Category Archives: Reading

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

This is a lovely book about a subject that kind of floats like an iceberg as you’re coming toward it. On the surface you see the fresh-faced young wives of Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, but just below the surface a massive chunk of civil rights is waiting to puncture…the hull of white comfort?

On one side of the story we have a circle of white girlfriends who’ve known each other forever. They’re all in their early twenties, all married with children except for one ugly duckling who graduated without her MRS degree, Skeeter Phelan. Skeeter loves her friends and playing bridge and editing the Junior League newsletter, but she’s restless. She wants to Write. A New York editor responds to Skeeter’s resume, telling her to find a subject she cares about, something close to her heart. Skeeter takes a hard look around her and finds the first thread of her story: Constantine, the black maid who raised her and who was probably the person she loved most in the world until Skeeter’s mother fired her without explaining why.

Since her mother won’t talk about Constantine, Skeeter slowly begins to approach Constantine’s peers, who also happen to work as maids for all of Skeeter’s friends, to see if they’ll give her any information. They won’t talk to her, of course, at first, but Skeeter’s slow but steady efforts to earn the trust of one maid in particular, Aibileen, form the hub of the novel.

The author concentrates mostly on the emotional core of the story, dropping in historical details (Vietnam, Medgar Evers’ murder) for little shocks of context.

Honestly, this was the first page-turner I’ve read in a long time. Emotionally it rang really true to me. It was also somewhat horrifying to realize that the precautions Skeeter and Aibileen take to meet in secret and work on the maids’ stories make it sound like they’re living in Nazi Germany; the consequences of their “race betrayal” could truly result in both of them ending up beaten, shunned, in hiding, or dead.

I’ve read some criticism about the author using dialect for the black characters and perfect, unaccented English for the white characters, and I suppose that’s a valid complaint. That said, I found the black dialect didn’t take much effort to read, and I just assumed the white characters had Southern accents, so…?

The point being, I liked this book. Should I give it a rating? Okay, I give this book four cantaloupes for being tough on the outside, sweet on the inside, and a healthy part of a nutritious breakfast.

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

I recently re-read this when I was visiting my mom’s house, and if you don’t know the book here’s a quick plot summary. Harriet is an eleven-year-old girl who lives in New York City with her father, a television executive, and her mother, who plays a lot of bridge. They have a cook, whom they all call “Cook,” and Harriet has an educated and strict but loving nurse with the peculiar name Ole Golly. Harriet is voraciously curious about other people’s lives and keeps a record of her observations in a series of notebooks because she wants to grow up to be a spy. But when her classmates discover that she’s been spying on them, she has to confront her circumstances with a new maturity and sensitivity.

I must have read this at least a dozen times when I was Harriet’s age, but revisiting it thirty-odd years later with my own experiences of Harriet’s city in my head gave a new richness to the book. Also, when I was a kid, the adults’ behavior in the book made NO sense to me; I used to think it was because the grownups in Harriet’s life were nothing like the ones in my own, but now I think it’s just because adults are just mysterious creatures operating on a whole different, sometimes fucked-up logic. Harriet’s friend Sport’s dad is a writer who works all night, thus requiring Sport to do all the housework, which he occasionally chooses to do wearing an apron. Her other friend, Janie, has a chemistry lab set up in her room, mystifying her mother, who calls her Dr. Caligari and throws up her hands in disgust whenever something explodes. All of their teachers are oddballs, impatient or scattered or dealing with the demise of their own dreams, all of which is sketched out quickly so as not to bore the young adult reader but with enough detail to provide a recognizable portrait for someone with more experience.

I don’t know. As far as book reports go, this post rates a B-. I guess my impressions of Harriet go too deeply to sum up in a couple of paragraphs, and I suspect it’s the same for many other people my age. I recall once an old boyfriend telling me that his mother made him wear purple socks so she could find him if he got lost in a crowd, and my friend was shocked when I told him that what he thought was a vivid personal memory was actually taken from this book (a character named The Boy With The Purple Socks, who was so boring, according to Harriet, that no one bothered to remember his name).

