The Invisible Wall

 

 

My mom lent me this book to read about a year ago, and for whatever reason I just barely got around to it. And now having read it, it just seems unbelievable to me that I let this book sit at my house not being read for so long! It did not deserve such treatment!

The Invisible Wall is the memoir of a boy named Harry growing up in England around World War I. It starts when he's about 4, and follows him to his early teenage years. He lives in a poor, working class neighborhood of row houses. And one side of the street is Jews, the other side Christians, and the "invisible wall" in the title refers to what might as well have been in the middle of their street. The Jews and Christians didn't associate with one another. They weren't mean or hostile, it was just as if the others didn't exist. 

When Harry is really little, only about 4 or 5, he unwittingly becomes part of a Romeo and Juliet-esque story with one of the older Jewish girls and a Christian boy. A lot of the book takes place on their street, with stories of what happened there, but he also talks about school and home and the synagogue. His angelic, wonderful mother is such an amazing and tragic character. She wants so badly for her children to have a good life, and it just feels so impossible. But she is so optimistic and believes that things will be better someday. His father is awful. He hardly ever speaks or looks at his children, and is hardly ever at home because he's out at the pub. I remember at one part the dad is talking to one of Harry's sisters, and he stands at the bottom of the stairs and yells up, "You!" Harry says his dad never called them by their names and I thought that was so sad.  He also talks about taking lunch to his dad at the factory, and how all the other boys were so excited to see their dads, but he was just scared. And then once they got there, the other dads went and hugged their kids and talked and ate lunch together, but his dad just stayed at his desk and waited for him to drop off the lunch, and never talked or looked at him. It's really sad.

Anyway, I don't want to say too much, because I think it's usually better to read something when you don't know very much about it. All I knew was that half their street was Jewish and the other half Christian, and I loved it. Also, sometimes books like this can be a little bit slow moving, but this is completely riveting. I couldn't put it down, I even took it to the gym with me and read on the elliptical. 

Do we rate our books? I don't remember, it's been too long since I've written. But if we do, I give this one 5 stars. It is wonderful.

I Remember Nothing

I read this last week, and it was funny and cute. Nora Ephron wrote You've Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle, and this funny little book. It's just a collection of personal essays and sort of memoir-ish, but it's mostly about funny things like how she doesn't remember anything--hence the title.

It takes like 2 hours to read, because it's big print and short, and it's the perfect book to read in the summer. I never like really sat down and READ, I would just pick it up for 10 minutes at a time while I was waiting for Chris to get ready to go somewhere, or waiting for dinner to come out of the oven--things like that. 

But yeah, it's just a cute, funny book that's super fast to read. It would be perfect for an airplane or the beach or something because there's not a plot or anything. Oh, and here's an excerpt. This is the first chapter of the book.



Between a Rock and a Hard Place

This book was written by Aron Ralston, the guy who cut off his arm. I'm pretty sure you all know about him, but just in case, here's a little re-cap. In 2003, he was hiking alone in Southern Utah, and got his arm trapped by a boulder in a slot canyon. His right hand was completely trapped, he couldn't move the boulder or chip away at it to free his hand, so on the 5th day of being trapped there with very little water and only a tiny bit of food (he thought it was about 500 calories spread over a few days), next to no sleep, and obviously his hand being crushed, he cut off his arm with a pocketknife to free himself. And then he had to rappel down a cliff and hike like 7 miles before he found other people. Insane.

I was really interested in this story when it happened (I'm sure Katie remembers me convincing her to accompany me to hear him speak at UVSC, after I assured her I didn't think he was going to discuss the gory details of the amputation. And then he totally did. This was before she was a nurse, though), and I am still totally fascinated by it. I want to see the movie, too, but I wanted to read the book first and get all the facts before I watched the movie, which I know has some extra theatrical elements. But I've found that I really love books about how amazing humans are. Our bodies and our minds. When I read Unbroken, I thought over and over that I couldn't believe that guy could survive everything that he did. And when I read this, I was really just amazed at the will to survive humans have. I don't think any other animal has that as much as we do. I mean, this guy was dying. He thought it was going to happen within a matter of hours. It was his 5th day of being trapped, he was dehydrated and hallucinating, but then he decided to take action, and he did it. It was amazing how quickly it happened. He had thought about cutting off his arm every day but always talked himself out of it. But then the day he did it, he just DID it. It took like 2 hours, and then he was free.

He interspersed the chapters about each day in the canyon with other memories of his adventurous life. It was pretty cool. I knew that he was an experienced hiker, but I didn't realize HOW experienced. He had solo climbed a whole bunch of mountains in Colorado, sometimes in the winter, he had this crazy experience with a bear stalking him in the Tetons, he graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a degree in engineering, but then quit after 5 years of working as an engineer because he loved the outdoors too much. He moved to Aspen and worked at an outdoor gear store and spent several days every week hiking, biking, and skiing. I have to admit, I skimmed through a lot of these chapters, partly because I just wanted to get back to the main story, and partly because I had to get the book back to the library. But it was interesting.

