{"id":12981,"date":"2014-12-10T16:47:08","date_gmt":"2014-12-10T21:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=12981"},"modified":"2016-07-27T12:34:02","modified_gmt":"2016-07-27T16:34:02","slug":"help-build-the-winter-reading-book-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2014\/12\/10\/help-build-the-winter-reading-book-list\/","title":{"rendered":"The 2014 Winter Reading and Holiday Giving Booklist"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Gerald Streiter<\/a>, Creative Commons, some rights reserved<\/p><\/div>\n

Readers & Writers hosts Ellen Rocco and Chris Robinson, book maven John Ernst, NCPR staff and friends, and listeners share their picks for the best books to read by the fireside or to give to friends and family this holiday season.<\/p>\n

Here’s our book list–for winter reading and holiday gift giving.<\/p>\n

Please add titles in the comment section or email them to me: ellen@ncpr.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From co-host John Ernst<\/strong><\/p>\n

NORA WEBSTER \u2013 Colm Toibin (2014)
\nAlso: The Master, Brooklyn
\nMany readers will remember Colm Toibin as the author of The Master and of Brooklyn. Here he was written a novel that is quiet on the surface but packs an immensely powerful emotional punch. It may be his best book yet.
\nNora Webster is widowed in her forties in the prime of her life, losing a husband who was her best friend and who balanced her perfectly. She is left with four children, two houses, no job, no savings and few prospects. She fiercely resists the sympathy of neighbors and family, and struggles to re-define her life. She feels as though she is, \u201calone in a sea of people.\u201d The time is the late 1960s in Wexford, Ireland with battles breaking out in Northern Ireland and men walking on the moon.
\nThe striking thing about the novel is the sheer dailiness that Toibin instills with such charged interest. Nora makes painful decisions. She sells a beach house without consulting her stunned children. She reclaims a job she left 25 years before, only to confront a supervisor with a bitter grudge against her. She battles on behalf of her oldest son, who has developed a stutter after his father\u2019s death and is struggling in school. Most important, she finds a new outlet through music that lets her grow and develop. Toibin\u2019s diction is unadorned and direct, but he has used it masterfully to create a character whom we may be discussing for years to come. Nora Webster is indelible.<\/p>\n

A MISPLACED MASSACRE: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek – -Ari Kelman (2013)<\/p>\n

The 150th<\/sup> anniversary of the Sand Creek massacre, which took place on November 29, 1864, is just days past. It marks the date on which the 1st<\/sup> and 3rd<\/sup> Colorado volunteer regiments, commanded by Colonel John Chivington, attacked hundreds of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped in southeastern Colorado under a white flag and an American flag, having been promised protection by the U. S. Army. Over 150 of them, mainly women, children and the elderly were callously slaughtered, their bodies hideously mutilated.<\/p>\n

This book by Ari Kelman, an Assistant Professor of history at the University of California, is not mainly about the massacre but about its effect on Native people and on Coloradans. It goes to the heart of local history and of the Civil War, which has been used by some to excuse the unprovoked\u00a0 attack. The story here is of the painful struggle to organize a memorial at a National Historic Site in 2007.<\/p>\n

Nothing about the project was simple. Even the exact site of the event was in dispute. Native leaders, descendants of survivors, historians, politicians, ranchers, and Park Service employees argued and negotiated. Sometimes the atmosphere was explosive. What happened and how it happened make compelling reading with a narrative drive like a novel. The knowledge achieved here was bought in blood.<\/p>\n

LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU \u2013 Richard Ford (2014)
\nAlso: Sportswriter, Independence Day (Pulitzer) The Lay of the Land<\/p>\n

