Summer Reading List: Update Edition

Last month I laid out my summer reading list but shortly afterwards I ended up at my favorite used bookstore with a $40 credit.  Consequently my list has expanded considerably.  I also realized I had a few books leftover from Christmas that I had never read.  So here is the addendum to my original list:

1. Fire in the Blood by Irene Nemirovsky
2. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
3. Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
4. Nerilka's Story by Anne McCaffrey
5. The Mystery of Breathing by Perri Klass
6. Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin
7. When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, by Gail Collins
8. Primitive People by Francine Prose
9. The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare

So we're up to a total of 22 books to finish before the semester starts.  How am I doing, you ask? From the original list I read most of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales.  I'm not a big fan of short stories or rather I enjoy them but I have a hard time reading one after another.  So I was very surprised that I managed to get through most of this book before I had to pick up a novel.  For the fairy tale lovers out there, there are some amazing ones in this little collection.

I also found Jane Smiley's Private Lives at the used bookstore and have finished that.  It was an interesting read as it portrayed a woman's life from 1883 to 1942, a time period that you don't normally get in a modern novel.  However I am often disappointed with Jane Smiley and this was no different.  I think I'm always hoping for another A Thousand Acres and never get it.

For book club we read Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Saves Herself.  Since book club is meeting tomorrow and there is a lot to say about this book, I'll leave that for another post.

From the above list I've read The Witch of Blackbird Pond.  For the life of me I could not remember why I had placed this book on my Young Adult To Re-Read list.  Not that it wasn't enjoyable but rather that I had no specific recollection of reading it originally (although I must have) and it didn't seem like the kind of book I would have particularly enjoyed as a young adult. Some interesting historical fiction but too much silly romance.

I also read Francine Poser's Primitive People.  I discovered Francine Poser when I picked up the book of fairy tales in the book store.  Her fairy tale was the first I read in the collection and the reason I bought the book.  She has a very engaging style and I do love satire.  This may not have been her best novel but was fun none-the-less.  I'm looking forward to reading more.

I'm also pages away from finishing Fire in the Blood.  I adored Suite Francaise and while this is not as magnificent, it is a beautifully written little book.  I've pretty much devoured it in a day.

So that is 6 down and 16 to go.  For book club next month we are turning back to fiction and will read Father of the Rain.  In the meantime I think I'll visit with Carson McCullers.   I am a big fan of A Member of the Wedding and don't know how I've gotten this far without reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

On Having A Heroine

Growing up I had several role models or people I considered my personal heroines.  I started with Elizabeth I (I had lofty aims as a young child), moved on to Amelia Earhart and then Jane Goodall. Once I realized I would never truly be an adventurer, I found Virginia Woolf.  All of these women had attributes I admired and wanted to emulate but I didn't identify closely with any one of them. These days there are many women I admire (famous or otherwise) but I don't actively search out role models or heroines.

Our next book for BB&B is Impatient With Desire by Gabrielle Burton.  It is a novel with Tamsen Donner (of Donner Party fame) as the protagonist.  I am vacationing at the beach this weekend and plan on consuming it.  Gabrielle Burton has another book out now, part memoir/part history, that I have just finished in preparation for Impatient With Desire.

In Searching for Tamsen Donner, Burton provides details of a family trip she took across the country in 1977 with her husband and five daughters.  Tamsen Donner had five daughters and took them on a journey across the country.  Burton, in order to research the novel she was writing on Tamesen Donner, decided to do the same.  It is an interesting read.  Burton supplies a lot of historical facts about the Donner Party and Tamesen Donner.  She also describes her conflicts as a writer and a mother and a feminist in a time when women weren't all that.  Tamsen Donner not only became a pioneer and took her family on an adventure but in her earlier life she was a teacher and a solo traveler in a time when women just didn't do all that.

Tamsen Donner is Burton's heroine and role model.  Burton identifies with Donner in a way I can't quite imagine.  She spends over 20 years writing a novel that she will never publish.  She, and her family, live with Tamsen Donner throughout the trip and for most of their lives together as a family.  It is a story of admiration, of eras now past, and of family.  The cannibalism was the least of it.

