Several people I know love this Irish author. This is both the first and last book of his I will read. I finished it only because it is a book for a book club of which I am a co-leader. I found the writing and the characters very off-putting (not sure how else to describe how I felt reading it). It is page after page of dialogue mostly between a mom and daughter. The rest of it is the inner musings of the mom. For people who like a certain style and perhaps certain sorts of characters, maybe it is fine.
After reading his other collection of short stories, I ordered this one which is an earlier collection. Once again, he does not disappoint. One of the stories, “The Hunter’s Wife” won the O’Henry Award and has to be one of those most touching and unusual stories I have ever read. One main character, the man who makes his living guiding hunting parties in Montana, becomes obsessed with a young woman he sees in a magic show and follows her everywhere. When he first meets her, she is underage and he does nothing. Later when she is older he relentlessly pursues and marries her. After years of enduring the hardships of living in a remote cabin in the mountains, she leaves. She has always possessed the ability to feel the emotions of both other humans and animals and begins to make her living using this ability to help people. After never seeing her for twenty years, the hunter comes to one of her events. The story details the years between their first meeting and what happens when the hunter attends this event.
The title story, “The Shell Collector”, details the life of a blind expert on certain kinds of sea shells and the marine life that inhabit them, some of which are poisonous. He moves to a remote Pacific island, becomes familiar to those who live there. After a local child becomes ill and her father thinks the shell collector saves her, his peaceful life as he has known it becomes totally upended.
All the stories are notable but another one I found fascinating is “Mkondo”. The main character, Ward Beach, works for a natural history museum and goes to Tanzania to study and collect specimens. While there, he becomes fascinated with a young woman he sees rapidly running through the forest. The rest of the story details his pursuit, their life together, their separate lives, and questions the meaning of what is considered success in life.
I generally am not a short story reader but Doerr’s stories are unique, insightful, touching, and carry a sort of magic not found in many novels or stories.
This book is part of a group read at the church where I sing. Classified as science fiction because it occurs in a society on the moon of a different planet far into the future, it is the cheeriest science fiction I have ever read. One of the main characters, Sibling Dex, is a tea monk who travels from town to town, village to village, dispensing the right herbal tea and “advice” to the people who come to see him. He becomes frustrated and bored with this life and decides to head out into the countryside, out into the untouched nature where all the old roads are overgrown or now non-existent.
Due to past experiences, these humans have freed all the robots after they became sentient, and they have an agreement as to where each lives. In addition, humans have decided to live very differently, leave a lot of nature to nature and so live only in certain areas, in bigger towns and small villages with some nature here and there, but most of nature is now untouched and left to do whatever nature does.
Dex heads out in his tea house wagon which he pedals to generate electricity. It is self containing and he has everything he needs for at least two weeks. At one campsite not too far into the wilderness, a robot named Mosscap appears. Mosscap has volunteered to go into human territory per the ancient agreement between humans and robots and learn about humans. Dex finds this a mixture of frightening, intriguing, and confusing. Yet he agrees to allow Mosscap to accompany him on his adventure. The rest of the book is about what they discover, what they learn from each other, and the future they plan.
While wandering around in the library, I found this book. His two more recent novels, ” All the Light We Cannot See” and “Cloud Cuckoo Land” remain two of the most touching and fascinating novels I have ever read so decided to try what he started with, short stories. These stories do not disappoint.
The title of the book comes from the first of the stories. It is a combination of science fiction and paleontology. Via an operation to his head a young boy in South Africa possesses the memories of an old woman. Through her memories he learns of a her deceased husband’s interest in rocks and fossils. This allows him to make a discovery that changes lives. In the next story, due to the death of her parents, a young girl in Kansas has to move to Lithuania to live with her grandfather and makes a myth come true. The following story, “Village 113”, won the O. Henry Prize. It details what happens to one woman, a keeper of seeds for an entire village, when the Three Gorges Dam was built in China. Another story tells what happens to a couple in Wyoming when they desperately want a child but cannot conceive. The shortest of the stories, “The Demilitarized Zone”, is well about that–sort of. The final story, like several others, is about memory, in this case the memories of a Holocaust survivor, who like many who survive horrible events when others they know do not, wonders why her.
