Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out - Shannon Reed

While it's not exactly the book I thought I'd be reading, Shannon Reed's Why We Read works well in the long run. At first I couldn't decide if I was reading a memoir or a book about the reading habits of especially avid readers. Then I figured it out: this is a memoir written by someone who largely defines herself as a Reader, someone who cannot even imagine her life without the pleasure of reading each and every single day of it. To one degree or another, I'm willing to bet that anyone bothering to read my thoughts on Why We Read feels exactly the same way.

Many of the book's sections have self-explanatory headings listing one of the reasons "why we read." Here are a few examples:

• To Finish a Series
• To Learn About (and From) the Past
• To Feel Less Alone
• To See Ourselves Across Time 
• For Comfort
• To Feel Superior
• To Be Shocked
• To Shake Up Your Perspective
• To Learn How to Die (and How to Live)

Sections like these form the backbone of Why We Read, and Reed shares her personal experiences to illustrate each section's main points. The final two-thirds or so of the book focus on sections like these in contrast to the more humorous approach to the subject that Reed incorporates into its first hundred pages. For me, that's when the book saved itself and I firmly decided to finish it. Earlier chapters like "Signs You May Be a Female Character in a Work of Historical Fiction" ("Your name is Sarah; Your best friend is a horse; Your mother is either dead or dead set on getting you married as quickly as possible; etc.") or "Calmed-Down Classics of American Fiction for the Anxiety-Ridden" ("The Good Enough Gatsby; To Mildly Startle a Mockingbird; Fahrenheit 71 Degrees; The Beige Letter; etc.") just don't work for me. But that's not to say they won't work for you. That kind of humor never works for me, especially for as long as these lists go on.

As a fan of series fiction, I found Reed's observations on the subject particularly interesting even if I didn't agree with all of them:

"We have to orient ourselves to the world of the novel (setting, time period, closeness to or distance from our known lives), as well as the narrator and their attitude toward the world, the characters and dialogue...But a series usually only asks us to do that heavy lifting at the beginning of the first book, and from them on we can simply wander."

...

"...the pleasure of a series - the intimacy of its world and people - can also chafe.

Reed goes on to say that these days she's been "constructing her own" thematic series rather than relying on a single author to suck her into their world for months or years to come. That's exactly what I've noticed others doing lately as we chain-read our way through a few fiction titles about World Wars I or II, ancient civilizations, the Roaring Twenties, etc. And as Reed goes on to say, this kind of reading often leads to nonfiction titles on the same subject or period because of what we've experienced in historical fiction titles. 

Why We Read is three hundred pages long (my personal ideal length), and there are almost certainly sections and topics here that will appeal to any avid reader who gives it a try. I'm a huge fan of memoirs, and for me this is a good one, a memoir in which I found more commonality with Shannon Reed than I ever dreamed I would find. Shannon Reed is one of us, Readers. You will enjoy her company.

Shannon Reed jacket photo

Absolution - Alice McDermott

 

"...in truth it seems to me that it's not the world that's small, only our time in it."

 Absolution opens with a 1963 tea party during which a naive newlywed is about to meet the woman who will change her forever. Tricia, the novel's primary narrator, has just arrived in Vietnam along with her husband, an engineer who has been seconded to the Navy, and the gathering is her first chance to meet some of the other American wives in the city. Tricia vividly remembers meeting Charlene and her little girl - along with the girl's baby brother who threw up all over her -  that day.

Now, some sixty years later, Tricia has reconnected with that little girl, and she is telling Rainey (and, at the same time, the reader) all about what her mother was really like in those days, exactly what Charlene was up to and how she managed to get away with it all for as long as she did. Wives in 1963 Saigon, it seems, were expected to represent their husbands' brands. That's why they were there in the first place, and that's all they were expected to worry about.  Housekeepers and nannies assured that the women had more free time on their hands than they could possibly fill with tea parties, formal dinners, and book clubs - but because the number one rule they all lived by was "never, ever embarrass your husband," anything else they got up to was risky business. 

Well, Charlene, was having none of that. And the innocently naive Tricia would prove to be the perfect "front man" for Charlene's schemes. 

Almost before she knows what is happening, Tricia is visiting a children's hospital, is deeply involved in a complicated fundraiser to buy children's toys, and is even visiting a dangerously remote jungle leper colony. She is meeting people, Americans and Vietnamese alike, who need her help, and her eyes are opening to the real world her husband and his peers want to keep hidden from her. And Peter Kelly, Tricia's Irish-American husband, knows nothing about it. 

Following Charlene's lead, Tricia is exposed to the real world and learns much about pain, suffering, courage, familial bonds, and what desperate people are capable of doing to and with each other. But most importantly, she learns who she is - and who she wants to be. Charlene may have only passed through Tricia's life for a few, brief months, but she changed it forever.

