Learning Something New

Title: Bobbed Hair and Bootleg Gin
Author:  Marion Meade
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN-10: 0156030594

Much of the 21st century classic literature list in many high schools draw from the American writers of the 1920s - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thurber.  But more neglected are the women writers of the time - Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber.  I stumbled on this audiobook through my library and am very glad that I did.  It has given me a new perspective of these writers and my image of the Roaring Twenties.

Each of these woman resisted the traditional image of what women could do and be during the early part of the 20th century. Each of them earned their own money as a writer and made a lot of their own choices in where they lived, who they lived with and what assignments to take.  Parker was married, but was most often without her husband.  Zelda, often known as the wife of Scott, was a writer in her own right (at times, earning more than Scott) and pursued professional dancing later in life to prove that she could do it.  St. Vincent, as a young woman, was dynamic and irresistible to many men.   She flitted from man to man until she settled, a bit with one who became not just her husband, but her manager, secretary and nurse.  Ferber, author of Showboat and Cimarron, wrote fiction, non-fiction, articles and was both a serious journalist and a playwright. 

Like the famous men of the era, these women spent the Roaring Twenties roaring.  alcohol was the foundation of most social engagements and binge drinking was more the norm than unusual.   The literary circle in New York was fairly small - meeting at the Algonquin Hotel and using the same publishers and editors - and the circle greatly influenced each other. Many writers of the time also lived for extended time in Europe, and especially Paris, where Hemingway's influence became more pronounced.

However, what most surprised me was the portrayal of the 1920s.  It was difficult to imagine the setting with model T Fords, grainy sepia pictures and short flapper dresses rather than the modern New York of crowded streets, high fashion and business, and constant travel.    At times the story reads like a Kardashian reality show - with affairs, drugs, abortions, attempted suicides, nervous breakdowns, and rivalries.   Although I know the 1920s was an era of massive change - socially, politically and economically - my image has often been more like ancient history, rather than modern.  This books made me re-adjust how I think about the time period and has led me to re-discover these writers. 

The style of the book is chronological - each chapter is a year and the narrative switches between each of the authors and highlights important events or incidents during the year.  Therefore the book
is written a bit more like sound bites, rather than an authoritative biography.  Marion Meade has also written a more detailed biography of Dorothy Parker and there are many other biographies of the other women. But, when a book spawns further investigation into its subjects, I think that is a sign of a good book. 

Family Secret, National Embarrassment

Title: Sarah's Key

Author:Tatiana de Rosnay

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 1st edition (September 30, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312370849

 

I'm a sucker for historical fiction, and I'll blame/commend my dad for that. He was always interested in history and taught me to love it too. Like many other adolescents, I had my phase of reading through all the Holocaust books available for young adults - the ubiquitous Anne Frank, plus some fiction titles. I moved on to non-fiction adult titles, all in a quest to understand, like many others have asked, "How could it happen?"

 

Not long ago, I read and posted on "The Book Thief" which was clearly a fictional creation as the narrator was Death himself. In Sarah's Key, the narrator is a modern woman, Julia, trying to investigate a family secret and a French national embarrassment. Wrapped around the mystery is her disintegrating marriage to a French man and her re-emergence as an independent woman.  Spoiler alert - do not read if you don't want to know the plot.  There are some interesting surprises!

 

Julia, an American-born woman, inherits from her French husband's grandmother, an apartment in Paris. At the same time, as a journalist, Julia is assigned to report on a commemoration of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup.  As the Nazis occupied France, they coerced the local population and police into rounding up and deporting the Jewish adult population to the concentration camps.  However, the children were left behind in horrible conditions.  It is a part of French history that many wish to forget, as Julia is reminded by several people.

 

Flashing back in time, Sarah locks her brother into a hiding place in their apartment to keep him from the round up.  Not knowing the true intention, Sarah assumes that she will be back for him.  However, she and her parents are confined to an arena, and then separated. Her parents are shipped off and she is confined with the other children.  She convinces another child to escape and they are taken in by a sympathetic older farming couple.   However, her friend, being ill is both seen by and betrayed by a doctor, leaving Sarah with the older couple, desperate to return to Paris and free her brother.  Disguising her as a relative, the couple takes Sarah to the apartment, to find the decomposed body of her brother in the locked cupboard.  A new family occupies the apartment - Julia's husband's family.

 

Through Julia's investigation, she follows the trail of Sarah from Paris, to the US, and then to Italy.  Her husband's family both dread and are relieved to have the family secret in the open.  As Julia gets deeper into the story of Sarah, her marriage begins to dissolve.  But, Julia re-discovers her own personality and passions.

