Category Archives: Reading

Reading

"Love," "Dead" and "Compliments"

I need to start recording where I first read about the books that are on my Reading List. Books stay on there for quite some time, and I’d like to be able to go back to the source for more recommendations. Or to avoid it, if I don’t like the book they’ve suggested.

Anywho …

Here are a few I’ve read recently.

“Love and Other Impossible Pursuits” by Ayelet Waldman has been on my list since shortly after Poppy was born. That’s right around two years, for those keeping count. I hadn’t read it before now because I couldn’t find a library that carried it (and I don’t often buy books). I don’t know what possessed me to read it now, though; it’s about a woman dealing with the death of her newborn. Stupid me. I wasn’t bowled over by it, but that could have been because I had to turn off the sentimental part of my brain to get through it.

Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Brief History of the Dead: A Novel” had an intriguing premise — it’s about what happens to souls after death, and it’s set at the brink of human extinction — but, again, I was underwhelmed. This one had also been on the list for a long time. I wonder if I don’t expect more from a book that I’ve been waiting to read for awhile. Am I putting too much pressure on them?

“The Careful Use of Compliments,” by Rockfordander McCall Smith, actually wasn’t on my list at all. I picked it up off the library shelf because I’d read a few of his other books, from the “No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” series. They weren’t bad, but they didn’t really capture me. I know there are a lot of people who love Smith, but I don’t think I’m one of them. I didn’t find Isabel, the protagonist in “Compliments,” particularly compelling or even very convincingly written. And the story’s “mystery” was dull, with a pretty obvious solution. I did find it somewhat notable that this was the second book I’ve read in the last few months to prominently feature the Corryvreckan whirpool in Scotland.

Reading

"Found Letter"

American Life in Poetry: Column 122

By Ted Kooser
U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006
There is a type of poem, the Found Poem, that records an author’s discovery of the beauty that occasionally occurs in the everyday discourse of others. Such a poem might be words scrawled on a wadded scrap of paper, or buried in the classified ads, or on a billboard by the road. The poet makes it his or her poem by holding it up for us to look at. Here the Washington, D.C., poet Joshua Weiner directs us to the poetry in a letter written not by him but to him.

Found Letter
What makes for a happier life, Josh, comes to this:
Gifts freely given, that you never earned;
Open affection with your wife and kids;
Clear pipes in winter, in summer screens that fit;
Few days in court, with little consequence;
A quiet mind, a strong body, short hours
In the office; close friends who speak the truth;
Good food, cooked simply; a memory that’s rich
Enough to build the future with; a bed
In which to love, read, dream, and re-imagine love;
A warm, dry field for laying down in sleep,
And sleep to trim the long night coming;
Knowledge of who you are, the wish to be
None other; freedom to forget the time;
To know the soul exceeds where it’s confined
Yet does not seek the terms of its release,
Like a child’s kite catching at the wind
That flies because the hand holds tight the line.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2006 by Joshua Weiner. Reprinted from “From the Book of Giants,” University of Chicago Press, 2006, by permission of the author. Introduction copyright (c) 2006 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.