I liked these stories so much that I ordered his earlier collection of short stories, “The Shell Collector.” He has won the O. Henry Prize for short stories five times and the Pulitzer for “Cloud Cuckoo Land” in 2015. I keep wondering how he knows so much about so many places. His short stories and novels are set in countries all over the world. The research must never end.
This is another great novel by one of my favorite authors. The book begins with the finding of a skeleton in a well in 1972. Since it is located near the site of an old synagogue, the police start to question a local, elderly Jewish man, Malachi, but get nowhere. Before they can come back to ask him more questions, Hurricane Agnes washes away the skeleton and many houses in the lower, wealthier part of town. When they do finally get around to hunting for him again, he has disappeared.
Then the novel goes back 47 years in this nondescript Pennsylvania town where the white people live in the lower, nicer part of town, and the Jews and black people live in or near an area called Chicken Hill, a poor area with little water and no plumbing. It is the story of a Jewish couple, Chona and Moshe. She runs the grocery store in the title, and he runs a dance theatre where he hosts dances, sometimes showcasing very famous musicians, mostly Jewish or black or Latino. It is also the story of some of their black neighbors, one of whom was Chona’s best friend in school, Jewish immigrants from Europe like Malachi, and a deaf black child, Dodo. When the state comes for Dodo because his mother has died and they think he should be institutionalized, Chona’s kindness and the courage of a local black worker, Nate Timblin, bring the black and Jewish people together to save him. While all this can be sad and serious, I also found myself frequently laughing. This novel reveals the quirks of all sorts of people, how they relate to one another, the dangers of racism, and ultimately the meaning of community, courage, and friendship and how much these things matter.
I finished this book on New Year’s Eve, missing my goal of reading a book a week all this past year, but not by much. No excuses except one book I read was nearly 800 pages which took a bit longer.
This last book was full of surprising information. I had no idea that Teddy Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington were friends. This book is very detailed with loads of historical information about the lives of both of these men. Born worlds apart in terms of freedom, economics, and race, they both had a goal to further the status of Black people. In terms of his political future, Roosevelt made a big mistake when he invited Washington to the Whitehouse for a family dinner. Once this event became known, white people in the South were outraged. Jim Crow incidents, e.g. lynching, increased. Roosevelt felt he had to backtrack some to save himself and this included one his worst decisions in terms of racial equality. Meanwhile, they tried to hide their relationship more, did not visit each other as often, and Washington had to go to great lengths to appease some whites in the South to keep Tuskegee growing and flourishing. W.E.B. Du Bois viewed Washington negatively and thought he went too far to appease white people and did not do enough for his own race. Du Bois who had grown up free in the North did not understand Washington’s viewpoints and did not know what he did secretly to help Black people. If you are interested in the actual history of this period and how these three men affect the present, I highly recommend this book. There are 35 pages of references, notes, and documentation at the end of the books for those who want to read further on this topic and time period.
As a counselor for College Match LA, I joined a group of current students in college and alumni at Perch LA, a restaurant in downtown with a rooftop venue. The views there are fantastic, the finger food yummy, and seeing some of my students delightful–they are at Oxy and loving it. Here are a few photos.
Here is a book that I never managed to read when I was reading all those other classics. Finally, I did it and I am so glad. What an amazing story. I know it takes place in another era with different language and customs and so on, but it is well worth the read. The plot is so ingenious, the story a lesson in how not to live, how leading a double life destroys not only the person leading it but so many others and for what? Does selling one’s soul for any reason pay off? Rarely, if ever.
Now that I am writing this, I keep thinking of several present day people who were living wealthy and successful in “polite” society but now have been caught with their depravity in full view for the world to see.
writingontherim 