I always remember Alice McDermott's characters, and she has created some memorable ones here, but Absolution reminds me again of just how good a storyteller McDermott is. It's also a reminder of just how "small" our time in the world we live in really is. Think about it: 2024 is just as far from 1963 Saigon as 1963 is from 1900 America. So much has changed...but so much hasn't, and never will. 

Alice McDermott publisher photo

What I'm Reading This Week (May 27, 2024)

 

After finishing two novels last week (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler and Dad Camp by Evan S. Porter), I begin the new week with three books in progress. I set Matt Haig's The Humans aside all of last week, but I'm looking forward to reading it this week, am almost halfway through Shannon Reed's Why We Read, and am completely taken with Dennis Lehane's 2023 novel Small Mercies. Of all five books I've just mentioned, I suspect that Small Mercies is going to prove to be the best of the lot.

I have mixed emotions about Why We Read at the book's halfway point. This is a collection of short essays about readers, how they became readers, and why reading is so important to so many of us. But still, it's not what I thought it would be. It often tries, I think, to be too cute and clever for its own good, even to the point of making me question at one point whether or not I would be finishing it. Too, I did not expect a memoir, but that's what Reed seems to be going for here as much as anything else - and it's not a particularly insightful memoir, at that. Still, there are some gems of insights to be mined here if only I'm patient enough to keep digging...so here I stand, shovel in hand, hoping to finish Why I Read this week.

I bought Small Mercies almost a year ago when I caught it marked down to 50% of retail not too long after it was first published, and I'm just now finally getting to it. The novel is set in 1974 Boston during the period in which Boston is about to begin bussing students in order to desegregate the city's schools. Mary Pat Fennessy, a lifetime Southie resident, is looking for her daughter who disappeared on the same night that a young black man was found dead nearby. It doesn't seem likely that the two events are connected, but Mary Pat starts asking the wrong people the wrong questions, and if she keeps it up much longer the Irish mob is going to have to shut her up. The casual racism in this story is shocking by today's standards, but it reminds me that this was the norm just fifty years ago.  

Right now, I'm limiting myself to two or three active books at a time, way down from the seven or eight I usually have going at the same time, because I'm curious as to how that might affect my comprehension and overall speed. Just a little experiment to see which style fits me best at this age. But if I do at least get to begin one or two new books this week, these are among the most likely candidates to be chosen:

It's always the wildcards, though, that make reading so much fun for me, and I wonder which ones will come out of nowhere this week to claim a spot. Have a great week, everyone, have fun.

Dad Camp - Evan S. Porter

John is in panic mode now that his almost eleven-year-old daughter is about to enter middle school. Suddenly, it seems to John that he has a pre-teen daughter who is determined to fill her life with afterschool activities that won't involve him. He has been Mr. Super Dad since Avery's birth, spending all his spare time with her, and now she's pulling away. But John is not going to give up that easily, so when he spots a special father-daughter camp for late summer, he books a week there without telling Avery about his plans. Big mistake, that.

Things don't exactly get off to a rousing start. Avery sulks during the entirety of a long drive to the remote camp; John's three cabin-mates seem to be in some kind of weird competition to see which of them can be the most obnoxious and hard to get along with; and the camp is a whole lot less physically impressive than the online brochure that lured John into signing up for the week made it out to be.

What happens during the next few days, though, is going to change the lives of four men and four little girls in a very positive, and hopefully lasting, way.

Dad Camp is a very heartfelt novel about a moment that most fathers of daughters experience at some point in their lives. It reminded me of what it was like when my own daughters were about to make the transition from elementary school to middle school - a bigger leap in so many ways than most realize until their children are there. That's why I wanted to read it in the first place, but the novel didn't quite work for me. I'm sure there's a big audience for books like Dad Camp out there; I'm just not part of it. I found it all the ups and downs, and their resolutions, too predictable to ever feel much sympathy for what the fathers are going through as they desperately try to re-bond with their girls. It was so obviously going to turn out well for all concerned in the long run that I knew there was really nothing to worry about.

I'm not a fan of Hallmark or Lifetime movies because of their predictability and overwhelming tendency for everyone to end up living "happily ever after" despite whatever trauma they first have to endure. But I know there's a huge audience for that kind of movie, my wife among them. Dad Camp would make a perfect Hallmark movie, and it deserves to find its audience. I hope it does, because they will love it.

 

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler

 

I first read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1987, and I've since considered it to be one of my two favorite Anne Tyler novels. This afternoon, some thirty-seven years later, I finished reading the novel for the second time - and the tie is broken. I'm disappointed to say that Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant did not quite live up to my memories of it. I know...I know. I've changed. Or maybe I'm not in the right mood for a novel like this one right now. Perhaps I've seen too many similar stories told by now, or maybe even seen the same story told better. Whatever the case, this re-read reminds me that you don't always get what you wish for when your pick up an old favorite for the first time in decades.