 

The constant shift of time and narrator at times was distracting.  Just as I began to visualize the story, it shifted to a new place and time.  At first I found Julia a bit whiny, but over time I began to understand how she had become who she was.  However,  my greatest sympathies, of course, were with Sarah, who had survived the Holocaust, but could never get past the guilt of that survival. 

A Book about Stealing Tea!

Title: For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History

Author:  Sarah Rose

Date: 2011

Publisher: Penguin Books

ISBN:  0143118749

Tea and books - there is no better combination. Not even chocolate and peanut butter!  And this is a book about how tea got to be a British monopoly and the drink of choice for the British Empire.

Up until the first Opium War, the secrets of growing and processing tea was closely guarded by the Chinese Dynasties. But with the conquering of China in the war, many new trade cities were opened to the East India Company and paved the way for Scotsman Robert Fortune to engage in some industrial espionage and smuggle the tea plants and seeds of China into the fully conquered country of India and try to reproduce the conditions for tea growing and processing.  Not only did Fortune sneak into the interior of China twice to abscond with tea, he also had to figure a method of transporting thousands of plants and seeds across water and time without detriment.  Once in India, other gardeners took over the planting and tending the precious cargo and within a few decades, India became the main source of British tea.  This brief summary highlights none of the details included by the author that shows her in-depth research of Fortune’s journey and subterfuge.  

Much of the quotes from Fortune's time make me cringe with overt racism and discrimination against the conquered Chinese people.  Like most of the other conveniences of cheap modern life (such as sugar, cotton etc), the tea trade has been built on the subjugation of people and corporate greed.  However, the author highlights the enormity of the impact of Fortune’s theft and made me re-consider the origin of the drink I truly love.  Through out the book, I constantly remarked, like I do when watching How Its Made, “Hmmm… I never thought about how people came up with that idea.”  Modern tea plantations look idyllic and inviting, but the history is very complicated.

I've Been Ristening

One of my favorite books is the short ode to reading entitled The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life by Steve Leveen, the founder of one of my favorite stores to window shop, Levengers.  I have listened and read this book several times over the past few years because it constantly inspires me to re-start my readerly life when I feel it begins to fade into the banality of everyday life. 

Leveen devotes a chapter to the listening of books and the inability of our vocabulary to express the difference between reading with our eyes and reading with our ears.  Is listening to a book "cheating"?  As a classroom teacher, I've been posed this question many times by parents and pre-service teachers. 

But, what is reading?  In my mind, it is understanding and making personal meaning of a text composed by someone.  Do I have to have eyes on the text to classify it as reading?  Or, can I wrestle with the ideas presented by the author through listening to it?

I would agree that I tend to focus a little closer when I'm eyes-on reading, as I can't really be doing anything else but focus on the text to be able to decipher the letters.  But, I can be just as easily distracted by the TV or a phone conversation and lose the sense of the text.  When I'm ears-on reading, I could be physically doing something else, driving, ironing etc., but my mind is more focused.  Though, I will have to admit, much of my ears-on reading takes place right before falling asleep, or at 3 am when I'm trying to get back to sleep.

Though I sometimes wondering if listening to books will turn out like an old Disney movie entitled The Monkey's Uncle in which high school students listen to their history lessons read in a female voice, to learn the facts.  But when they have to recite the lessons, the woman's voice comes out, rather then their own.  When I encounter the printed version of books I've listened to, I can only read the text with the actor's voice in my head.

With limited choices in my local digital library, I've been trying titles of books that I might not otherwise read with eyes-on.  Many times I've been pleasantly surprised by these titles - many of which have appeared on this blog.

I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious . . .

Title: The Book Thief

Author: Markus Zusak

Date: 2007

Pages: 576

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

ISBN: 978-0375842207

A book narrated by death – not a typical narrator. And death has a sense of humor and compassion for the book thief, Liesel who stole her first book at the grave-site of her brother. A handbook for grave diggers. When her mother sends her to a foster family, she meets a compatriot in her foster father, a painter and violinist. Her foster mother is rough and sharp tongued, but strong and smart. Liesel becomes frenemies with Rudy and is teased at school for being uneducated. With various traumas surfacing each night in her dreams, her foster father begins midnight reading lessons. Liesel learns the power of words and wielding word in WWII Germany as Hilter begins his campaign against Jewish people. Because of an old promise to her foster father, the family hides a Jewish man, Max, who also befriends Liesel and builds new stories with her. As Germany rises and falls, Liesel's childhood is filled with unique characters, the illicit pleasure of stealing forbidden books, and treading a fine line of secrecy and discovery. Being a book narrated by death, the body count is not unexpected but it is still difficult to comprehend. The author uses a very interesting tone and style throughout the book that at first was distracting but became comfortable over the first few chapters. It was originally intended as a young adult book, yet because of the movie released in 2013, the book has been taken up by adult reading groups.

