Sunday Caught My Interest

Summer is in full swing here in the Hinterland. We had a few days of very hot weather but it seems to have settled down  to more seasonable temperatures. Himself is done with his traveling and aside from a few days in the office, he is spending his time in the house and yard making one dog very happy. It does make the days run into each other and I lose track of what day of the week it is. The Fourth of July is a very big deal in our small town and we went to the local parade and annual BBQ at friends. I made a spinach and grapefruit salad and Kahlua Mocha Chocolate Cream cookies (a big hit). However absolutely no reading went on this week. And I am slowly getting used to Feedly – still some kinks to work out.

Here is what caught my interest this week:

JoAnn from Lakeside Musing posted a sentence from Claire Massud’s novel The Woman Upstairs:

Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn’t that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying – valiantly, fruitlessly – to eradicate.

What a delicious sentence. The Woman Upstairs is about Nora, a forty-two elementary school teacher leading a lonely unfulfilled life – a life that doesn’t fit her expectations at all. Then she becomes obsessed with the family of one of her students – an obsession which she feels leads to her living an authentic life. But is it real? It sounds like a novel that explore the intricate illusions we weave in our own lives.

Speaking of sentences, Heaven Ali has a post on the best opening lines of classic fiction (Pride and Prejudice and Rebecca, among others). I really liked the opening line of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between:

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Written in the 1950’s, The Go-Between is the reminiscence of Leo, looking back at his life, particularly the events of the summer of 1900 when he was thirteen. Leo became the go-between between the daughter of the house he was staying at and a tenant farmer, a clandestine relationship doomed because of the differences in social strata of the two. The look back allows Leo to see the huge impact being a go-between had on his life.

Two non-fiction books caught my interest this week. The first is The Truth about Luck by Iain Reid (reviewed by Buried in Print). Iain Reid is just starting his adult life and his ninety-two year old grandmother comes to visit him in Kingston, Ontario for five days. They explore London and during their “staycation”, Iain learns about his grandmother’s life. I am very grateful that my mother has a wonderful relationship with my boys and they also love hearing her stories (as do my nieces and nephews). If the author can convey the specialness of this relationship, then he has succeeded in doing an important thing.

The second non-fiction work is also about family but on a macro-scale is Carolyn Abraham’s The Juggler’s Children: A Journey into Family, Legend, and the Genes That Bind Us (also reviewed by Buried in Print). Being from a LDS (Church of Latter Day Saints) background, genealogy is a part of my heritage. If I have a question about any branch of my family, chances are some relative of mine has done the research. When Carolyn Abraham’s daughter is born, she becomes interested in exploring her ancestors and one of the tools she uses is DNA. Her use of mitochondrial DNA leads to interesting results and interesting conversation both within her family and with the reader. Buried in Print writes, “Carolyn Abraham has come to see the family search as a ‘modern tango, a dance between DNA and documentary evidence, science and paper'”.

Happy Reading!

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