Life: It Goes On - July 12

If it didn't feel like summer before this weekend, it does now! With temps in the upper 90's and humidity driving the "feels like" temp even higher, being outside during the day pretty much means you're going to melt.

 We've had a busy, fun-filled week. Wednesday we went with friends to see the Avett Brothers at an outdoors venue. They are tremendous musicians and put on such a great show. When we got home, BG's brother and his wife were at the house; they spent the night on their way through town so we went into work late on Thursday to spend time with them.  Thursday evening was my company's annual picnic/baseball game at the local Triple A team's stadium. Miss H and Mini-him were able to join us. Another beautiful night to be outside.

Last night was date night - a trip to a local bbq food truck which we were allowed to eat in a bar across the street for the price of a couple of drinks. They were having a pin-up contest later in the evening and the place was filled with young ladies dolled up a modern-day versions of 1940's beauties. Capped off the evening with a visit to Mini-me's coffee shop. Fun evening!

This Week I'm:

Listening To: I started Heidi Durrow's The Girl Who Fell From The Sky on Thursday after a trip to the library book sale. For music? The Avett Brothers, of course.

Watching: Some food shows ("Pioneer Woman," "Farmhouse Rules") and a new-to-me home show called "Stone House Revival."

Reading: I finally finished Matthew Quick's We Are Not Ourselves (review this week) and started Victoria Hilsop's The Sunrise which looks like the perfect beachy read on the cover but which promises to have some politics woven in.

Making: Shrimp and pasta, chicken tacos, caprese salad, mushroom risotto and bar-b-que'd chicken.

Brucemore

Planning: For another busy week - a birthday get-together for my mom's 96-year-old cousin, an evening with BG's siblings, and a trip to visit my aunt and uncle.

Grateful: To Mini-me and his wonderful girlfriend for spending another of their summer days helping my parents around the yard last week. I'm not sure who enjoys the time together more, my folks or the young people!

Enjoying: New experiences.

Feeling: Recharged after a mostly relaxing weekend. Hoping to get some reading time in yet today.

Looking forward to: Our trip east this weekend to see my aunt and uncle. The four of us will be attending a performance of Sinclair Lewis' "Our Town" on the grounds of the Brucemore mansion, picnic dinner and all.

The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera

The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera
Published June 2015 by Harper
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher and TLC Book Tours

Publisher's Summary:
Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism—that’s The Festival of Insignificance.

Now, far from watching out, Kundera is finally and fully realizing his old aesthetic dream in this novel, which we may easily view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our time, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humor.


My Thoughts:
Apologies up front for not getting this review posted earlier - just wrapped up the book yesterday then had to head out for the evening and didn't get back in time to write my review.

Also, gotta apologize for rushing this book. It's thin, just 128 pages, and my tendency, unfortunately, is to assume that will mean a quick read. So I didn't allot myself nearly enough time to really read and think about what Kundera wrote. And this is a book that really wants you to think. So I'm not sure I got out of it all that I could have. Perhaps other stops on the TLC Book tour will offer you a better perspective.

I know of Kundera from the movie adaptation of his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (starring the very young, very beautiful trio of Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin) which I quite liked. So when this book came up for review, I assumed it would be something along the same lines. Perhaps it is in the same vein as that book, but I've never read that book so I can't say. What I can say is that this book feels entirely different from anything I've read before. It also feels entirely foreign; there is always something to translated works that I read that make me think that we just don't get it here in the U.S. Which is sort of the way I felt about this book. For a little book, filled with insignificance, it's chock full of big ideas. I'm just not sure I understood what Kundera was trying to say about all of those things - perhaps that all of those things that seem small in our days might just be very important? Or, buried in all of that mundane are really important moments? Or, perhaps, as this piece seems to be saying, there is insignificance everywhere - even in the biggest things?

"I wanted to talk to you about something. About the value of insignificance...Insignificance, my friend, is the essence of existence. It is present even when no one wants to see it: in atrocities, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters. It often takes courage to acknowledge it in such dramatic situations, and to call it by name. But it is not only a matter of acknowledging it, we must love insignificance, we must learn to love it."

The book follows a group of men in the space of a few days where very little happens other than the reader getting deeply into the heads of these men. But Kundera uses some interesting tools to make his points - a book about Nikita Khrushchev, for example, serves as a tool to illustrate points throughout. The seduction/seductiveness of women is also a recurring theme (go figure, a book about men where seduction plays a big role).

