What I Read on My Summer Vacation

While visiting, we picked up

Kearns on the Double by Eamon McCarthy Earls

Kearns is Bill Kearns, a postman turned detective turned journalist who lives and works in a quiet town in Central MA in 1920. I am privileged to own a signed copy because the author is my sixteen year old cousin. Eamon used family legends and traditions to build his characters, but this is not a family memoir. Eamon clearly did his research and captures the era for his readers (intermediate school) as well as Richard Russo did for adults in Empire Falls. Read together, one journeys through time from a hope filled immigrant mill town just before the Depression to the despair of post-industrial America. I like Eamon’s perspective better.

As we traveled we listened to

Blasphemy by Douglas Preston – Buried beneath land rented from Native Americans, scientists are prepared to go to the center of the atom, but as they get closer, a voice they believe to be God’s begin to speak to them. At the same time, a fundamentalist preacher is manipulated into calling the experiment the beginning of Armageddon, and the Native Americans realize their land will no longer be theirs if the experiment succeeds. The triangle of conflicts led to conversations on the relationship between faith and science, and lots of guesses, whenever we stopped, which wasn’t often, as we were held spell bound by Scott Sowers reading of this novel.

Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card read by a full cast.
Ender is Ender Wiggin of Ender’s Game, a science fiction novel found on high school reading lists as a complement to Pride and Prejudice. We know from the beginning of Ender’s Game that he is being trained to save the world at Battle School. Ender’s Shadow is the story of Bean, a street child, who talked before he was one, and solved moral dilemmas by age four, who discovers when he is sent to Battle School that if Ender cannot accomplish the task, the responsibility will fall to him. Ender’s Game is a story of a child sorting out internal conflicts through action. Ender’s Shadow is a story of self-discovery through logic and analysis. As we listened, I imagined which book would be the better introduction to the series for my 12 year old relatives. Each stands alone, and together they challenge adults to appreciate the whole of a child, and encourage young people to question, question, question, and to trust their own answers - Maybe the families will get the whole set.

Library books read in the comfort of the RV
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fjorde
Chromatica is a world where the strata of society is defined by color and one must do as commanded by anyone above your color in the spectrum. Defy the authorities and you are punished … or worse. One can move up, of course – Red marries Blue and voila, Violet. The Greys are everyone’s servants/slaves. Our protagonist is Eddie Russett (a red of course) who, in an attempt find out how Jane (a grey) moves in and out of places she doesn’t’ belong, discovers the rigidity in the rainbow and the colors of his heart. Fjorde’s fantasy world is populated by the absurd, and at first feels too contrived, but when one trusts his imagination, one’s own is opened to the possibilities in our world, which is why one reads, is it not?

Day After Night by Anita Diamant – Set in the Atlit Internment camp , a “holding place” run by the British in Haifa for Jews entering Palestine after WWII, we learn of the Holocaust and the dream of Israel through the eyes of four young Jewish women imprisoned there. Diamant does not preach nor embellish the day to day lives of the women. She just imagines four of six million points of view and through their memories, or denial of them, we learn what it means to find hope grounded in a reality most of us will never experience, and we begin to understand what it means to begin again.

And “Beach Books” found at campground book exchanges
Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon (suspense) Minor in Possession by J.A. Jance (murder mystery)

Science Fiction Gives a Moral Compass

When I was eight years old I read a folk tale that said anyone who could kiss her elbow would turn into a boy. A middle child, and the only girl, I found the concept intriguing and practiced for days. In the same story collection, I met King Midas, I imagined myself his daughter, and then her mother. I was Pandora. I was hope. Myth, legend, folk tale, and fantasy rolled into one in the genre Science Fiction I discovered in my twenties. The science behind the fiction made it possible to trust the questions I asked of myself (and everyone who’d read the books along with me). Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Frank Hebert’s Dune, and Issac Asimov’s I, Robot inspired this flower child to seek community, work for justice and accept that while evil is a reality, humanity can choose to create a good that will survive it.
Now the children of the 60’s are approaching their seventies and their Science Fiction has morphed into apologia. In The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood allows her personal despair about the lack of international Climate Change policy and technology without regulation to color her characters with a shallow, dark pen. The “flood” is a pandemic brought on by a virus developed by corporations in order to sell the cure. But the virus is not the only gene alteration we discover in this future. Technology has changed the balance of the planet and the only ones who seem to care are religious cults that warn of the dangers, but live in isolation. By making her protagonists religious eccentrics, Ms. Atwood offers those of us in the mainstream world little hope for change or motivation for action. And there is much: for those reading this review who would like to take action, GOOGLE your faith community name and ecology. I found over 200 sites organized by Catholics.
Catholic stories of saints and martyrs also formed my conscience, which may be why I recognized the spiritual quest in Stephenie Meyer’s Host. How strong is your Self? How strong is your commitment to those you love? Would you be willing to let another being reside in your brain in order to bring peace to the world? What if that meant never loving your family again? For Melanie Stryder, our heroine, the answer is obvious. Love and Self will not give in, so the peaceful alien who invades her body works with her. This intriguing novel gives the reader the opportunity to debate questions of life, death, love, commitment and wisdom with as many moral twists and turns as the caves in which the protagonist finds her family. Theirs is not an easy journey – anyone ever faced with a moral dilemma knows how confusing conversations in one’s own head can be – but Ms. Meyers gives us balance and opportunity in her characters and a romantic adventure as well.

Bel Canto – Just a Moment?

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett was Book Club’s choice this month. It’s the story of people gathered to celebrate the birthday of a foreign business man who the President of this unnamed country thinks he can buy by bringing in the man’s favorite opera star to sing “Happy Birthday” and arias of the man’s choosing. The president himself doesn’t come to the party, but terrorists do, and we end up spending four months with the hostages and their captors.
It’s the third time I’ve read Bel Canto as its popular with discussion groups, but the first when opera was playing in the background, and the music caused the conversation within me to take an unexpected turn. No longer did Bel Canto, the beautiful song of the title refer just to the main character whose voice and presence commands the attention of all. I thought for a while that Bel Canto meant the long moment of captivity wherein days drifts into months, boundaries become fluid and the house becomes a haven for the people it contains. Then, one woman said “Not one of them will be the same,” and I was brought back to the grief of my brother’s sudden death twenty years ago. In that months’ long moment, every sound I heard was felt in my core, colors were so vivid they breathed and all that I did was backdrop to my loss - until one day it reversed and my grief became the background song for my life. Bel Canto, the beautiful song reminds us that given nothing but time, we will hear the song deep within that is the core of our humanness, our souls, and we need not wait until we are hostage to a moment to listen. Do read it...with accompaniment.