Burton on family:

"The nicest husbands and children will eat you up alive if you offer yourself on the plate, and they will ask for seconds."

At the end of the book she publishes the 15 of Tamsen Donner's letters that have survived.  All were to her sister.

Donner on adventure:

"I do not regret nor shall I the fatigue expense nor embarrassment to which I have subjected myself.  My heart is big with hope and impatient with desire.  And this day needful for rest finds me agitated & restless.  The past & present is swallowed up by the future.  I believe I am not influenced by the love of novelty for passionately fond as I am of scenery I have learned to look almost with disgust upon that which in other circumstances would have delighted me.  Happy am I to be enabled to hide my feelings so successfully as cause many I meet to wish to be in my situation."

The novel Burton was working on during her family travels thad two protagonists, Tamsen Donner in 1846 and a fictional woman in the 1970s, traveling the same road.  Although she never published that novel, this book tells the same tale.

Tamsen Donner kept a journal throughout her travels.  It was never recovered.  The novel Burton did published is her rendition of that journal.  I can't wait to read it.

RBOC: Writing a Grant Edition

• More great feedback from our grant consultant guru has resulted in me trying to get this grant out in a week.
• Have been reading more than writing and while I love reading, I feel stagnated when I don't write.
• I've been taking yoga and tai chi classes. Loving both but am feeling itchy without a more cardio workout.
• The weather, general bad timing, and heating problems have kept me from the steam room all week.
• Bought myself clothes today that actually fit. Although my size hasn't changed dramatically all of my old clothes were bought for my pre-40s body.
• Pumpkin landed a great new job as a graduate assistant. She'll be making more than she ever has and learning cool new things!
• Pumpkin is also in The Vagina Monologues this weekend but the show is cancelled tonight due to snow.
• Snow is falling right now and I'm trying to stay warm and cozy.
• Hair is cut and colored.

Summer Reading List

While enjoying our brief fling in our fun mountain city, b and I spent over an hour at their famous independent bookstore. I don't think I need to say how I crave a good bookstore. I stopped myself at 2 books (and one was from the 50% off sale shelf) but decided to write a list of what I wanted to buy. Book browsing also reminded me of fabulous books I own and would like to reread. So below is the beginning (in not-too-particular of an order) of my summer reading list. Any suggested additions would be most appreciated. Those marked [R] will be re-reads.

1. Mercy - Toni Morrison
2. The Worst Thing I've Ever Done - Ursula Hegi
3. Housekeeping - Marianne Robinson
4. Gilead [R] - Marianne Robinson
5. Home - Marianne Robinson
6. Moo [R] - Jane Smiley
7. Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories- Katha Pollitt
8. Middlemarch [R] - George Eliot
9. Silas Marner [R] - George Eliot
10. Truth & Beauty: A Friendship - Ann Patchett
11. Autobiography of A Face - Lucy Grealy
12. Orlando [R] - Virginia Woolf
13. Mrs. Dalloway [R] - Virginia Woolf
14. To The Lighthouse [R] - Virginia Woolf
15. The Waves [R] - Virginia Woolf
16. Briar Rose - Jane Yolen
17. Sister Light, Sister Dark - Jane Yolen
18. White Jenna - Jane Yolen
19. The One Armed Queen - Jane Yolen
20. The Gate to Women's Country - Sheri S. Tepper
21. Beauty - Sheri S. Tepper
22. Native Tongue - Suzette Haden Elgin
23. Tales from Earthsea - Ursula K. LeGuin
24. Always Coming Home* - Ursula K. LeGuin
25. The Little Disturbances of Man - Grace Paley
26. Enormous Changes At The Last Minute [R] - Grace Paley

*What I actually bought. I also bought Grace Paley's last book of poems: Fidelity but I don't include poetry on the summer reading list. Poetry should be an all-time thing. It did make me want to reread Paley's short stories, however.

Let's see your summer reading lists.