"The uselessness of brilliance - yes, I get it." "More than useless. It's harmful. when a brilliant fellow tries to seduce a woman, she has the sense she's entering a kind of competition. She feels obliged to shine too, to not give herself over without some resistance. Whereas insignificance sets her free. Spares her the need to vigilance. Requires no presence of mind. Makes her incautious, and thus more easily accessible."

Yeah, so, maybe I didn't entirely "get" it...but then maybe that was Kundera's purpose. Just to make readers think, to make them look at things in a different way. Thanks to the ladies at TLC Book Tours for offering me this chance to stretch my brain!

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Published September 2014 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Source: got this one for a Christmas present

Publisher's Summary:
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.

Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.

Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all.

My Thoughts:
I have been wanting to read this book since I first learned about it. I have had it on my bookshelf since Christmas. For some reason, I kept putting it off. Oh yeah, I know the reason - dystopian fiction. Dystopian fiction and I have a love/hate relationship. I really, really have to be talked into reading it. Maybe I need to get over that. Because I loved this book.

Maybe because Mandel's focus is not on the horror of the pandemic or its immediate aftermath. In fact, although the pandemic is the pivotal moment of the book, Mandel does not focus on it. It happens quickly and 99% of the world population is annihilated. Jump forward 20 years. There are no zombies, there is no reason crops can't be grown, there are no cannibals to avoid. Which is not to say there is no tension because that prophet? He is not a nice guy. Also, people start disappearing. So it's not entirely without the usual scary post-apocalyptic stuff.

Mandel moves the story back in forth in time, changing the focus from one character to another, although Arthur remains the heart of the story even though he dies before the pandemic starts. Mandel crafts a mystery, leaving clues along the way then gradually reveals how everything is tied together. It was, for me, an impressive balancing act that caught me by surprise at the end. I'm hesitant to tell you more about the book because I feel like it's something you need to have unfold as you read it without knowing too much in advance.

As she has in her previous books, Mandel has crafted interesting characters involved in unusual situations. It was fun to look back at think about the way her previous books have been building up to this work. Station Eleven won the Arthur C. Clarke award and The Morning News Tournament of Books, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was on the Bailey's Prize long list as well as numerous Top 10 lists for 2014. It's going to be a tough one to top.

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James
Published February 2010 by Penguin Publishing Group
Source: both the audio book and hardcover copy were purchased by me

Publisher's Summary:
It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they- and she-will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings, desires, and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link.


My Thoughts:
If my review could be just one word, it would be devastating. Or maybe brilliant. Or, perhaps, overwhelming. So, yeah, maybe one word won't suffice.

I've studied American History, I've read Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Dolan Valdez-Perkins. But I have never read anything as powerfully written about slavery as The Book of Night Women. James does an exceptional job of capturing the hopelessness and claustrophobic nature of Montpelier Estate where Lilith grows up an unloved orphan.

It is not until Lilith comes of age to be of use on the plantation that she fully grasps the horrific future that awaits her. She is saved by the head house slave after a she commits a shocking act to save herself from field work. But life for Lilith will never be the same. Outside of the house, the "johnny jumpers" are always looking to punish her. Inside the house, the other slaves look down on her. And everyone is looking to use her in some way. Lilith doesn't always act in her own best interest, alienating those who might be her allies and angering those she can least afford to anger. She is conceited, impulsive, and convinced that she is better than the other slaves because her green eyes mean her father was white.

For the squeamish, this is not a book for you. It is brutal and shocking and, had I been reading it in print, I might have had to put it down and walk away from it more than once. We are all well aware that slavery was a barbarous practice but nothing I have ever read before comes close to capturing just how sadistic and cruel it was. James does not spare the slaves, who were often equally brutal to each other, nor are most of his white characters entirely one-dimensional.

I listened to this book on audio. Having passed along my hardcover book before I started reading it, I can't speak for how James' writing might have flowed from the page; it would almost certainly have been more difficult to read given that the patois narration is not always easy to understand. On audio, it is simply breathtaking. Robin Miles perfectly captures the dialect and accent and does a fine job of differentiating the many different characters, both male and female. Audiobook fans, I highly recommend this one.