And the part I really could NOT stop reading was when I finally got to the amputation. It is pretty detailed, so if things like that will make you squeamish, do not read this. But if they don't, it is fascinating. And just incredible. I cannot believe a human being can cut off their arm, rappel down a cliff, and hike through a canyon, and be alive still. It is amazing.

Another favorite part of it for me was the pictures he included. He had a camera and a video camera with him, and he took pictures of himself. A couple of them are included in the book, including one of a blood spattered boulder in the canyon, taken after the fact. I love that he had the presence of mind to do that. And obviously he didn't include the videos in the book (because we are Muggles and don't have the capability), but he did transcribe everything he talked about. It's a message to his family and friends, tying up his financial affairs, and sharing memories with everyone, stuff like that. And I just love so much that it didn't end up being his funeral video. He would get it out and say, "Well, I think today might be the day," and stuff like that. But then he didn't die. He is ok. And that is so cool to me.

So anyway, if reading about someone cutting their arm off with a knife that is very unfit for the task will make you squeamish, don't read this. Or just skip that part, it's only like 4 pages long. If that. But if you like stories about people being inspired to live by hallucinations of their family and friends and future, you will like this. It was pretty awesome.

Also, one of my favorite passages from the book is when he finally does it. I found an excerpt online and copied and pasted it here:

It is 11.32am, Thursday, May 1 2003. For the second time in my life, I am being born. This time I am being delivered from the canyon’s pink womb, where I have been incubating. This time I am a grown adult and I understand the significance and power of this birth as none of us can when it happens the first time. The value of my family, my friends and my passions well up a heaving rush of energy that is like the burst I get approaching a hard-earned summit, multiplied by ten thousand. Pulling tight the remaining connective tissues of my arm, I rock the knife against the wall, and the final thin strand of flesh tears loose; tensile force rips the skin apart more than the blade cuts it.

A crystalline moment shatters, and the world is a different place.

Where there was confinement, now there is release. Recoiling from my sudden liberation, my left arm flings downcanyon, opening my shoulders to the south, and I fall back against the northern wall of the canyon, my mind surfing on euphoria. As I stare at the wall where not 12 hours ago I etched “RIP OCT 75 ARON APR 03”, a voice shouts in my head: “I AM FREE!”

Orange Is the New Black

Orange Is the New Black was not written by Salman Rushdie :)

No, it was written by Piper Kerman, a Smith-graduate who unintentionally got herself caught in the world of drug trafficking, and ended up paying for it ten years later.

The bulk of the memoir covers the time she did in Danbury, the women’s prison in Connecticut, although she does discuss how she got to that point in the first place. I learned more than I ever knew before about the prison system, which is very interesting and full of flaws. I also learned a great deal about empathy. Because to me, that was the point of this book: people commit crimes when they don’t care about the suffering of others. Rape, theft, assault, drug dealing, they all are very selfish and uncaring acts. But when we start to care about other people’s suffering and we start to empathize with them, that’s when we become better and begin to heal. The relationships Piper has with her family and friends, and the relationships she forms with other inmates, are amazing examples of how we can help each other through terribly hard situations in life. We cannot get through life alone; we need other people.

So a little background, I’ve known about this book for several years, although it was only published in 2010. Piper Kerman, author, is the sister-in-law to my uncle Michael; I’ve actually had the chance to meet her twice, once at Michael’s wedding in 2007 and once just last month in New York. I like her a lot. It was a little strange to read a book where I’d met the author, as well as some other people who are mentioned (her husband and his family, my uncle’s in-laws). But she is a great writer: she had me laughing sometimes at the ridiculousness of some situations, and other times I cried because of the sadness she or others had to deal with. It’s a powerful book that I highly recommend. Her husband, Larry, wrote an article for the New York Times right before the book was published, talking about how it was for him while she was in prison. Also some powerful writing, so you should check it out too.

I do feel I have to give fair warning about the language in the book. It can get rather colorful, but as it was a depiction of her year in prison I didn’t really have a problem with that because I’m sure it was quite accurate. I also think I should perhaps warn you that homosexuality is discussed fairly regularly as well; again, it is a huge aspect of the prisoners’ lives (she mentions how some people choose to be “gay for the stay”), but it is never in any way explicit or graphic and didn’t make me uncomfortable at all. But I have no idea how others feel about those things, so I thought I'd mention it.

I really liked this book. I was impressed by her writing and I came away with serious questions about the prison system, as well as a strong desire to help (in the back of the paperback edition there is a list of organizations that work with women in the system as well as their children).

Bossypants

I'm sure a lot of you have seen this book around. The cover is really so gross. I couldn't handle looking at it.

The book itself, however, is very funny. There are a couple of F words, which is disappointing, but I thought it was really funny. It's sort of a memoir, but sort of just a collection of essays about different things in her life. Like there's a chapter about her dad, who sounded awesome. He was like a scary dad who everyone just respects the moment they meet him. And there's a chapter about starting at Saturday Night Live, and one about leaving to create 30 Rock, a chapter about her honeymoon cruise to Bermuda and how the ship caught on fire and everyone had to fly back to New York--stuff like that.

