I needed a shift, after all the Le Guin in November. No one can match her, in my estimation, so the best followup for her stories is often something really light and easy. I chose an author who fictionalizes an entirely different realm, and tells her story with an entirely different voice.

S is for Silence
Sue Grafton

Good pulp is how I think of the Kinsey Milhone mysteries – not meaning to cast any aspersions on the author, the story or the genre. What I mean is that the stories are fast and engaging, may introduce a few thought-provoking items here and there but are not focused on them as major themes, and generally are fun to read, however morbid or scary. Pulp can be bad, but good pulp is characterized by smooth story-telling, someone who can hold your attention but keeps it light and easy.

This particular novel was structured a little differently than the others (A is for Alibi through R is for Ricochet). The story, like all the mysteries in the series, are set in the 1980s, but the mystery is rooted in the 1950s, so the chapters moved back and forth in time, a few set in the present day, interspersed with a chapter set in 1953, telling the events from a particular character’s point of view.

Of course Kinsey figured it out. She always does.

It was a good break from the extremely thought-provoking, take me to another place worlds of Le Guin. Also a good addition to the series.

I feel bad about my neck
Nora Ephron

In a rare moment of literary commitment, I’ve been reading a non-fiction book at the same time as a book of fiction. Very rare for me these days, and therefore notable.

Nora Ephron is a great writer, in the sense of just laying her thoughts in everyday language. She might be sitting across the table from me at some New York bistro, telling stories from her life. Each chapter focuses on some aspect of her life, like hating her neck as she ages, or falling in love with an apartment, or how parenting has changed over the last few decades. I was three chapters in and decided to buy my mom a copy for Christmas.

Ephron’s priorities are entirely different than mine – I, for example, don’t think a lot about my neck wrinkles, or fret over my designer handbag, or my hair. But I fret about other things as I age, as my body and my priorities shift through the years, so I could find common ground in the general sense if not the particulars. And it speaks volumes that Ephron, living an entirely different kind of woman’s life than I, could still reach across our differences and resonate for me.

I haven’t finished this book, treating it somewhat like a magazine of good articles I pick up and put down at will. It sits on the coffee table, and periodically I open it and read an a chapter or two. Great stuff.

Now is the Time to Open Your Heart
Alice Walker

Not my favorite of her works, but it was worth reading. Alternates between Kate, who is off on a central American shaman-guided journey to discover more about her inner, middle-aged and somewhat lost self, and her lover Yolo, who is off on a Hawaiian vacation doing something of the same, but in a much less directed fashion. In the end, they make their own ritual, their own way of finding their path.

Kate doesn’t feel the effects of her shamanic journey after a while, but the effects of the other people in her group are deep and life changing; in this sense, she doesn’t really “get” what she’s after when she signed up for the journey, but in a larger sense she gets exactly what she needs from the others in her group. Mission accomplished.

Yolo hopes for a Hawaiian vacation with complete absence of plan, basically just sitting on the beach, lazing around. Instead he gets pulled into a local family’s crisis, sharing ritual and grief with them at the loss of one of their members, but it’s not the usual family. Yolo meets up with a group of Mahus, the island version of effeminate gay man (nothing like a drag queen, mind you), and through them reconnects with old friend (female). Instead of finding his center by reading in a lounge chair on the shore, he finds it in the mutual bonds of those who are grieving not only the loss of one particular young man, but the effects of meth addiction on local people and the familial culture of Hawaii.

Kate and Yolo reconnect at the end of the story, bringing their separate experiences into a cohesive whole. As I said, it’s not my favorite of Walker’s works, but it was very interesting.

It occurs to me in this description of the book that I haven’t once mentioned that the characters are black. And American. Does that go without saying if one is reading Alice Walker? I don’t really know; I guess I would expect Walker to write primarily about black people, American and otherwise, but on the other hand, it wouldn’t surprise me if she placed a white person as a central character in a novel, and I think she could do a good job of it. But most likely she has no need; the stories she needs to tell are not “our” stories (speaking as the white writer I am) but rather the stories of her community and her family.

Also, though I didn’t mention the race of the two main characters until just now, certainly their “background” is part of the telling of their experience. How could it not be? But I guess I’ve started to think that of every thing I read – the experience of the author, the background of a fictional or actual character, cannot be separated from the story that they have to tell, or is told about them. Context is everything, I often say. Perhaps not everything, but a big part of it. So perhaps I didn’t think to point out the race of the characters because I’ve gradually stopped assuming everyone I read about is white, that their background and perspective might come from any direction. I am more ready for whatever that might be.

The Fellowship of the Ring
JRR Tolkien

I needed some familiar land to return to, explore, re-experience. Tolkien leapt to hand (though I briefly considered Alcott’s Little Women) but I can’t say quite why this one appealed this particular time.

I never can. But I do have this habit of returning to familiar works, kind of like deciding to go home for a while when life throws too many upsets ones way. Sometimes it’s the original Dune series, sometime an old favorite like Alcott’s Little Women or Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, and sometimes it’s the Lord of the Rings. What all of these works have in common is this: they each take me to a place where people try to behave with good ethics and wise hearts, when faced with what seem to be nearly insurmountable odds. Each also takes me to another place, another world: Middle Earth, or the futuristic feudal universe of Herbert’s Dune books, or the community-based anarchy of the Na Valley (Le Guin) or the unfamiliar world of the progressive Christians living in the mid-nineteenth century Northeast United States (Alcott). All are places in disorder, but the main characters are striving to find their own sense of the world, even as they try to better the lives around them. All the characters are human, not heroic; sometimes the story is even built around the dichotomies of all-too-human heroes. All focus on people trying to Do The Right Thing.

Why I sought Tolkien’s Middle Earth saga this time is hard to tell. It’s been a couple of month of upsets and deaths: first a friend, then in early December my dear old 22-year old cat (making the decision to euthanize being a major part of that). At the same time, my elderly dog is heading down the same road; though pets are sometimes dismissed as not worth grieving over, these are my long time friends, my responsibility, my family members. I’ve raised them from childhood, and seen them into their elder years. It’s a microcosm of the course of a life, all unfolding before my eyes, and in my hands to foster for better or worse. No wonder I’ve been pondering deep things all through the month.

Then on Christmas Day, my stepfather died. His death was expected, but nonetheless hard. Within a few days, I knew I needed to “go home” and find my path by reading about that of another. And it wasn’t so much Frodo who called to me from Tolkien’s story, but the other characters: Sam, and Merry and Pippin, and all those who lived ordinary Middle Earth lives until the epic events of the story began to ripple through even the most unremarkable of lives.