Fall Book Selections

I am offering three book choices for our Fall (pre-Christmas) book:

In Need of a Good Wife, by Kelly O'Connor McNees
Violets of March, by Sarah Jio
Mr. Churchill's Secretary, by Susan Elia MacNeal

Email your vote to kzmclain@comcast.net by Friday, November 3.

Family Love ala Brothers K

The next time I read a 600-some page book, it better have been written by Tolstoy.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate long books. In fact, there is something wholly satisfying about sitting down with a good epic novel that has a lot of pages.  I enjoyed reading, for example, Fall of Giants, by Ken Follett.

Understand also that I didn’t hate this book. In fact, at times I totally loved this book. I just don’t think it needed to be 689 pages long. I started out absolutely enchanted; I ended up skimming some of the last chapters (or whatever you would call them) and being totally and entirely annoyed at all of the characters at some time or another.

Well, I don’t think that’s exactly true. I loved the father all the way through the book. I loved his devotion to his children, and his willingness to take on his rather difficult wife at times if he felt that they were being treated unfairly by her.

The first part of the book, as I said before, enthralled me. I loved the entire scene where the narrator and Papa are watching the game. I really enjoyed the sort of stream of consciousness from the narrator, who is fairly young at this point. Through his thought process, you learn about the characters. I thought that was a clever way for the author to help us to learn about the family. And the language was so dead on. The author NAILED the way a 10- or 12-year-old speaks. For example, take this excerpt when he is talking about how much he dislikes Roger Maris because of his boring style of play: I usually like watching home runs, but there is something about Roger Maris that makes even his homers boring ……Everett says he’s from Mars, which is why he’s named Maris, so maybe it’s a racial thing. Whatever it is, it worries me a little, because one of the things Jesus used to say was to love everybody the same whether they’re geeks, Yanks, Wops, Micks, Meredith Starrs or what have you, and when I look at Roger Maris I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to pull it off. I loved those lines because it displays the way a kid’s mind works, particularly a kid’s confusion about Christianity, so accurately.

I liked the succinct way that the author would get a point across – e.g. “yak butter” (remember that Mama was the first one to talk about yak butter when she was convinced she had experienced another life as a Tibetan) became synonymous with odd things that make total sense once you look at it.  Likewise, the disabled girl (Vera) who talked with a strong lisp because of a cleft palate, became the poster child for doing the right thing even if you felt uncomfortable doing it.

Surprisingly, I enjoyed all of the baseball scenes, and I’m not even a baseball fan. But I do love to see people (real or fictitious) who just love what they do, and I think that baseball often replicates life. Ups, downs, ins and outs.

Real life families are not like the families we saw on television in the 1960s. Instead, we often experience a variety of feelings about our family members at different times. The brothers and sisters in this book were extremely different from one another, and could be annoying or wonderful, depending on the situation. But they were all loyal to one another, no matter what. Oddly, even Mama was loyal, though she was often distracted by her unrelenting alliance to her religion.

The story of Irwin was very sad. There were a number of sad situations in this book, but that was, to me, the saddest. Yet, his story ended in a positive way. In fact, the book ended positively (except, of course, for the death of Papa). And again, I thought the ending was realistic. Not perfect results for everyone, just as in real life, but general happiness and love, which is what I think this book was all about.

Still, I think it could have been done in fewer pages!