I remember that the sequel, The Long Secret, wherein Harriet goes on summer vacation, is even better.

The Hidden Life of Dogs by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

I’m stuck at my mom’s house with not much to read. It was either this or one of my dad’s books about Nazis.

The author put me off right away by saying you should never pay for a dog. I don’t agree, but whatever, we can still be friends. But then slowly she reveals more attitudes that don’t make much sense to me. She unashamedly broke local leash laws and let her dogs jump her fence and wander around the city (Cambridge, Mass.), marveling at their ability to either find their way home or, if they couldn’t, to find a porch to wait on until the distant homeowner brought themselves to read the tag of the strange dog at their door and called her to come get it. The homeowners of Cambridge were often put upon by Marshall and her canine behavioral “experiments.” Woo, they loved it when she had a couple of wolves come to visit. I’m sure the whole neighborhood enjoyed their “singing.”

She also let her dogs remain unneutered and breed indiscriminately. One day she came home to find that, of her two females that had just given birth, one had just killed the other’s litter. Nice. Well, that’s what their wolf ancestors did in the wild, right? The pack can only care for one litter at a time so only the dominant female’s pups get to live. Thomas seemed to have this pseudo-scientific mindset that made it okay for her to stand back and observe what her dogs would do if undisturbed by human ideas of right and wrong behavior, but that would have been a really good time to intrude.

I was excited to read this book at first, and it has got me thinking that it would be the right thing for us to get another dog so that Cookie can have a buddy. But in the end I found Thomas’s insights to be kind of shallow, her descriptions inadequate, and the demise of her dog pack a bummer. Yes, everyone dies in the end.

Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives by Brian L. Weiss, M.D.

I read this because the book group I joined but only ever went to once assigned it for September. (And did I go? To sit in a hot tub and discuss it? No.)

So there’s this psychiatrist who has a patient who, while under hypnosis, appears to spontaneously regress into past lives. “Catherine” gives detailed accounts of twelve lives lived in different places, as either sex, inhabiting a few different races, as well as information about each death and afterlife experience. The shrink, previously a man of hard science, falls for her sincere and apparently credible tales, especially as each past life corresponds with a phobia she has come to him to help her overcome. As she remembers a life where she was murdered by having her throat slit, she thus overcomes her irrational fear in this life of having her throat slit.

She has other information, too. People in comas can choose to come back or not, depending on if they’ve finished their “lessons” for this life. She can recognize certain individuals from past lives that she is close to in this one, their relationships playing out similar themes from life to life. The “Masters” look after her after death and help heal the wounds people suffer in life before sending them back into the fray.

A highly emotional book, I let myself get swept up in the romance of it all, the comforting feeling that once we learn all the lessons we’re supposed to learn in each life we are looked out for and guided with great wisdom after death. But the other half of my brain went, “Hmm, well, but does her story check out?” The doctor claims that everything she said can be independently verified, that it would be impossible for someone with no experience of rural life to spontaneously describe, while under hypnosis, how to churn butter. (Unless perhaps our brains are capable of storing survival tactics from all those Laura Ingalls Wilder books we read in elementary school.)

So I dunno. I think it’s a fascinating subject but I’d like to see it in the hands of a more rigorous author, someone like Mary Roach or Susan Orlean.

The Blue Angel, by Francine Prose

I liked the premise of a writing teacher dealing with his own writer’s block and the fact that one of his students is more talented than he is. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a convincing novel where the author writes inside the head of a character of the opposite sex, though.

Geek Love, by Katherine Dunne

I’d avoided reading this when it first came out in the late eighties because it seemed so trendy to read a book about a family of circus freaks. Twenty years later the hype has died and what’s left is a solid family drama about the power struggles and rivalries between brothers and sisters who happen to grow up with humps and extra appendages and conjoined twins.