In these four linked stories, Richard Ford revives his most famous and beloved character, Frank Bascombe, whose life readers have followed from Sportswriter, through Independence Day (a Pulitzer Prize winner) to The Lay of the Land. Here is an older, crustier Frank. He is 68 and has returned to the New Jersey town of Haddam. The time is shortly after Hurricane Sandy\u2019s devastation.\u00a0 In the first story, Frank reluctantly visits the site of his former beach-front house, now destroyed, at the invitation of the man to whom he sold it, feeling undeserved guilt and some trepidation. These days Frank speaks of his \u201cdefault self,\u201d a kinder, more generous person than the cynical, death-haunted, cancer-survivor that he really is. In each of these stories he attempts to perform a humane act. He brings a special pillow to his ex-wife, Ann, who is suffering from an incurable disease in a toney extended care facility. Frank must undergo a humiliating security probe and endure his beneficiary\u2019s cool sarcasm. In another story, he responds to an urgent call to make a death-bed visit to an old acquaintance who wants to tell him that he slept with Ann years before. In another, he accepts an unannounced visit by a black woman who needs to re-live a terrible event that happened 20 years before in Frank\u2019s house. As in the novels, the stories are set in a holiday season, in this case Christmas, which lends a subtext to the action. Like Updike\u2019s Rabbit Angstrom and Roth\u2019s Zuckerman, Frank is an old friend, as decent and non-politically-correct as ever. We forgive him because he\u2019s a guy we wouldn\u2019t mind having a beer with. Before or after Christmas.<\/p>\n

OFF THE SIDELINES: Raise Your Voice, Change the World
\nKirsten Gillibrand with Elizabeth Weil. Foreword by Hillary Rodham Clinton (2014)
\nKirsten Gillibrand comes from an old Albany political family and ran for Congress in the 20th district, a race she won against a long-time incumbent (John Sweeney). If that is not enough reason to talk about this book, let me say that it is a powerful and sincere call for women to make themselves heard in the political arena — on their local school boards, in town politics, and on the national level — in other words, to get off the sidelines. Gillibrand outlines her route from corporate law to working for Andrew Cuomo at HUD in Washington, winning the congressional race in the 20th, being appointed to Hillary Clinton\u2019s vacant Senate seat and then winning two tough races in four years, ending with 70% of the vote. The issues on which Gillibrand has led in the Senate — don\u2019t ask, don\u2019t tell; medical care for 9\/11 first responders; sexual assault in the military — are important ones and reflect her vital concerns. But the book also gives one a sense of a real person, making mistakes and recovering, struggling to mesh her career with a marriage and two young boys, even dealing with weight gain on a very public stage. This is not a plastic campaign bio. Gillibrand is a voice for those who have no other champion<\/p>\n

LILA \u2013 Marilynne Robinson (2014)
\nAlso: Housekeeping, Gilead, Home
\nLila is Marilynne Robinson\u2019s third novel set in the small, tired Iowa town that gave its name to her luminous Pulitzer-winning novel, Gilead. Lila picks up the story of the hard-bitten drifter who enters a church to get out of the rain and catches the eye of the minister, John Ames, a widower thirty years her senior.
\nThe novel is a kind of contemplation \u2013 it looks back at Lila\u2019s beginnings as a neglected infant stolen away by a rootless woman called Doll and growing up among a company of migrants, weaving that story through the contemporary events of Lila\u2019s meeting and marrying Ames, having a child, struggling with an understanding of the Bible under the gentle instruction of her husband, learning gradually to trust and to accept a tentative happiness she never expected.
\nRobinson\u2019s biblically ornate language is as powerful as ever, but as others have pointed out, telling this story in the third person distances the reader from Lila and makes her harshness and continual suspicion hard to accept. In the end it seems as though the first novel, Gilead, is the brilliant centerpiece of a triptych in which the other pieces, Home and Lila, are peripheral. To switch metaphors they are mildly interesting glosses on a masterful original text.<\/p>\n

QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can\u2019t Stop Talking \u2013
\nSusan Cain (2012)
\nSusan Cain left a career as a corporate lawyer to research and write this book, a sensitive and wide-ranging look at the 30 to 50% of the population who fall somewhere along the spectrum of introversion. Cain investigates the qualities that make one an introvert and explores how introverts react in society, how they change, how they develop. She outlines the life strategies that make the best use of the positive qualities of introverts in a country like the U.S. that particularly values the qualities of an extrovert.
\nCain tackles the subject of how parents, teachers and employers can evoke the best qualities of people who are put off by intense stimulus, who work best alone, who can be socially adept but require down-time to re-charge their batteries. They are scholars, thinkers, writers, artists. They are leaders like Rosa Parks \u2013 quiet and dignified. They are corporate lawyers, like the author, who– facing a high-powered Wall Street team in a tense negotiation– avoids a battle and finds middle ground \u2013 and is later offered a job by the opposing firm.
\nThis is a book full of anecdote and lively research. It is a much-needed hymn to the quiet, reflective life in a noisy and self-aggrandizing society.<\/p>\n

ADIRONDACK LIFE AND WILDLIFE IN THE WILD, WILD EAST \u2013
\nEdward Kanze (2014)
\nAlso: The World of John Burroughs
\nEdward Kanze, a writer, guide and naturalist has written a book that is part family history, part guide to the North Country, and part natural inventory of the 18 acres where he lives, acres on which sits a house that has all the challenges of Mr. Blandings\u2019 dream house of the 1950s book and film.
\nNot to put too fine a point on it, the house is a wreck. He is advised by contractors to tear it down, but he decides to rebuild. The descriptions of its horrors, such as hundreds of dead mouse skeletons behind walls, and of the heroic exertions required to make it semi-habitable, as well as the challenges it poses to his new marriage are very entertaining.
\nKanze also writes of his deep family roots in the town that became known as Bloomingdale, going back through 4 greats of grandfather, about he and his wife Debbie\u2019s struggles to have children late in life, and about the financial pressures of his chosen life style. And he writes of finding the overgrown camp he remembers being taken to as a child by his beloved grandfather.
\nBut most of all, Kanze conveys his pleasure in documenting the plants and animals and insects among which he lives and his pride in a Park where people have lived for generations.<\/p>\n

The Children Act<\/span> –\u00a0Ian McEwan<\/p>\n

The Passage to Power, Vol. 4 of the Years of Lyndon Johnson<\/span> – Robert M. Caro<\/p>\n

Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity<\/span> – Andrew Solomon<\/p>\n

The Patriarch<\/span> – David Nasaw<\/p>\n

Chris Robinson<\/strong><\/p>\n

The windows are closed and outdoor sounds are muffled by snow.\u00a0 This quiet of winter leaves me feeling ambitious. I can take on more challenging reading assignments.\u00a0 It is time for Proust, or fat Russian novels and multi-volume Nordic memoirs. The slowness and solitude of a North Country winter feels like a great gift.\u00a0 But there is danger lurking too.\u00a0 The other morning, I watched a panel on Book TV composed of Ann Patchett, Francine Prose, Nicholson Baker and Walter Moseley. These are all formidable voices of and for literature. We\u2019ve interviewed Patchett and Prose on Readers and Writers. They were asked a simple question: Why do you like to read?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m fairly certain I\u2019ve never been asked this question. It has not been a question I have posed to myself. Immediately, I fell in love with its simplicity and elegance. I waited anxiously for the answer offered by these authors.\u00a0 Moseley loved reading because his parents loved it. For Nicholson Baker and Francine Prose, they began their love of reading because of the relief it offered from childhood fears and boredom.\u00a0 Ann Patchett\u2019s response was less direct and exposed the danger of winter reading.\u00a0 Indeed, she slipped the whole question of why she loves to read to admit that she loved reading above all else. She now resents invitations to parties or other social engagements because they\u00a0 \u00a0interfere with her reading time.<\/p>\n

I found something of myself in each of the responses from the panelists. I know I read for information and to stimulate my own thinking. I read to write. I read for both comfort and for discomfort. The only thing better than picking up a beloved author, is picking up someone who I disagree with and even hate.\u00a0 The works of those I conceive to be enemies demand a written response. They spur me to think for myself.\u00a0 So leave me to it.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I\u2019ve been reading lately:<\/p>\n

Fiction<\/p>\n