Into the Woods, Into the Past

I actually am enjoying Thoreau's Maine Woods the second time around. I keep trying to picture Maine more than 170 years ago.  His is a more philosophical account of travels than the average person would write, I think. He seems respectful of people and nature as well.  He makes interesting observations about the logging business and the fading trapping business.  He seems interested in the indigenous people he encounters; he asks about their words and their customs. At the end of the book there is a glossary of place names that are translated from the native language into English.  Many native place names are gone now, so it's interesting to see what they were when still being used.

He talks about tiny towns like Greenville that are now not really much bigger than they were then. I keep reflecting on my ancestors and other cousins and trying to imagine what they were doing when Thoreau was in their midst. When Thoreau sails down the Penobscot toward Bangor, for instance, he goes by my cousin's house as it is now and was then, since it was built in the 18th century. He talks about Sugar Island, where my grandfather was born about 50 years after that. In fact, my great grandparents weren't even born yet when he was passing through Greenville.  My great-great grandparents were just getting started on their lives in the United States, having migrated from Canada a few years before.

Thoreau details the plants and animals he finds as he travels; the lists are a little boring to me, but his impulse is interesting. It's as if he wants to document these phenomena before they are gone forever.  I get the sense that he knows much of the wilderness will soon be gone and he is mourning its passing.  I wonder if he would have been surprised by just how much wilderness remains in Maine, though most of it is probably regrowth from logging.

It's been a worthwhile read, I think. I recommend it to all who want a close up history of a particular region of our country, and a window into a time when the wilderness was vanishing before our eyes.

Next I'll launch into one of the "M" books, I think. I've started a Walter Mosley novel so I'll probably continue with that.

French Fun, Southern Portraits, Maine Travels

After reading French Fun, I moved on to fiction by Jean Toomer: his signature book, Cane. It has been called a novel, but is really not that organized, being made up of a variety of poems and sketches about fictional African-American people of his era, mostly women, mostly Georgian country folk. 

Toomer was born Nathan Eugene Toomer in 1894, was raised by middle-class grandparents, attended several colleges and later taught at a black college in Georgia before settling into a writing career. It was while he was teaching in Sparta, GA that he wrote the book for which he is still known. Cane was published in 1923, just in time for the Harlem Renaissance, when interest in all-things-negro was at a high. The edition of the book I have was published in 1975, but there is a new addition out with an afterword by Henry Louis Gates. Cane is no doubt still a staple of African American Studies programs, so it will probably continue to stay in print.

Jean Toomer

I'm glad I started with the introduction to the book; it was informative and helpful for understanding the unusual structure of the work.  I enjoyed reading Cane for the most part, but I must admit that although it was well written, I had to fast-forward through parts of it.  All in all, I'm glad I discovered it at last since it's been sitting on my book shelf for quite a few years having been bought while I was still a graduate student at UC Davis, back in the nineties.  I recommend it to those interested in African American literature and history, but do read the introduction first to help you get more out of it.

Next, I want to try to finish reading Henry David Thoreau's The Maine Woods, a collection of his writings about his travels in Maine in the mid-nineteenth century. I started it a while back, but didn't get very far, so I'm hoping this time it will prove more entertaining.

Until then . . .

Four Weeks of Fiction and a Short Walk in the Woods

I guess I took quite a long break from my reading blog, but, as ever, I didn't stop reading!

In these past four weeks I've read two novels and part of a travelogue.  The travelogue was The Maine Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, which I picked up thinking it would be a good follow-on to the book about foundation narratives, America as Second Creation. The Maine Woods is a compilation of travel narratives Thoreau wrote about his trips to Maine in 1846, 1853, and 1857, around the same time agricultural pioneers were traveling westward to realize the American dream of owning land.  In fact, in the book Thoreau mentions such pioneers and suggests that if people are looking for land to farm, they could find some in the vast forests of Maine (once all the trees are cut down, of course).  I'm glad people didn't take his advice.

