Thousands of Tiny Dots...

Just thought I'd pop on here & tell you all what I've been up to.  Haven't been reading anything new, unfortunately.  But I have been re-reading some of my favorite books.  Right now I'm tackling Great Expectations again.  I haven't read much of Dickens, but this is by far my favorite book by him.  I think it has a lot to do with my own great expectations, & how it seems like they just set us up to not appreciate all  the small things that happen to us that, when added together, make up a solid life.  When viewed in hindsight I think most of us would think a great many people have lived important lives in some way or another.  I often wonder, though, how many of those people thought they were supposed to achieve something large, or great, all at once in the course of their time on earth.  Only in retrospect can you look back & feel that you've lead a "good" life.  At least that's what I hope.  My expectations are still making my life difficult.  I hope that once I'm out of my 40's (& God help me, I've only just gotten into them!) I can maybe start to forgive myself for what I consider my lack of acheivement in my life.  I hope that I can start to see in a few years the solid wall of something built of the many little things that make up my daily life.

But for right now I'm still stuck not seeing the whole picture.

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett ****

I'm a sucker for a good historical fiction novel, and this is one!  It follows 5 families (one Welsh, one Russian, one American, one Brit and one German) from the turn of the century to just after WWI, showing how their stories meet and part while they live in those turbulent times.  Now you know there are going to be a lot of characters when you have to have a list of them in the front of the book, but these are even organized by nationality and sometimes even by job.  And I'm so glad Ken Follett did that, because I'm one of those people that has a hard time remembering who's who. 

It's a big, sweeping book, and Follett is planing of following it with two more just like it, since it says on the front cover that this is book one of The Century Trilogy.  I think it's fascinating to see how war brings very different people together that would never have met and creates a new reality that our ancestors would be rather surprised to learn about (for example:  both of my husband's grandparents never would have met each other without WWII happening).  So I can't wait for the next book, which will undoubtedly deal with WWII and how the same characters and their children experience it. 

Thanks Ken Follett for another great read!

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain ****

I needed a new book to read, something recent that looked good.  I can't remember where I saw this book listed, maybe on the New York Times bestsellers list, but the idea of reading a pseudo-memoir about Hemingway's first wife was intriguing. 

Hadley Richardson was from my hometown, St. Louis, and was considered a spinster at age 28 when she met Ernest Hemingway.  He was 21 and just starting his writing career, not yet the man he would later become.  They fell in love, married, and moved to Paris so Ernest could be where all the great writers of the age were:  Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and more.  There they lived for several years in what for Hadley was marital bliss, but for Ernest became a tightening noose around his neck. 

I appreciated this book on several different levels, one of which was the character of Hadley herself.  I've seen that many people who've reviewed it thought that Hadley was a wimpy character, but I found her to be quite real.  She was the only person in a circle of very bright stars that wasn't a writer and wasn't trying to be famous in some way.  She was very ordinary, and as a rather ordinary person myself I liked her.  It was as though she were trying very hard to not be eaten alive by the people around her, and somehow she came out the other end intact. 

I would like to read The Sun Also Rises now since Hemingway's life while writing it was the model for this book.  And my husband's favorite Hemingway book, Islands in the Stream, would be good to read also--it has so much to do with Ernest looking back on his life and his wives with regret and longing.  And it's obvious that though she wasn't a flashy flapper, a love-starved socialite, or a petulant  beauty queen, Hadley in many ways was the love of his life and an anchor that he lost and never could find again.

Joplin

I've been reading a lot of magazines lately and haven't felt up to finishing my current book, Say Her Name, yet.  It's a good book, but the author's grief is hard to handle all at once.  I've been taking breaks.  One break was June 25th. 
I work at a hospital that is part of a large system of Catholic health care providers, and one of the medical centers in our system was struck by an F5 tornado on May 22.  My mother-in-law happens to work at this medical center, and also happened to be working that Sunday evening when the tornado hit.  I'll refer readers to Dog's blog for the details of what she went through.  The destruction was massive and the last I heard 156 people died in Joplin, Missouri that day.
Stuck up here in St. Louis, we didn't know what to do for the people of Joplin.  Our family was lucky--no one was hurt and their homes were fine.  But seeing the destruction on tv was hard.  This is a town that Dog knew well.  He hadn't lived there, but had grown up in several of the towns and cities in the surrounding area. 
When my work started to organize employees to go help with the clean-up, I volunteered.  So on June 25 I boarded a chartered bus at my place of work along with about 40 of my fellow employees and took the drive to Joplin.
One word to describe what was seen--overwhelming.  There was so much gone.  Just flat out gone.  Even the trees were stripped of their leaves and bark.  I could have been told that a bomb had been dropped on Joplin and I would have believed it. 
We worked for only 1 1/2 hours on a small house near the hospital.  Our short work duration was due to us getting there late (not sure why) and then the heat being so bad that they stopped us at 3 instead of 4.  But I think we got some work done while we were there.
What we did was sort the damage out into piles.  There was the masonry pile, the metal pile, the electronics pile, and the personal belongings pile.  I regret now not taking pictures, but at the time that seemed like a very...disrespectful thing to do.  That's the only word I can think of to describe when you're literally picking up the pieces of someone's life.  I was able to guess at the sort of people that lived in this little house by what we found.  I'll list some of the things that struck me the hardest:

• a frilly little girl's umbrella
• the top of the stove
• the back-drop for a small aquarium
• Are You My Mother? (one of Puppy's favorites when he was younger)
• a huge stuffed teddy bear
• curtains from Target
• a gallon of milk
• an extra large box of off-brand snack crackers
• a child's collection of plastic blocks with letters on them
• a VHS tape of Fievel Goes West
• a picture of two young women

The last item was given to an Americorps volunteer--they were in charge of any and all photos.  And those volunteers were some of the nicest people I've ever met.  They were all young folks, college aged I'd guess, and they kept thanking us over and over for helping them.  I was flabbergasted--they were the ones living down there in tents, doing some very hard work, both physically and emotionally.  It was so good to see them caring about the people of Joplin, and caring about us volunteers too.  They took good care of us, taking us right to where the work needed to be done and pressing water and Gator-Aide on us constantly. 
I want to go back sometime in September and maybe get some other people from my department to go with me.  I worried when driving down there that they wouldn't have much left for us to do.

