This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

 

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a fine, but underwhelming collection of essays that were previously published (for the most part) in various magazines Patchett wrote for. There a few stand-outs, but once again I feel like Patchett's strength lies in fiction. It's her personality more than the writing that doesn't jive with me, so it may just be a personal problem with me.

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Most of us are full up with bad stories, boring stories, self-indulgent stories, searing works of unendurable melodrama.  We must get all of them out of our system in order to find the good stories that may or may not exist in the fresh water underneath.

Forgiveness, therefore, is key.  I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.  again and again throughtout the course of my life I will forgive myself. 

the more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the  more writing will get on the page.

My mother used to say the more lost you are, the later it got, the more you had investedin not being lost.  That's why people who are lost so often keep heading in the same direction.

The Golden State

 

The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Essentially ten days in the life of a young mother as she grapples with grief and loss, the deaths of some students she mentored becoming a catalyst for her to realize her life has become overwhelming. She spontaneously decamps to a house in a small northern California town that her mother has left her, and she tries to figure out her next steps. It's told in stream of consciousness that becomes unique if only because it illustrates the relentlessness of being a parent to a small child. Despite what else is going on, the child must be fed, changed, entertained, etc. She isn't an exemplary parent, which makes it all the more relatable. As she reaches out for connection in the small town she realizes her own strengths and priorities and gives her the motivation to move forward. I personally loved the peek inside the mind of this young mother, the characterization of her and the small town felt spot-on and honest.

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observation is violence, anyway, as any Orientalist knows

"You're never safte from bad things happening..."

"you suffering won't ease anyone else's suffering."

Your Duck is Not My Duck

Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories by Deborah Eisenberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is an art to the short story and I am not sure I fully appreciate it. Instead of a short novel, the short story seems to glory in vagueness and abrupt endings. I'm sure there is an art to reading them and a key to understanding, but it seems to elude me lately. So while I did enjoy some of the stories in this collection, there were others that I thought were frustratingly obtuse. I did enjoy her observations on language and especially the thoughts in "Merge" about the first words humans spoke and how our communication, the written word especially has allowed us to become who we are. And "The Third Tower" about how who we are develops from how we associate different and unique thoughts from the names of things. In fact, those stories hold enough ideas in them that I might give this collection another go after I've given it some time to marinate.

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to observe the moment when, at the heart of the conflagration, the trees that sustained it became phantoms, the fire's memory.

"Can you believe that all that turned out to be then? At the time I somehow thought that it was now.  Did it occur to you that it was going to be then?

The tool that doesn't work, Ernst called language.

Maybe these pictures are memories that somehow became detached from other people and stray through the universe, slipping through rips in the fabric and clinging to whatever living beings they can, faulty beings like her.

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

 

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a fun read. A man dies in Vera's tea shop and she takes it upon herself to solve the murder. She does this by befriending the suspects, making them special tea, feeding them food that sounds amazing, and giving out advice in her demanding, no-nonsense, Vera way.

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Why We Sleep

 

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sleep is more important than anyone would think. I do think we've come a ways since this book was published (maybe because of it?). Walker does a great job of recounting numerous experiments that show how important sleep is and all the ways we cheat ourselves of getting the whole benefits of sleep. I loved his ingenious and imaginative (and specific) ways we can educate and practice sleep hygiene. If there was one thing he didn't cover as in depth as I wished was why we vilify sleep as a culture--the person who wakes up early and works late in the evening is always more admirable than the one who wakes late or leaves early. But at least he makes an airtight case for those of us willing to buck the system and sleep a full eight hours!

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REM sleep, was clearly needed in order for us to heal emotional wounds.

Reality and perceived reality were no longer the same in the "eyes" of the sleepless brain.

Never definitely on or off, the brain of a narcoleptic patient wobbles precariously around a middle point, teeter-tottering between sleep and wakefulness.

We, and not the rotating mechanics of planet Earth, would not decide when it was "night" and when it was "day".  we are the only species that has managed to light the night to such dramatic effect. 

Miracle Creek

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was impressed by the depth and breadth of this mystery/trial story. A hyperbaric chamber has been blown up with patients inside, resulting in death. The problem is nothing is at it seems. Kim does a credible job of convincing the reader of the guilt of one character only to reveal some new secret that changes points to a whole new suspect or discredits all the previous assumptions. But besides being a great crime drama, Kim also explores issues such as immigration, fertility, racism, and sexual exploitation. She tackles autism and other disabilities and the challenges of being a parent of a nontypical child--the exhaustion, the guilt, the frustration, the relentlessness of it. But she also captures the community that can spring up among those experiencing the same difficulties--the support and also some of the competition and envy. But she also ties in how hard it is to just be a parent, how you show love and how kids recognize it (or not).

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But what he hadn't known, hadn't expected, was that this linguistic uncertainty would extend beyond speech, and like a virus, infect other parts: his thinking, demeanor, his very personality itself.  In Korean, he was an authoritative man, educated and worthy of respect.  In English, he was a deaf, mute idiot, unsure, nervous, and inept.

Good things and bad--every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness--resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential. 

Anxious People

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think I might be being generous. I felt like this cutesy telling of a bank-heist-hostage situation was all over the place. There were flashbacks, and witness statements, and more flashbacks and backstories and more flashbacks. Maybe it was me but it was hard to keep it all straight. Especially since there were also mistaken identities, flashback tie-ins, and missing persons. And new persons hiding in the bathroom. It ends nice, but the first part emphasizes everyone's problems and anxieties and made me a little depressed myself. Maybe another time in my life I would have enjoyed this but as it was, it was just a little too much--too twisty, too cutesy, too quirky-corny.

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