Here is some background and discussion questions from One Book, One Chicago 2012

Other discussion questions from LitLovers

Beach Read

Title: How to Bake a Perfect Life

Author: Barbara O’Neal

Date: 2011

Publisher: Bantam Books

ISBN: 978-0-553-38977-6

A few months ago my local newspaper had a list of food related novel.  Some were mysteries, others were beach-reads.  This was a beach read - a fun, easy and it even came with recipes.

Ramona is trying to make a living baking the 100 year old house she inherited from her grandmother.  With multiple major repairs on house, Ramona is drowning.  Then  her pregnant daughter’s soldier husband is badly wounded and Sofie leaves to be with him.  However, she leaves behind her step-daughter, Katie, who was taken from her drug addicted mother’s home.  In between this drama, Ramona meets the kind boy who befriended her during her 15th summer that she spent with her aunt learning how to bake and giving birth to Sophie.  The story alternates between each of the major actors and flashbacks.  There is a fun twist at the end and a few good recipes.   Not a great book, but a fun read .

Power of One Formidable, but Together, Better

Title: The Necklace: Thirteen Women and The Experiment That Transformed Their Lives

Author: Cheryl Jarvis

Date: 2008

Pages: 222

Publisher: Ballantine Books

ISBN: 978-0345500724

As a teacher of literature, I've often had my students read Guy de Maupassant short story, “The Necklace.” In the story, Madame Loisel, unsatisfied with her life, almost refuses to attend a society gather, but relents when her friend loans a spectacular diamond necklace. With the necklace, Madame Loisel feels like she is the star of the party, but loses the necklace on the way home. She is too embarrassed to tell her friend, and goes into deep debt to purchase a new necklace to replace the lost one. To pay off the debt, Madame Loisel works harder and longer and become a bitter, tired old woman. When she meets her friend years later, Madame Loisel is unrecognizable and she blames her friend for her misfortunes. If her friend had not loaned her the diamond necklace, she would not have lost it and gone into debt. When she admits her deception to her friend, she is confronted with a chilling response, “"Oh, my poor Mathilde! But mine was imitation. It was worth at the very most five hundred francs! . . . "

Usually high schoolers are incredulous that Madame Loisel would hid the loss of the necklace and not just admit it. Often though, adult readers understand the prideful ego that led Madame Loisel to conceal her carelessness. Madame Loisel was concerned primarily about how the world perceived her, she longed to portray herself as wealthy and influential. Adults also understand how life often works as ironically as the ending – that what we think is real often is false, and we pay for this disillusionment.

Why do I mention Guy de Maupassant's story? Although Cheryl Jarvis's reporting of the true story of a diamond necklace the belonged to thirteen women in California in 2004 does not have the dark ending of de Maupassant's it exposes the facades many women present to themselves and the world, and how a necklace exposes these masks.

Each chapter is dedicated to one of the women involved in the time-share necklace, but the idea originates with Jonell. As a real estate agent, she frequently rewarded herself with something special after a good sale. When she sees a $37,000 tennis-style diamond necklace, she wonders why ordinary people can't experience extraordinary luxury. If she could convince several other women to buy a share of the necklace, and share the wearing of it, then everyone could feel the luxury. After phone calls and emails, she convinces a small group to time-share the necklace, and with the gracious pricing of the jewelry store owned who significantly reduced the price to $15,000, the women had a necklace to wear for 28 days around their birth date.

The group met for the first time to set some ground rules – the name of the necklace became Jewelia and at the end of the time-share, the woman with the necklace would host the next meeting. Each woman came to the group with different reasons for buying into the necklace, different seasons in life, and different expectations of the group. Without the necklace, many of the women would have never met each other. However, the necklace inspired each woman to examine herself and her desires from life. They discarded the masks they wore and began to embrace their potential.  Additionally, collectively, the group began to take up local causes, fund-raise, and become involved in their local community. In the group, the women found themselves to be both accepted and challenged. Over time, their experiment in time-sharing a luxury item become fodder to local and national news.

Each chapter is a short profile of each of the woman and are not fully realized, even though the author spent several weeks with each of the woman. But, as the necklace and group symbolized potential for the women, the book symbolizes potential for any woman to envision a life that fulfills her true possibilities. This theme is clearly evident with the opening quote:

“Here we are, women who have been the beneficiaries of education, resources, reproductive choices, travel opportunities, the Internet, and a longer life expectancy than women have ever had in history.

What can and will we do?” ― Jean Shinoda Bolen

For current information about the Jewelia group, their webpage is The Women of Jewelia.