On Empty Nesting

I've been struggling with understanding the issues around this phase of motherhood. When I struggle with something on both a personal and an intellectual level I usually try to find answers in literature. However I have had very little success for this subject. I haven't found any relevant social science or pop culture or even a good self-help book that really explains for me what is going on. The research literature is also fairly silent when it comes to transitioning out of active mothering.

I have not found many blogs that address this end of the mommy spectrum, perhaps because blogging brings in a younger crowd and most mothers who blog still have very small children at home. It seems there is no empty nest community. Sometimes I think I'm over-reacting; that I am somehow pathologizing this experience; maybe it is just me who is making this a major transition in my life. Its not a horrible one (well at times it is) but it feels pretty damned significant. Other times I think about all the other experiences and transitions women have lived through that were never discussed (think menopause, date rape, and breast cancer). Lack of community doesn't necessarily make an event less real or less universal. Yet the studies I have found in the scientific literature tell me that most women, contrary to folklore, experience few negative emotions and many look forward and enjoy this time. So maybe it is just me.

The entry into motherhood is well represented. You can find support (and it is needed) in a variety of places and you can find information--some of it good, loads of it poor--on various aspect of this important transitional stage. However everything that I've found on "the empty nest" syndrome sounds placating and insufficient. I'm supposed to feel "blue" and "have the weepies" for a few weeks and then I'll be magically over it. I've also noticed that women who are actively mothering are not comfortable discussing it. I believe it is painful to even consider how you will feel when your time comes. I know I hated to think about it previously.

I realize that I'm still square in the middle of this and that my thoughts will probably change over time, however I wanted to try and sort a few of them out here, while I'm still experiencing it all. If you are at the stage where it is too painful to consider life as an inactive mother or if your world is so overwhelmed with childcare issues that you can't imagine why anyone would see this as a problem to be addressed, you may want to skip this post. However, it may be those people who need to read it the most.

One thing I've realized is that mothers (and I use the term loosely, in that I mean individuals who take a primary role in the emotional and physical caring and nurturing of a child they claim as their own--an individual's sex has nothing to do with mothering, except for the fact that it is still primarily the female sex that takes on this role) spend their lives learning their children. It is a knowledge that goes so deep and becomes so entwined with who you are that you no longer see it as knowledge. We spend a considerable amount of our time figuring out why our child did or didn't do something; what our child may be thinking or feeling or believing and why. We learn what our child likes to eat and how he or she likes to eat it. We learn all the incredibly intimate details of our children's daily worlds.

Intimacy through knowledge does not only belong to the mother-child relationship, our relationships with our partners can also include an incredibly rich and detailed knowledge of the other, especially in long-term relationships. However there are several differences, a big one being that our partners can speak for themselves (well hopefully) and care for themselves while our children (at first) cannot. So we learn to listen to them in a way we do not listen to any other person in our lives. We strive to understand them because we want to help them and because they fascinate us. We look for ourselves and our loved ones within our children. We also constantly look for who our child will be--we see glimpses of our future child.

Growing up under this scrutiny, our children also study us but they don't see us. They study us for the reasons that all people in the underdog position of a power-imbalanced relationship study their superiors--that knowledge can save them from us. The result is an incredibly intimate relationship (the relationship can be healthy or unhealthy but it still remains at a level of intimacy we rarely experience elsewhere). When I say our children don't see us I mean they can see us only as mothers not as individuals, at least initially. Not being able to see us as individuals they are completely unaware of their true power to harm us. They are aware of a superficial level of that power--and many will try out that power by screaming "I hate you" at the top of their lungs one day--but they are oblivious to the harm they cause by becoming their own person and stepping out of that intimacy; by seeking that intimacy elsewhere.

So what happens when they do leave? There is a hole that is left that no other relationship seems capable of replacing. I suppose some people do start "mothering" their partners but that seems, to me, to be (a) a poor substitute and (b) both insulting and unfair to a partner who is a fully grown and functional adult. Other people mother their pets; some refuse to stop mothering their grown children (think helicopter parent here); and some push their children to have grandchildren. I'm sure there are myriad other approaches or strategies but I haven't found a satisfactory one yet.