There is more than enough.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell ****

First, I want to recommend a blog: Rolling Around In My Head. In general, it's a blog about the world of disabilities--having them, living with & loving people with them, working for people with them, embracing them. The reason I mention this is that the author of this blog, Dave Hingsburger, has a book club going that includes books that deal with-you guessed it-disabilities. Some of the best books I've read lately are the ones he picks. And like people who happen to have disabilities, these books aren't defined by the inclusion of disabilities. They're just great books.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is first and foremost about loss.  Jacob is a young clerk sent from Holland to Japan in the very late 1700's to work for the Dutch East India Company.  When he makes this journey he loses touch with his homeland and very importantly to him, his religion.  He and his sister have been raised by his uncle, a minister, so it is very hard for him to be in Japan without any outward signs of his faith--Christianity was punishable by death at the time in Japan.  Also comes a loss of belief in the honesty of mankind, when in his process of auditing the books at the Dutch installment of Dejima he finds that the corruption of money has gotten to every level of the "factory".  Loss touches every character that touches Jacob also--loss of love, loss of a child, loss of faith, loss of youth, loss of innocence.  Because of this overwhelming feeling of loss, this book can be rather heavy.  But you can't stop reading because you want the losses to be abated, or at least to be for a higher purpose.  Sometimes, though, loss is just loss.  There is a hole and it won't be filled.
I'm sure Dave chose this book because of one of the settings--a perverse temple that claimed to care for women who were too deformed and imperfect to be missed from "normal" society.  Women who could be used with impunity and no one would be the wiser; women who were actually grateful to be cared for there because the world outside had treated them so badly.  It took a very special woman to come in and care for these "nuns"--though society could call her "deformed" also, she was confident in her knowledge and in her compassion.  She made the hell of that temple bearable for her fellow nuns, until another loss by a person far away took away the prison walls. 
I wanted, as I think most humans do, for there to be a "happily-ever-after" to this story.  But in truth, how many of us get to have that kind of clean finality?  I wanted a fairy tale ending, but I got reality.  When I was younger I craved the starkness of truth in all I read and would ridicule the cutesy endings to many books.  As I've aged I've noticed a desire to see that clean finality now.  Is it perhaps because stark reality is all around us and it's only as we get older that we see it everywhere? 
A very fine book, and another great recommendation from Dave.  Thanks.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown **

I was loaned this book by someone I work with, or else I probably wouldn't have read it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not being a snob or anything, it's just that these kinds of books start to all seem the same. And since I've read The Da Vinci Code, I have to say that I was right.

I like The Da Vinci Code. It was fast paced, interesting, and the ending was great. Dan Brown wrote a great thriller when he wrote that one. So not surprisingly, he stayed with the same model when he wrote The Lost Symbol.

Here are some of the similarities: same main character, smart woman in distress that then helps the hero, classic architecture, big crazy scary guy that likes to kill, a secret that most people don't know but which is right under their noses.

Even with all those similarities, I was still flying through the book trying to find out how it ends. Well, it ended quite lamely. The ending was just not very good. It was anticlimactic and didn't make a lot of logical sense. For example, if you'd gotten your hand cut off and been tortured all day, wouldn't you want to take a nice rest around 2 AM? I know there are a lot of cool things you'd like to tell the hero, but you've had a rough day and to top it all off you found out a very disturbing bit of family info that would make most people collapse in pain and horror. But no. You'd like to take the hero on a little tour of Washington D.C. in the wee hours of the morning. Why not.

Also the massive revelation at the end of the whole sha-bang is just kinda...okay. I'm saying if I were the big scary guy that likes to kill and I was still running around at the end of the story, I'd be killing. Just cause I would have found out that none of this was really worth anything. And cause I'd like to kill.

So while this was an interesting and fast read, I don't recommend it very highly. I have only read these two Dan Brown books, though, so if his other writing gets off this same pattern I would be more than glad to give it a try. But if it uses the same format...I think I've already been there.

Found by Mararet Peterson Haddix ***

I'm going to reveal something about this book that you might not want to know if you haven't read it yet, so don't read any further if you don't like having your book spoiled!!

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I used to really like time travel books--I have always been fascinated with the past and I'd love to be able to go back in time to see what life was really like, especially the clothes! But as I've gotten older I have a hard time dealing with the paradoxes that present themselves when you try to actually think of time as fluid. That's the only reason I haven't given this book 4 stars. I guess I'm just getting to where I don't want to have to get a headache when I read anymore!

A plane load of babies mysteriously appears 13 years ago, with no pilot or crew. The 36 babies are adopted out, with Jonah and his friend Chip being two of them. And now someone is coming back to find them all, but what are they going to do with them? Jonah, his sister Katherine, and Chip must try to figure out what's going on before they're stopped...or worse.

This was a great page-turning read, and if it wasn't for my brain not being able to grasp all the complexities of time travel I would have liked it even more. I'm not sure if I'm going to read the next book in the series or not...we shall see! But certainly do recommend this book if you like suspense and sci-fi.