After about 100 pages of the Thoreau book, though, it started to get repetitious, so I put it aside and turned to literary fiction, most notably a book many people have been reading recently, The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd.  First published in 2002, this is an excellent novel; it's praise in the media is well deserved, I think.  It takes place in 1964 in South Carolina, and is the story of a 14-year old white girl who lives alone with her cruel and distant (widowed) father and her black nanny/housekeeper, Rosaleen.  She inadvertently gets caught up in the Civil Rights Movement by breaking Rosaleen out of the hospital where she is under guard after being arrested (and beaten) for spitting on a local racist's shoes.  The two of them flee to a place Lily hopes will reveal something about her mother who died ten years before.  In her mother's things, Lily had found a card with the figure of the Black Madonna and the name of a town, Tiburon, on the back.  When Lily and Rosaleen get to that town, they find that the Black Madonna is the label for a honey making business in town. They go there and are taken in by the beekeepers, three black sisters who hide them from the law (unknowingly) and teach Lily how to keep bees.  Eventually, Lily learns about her mother's connection to that place and the truth about her mother's death.

This book is very well written.  From the very first page I was struck by the strength of the voice I was hearing, that of the first-person narrator, Lily.  The characters are well developed, and there is great depth to the story, but what makes the book an exceptionally good read is the suspense that builds--not only from the fact that Lily and Rosaleen are fugitives from the law in segregated South Carolina just after the Civil Rights Act was signed, but also from the mystery of Lily's mother and her connection to the beekeepers.  Not until the end do readers learn the answer to all the questions that develop over the course of the novel. My only criticism is that at times the chain of events seems a bit implausible, especially for that time period. But for the most part, the plot kept me involved.

I've just learned that there is a movie of the novel that came out in 2008; I'm going to get it and see if it is true to the book.  I recommend the book highly; as for the movie, I'll reserve judgment until I've seen it.

After The Secret Life of Bees, I continued my foray into fiction with Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, a novel about a Dominican American family with four daughters and one son.  The novel goes back and forth in time as well as place, taking us to the Dominican Republic and to New York City, showing the differences between the two places over the decades, following each of the four daughters from early childhood to adulthood, marriage and children.  Each daughter has her own story to tell; each reacts differently to the two worlds, to their parents, to each other, and to the challenges of adjusting to life in the United States.

The book is interesting in that it doesn't have a clear narrative path; when I got to the end, it didn't feel like the end, and I wasn't sure that the story was resolved.  But that was okay.  I felt like I got to the know the Garcia family in all their complexity, which may have been the point, and a good thing, especially from the point of view of an Anglo who might tend to lump all Hispanics into one category and make a judgment about them as a group.  In this book, all the characters are widely divergent, exhibiting characteristics of humans from any race or culture.  They are Dominican, but they are also individuals, unique and complex.

That's one of the things I like about reading fiction written by people from other cultures: I find out how complex these groups of people truly are.  The characters in these books defy stereotyping because we see them up close, noting their individual traits, their peculiar characteristics, their brilliance and their flaws.  They're not all alike; they are a part of their culture but not merged with it. They are not merely Hispanics or Latinos; they are people, complicated and therefore interesting. I recommend this book highly, but beware--it's not a conventional narrative.

The final book, which I'm nearly finished reading, is a novel I borrowed from one of my coworkers: Live Wire, by Harlan Coben.  It's a murder mystery, of the the hard-boiled (HB) detective genre, featuring the continuing protagonist, Myron Bolitar.  Myron is an interesting character; he's a sports agent who somehow gets involved in investigating murders.  Who'da thunk it?  But all the conventions of the HB genre are here, from the main character's troubled past and unbelievably skilled performance in a fight; to the edgy, dangerous, not-quite-legal sidekick; the savvy female partner; and the suspenseful, intricate, and fast-paced plot.  It's not great literature, but it's a really good read.  What more could you ask from pulp fiction?  I recommend it to those who love mysteries, especially the hard-boiled-detective type.

So, this week I'll probably go back to non-fiction.  I may read a library book about Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, or I might choose another book from my collection that I've been meaning to read for lo, these many years.

In any case, I'll keep you posted!