Don't get me wrong. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is an excellent novel. It's just that it's an Anne Tyler novel, and I hold Tyler and other writers I consider among the best I've ever read to a much higher standard than the standard I use to judge lesser writers by (and I know that's not fair).

As are all Anne Tyler novels, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is set in Baltimore. Pearl Tull is dying, and for the first time in a long, long while she is not angry at the world. She's tired of being angry at the husband who abandoned her and his three children thirty-five years earlier, and now that her children are all relatively successful adults, she doesn't have the energy to be angry at them either. Her children, though, are still struggling with the anger Pearl passed down to them. 

Cody, oldest of the three, still resents his mother for choosing his younger brother Ezra as her favorite, and he still sees Ezra more as a rival to be competed against than as a brother. Ezra, on the other hand, is so passive and easygoing, that Cody ends up largely fighting himself, not Ezra. And because this is not a touchy-feely kind of family, Jenny directs her empathy elsewhere and becomes a successful pediatrician. None of the three think much about their father anymore, and all of them have learned to get along plenty well without ever having known the man.

But Ezra, ever the idealist, won't give up on his family. He owns an unusual restaurant, a place purposely built to remind patrons of the kind of home-cooked meals they grew up on, even to Ezra occasionally choosing what meal his customers are going to have on a given night. For every big family event, Ezra invites his mother, his siblings, and their children for a special meal at the restaurant - but the Tulls have never successfully completed even one dinner. One or another of them (usually Pearl or Cody) always stalks off in a huff somewhere around the midway point of the meal - if not even before the first bites are taken. Ezra, however, is not a quitter, and he has one last chance to make it happen. 

A family dinner has been planned for right after Pearl's funeral - with one surprise guest.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a generational saga about a family slow to learn from its past. It is a warning about what can happen when families are incapable of change, and how the sins of one generation can make life miserable for the next. Now the question is whether or not this latest Tull family dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is also going to be the last one - or if they finally get it right.

Dust jacket photo, disclaimer and all

Clete - James Lee Burke

 

I finally discovered James Lee Burke in 1990, some four books into his Dave Robicheaux series, when my favorite bookseller of all time put a copy of The Neon Rain in my hands and said "you have to take this one home with you." Thirty-four years later I've enjoyed almost forty of Burke's novels, including all twenty-four Robicheaux books, and I'm thrilled that Burke is still adding to the series. But the series addition I've been itching for for a while now is one featuring Clete Purcell, Dave's soulmate, and I finally got it. 

Clete Purcell has shared most of his life's experiences with Dave Robicheaux. The two had each other's backs in Vietnam, then again as frustrated New Orleans Police Department cops, and have continued to watch over each other now that Dave is a sheriff's detective for New Iberia Parish and Clete is working as a New Iberia private detective. If one of them is in trouble, the other can be counted on to show up with guns blazing - and this time around, Clete is going to need all the firepower he can get. 

Trouble has a way of finding people like Clete Purcell even if it has to find his Cadillac convertible first. Shortly after picking the Caddy up from a local car wash, Clete wakes up to find four thugs systematically taking the car apart. What they are looking for he hasn't a clue, but Clete does have a good idea about who might have stashed something in the car without his permission. Clete's grandniece died of a fentanyl overdose, and if there's anything he hates more than fentanyl, it's the people who deal it. So it's a red hot Clete Purcell who returns to the car wash to get some answers.

But it won't be that simple because before Clete even gets started a pretty young woman calling herself Clara Bow asks him to investigate her evil ex-husband. Clara pushes all the right buttons. She's exactly the type of woman Clete can never resist rescuing, even when it puts his own life in danger, so now things are certain to get a lot more complicated for Clete Purcell and Dave Robicheaux. If they don't figure this thing out quickly, it is not only Southwest Louisiana that's in trouble - the rest of the world will pay a heavy price.

James Lee Burke paints a dark picture when it comes to good vs. evil, and he pretty much always has. When it comes to portraying evilness, Burke doesn't blink - but he saves his best writing for flawed white knights like Clete and Dave. Burke believes that a few good men willing to stop evil in its tracks no matter the personal cost can impact the world for centuries to come. Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell are two of those good men.

Longtime readers of the Dave Robicheaux series will especially enjoy Clete because they get to experience Dave through the eyes of the man who knows him best. As powerful as this story is, I still could not help but chuckle when I realized that each of the men sees the other as the craziest and most dangerous of the pair. They both believe that the other has to be protected from himself and his urges - and both of them are correct. What a team.

James Lee Burke author photo

(Clete will be published on June 11, 2024. Look for it then.)