowded into a tiny little space.  The transfer of the main story out to the Wilknis ranch presents a nice comparison between the ranch’s wide open spaces beautiful landscape to the busy city.

My favorite part of this novel was the descriptions of Jack’s travels around the Pacific: Australia, Hawaii and other Pacific Islands.  It’s really neat to think that even nearly 150 years ago, people could still travel the world and come back to their families.

If you’ve read the other books in the Trilogy, Chasing the Sun provides a nice follow-up and a sense of closure with the characters.  If you haven’t read the other books, I’d recommend not picking this one up first.  It’s a bit difficult to understand without background from those books and contains some spoilers.

Winner Take All – Book Review

The Chinese are everywhere.  That’s one take away from Dambisa Moyo’s Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What It Means for the World, but it’s not the only one.  In this fairly short but very extensive look at China’s investments, purchases and loans around the world, Moyo explores the whys, wheres and hows of China’s past and future development.

The big takeaway is that China is the Little Red Hen, working steadily and surely while the rest of the world is the other barn animals off playing.  China, and only China, is preparing for the future.  China is purchasing, excavating and storing resources it will need to continue developing, resources that are limited and for which the world will face shortages in the future.

Most surprising to me, China isn’t only working out deals with other developing countries, but also with countries that like to consider themselves world powers.  I knew about many of China’s dealings with Zambia, and I’d heard some rumblings of China’s loans to the US.  But, I had no idea how extensive China's network is.  I didn’t know, for example, that China attempted to buy the port of Long Beach or that it has 25 year deals with Eastern European countries for oil supplies.

China has been accused of neo-colonialism.  But, as Moyo points out, China's activities may have some similarities to past colonial powers’ activities, but China’s approach is very different.  China is building partners and working to create win-win situations where both China and the host country get something they need.  This builds good will, strong good will that is already taking hold.  Many developing countries already view China far more favorably than traditional donor countries like the US.

Moyo’s work is well-researched and her premises and conclusions well-backed by her extensive economic background.  There are a few spots in the book where the economic language and ideas get pretty heavy and require a good working knowledge of econ.  However, even for those who do not have such a background, this book is worth a read.  Most of it is very accessible and Moyo does a good job explaining some of the complex issues.  And the subject matter is highly important.

This is one of those books I hope our leaders read.  I recommend it for you, too.

Deeper in the Blood Rose Trilogy

Man, Kaki Warner makes me want to move to New Mexico.   Her second book in the Blood Rose Trilogy, Open Country, is just as beautiful and engaging as Pieces of Sky.  

The Blood Rose Trilogy is about the Wilkins brothers, owners of a large cattle ranch in New Mexico in the second-half of the 19th century.  Open Country takes place a few years after Pieces of Sky ends and revolves around one of the younger brothers, Hank.  (The first novel is about the oldest brother, Brady.)  It’s really neat to have characters you love and know well appear again as secondary characters.  It adds depth to the novel and makes it even more enveloping.

I didn’t have the same connection to this book as I did to the first one, but I still couldn’t put it down, despite the fact that I accidentally ordered the large print version and so had a pretty heavy weight to hold up.  I devoured this novel in just three days.  Warner’s descriptions are enchanting and the dialogue quick paced. It’s hard not to fall in love with the characters as they fall in love with each other.

The book is a great love story and a decent adventure story - thankfully, with quite a bit less blood and gore than the first novel.  The only downside of Warner’s books is they make me so wistful.  It must be wonderful to be loved the way her main characters are. 

I am definitely looking forward to the last book in the trilogy!

Sports and Politics, Book Review of Game Over

The lesson I learned from this read is that a good book can be ruined by too much soap-box.  Game Over by Dave Zirin is mostly a well-written, engaging book.  It looks at the sports-world, both in America and abroad, and it’s relationship with politics.  These are connections that need to be better recognized and Zirin does a good job of drawing the lines to make the connections.

The first chapter begins with the Green Bay Packers – so of course, how could I not love that – and the connections between the Packers, the NFL Lockout, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Occupy Movement.  Other chapters cover soccer and the Arab Spring, the Olympics and a global movement towards police states, and the NCAA and labor. 

The most powerful chapter is the one on Joe Paterno and the sports world’s willingness to turn its eyes from very terrible wrongs.  As Zirin points out, “this is what happens when a football program becomes the economic, social, and spiritual heartbeat of an entire region.”  I have no doubt that had this book been written a few months later, that chapter would have included conversation about Stubenville as well.

The chapter on “Sexuality and Sports” highlights far more than just your average “woman aren’t treated equally” view.  Zirin gets into everything from the ultra-sexualization of some women athletes to the full gender spectrum that includes more than those on the outer edges of masculine and feminine.   If you were to pick up this book and only read 2 chapters, I’d definitely suggest this one and the one on Paterno.

As I said, Game Over is mostly well-written.  It’s sprinkled throughout with a little too much of Zirin’s own politics.  These things can be glossed over for the most part, until you get to the last chapter.  Zirin attempts to write about racism in sports, but it comes off as if he’s grasping at straws.  I’m not saying there is no racism in sports, but Zirin doesn’t do a good job of putting together a compelling narrative.  He also strays way off topic going into the Trayvon Martin shooting (racism but not sports) and Tim Tebow’s faith (sports but not racism).  Other than that one chapter, I’d highly recommend the book.

Game Over is a short read and fodder for a good number of long night’s thinking.  The toughest part for me now that I’m done reading it is who to lend it to first.

Book Review: The Annotated Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is my absolute favorite book.  I’ve read it at least a dozen times, seen the A&E/BBC film version well over twice that, turn my nose up at the Keira Knightly version – removing Mrs. Hurst really changes the dynamics between Elizabeth and Caroline Bingley – and try every few years to make (or have Mommy make) my own turn of the 19th century gown;  first one, third one.

Alfred’s wonderful husband, Nathy-Boo, knowing how much I love all most things Pride-and-Prejudice got me a most excellent Christmas present in The Annotated Pride and Prejudice, revised and expanded edition, annotated and edited by David M. Shapard.  I’ve read versions of the novels with some footnotes or endnote annotations before, but nothing quite like this.  Every single page of the novel is heavily annotated, all left-hand pages are novel text, all right-hand pages are annotations.  The resulting book is as fat as Gone with the Wind!

Some of the annotations are the fairly standard ones, describing a word that’s not common in English any longer or geographical descriptions of places mentioned in the book.  There’s also detailed explanations of small nuances in Austen’s text, subtleties that would go over the heads of anyone not intimately acquainted with social life of the gentry in early 19th century England.  My favorite annotations are the vocabulary definitions for English words that have since changed meaning.

There’s pictures of various carriages, houses and landscapes similar to those described, garments, shoes and activities.  There’s maps of England to describe the characters’ travels and a chronological listing of events in the book with dates as exact as Shapard could get them. – This proves extremely useful in showing how destroyed the story would have been had Facebook existed at the time.  Elizabeth would have known of Lydia’s elopement before having a chance to run into Darcy and he may never of won her love.

Shapard is pretty good at keeping the reference numbers at the ends of sentences, but if there’s several things to comment on in one sentence, the numbers, and thus the annotations, can interrupt Austen’s descriptions or characters’ dialogue.  I certainly learned a lot reading this version and now find myself looking for extra details when watching the film version.

A note of caution, I would only recommend this book to someone who is already very familiar with the book, but not for say a high school student reading it for the first time for class.  The sheer amount of annotations makes it difficult for the reader to follow the novel’s flow.  I often found myself turning back to the left page trying to remember where in the story I was. If you love Pride and Prejudice and want to understand its world better, I highly recommend this version.