This week, I’m on call for jury duty. Anticipating some time waiting around in the Hall of Justice, I took some time this weekend to start a summer reading list, and sharing it seemed a great way to kick off this summer’s Wednesday Messages.
My first goal is to finish Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird. I picked up this novel by happenstance and have found a new favorite author. Oyeyemi’s voice and terrain here are a little bit Margaret Atwood, a little bit Christina Rosetti with a cruel distance that recalls Margaret Drabble at times. Yet, her subject matter aligns with her own context: born in Nigeria, Oyeyemi grew up in London and now lives in Prague; along the way, she collected an interest in fairy tales and myths and a prodigious talent. This book is hypnotic.
Moving from chill to warmth, I’ve also reacquired the Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, since my old, dog-eared copy seems to have vanished. Nobody captures the rhythms, the voices, and the “placeness” of the South better than Welty, whose own photographs mirror the worlds of her stories. She writes with a grace and humor that can obscure the keen eye with which she views the genteel cruelty of Southern custom. Welty is on the short list of America’s most accomplished short story writers and is a delight to read on long, hazy summer days.
Shifting regions: Last year, I read Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.’s fascinating Empty Mansions, which traced a story of wealth and loss, capturing the history of an American copper-magnate W. A. Clark and his family. It’s an extraordinary tale of gilded excess and eccentricity hiding deep sadness and emptiness, including the unoccupied mansions of the title. So, when I saw that Mary Gordon had written a new biography of Huguette Clark, who died in 2011 at the age of 104 after living the last twenty years of her life at a NYC hospital, I was in. The Phantom of Fifth Avenue opens yet another window on why, as Fitzgerald wrote in “The Rich Boy”: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”
And, now for the last books on my list. In trying to explain our childhoods to our children, my husband and I are increasingly defaulting to a paraphrase of that same Fitzgerald quote: “Let me tell you about the 70s. They were different … and very difficult to understand.” Huguette Clark was shaped by the gilded age; we were shaped by the golden age of TV dinners, gas rationing, cults, and disco. How can anyone explain the 1970s? I’m hoping two different histories written about the decade will provide an answer: America in the Seventies edited by Beth Bailey and David Farber; and The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics by Bruce J. Schulman. Perhaps, like Eudora Welty, in recapturing the stories of my own youth, “I [feel] the need to hold transient life in words—there’s so much more of life that only words can convey.”
That’s my list. What’s yours? What books are on your bedside table, your beach chair, your Kindle? Share your recommendations on the blog.
Anne M. Kress
Office of the President
06/11/2014 |