March Books

I read several good books this month, and seemed a bit more chatty about a few of them! What have you been reading?  Anything good? Too Close to Home by Lynette Eason -- a mystery taking place in South Carolina; teen girls disappearing and later being found dead; the story of a police force as they track down this killer Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim -- a very interesting read about a South Korean-born American journalist who goes to Pyongyang as a teacher at a school founded by Christian missionaries. While I did not like certain things about this book (more particularly, the author), for the most part I really enjoyed learning about her interactions with her students and about her life those few months she taught in North Korea. I looked up more information about the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), and found this video which was great for seeing things which the author had described in her book.   Also here is a short NPR interview with the author. A Solitary Blue by Cynthia Voight -- I got this at a book exchange awhile back.  A young boy is abandoned by his mother, and raised by his father, the Professor.  Later his mother contacts him, and he spends a delightful summer with her in Charleston, SC.  But then he doesn't hear from her again until the following summer, which is quite different.  This book was weird, simple in a way especially at first, but I ended up liking it okay. Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times by Jennifer Worth  -- my mom found this book at the library, and it was different from others she's been passing along to me.  It was a biography from a lady who had been a young nurse serving in London's East End slums in the 1950s. Mama warned me that it may take a few chapters to get into the book, and that was true. It's not that it was uninteresting in the beginning, but it started off with a tale of childbirth, and, quite frankly, that's not my thing! I figured the rest of the book might be the same, and it was in a way since it's about a convent full of midwives (the nurses and nuns did this service), but there was so much more!  Like stories of people who lived around the docks.  Women with a dozen or more children living in cramped spaces, many in filth.  One lady we met in the book when she was pregnant with her 24th child.  Yes, that's 2 dozen children by her early forties.  I learned about workhouses and the lives of prostitutes as told through Mary's tales and women having black babies and the reactions of their husbands (kill the bastard v. a Holy Fool).  Very interesting tales!  I cried off and on through this book. It wasn't all sad. Some stories were quite funny especially when one nun visited the eccentric lady who refused initially to have her pulse taken.  I cried partly because as I read this book, I learned of a girl who attended church with me years ago who died on March 5 soon after giving birth to her first child, a boy named Levi.  Sherry was just 28.  Plus, some of these stories truly were heartbreaking! Can we all just take a moment and thank God for inventions such as the Pill? "The Pill was introduced in the early 1960s and modern woman was born.  Women were no longer going to be tied to the cycle of endless babies; they were going to be themselves. With the Pill came what we now call the sexual revolution.  Women could, for the first time in history, be like men, and enjoy sex for its own sake. In the late 1950s we had eighty to a hundred deliveries a month on our books. In 1963 the number had dropped to four or five a month. Now that is some social change!"  (pg. 5) This was something I shared with a private online group whom I've known for years. We met because of our mutual love of discussing names.  "Mrs Conchita Warren is an unusual name, I thought as I cycled towards Limehouse.  Most local women were Doris, Winnie, Ethel (pronounced Eff) or Gertie. But Conchita! The name breathed 'a beaker full of the warm South...with beaded bubbles winking at the brim.' What was a Conchita doing in the grey streets of Limehouse, with its pall of grey smoke and the grey sky beyond?"  (pg. 127) I really enjoyed how the author changed subtly throughout this book.  In the beginning, she was laughing at prayers, an "irreligious" sort who just found the whole religion thing somewhat silly or superstitious.  By the time Jenny was on her way through the horrible London smog to deliver a premature baby, she felt hope and peace when Sister Julienne promised to pray for both mother and the unborn child (28 weeks).  This from the final chapter.  I loved it. 'What had impelled Sister Monica Joan [the 90+ year old nun] to abandon a privileged life for one of hardship working in the slums of London's Docklands?  "Was it love of people?" I asked her. "Of course not," she snapped sharply. "How can you love ignorant, brutish people whom you don't even know?  Can anyone love filth and squalor? Or lice and rats? Who can love aching weariness, and carry on working, in spite of it?  One cannot love these things.  One can only love God, and through His grace come to love His people."'  (pg. 318-9) Also, from Sister Monica Joan: "'Questions, questions - you wear me out with your questions, child.  Find out for yourself - we all have to in the end.  No one can give you faith. It is a gift from God alone.  Seek and ye shall find. Read the Gospels. There is no other way. Do not pester me with your everlasting questions. Go with God, child; just go with God.'"  (pg. 319)   Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth -- volume two from the author; this one dealt with fewer stories, but in more depth. Very interesting although I know this must be partially a novel because there is no way the author would be privy to some of the conversations and actions quoted in this book. How's this for an accent?  