But lets think about that hole a bit more. The knowledge that we accumulate about our children is no longer necessary and soon becomes obsolete. Your child's favorite snack is no longer a staple on your shopping list. And your child will most likely develop new tastes and favorites that he or she would never think it important to tell you about. Other people will know his or her intimate details and will understand the person your child is becoming in ways you will never again. Now that is not to say that people don't stay the same. There will be knowledge that will continue to be useful; there will be sides of your child that probably only you will know (of course for many years these will be embarrassing to your child so you won't be able to use them anyway). However I believe people change as much as they stay the same. As individuals we realign our personal narrative to allow for change; we create more continuity than I believe is really there.

But we still own the knowledge and have no place to put it. We also have spent years being concerned about our child's welfare. As mothers we worry. This worrying is an activity. It takes up a certain amount of our time and of our emotional energy. What do you do with this worry when it is no longer applicable? As it turns out, it doesn't go away on its own (at least it hasn't for me yet). I wrote in an earlier post about being on the beach last summer with Angel and losing track of him. I thought he was in the water and the ocean was crowded. I couldn't see him anywhere and fell into default mode of imagining him in danger, knowing full well this was irrational. Angel was just in Costa Rica when the recent earthquake hit. Again, rationally I knew he was fine and that I didn't NEED to worry about him but my entire mood changed once I knew he had landed back in the States. I have also come to the recent realization that soon I won't be the first person called when something goes wrong. He will (a) know how to handle things on his own and (b) have other people--more intimate relationships--to call and reassure first. But the reaction doesn't turn off. There's just no where to put it, at least no where that is considered appropriate.

If your partner was suddenly no longer in your life as your partner (which unfortunately happens frequently) you would feel many emotions, such as hurt and anger and despair. If you are the person left you would probably feel abandoned and lonely. With time those feelings would begin to lessen. Let's say you've even managed to stay friends with your partner and the two of you enjoy a very different but satisfying relationship. At some point you would realize that you might not miss the person but you might miss being in a partnered relationship. You miss the shared intimacy; the small everyday things you do together that make up your world. You would realize that you can find this with someone else and you would look for it. When your child leaves the relationship, even if you manage to readjust your relationship, even if you have a satisfactory level and quality of contact, you miss being in a mothering relationship; you miss that intimacy. However no one is telling you to go out and find another (although admittedly this is the approach I took with Pumpkin). Instead the message is to find yourself; enjoy the free time; enjoy your partner. But what if you had already found yourself? Have been enjoying your partner? Don't particularly need more free time? How many hobbies can one have, really?

We don't have the language for the relationship between mothers and their grown children. We use the phrase "my child" to mean both the person that you are raising--who happens to be a child--and the person that you raised. However the person that you raised is not a child. In a sense you are always a mother--even if your child should die, you are still a mother. And I find people like to remind you of that fact when you are no longer, what I phrase, "actively mothering." They say it to reassure you that your identity hasn't changed but in fact it has. My identity as an active mother is far different than my identity as an inactive one. Retirement is not the same as employment. When I retire I will still be a professor but it will not be the same. And my relationship with Angel as an adult is very different from my relationship with him when he was a child. There is no way around it and it is a good thing for him. My point here is that I have gone through (am going through) a transition of the same magnitude as the one I went through becoming a mother, however the line between not being a mother and being a mother was sharply defined then whereas now it is blurry.

In my professional life I've heard a lot of talk about the problems associated with not having "coming-of-age" rituals for adolescents and young adults. We, as a society (although some cultures still have strong and meaningful rituals), no longer clearly mark the distinction between childhood and adulthood. We also, due to economic conditions, have been prolonging the time people spend in this quasi-dependent state. It may be a problem for young people; I believe the way we view adolescence in general is highly problematic for young people. Perhaps it is also a problem for mothers. The lack of a distinct boundary and a recognized mechanism for crossing that boundary, might be leaving some mothers suffering in silence and creating solutions that may or may not be healthy for them in the long run.

A Book Meme

As seen over at Radical Mama:

The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield