A Covid-19 Christmas

All month, we had no lasting snow, just lots of green grass...

...but then it did snow for Christmas!

This week, we delivered packages to our son and his girlfriend, meeting in their back yard, masked. Sunny and Ellie are always thrilled to see us. My brother stopped by and delivered presents. We visited, masked. He has social distanced, and his workplace monitors the 180 employees not working remotely, requiring masks and social distancing.

It's just me and my husband for Christmas Day.

My husband gifted me A Promised Land by Barack Obama and Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson.

I surprised my husband with a tea set purchased from a Twitter friend who is an author and a potter. 

My brother's gifts included a What Would RBG Do? mug.

For our last book club of the year we read The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. Next month we read The Wicked Sister by Michigan author Karen Dionne and she will Zoom with us!

Book mail included We Hope for Better Things by Erin Bartels, a Michigan author. I read the galley before it came out. I was glad to win a finished copy form A Novel Bee Facebook group. I just read the galley for Bartel's new book coming out next month, All That We Carried, plus I had ordered the finished copy with a signed bookplate and it came in.

Other book mail included Better Luck Next Time by Julia Claiborne Johnson, a LibraryThing win. My review is coming next month, too.

I requested two Amazon Vine books to review. A young reader book on disabled role models, I Am Not A Label,

And Machine Embroidered Art.

My son and his girlfriend sent us lovely cookies a few weeks ago, and more this week. They are too pretty to eat! (But we did, with Simpson & Vail tea that they sent us!) We will finish the cookies off today, and use the tea set for the tea.

My husband's brother and his wife sent us lovely Michigan cherry edibles.

Two new NetGalley titles are on my shelf:

• Eleanor in the Village:  Eleanor Roosevelt's Search for Freedom and Identity in New York's Greenwich Village by Jan Jarboe Russell 
• Poems to Night by Rainier Maria Rilke, the first translation and publication of a group of poems presented to Rilke's friend Rudolph Kassner

Here is my obligatory grand-pup pics. Sunny snuggled down, one of my quilts in the background.

And, Sunny sharing her dinner with Gus (who does not share with Sunny!) Ellie eats on the other side of the fence so Sunny doesn't steal her food, too! We don't know how Sunny stays so skinny!

With vaccines being distributed to our essential workers, perhaps this pandemic will begin to be contained. And perhaps this summer will find 'life as normal' again. 

Or at least, some semblance of normal. I have the luxury of staying in and staying safe. I have my books and my quilting. Our son and his girlfriend work safely from home. 

But for hundreds of thousands, 'normal' will never come again. Loss of loved ones, loss of income, economic hardships--some things will not go away. We donated hundreds to food banks in the last month. But it doesn't feel like doing enough.

Stay safe out there. Have a safe holiday season, however you celebrate it. 

Questions Answered with 2020 Books Read

Quite a few years ago on Facebook I happened upon a meme that I have enjoyed sharing every year.

Answer these questions with the titles of books read in 2020:

Describe Yourself: The Wicked Sister

Describe Where You Currently Live: The Mission House...but Once Upon a Time I lived on Mars

If you could go anywhere, where would go? Miracle Country. Or, at least Hoboken near The Long Bright River. 

Your best friend is: Other People’s Pets.

You and your friends are: The Dearly Beloved: Pelosi, Eleanor, Nora, Jack, JFK, and Sergeant Salinger.

What’s the Weather Like: Angry Weather

Favorite time of day: The Darkest Evening

What is life to you: Hieroglyphics

Your fear: What The Eyes Don’t See—The Violence Inside Us. The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing.

What is the best advice you have to give: Superman’s Not Coming. 

                                               

Thought for the day: Shelter in Place

                                           

How I would like to die: in My Bed

My soul’s present condition: knowing I am one of The Fortunate Ones

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

My library book club's choice this month was Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child, a novel that had been sitting on my TBR shelf for some time. I was happy to finally read it, especially as I had read and reviewed her second novel, To The Bright Edge of the World through NetGalley.

It turns out that The Snow Child interrupted Ivey's writing of that novel. She caught a story and couldn't let it go.

I had heard so much positive buzz about this book! Then, it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in literature!

The book clubbers all enjoyed reading The Snow Child, one saying she didn't expect to like it but was 'hooked'. Several enjoyed it, but thought it would be a 'one time read.' Another labeled the novel as a 'historical romance fantasy.'

The readers loved the descriptive writing of the Alaskan landscape, one saying nature itself became a character in the book. A reader was impressed by the realistic exploration of childlessness and the challenges of marriage.

Of course, there was great debate over the tension between realism and fantasy in the novel, the question of the nature of Faina, the 'Snow Child' who appears out of the snow and is adopted by the childless, middle-aged homesteaders, Mabel and Jack. Is she real? Is she a magical being? Is she human? We wondered about Faina's killing of a swan and her use of the feathers on her wedding dress. Was she the swan? Was the swan her burgeoning sexuality or attachment to the wild and free life? 

Faina is at home in the wild where she is free and independent. Jack and Mabel lure her into their lives, but she disappears over the summers. She seems trapped between two worlds. When her need for companionship results in circumstances that will keep her from her wild and free world, she fails.

We talked about this being a feminist novel. The childless homesteader wife Mabel had lost her her one baby. She thought that by leaving the East for Alaska, she and her husband would be equal partners. It takes her husband's incapacitation to allow her to become a full partner. 

Mabel begins in isolation, alienated from her back-home sister and family, and alone in Alaska. When the neighboring family barge into her life with their good-natured willingness to help out and socialize, being in community literally is a life saver. The neighboring wife wears men's pants and displaying a competent, almost joyous, attitude in her ability to wrest success from the inhospitable wilderness. We talked about the importance of community in the book and during this pandemic when everyone is isolated at home.

Later, I realized we had not even touched on the homesteader husband, Jack. At first, he tried to protect Mabel from the hard work he endured, not asking for her help resulting in alienating her. He follows Faina and discovers her secret home and history. It is Jack who protects Faina's companion fox and later fiercely defends her innocence.

There is hardship and sorrow, personal growth and joy, realism and magic to be found in these pages.

The Snow Child was a lovely book club selection. 

The Snow Child
by Eowyn Ivey 
Reagan Arthur Book/Little, Brown and Company

from the publisher

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them. (

History Mini-Reviews: You Never Forget Your First and Caste

These two books on American history seem to have little in common. 

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson is a history of American society based on a caste system that dehumanizes and devalues African Americans. 

You Never Forget Your First demythologizes George Washington. Both offer new ways of interpreting America, past and present.

Alexis Coe's entertaining biography of George Washington, You Never Forget Your First encompasses a wide consideration of the man. One of the most sobering considerations looked at the enslaved people he owned, including a reading of the slave schedule. The reader is fanatic. A good first biography due to its entertaining nature, sure to appeal to younger people and those who don't usually delve into biographies. I borrowed an audiobook through the local library.

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington
by Alexis Coe

Brittany Pressley (Narrator)
ISBN: 139781984842527

from the publisher

As the first woman historian to solely write an adult biography on Washington in more than a hundred years, Alexis Coe combines rigorous research and lively storytelling that will have readers--including those who thought presidential biographies were just for dads--inhaling each page.

In You Never Forget Your First, Washington's wild ambition is encouraged by his single mother and solidified by Martha Washington, the young, wealthy widow he marries. After the Revolutionary War, Washington is unanimously elected to the presidency, twice, and readers finally understand why his more educated, wealthy, and outwardly hungry Founding Fathers knew he was the only man for a seemingly impossible job. Washington loved to dance, offered unsolicited romantic advice, lost more battles than he won, and was almost felled by a life-threatening disease and a backstabbing cabinet. But he emerged successful, establishing values that ensured the survival of the United States of America to this day. Yet presidential biographers have always presented him in the same, stale way.

In a genre overdue for a shake-up, Coe highlights juicy details and skillfully differentiates between the legend and the man--and confirms she's a historian to be reckoned with

*****

Wilkerson argues that American racism has all the hallmarks of Hindi caste. She lays out her argument logically and illustrated with a multitude of examples from history, American slavery and Nazi Germany and the Hindi caste system. 

It’s heart-wrenching stuff. I am sick and disgusted by our history and current conduct as a society and as a political system. I have had to put this away for a bit. Brilliant, horrifying.

I purchased an ebook.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson

Random House 
Published August 4, 2020  
ISBN: 0593230256 (ISBN13: 9780593230251)

from the publisher

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Like millions of others, I watched the 1981 Great Performances television series of Brideshead Revisited--several times--and read the paperback published at that time.

Little, Brown and Company has reissued a 75th anniversary edition of the novel and I used this as an excuse to revisit Waugh's book.

I loved the nostalgia and longing regret for lost places and relationships. But the novel is not just a romance, or the story of a young man's first love and glimpse into another world. 

The story opens during WWII in England. A disillusioned, thirty-nine-year-old Capt. Ryder and his platoon have been moved to a new location, which he recognizes as the home of his college friend. 

I had been here before; I knew all about it, Ryder thinks about Brideshead. The book goes on to tell the events of twenty years ago.

Book I, Et in Arcadia Ego, begins with a flashback to Ryder's first view of Brideshead in the company of his Oxford friend Sebastian Flyte, who became Charles's first love. It is never quite clear the nature of that love. At Oxford, Charles notices Sebastian for his 'arresting' beauty and his eccentricities, including carrying a teddy-bear. "Sebastian takes Charles into his circle of friends, indulging in high-spirited (and drunken) adventures. One friend warns Charles about the Flyte family, including that Sebastian's parents live apart, but his mother's faith does not allow for divorce.

Charles's mother is dead and his father is self-involved and distant. Sebastian takes Charles to Brideshead to meet Nanny Hawkins, who still lives in the nursery, then Charles away before his family arrives, warning, "I am not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They're all so madly charming. All my life they've been taking things away from me."

Their second year at college, they become mutually exclusive in their friendship, but by the end of the year, their relationship comes to a break and they go their separate ways, Charles to art school against his father's wishes, while Sebastian's alcoholism brings a schism between him and his family. 

Charles rejection of the Brideshead's Catholicism also plays a part in the break. He is agnostic with a Protestant background. The Catholic faith is pure superstition to him. Sebastian's mother is devout, but is separated from her agnostic husband who lives abroad with a mistress. The elder Brideshead son wishes for a calling. The youngest daughter has faith, but not daughter Julia. Julia tells Charles that Sebastian has a calling, but flees from it.

Charles becomes an artist specializing in architecture and marries. Years later he and Sebastian's sister Julia fall in love and have an affair. They are waiting for their divorces to come through when the Brideshead patriarch returns to die in the family home. 

The family bickers over whether to bring a priest to their father's death bed; his death-bed conversion leads Julia to give up Charles for God. 

The last scene finds Charles in the Brideshead chapel, the eternal flame of faith burning, saying an ancient prayer.

Waugh wrote that "the whole thing is steeped in theology, but I begin to agree that theologians won't recognize it," and "the book is about God." Waugh even considered changing the title to "A Household of Faith." 

Before he left for Oxford, Charles was given advice, including to avoid Anglo-Catholics, "they're all sodomites." Charles struggles to understand the Flyte's Catholic faith. "Sebastian's faith was an enigma to me at that time," Charles says, adding "I had no religion." Although he had gone to church as a child, and "the masters who taught me Divinity told me that biblical texts were highly untrustworthy. They never suggested I should try to pray." He thinks about his devout mother died as a nurse volunteer during the war and recognizes he did inherit "some such spirit." "I have come to accept claims which then, in 1923, I never troubled to examine, and to accept the supernatural as the real."

He recounts a conversation with Sebastian who affirmed his simple faith and awareness of being "much wickeder." Charles is baffled. "...if you can believe all that and you don't want to be good, where's the difficulty about your religion?" he asks. 

Sebastian also recounts his family's "mixed" attitude toward faith, noting "happiness doesn't seem to have much to do with it, and that's all I want." But his pursuit of happiness makes him miserable. He takes up an unworthy, needy soul to care for, as if in penance, or perhaps longing for love or companionship. In the end, he finds a home with monks who forgive him his alcoholism. 