A business man in London testifying in the trial of Sister Monica Joan. "'I sells ladies fings, and vis nun, she comes up to me stall an' afore you can blink an eye, she picks up a couple of bread an' cheeses, tucks 'em in 'er petticoats, an' is off round the Jack Horner, dahn ve frog an' toad ... I couldn't Adam an' Eve it, bu' vats wot she done. When I tell me carvin' knife wot I seen, she calls me an 'oly friar, an' says she'll land me one on me north and south if I calls Sister Monica Joan a tealeaf.  Very fond of Sister, she is. So I never says nuffink to no one, like.'" (pg. 187) The judge: "'I think I am going to need an interpreter.'' Thankfully the usher spoke up.  "'I think I can help you, My Lord.  My mother was a cockney and I was brought up with rhyming slang.  Mr Crumb has testified that he saw Sister Monica Joan take a couple of handkerchiefs - bread and cheese is the usual expression for handkerchiefs - off his sparrow, or barrow, and set off round the Jack Horner - corner, My Lord - down the frog and toad - meaning road - as quick as - I need not go on ... "'To Adam and Eve it' is a very common expression, my Lord.  It means 'to believe it,' or the negative.  Mr Crumb could not Adam and Eve the evidence of his own eyes.'" ... "Mr Crumb said that he told his wife what had happened.  There are several expressions for wife - carving knife, trouble and strife, Duchess of Fife spring readily to mind - and she would call him a liar - holy friar, My Lord, and said she would hit him in the north and south - mouth - if he called Sister Monica Joan a thief - tea-leaf was the rhyming slang used by Mr Crumb."  (pg. 187) Did you get all that?  Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth - the last book in this series; more interesting stories - some quite funny, some absolutely gross (to me anyway).  I liked that the author ended the book with a short update on most of main characters that I was able to know through this trilogy. The couple of chapters on abortions and the woman who wanted an abortion because she already had too many children were interesting (though this part made me a bit queasy).  I thought this paragraph interesting: "The Criminal Abortion Act 1803 was repealed in 1967.  Knowing that I had been a midwife I was sometimes asked if I approved of it or not.  My reply was that I did not regard it as a moral issue, but as a medical one. A minority of women will always want an abortion. Therefore it must be done properly."  (pg. 224) After reading this book, I better understood this!  Ah, queasiness.  Once in a Blue Moon by Leanna Ellis - one of those easy-reads from the library; a reporter travels to Texas to find out information about her mother's past; not super-interesting, but OK The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins by Peter Enns - This book dealt with stuff like the following: "The theology of Genesis 1 becomes clearer when we read it in its ancient literary-religious context.  For those who wish to see support in Genesis for modern science, it may seem a bit of a letdown that God is 'only' said to have tamed a preexisting chaos, for example. After all, if he were truly almighty, would he not create out of nothing?  But in the ancient world of the Israelites, this was not an active question.  In that world, the theology of a chaos-tamer working solo, commanding the elements to line up, was counterintuitive  and set Israel apart theologically. Genesis 1 is not in any way a modern scientific statement, but an ancient religious one.  It drew on the thought categories available at the time to create a powerful statement within its own context for the uniqueness of Israel's God and his worthiness to be worshiped."  (pg. 45) See previous post for a Jewish viewpoint. Midnight in Siberia by David Greene -- this is "a train journey into the heart of Russia" by one of the NPR Morning Edition hosts.  After living in Russia for three years on assignment, the author returns for this train journey where he visits cities and villages along the way, and talks with ordinary Russians. Apparently Moscow isn't necessarily representative of the rest of Russia.  What a surprise.   I was struck with how Russians tend to want a strong leader. While many people interviewed weren't necessarily Putin fans, their mindset was such that the government should provide stability - something missing when Russia flirted with democracy, something they long for.  It reminded me of a book I read a few years ago about East Germans after the Berlin wall fell.  Some of them wanted the safety, security, and stability of a socialist country, where the government might send you some ugly, not-very-comfortable shoes, but, by golly, at least you had shoes!  One lady in here even wanted the Stalin days back - minus the cruelties. Russian Tattoo by Elena Gorokhova -- Imagine meeting an American taking a class in a Russian university and later agreeing to his suggestion of marrying him so you can escape your homeland (and your overbearing mother). This is what she does, and, boy, is it interesting as she encounters life in the United States: things like eating raw mushrooms, this big thing called a 'hamburger,' cereal that sounds like nails falling into a bowl, iced tea, and lots and lots of shoe choices in the department store!  The book is more than that, of course. It's a memoir, and a pretty good one. Every Secret Thing by Ann Tatlock -- This book didn't start out the most exciting or funny for a fiction book, but I came to appreciate it quite well throughout. I think it had a good overall message about "moments of being," and I enjoyed several of the characters (teacher Beth, her former English teacher, Mr. Theodore Dutton, and Beth's student Satchel Queen) and how they interacted.