- Recipes for a Beautiful Life (nonfiction), by Rebecca Barry
- Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (nonfiction), by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
- The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (fiction), by Katarina Bivald
I
don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration for me to claim that my reading in
general is catholic. Catholic: “broad or wide-ranging in tastes,
interests, or the like; having sympathies with all; broad-minded; liberal” (Webster’s
New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, Fully Revised and Updated, 1996). A tiny
exaggeration, maybe, that “all” part. You’d have to look through several years
of my lists of books read to find much if any science fiction or fantasy, and a
lot of bestsellers never make it to my nightstand, either. But “wide-ranging”
seems a fair claim.
What
the three books I’m putting together in this post have in common is that all
are (1) light reading and (2) written by women. (Clive Cussler fans, be
forewarned!) One was sent to me as an Advance Reading Copies (ARC), another the
final published version, and the third (not in the order they are listed above)
I initially opened only to see where to shelve it in my bookstore.
Here’s
how I’ll refer to them: Recipes; Encyclopedia; Broken Wheel.
(1)
Recipes
confounded me. The author and her husband decide to move their family from New
York City to a small town upstate. With a much smaller income, they become
owners of an old building that needs major repair and renovation. The “simple
life” is never simple except when looked at from the outside. The author’s
proposal for a novel is accepted, however, and if she can get it written in a
year they’ll have enough to live on until the money starts rolling in.
This is an entertaining book. The children, as children will, say lots of funny things. (Very funny. I was reminded of Jean Kerr's The Snake Has All the Lines.) Rebecca and her sisters have that sister thing going on, and I relate to that, of course. Friends share meals
and wine and worries and laughs. The writer tries to find time to write and struggles to find inspiration, while children and small town life keep catching her up in a giddy swirl.
Some of the “recipes” in the title are things
to fix for meals, but most are fixes of a different kind: “Recipe: How to Heal
Your Heart,” for example, or “Recipe: Get Kids to Listen to You.” Like most of
us, the writer of this books “learns” a few lessons, passes them along to us –
then forgets them and has to re-learn them a few days and a few pages later.
Most
baffling to me, though, is that this book is basically a book about how the author did
not get her book written. The novel proposal? Advance spent, but author and editor
agree the draft of the novel is, in the author’s own (unspoken) words,
“unpublishable.” So Simon & Schuster published this story from her real
life instead? From diary, blog, whatever? Well, clearly she had to work to give
it a shape, but all I could think was that writers who spend their advances and
fail to meet their deadlines are very seldom so fortunate! I didn’t know what
to think, in the end. I still don’t.
(Am
I simply blinded by envy? Not completely, I don’t think. I want to get my novel
written!)
(2)
Encyclopedia
is the book I picked up to figure out where to shelve it. Glancing at a few
pages, I was slightly annoyed at first. Is a collection of slightly quirky lists worthy
of being a book?
I was dubious, resistant, but the book pulled me in. Finally I sat down with it and kept reading.
Soon I was smiling – and then laughing out loud, to the alarm of a few silent
browsers in the stacks.
We
are warned on the cover that the author of this memoir has “not survived
against all odds” or “witnessed the extraordinary.” This is an ordinary life.
Here, under H, is a typical entry:
HAPPINESS
I’m turning left. Look, everyone, my blinker is on, and I’m turning left. I am so happy to be alive, driving along, making a left turn. I’m serious. I am doing exactly what I want to be doing at this moment: existing on a Tuesday, going about my business, on my way somewhere, turning left. There is nothing disconcerting or unpleasant or unfortunate about this moment. It is exceptionally nice, plain, and perfect.
Not
everything is perfect, even in an ordinary life. There are ordinary annoyances
and ordinary worries. But Amy has a way of dealing with those, too:
RETURNING TO LIFE AFTER BEING DEAD
When I am feeling dreary, annoyed, and generally unimpressed by life, I imagine what it would be like to come back to this world for just a day after having been dead. I imagine how sentimental I would feel about the very things I once found stupid, hateful, or mundane. Oh, there’s a light switch! I haven’t seen a light switch in so long! I didn’t realize how much I missed light switches! Oh! Oh! And look—the stairs up to our front porch are still completely cracked! Hello, cracks! Let me get a good look at you. And there’s my neighbor, standing there, fantastically alive, just the same, still punctuating her sentences with you know what I’m saying? Why did that used to bother me? It’s so . . . endearing.
This
is a charming
book! Well, I found it so, anyway. I finished the last page wishing the author would walk in my bookstore door so we
could meet. But then -- quite honestly, I am nowhere near as light-hearted and
fun as she is. No, I’m sure it’s best to keep our friendship one-sided, within
the covers of her book.
(3) Finally, the ARC of Broken
Wheel.
How can a bookseller resist a book about a bookstore? How can a bookseller in a
small town in the northern Midwest resist a story about a bookstore in a dying
town in the cornbelt? Can a bookstore “save” the town?
Despite
the hope and excitement I felt when opening to the first page, it took me a
long time to enter fully the world of Broken Wheel. I kept turning back
to the author’s name on the cover, wondering if English might be her second
language and why, even so, no one in the publishing house had corrected
sentence moods that so obviously should have been in the subjective, e.g.,
There were only two other customers in the entire bar. One looked as though he was sleeping....
Well,
was
he sleeping, or did he simply look as though [counterfactual] he were?
I did not keep track of how many times this error found its way into the book –
and I know it is a small nit to pick – but it happened over and over again, and
every time it distracted me, my inner editor pulling me out of the story where
I wanted to lose myself, so I was halfway through the book before being finally
able to stop obsessing over was/were. I hate when that happens! I don't want my inner editor springing into action when all I want to do is immerse myself in a story.
Back to the novel --
A
stranger comes to town. It’s a classic setup. In this case, the stranger is
Sara, come from Sweden to visit Amy, who has just died. The town itself seems
very near a final death gasp. So....
Will
Sara get together in the end with Tom, the character so obviously meant
for her?
That’s one question we ask as we read this novel, though we’re pretty sure what
the answer will be, given the kind of book it clearly is. Will the
townspeople ever go in the bookstore? Will they ever buy books?
Will they read books? Most importantly, for all concerned, will
people’s lives change because Sara came to Broken Wheel and opened a bookstore? You can pretty much
guess the answers, but that doesn’t take away the pleasure of the story. This
book is one Sara herself would have shelved under “Happy Ending Guaranteed.”
Hot,
humid, busy summer days call out for the relief of light reading. Chick-lit
fiction and humorous memoir can be very healthy choices for the sun- or
work-addled summer brain. The perfect prescription, however, must be tailored
to the individual, so the final choice, as always, is up to you.
2 comments:
I'll post the first comment myself, since I now learn from a publicist for the book that it was originally written in Swedish, "a language in which the subjunctive is becoming increasingly rare." Also, since I had an ARC, the grammar may be smoothed out for the final public release.
I think I'll have to go read some of these...
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