It was really fast, too. I picked it up from the library on Friday and finished it on Saturday. I probably spent 5 hours reading the whole thing. So it goes fast.

One of my favorite things about the book was the girl power-ness of it. I really liked that. She brings in little feminist elements throughout the whole thing, but my favorite part was when she talked about working at Second City, an improv group in Chicago. The improv group had a touring company, which toured, obviously, and a mainstage company, which put on shows in Chicago. The mainstage company had always been 6 people. 4 men, 2 women. When she was working there, they suggested that they change it to 3 men and 3 women. And the people in charge, whoever they were, argued that having an equal number wouldn't work, because there wouldn't be enough parts for all the girls. Tina Fey called this her first experience with the illusion of not enough. She was like, "Not enough parts? We're not doing Death of a Salesman. This is improv. We're making it up, it's not even real. Of course there will be enough parts." And for some reason that little experience was my favorite part of the book.

So yeah. It was good, it was fast, and I laughed out loud frequently. Excellent book by my favorite funny lady.

All Souls

Well, as long as we're all reading books about cities, here's one!

I know that you know that I exaggerate ALL THE TIME, but here's the thing. This book is so good, and all of you should read it. It's one of the best books I've read in a long time.

My sister recommended it to me, she read it for one of her social work classes, and it really is so interesting and heartbreaking at the same time.

I know Katie will love it, because it's about Boston. Specifically, a neighborhood called Southie, and even more specifically the housing project Old Colony.

The guy who wrote the book grew up there, and this is the story of his family. Of the 11 children in his family, 4 died. And only one of them had an illness. In this neighborhood there are a lot of murders, suicides, and drug overdoses every year. Way too many teenagers die. 

It's an honest but not too painful depiction of growing up in an incredibly tough neighborhood. I was a little worried it would be really graphic and make me bawl my eyes out the whole time, but it wasn't and I didn't. I shed a few tears, of course, but it's not just some gut wrenching sob story. He loves his neighborhood, and even moved back there.

It's funny but also sad, it's quick moving, and everyone in it just comes alive. The best person in the book is his mother, always referred to as Ma. To give you a good example of the kind of lady she is, one night she got shot by a stray bullet while standing in the kitchen. It grazed her side, right under her armpit. She said there was no need to call 911 even though she was bleeding a lot, because she was going to go play her accordion at a pub (which she did regularly for extra cash). She changed into a black shirt so no one could see the blood, stuffed a bunch of toilet paper in her bra, and kept arguing and joking with EMTs about going to the hospital, telling her she'd only get in the ambulance if they'd drop her off at the pub. They finally made her get in the ambulance, but when they got to the hospital she hopped out the back and ran to the pub and bragged to all the Irish peeps about getting shot and not even seeing a doctor.

Another amazing chapter is about his 13 year old brother being charged with a murder he did not do, and all the corruption that happens in the system. It's pretty incredible and pretty awful.

Anyway, I can't imagine anyone reading this book and not enjoying it. I highly recommend it. I borrowed it from my sister and had it for a few days before I started it, and once I read it I kept thinking, "I can't believe I had this in my possession for any length of time without reading it." It's really really REALLY good.

P.S.

One disclaimer--if you don't want to read the F word, don't read this. It's set in the projects in Boston, so . . . yeah. I'ts not gratuitous, but it is there.

The Glass Castle

Sorry to be a blog hog and post 2 days/books in a row, but I had to write about The Glass Castle.

I just finished it (like, 5 minutes ago), and I had to be sure all of you know that this is a must read. Casidy told me to read this book about a year ago, and I finally got around to reading it this week.

The very first chapter of the book has Jeannette telling how she was in the back of a taxi, headed to a party, when she saw her mother going through a dumpster, just another homeless lady in New York. She then told her driver to turn around and take her back to her apartment on Park Avenue.

She then goes back to the beginning and tells the story of her childhood, moving around all the time, mostly being practically homeless, her mom and dad never really having jobs, her dad as an alcoholic, etc. etc.

She has some truly amazing things happen in her life, this book is incredibly interesting. If you're like me, when you hear that someone wrote a "memoir," you're not really too interested, but this is a page turner. I really couldn't put it down. Like I said before, I made the mistake of starting this while I was still reading another book and had to force myself to finish the other one first.

One of the most remarkable things about this story is how she portrays her parents. She doesn't glamorize them at all, she tells it like it is, her mother's dramatic laziness, and her dad's alcoholism--but neither does she come across as bitter and angry, as many people would. She has an affection for them that the reader shares. By the end I would chuckle when her mom said something, thinking, "Oh, that is so like her." She really brought her family to life, and though you sympathize for their plight, you also kind of admire them. The thing I admired about her parents was their love of learning. They raised intelligent children because they had intelligent conversations about all sorts of things. There's a story in the book about how the mom was talking to someone else and mentioned Jackson Pollock, and the lady said, "I have Polish blood, so I don't appreciate you talking like that."

Mostly, they were pretty reprehensible parents, but the way she tells her life story made me love them too.

I give this a 5 out of 5 stars. I loved it.