I believe I first learned about this book on NPR and have owned the hardcover book for years. But it's a book that languished on my shelves in no small part to the fact that it gained so little attention in the press or blogging world. What a shame. I am not alone in being impressed with The Book of Night Women:

“Both beautifully written and devastating…Writing in the spirit of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker but in a style all his own, James has conducted an experiment in how to write the unspeakable— even the unthinkable. And the results of that experiment are an undeniable success.”
— The New York Times Book Review

“The narrative voice is so assured and the descriptions so detailed and believable that one can’t help being engaged. This is a book to love. . . . The Book of Night Women is hard to pick up, even harder to put down . . . and it deserves to be read.”
—Chicago Tribune

“The Book of Night Women is a searing read, full of blood, tears, and the stench of misery. It’s barbaric and ancient, but also familiar in the ways that people, consumed by their differences and divisions, easily overlook all that binds them— the desire for independence, the right to a civilized life, and the need to give and receive love.”
—The Boston Globe

“The Book of Night Women is not merely a historical novel. It is a book as heavily peopled and dark as the night in this isolated and brutal place. It is a canticle of love and hate.”
—Los Angeles Times

Life: It Goes On - July 5

Well, that was a fast three-day weekend! And, apparently, a fast last week - it went by so fast that I wasn't even aware until Friday that I had entirely neglected to post any book reviews last week. So, this week - two of my favorites of the year!

Friday night we met for appetizers, desserts, drinks and camaraderie with the neighbors then got treated to our first great fireworks show of the weekend, thanks to our neighbor who puts on nearly professional shows twice over the Fourth. This year we nearly had a disaster when one of the fireworks blew out the side of its box. Let's just say that my reflexes aren't what they used to be. And I may be too attached to my phone.

Friday night fireworks

Yesterday, our three kids, two girlfriends and my parents enjoyed lunch on the patio before the kids blew some stuff up in the street so they could share the fun with their grandpa. Miss H and Mini-him headed off to join friends but the rest of us were later joined by friends for a low country boil, killer margaritas, and multiple desserts for a second meal on the patio). Thanks to our neighbor putting on a second show for his family, we were able to enjoy more fireworks to end the night. A perfect day!

Perhaps some pictures before we dove into the food would have been more appealing?!

This Week I'm:

Listening To: I'm all caught up with the Nerdette podcast's "Game of Thrones" recaps and this week I'll finish up the other episodes I have left. Then it's on to a new book. Not sure what that will be yet.

Watching: "West Side Story," women's World Cup soccer, and not another thing I can recall. Must have been an exciting tv week!

Reading: I'm about two-thirds of the way through We Are Not Ourselves and hope to finish it by tomorrow. Then I'll read Milan Kundera's The Festival of Insignificance for a TLC Book Tour. After that, I'm on to Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies for this month's book club selection.

Making: Caprese salad, dipped pretzels, red velvet cake, and that low country boil.

Planning: My office had become a dumping ground for things that Miss H was sending back home but I've got that all dealt with now and it's time to get back to projects in there. It needs to be painted but not this week so I'm just planning on working on a couple of sewing projects and some scrapbooking.

Grateful for:  An abundance of food. We take it for granted but after spending all day today eating just the food we had leftover from yesterday, I'm reminded how fortunate I am to be in a country where there is plenty and in a position to afford it.

Enjoying: Relaxing today, after a busy weekend, and in anticipation of a busy week.

Feeling: Sated. Yesterday was a good day that filled me with love, laughter, and oh, so much food!


Looking forward to: Going with friends Wednesday to see the Avett Brothers in concert then Thursday is my company's annual picnic followed by a Triple A baseball game.

Happy Fourth of July!

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Read All About It! Colonies Form Union - Break Away From England!

Here in the Unites States, we call it the Revolution. In Britain, they call it the Rebellion. Of course, I prefer the former. But when you look around the world and see "rebels" trying to overthrow governments, remember that 239 years ago that's just what Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock and their band of brothers and sisters were doing. Sure you learned all about it in school but if you really want to learn the truth, there are plenty of books to choose from.

You can hardly go wrong picking up a book by Joseph Ellis, Jeff Shaara, David McCullough, or Page Smith but don't stop there. There is always something new to be learned, surprisingly.

The men are certainly well covered by books and it's interesting to be able to read their actual writings. Don't stop with these well known books - there are a number that discuss the contributions of Benedict Arnold before he betrayed the cause, books about the men from other countries who helped the revolutionaries, and those lesser-known founding fathers who played major roles in the founding of our country.

And let's don't forget the ladies! Of course, we're all familiar with Abigail Adams. But there were women behind most of those founding fathers who made it possible for them to go off and do what they did and who often found themselves in the position of defending their homes on their own.

Now where did I put my copy of Nathaniel Philbrick's Bunker Hill??