Julia's sudden change, the awareness that her faith does not recognize her divorce, ends any chance for happiness for Charles or herself. In his misery, somehow faith also comes to Charles.

It is a beautifully written last scene, Charles in the room that was built to be the Brideshead chapel, the lamp still burning above the altar. What the chapel and the flame represented had outlasted the human tragedies of time and history,something eternal that Charles could turn to. He is rejuvenated just by being there and reciting "a prayer, an ancient, newly-learned form of words."

The moving and hopeful ending, Captain Ryder experiencing the sacred, is satisfying and uplifting. 

Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
by Evelyn Waugh
Little, Brown & Co
paperback 
ISBN0316242101 (ISBN13: 9780316242103)

from the publisher

The gorgeous 75th-anniversary edition of Brideshead Revisited, the novel selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best of the century.  

The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece—a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire.

Through the story of Charles Ryder's entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh's early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity. 

Perestroika in Paris by Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley's Perestroika in Paris was an easy reading, charming book, but for many pages I wondered what was the 'point'? Every book that gives animals human thought and language has a point, right? 

Sure, Paras (short for Perestroika) is a wonderful character, a filly too curious for her own good, who leaves the comforts of her home at the stable and the horse racing she loves to see the world--or, at least, Paris under the Eiffel Tower.

Then there is Frida, the German Shorthaired Pointer ticked all over with a brown head and two patches, left on her own when her brilliant and eccentric owner is picked up from the streets by the gendarme. Frida understands human behavior better than we understand each other.

Paras and Frida meet up and help each other, for Paras has brought her groomer's purse filled with winnings from the last race Paras ran. Frida takes the euros to the local shops and returns with dinner for them and their new friends, the bickering mallard ducks, Sid and Nancy, and Raoul, an aged raven.

Paras walks the streets of Paris by night, visiting a Patisserie for a meal. Into her life comes Etienne, an eight-year-old human child living with his blind and deaf great-grandmother in the rundown family mansion. The elderly lady knits, using up her stash of yard, worrying about what will happen to her great-grandson upon her death, wondering if she did right by keeping him from school.

The child secretly takes Paras into his home and his heart, Frida joining the family. They are befriended by the house rats Conrad and his son Kurt. Together they cobble together everything they need.

Just when everything seems to have gone wrong, and Etienne faces his biggest challenge, the story resolves happily.

The story never gets too syrupy and never gets preachy. And yet, I did find a 'point'.

First, it is the story of family, the families we create by helping one another, joining our strengths, even if we seemingly have nothing in common--are 'different species'.

Second, it is about finding our bliss, how curiosity leads us to new discoveries and fulfillment.

Third, Etienne's family has survived horrible tragedy. WWI and WWII, the deaths of Etienne's great-grandfather and his grandfather and his parents. 

"It was their fate as a family, perhaps, or merely lick, merely a part of being French in the twentieth century, when wars came and went like terrifying, unstoppable tempests." ~from Perestroika in Paris by Jane Smiley

Out of great tragedy, we can survive and even thrive.

And last of all, there is the fortitude and persistence these animals show, accepting what they cannot change and changing what they can change.

In the end, I discovered a novel that can be read by any age, in any age, portraying the core values that make a life.

I was sent a free book by the publisher. My review is fair and unbiased.

Perestroika in Paris
by Jane Smiley
Publication December 1, 2020
Knopf
$26.95 hardcover
ISBN 10: 52552035X; ISBN  13: 9780525520351

from the publisher

Paras, short for "Perestroika," is a spirited racehorse at a racetrack west of Paris. One afternoon at dusk, she finds the door of her stall open and--she's a curious filly--wanders all the way to the City of Light. She's dazzled and often mystified by the sights, sounds, and smells around her, but she isn't afraid. Soon she meets an elegant dog, a German shorthaired pointer named Frida, who knows how to get by without attracting the attention of suspicious Parisians. Paras and Frida coexist for a time in the city's lush green spaces, nourished by Frida's strategic trips to the vegetable market. They keep company with two irrepressible ducks and an opinionated raven. But then Paras meets a human boy, Etienne, and discovers a new, otherworldly part of Paris: the ivy-walled house where the boy and his nearly-one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother live in seclusion. As the cold weather and Christmas near, the unlikeliest of friendships bloom. But how long can a runaway horse stay undiscovered in Paris? How long can a boy keep her hidden and all to himself? Jane Smiley's beguiling new novel is itself an adventure that celebrates curiosity, ingenuity, and the desire of all creatures for true love and freedom

The Cold Millions by Jess Walter

Spokane felt like the intersection of Frontier and Civilized, the final gasp of a thing before it turned into something else--the Last Rush Town, Gig called it, for the silver rushes in the foothills, but also the rush of railroad and bank, school and merchant, brick, stone, and steel, old-growth timber turned to pillared houses, hammer popping nonstop against the wild, a mad rush to log and pave the whole world.~ from The Cold Millions by Jess Walter

In 1909, the cold millions,"living and scraping and fighting and dying," with no chance in this world, are countered by the cold millionaires in their palatial, golden homes who dole out thousands to secure their privilege. 

Migrant workers sheltered in open fields as they drifted between cities, looking for work. The police cleared out the vagrants. The working men were lured by union organizers of the Industrial Workers of the World, promising to give workers a fair deal and a voice by taking power out of the hands of capitalist bosses.

The rise of unions was met with hostility, their leaders vilified as anarchists and revolutionaries who recruited discouraged workers into an expendable army. 

The rich didn't want to level the playing field. They sold the dream of opportunity, the chance to rise into wealth like they had.

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps originally meant to do the impossible. We hear about the few who started with nothing and built empires. And of the 1% who now control the bulk of money, many unconcerned about the cold millions who exist outside of the mythic American Dream.

Jess Walter's novel tells the story of Gig and Rye, sons of Irish immigrants who have died, the boys become migrant workers. Pawns in the system, they had to pay money for information on who is hiring; after a while they were fired and once again had to pay money for information on who is hiring...

Gig is a Wobblie. When Rye sees him arrested at a peaceful demonstration of unionists, he is moved to join the protest. East Coast union organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn arrives to raise money to hire Charles Darrow to defend Gig and the five hundred workers wrongfully imprisoned and inhumanly treated. Rye becomes a symbol--the sixteen-year-old orphan abused by the police.

Rye is also courted by the richest man in town, Lemuel Brand, to spy on Gurley. Brand hires Dalveaux to stop the next union meeting, rolling out a speech about the "dangers of socialism--East Coast agitators--immigrant filth--concerned mine owners and business leaders--real Americans--jail full of vermin--mayor's hands tied--in support of police--moral responsibility--commercial interests--future in balance--last stand of decency--". Rye and Gurley are to be stopped. 

One man to a boat. We all go over alone. The lesson comes early in the novel. Cops and killers, detectives and anarchists, wealthy men deciding everything in a back room, and Gurley--Rye knew them all. Each tried to be in charge of his own life. Rye outlasted them all, partly because of Gig's sacrifice, and partly because he found work and a family that took him in. Rye wasn't alone in the boat, after all. He was lucky. He won a few battles, and Gurley said that was all one could hope for in this life.

The Cold Millions is about the rise of the unions; it is historical fiction that makes past places and people come alive; it is a family drama that will tug at your heartstrings. The writing is fantastic. And best of all, it is a mirror flashing light on timeless social and personal conflicts.

I purchased a book.

I previously read and reviewed the author's novel Beautiful Ruins.

The Cold Millions
by Jess Walter
Harper, Collins
Published October, 2020

from the publisher

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins comes another “literary miracle” (NPR)—a propulsive, richly entertaining novel about two brothers swept up in the turbulent class warfare of the early twentieth century.

An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice,  and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a  kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams.

The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula.

Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war?

Featuring an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers, The Cold Millions is a tour de force from a “writer who has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors” (Boston Globe).