Godspeed Ms. Lee

Dear Harper:

You died on February 16, 2016 so I must make my apologies for no writing you sooner and memorializing you in my own way. It is completely inhuman of me and disrespectful, giving the esteem with which I hold you and how you have influenced my life in a positive way.

I first read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in ninth grade at Memorial High School. At that time, I found it fascinating that a group comprised of two children, their single father and their Black cook could so easily form a unit.  I was more fascinated by the adventures that the children had and what happened to Scout at the end of the book, with Atticus just being a character that flitted around the edges, no more important than Calpurnia or Boo. As a 13 year old or 14 year old, I think that I had related more to Scout than anyone else in the book and in some ways I probably still do (since she is loosely based upon you and we probably had more in common than not).  This is, however, one of those few books that you can read at various parts of your life and upon each reading, you can read many times at different parts of your life and still take away many, many lessons. It was so with me and this book.  I found the racial relationships described in teh book fascinating - how did Calpurnia feel about her position? What did her family and friends think?  What did the black and white communities think of her role and what those communities in real life?

And then there was Atticus.  Oh, Atticus!  How you created a character that people grew to adore, love even, respect and emulate. He was the person that you wanted to model your behavior after, particularly when it came to how to treat people and wisdom. Those were two things that made him one of the most admirable people in literature but perhaps, most importantly, he is why I and countless others went to law school.  He stood up for the underdog and the person that culture silenced, even though it came at much personal emotional, financial and physical risk. He showed his belief that everyone deserved the best representation possible regardless of who they were and he did his best.  Whenever I feel that I'm losing my vision of what I am doing in my own job and life as a lawyer/trainer/educator, I read the book again and it re focuses me and puts me on the right path again.  I remember why I'm doing what I'm doing and why it's important. It continues to drive me forward.

Thank you. Thank you, Thank you. When you wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, I often wonder if you anticipated how far reaching and how much of an impact your novel would h ave.  I'm not sure it would have been looked at twice if you had released Go Set A Watchman first, but that's not what happened so I won't speculate.  The point is, your work has had an impact not on just my own, small, life but on a much bigger level.  May you rest in peace Harper and thank you!

The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy by Masha Gessen

I picked up this book because, in part, I have this morbid curiosity about what drives people to do some of the most horrendous things ever: bombings, the Holocaust, whatever.  I'm also a transplant in the Boston area - I went to college on mile 13.1 of the Boston Marathon (go Wellesley), so Marathon Monday always will and always had a special place in my heart.  So when the bombings at the finish line happened on April 15, 2013 it was almost a personal violation. 

This book isn't about intricate relationships between Jahar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev or about family even.  I found that it was more about disconnection and sociopathy and what led to the disaffection that could lead two people to cause such pain and tragedy in the city that had seemingly welcomed them. It describes the events leading up to the bombings and the events in its immediate aftermath and offers a theory that the FBI doesn't really get terrorism. The book was most interesting and effective in conveying the Tsarnaev's social history. The story begins in Soviet-era Russia where we meet the parents of the marathon bombers as young adults.

Zubeidat, the boys' mother, is an ethnic Avar from Makhachkala, Dagestan, who met Anzor Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen from Kyrgyzstan, on the street in Novosibirsk, Siberia, in the spring of 1985. Their marriage was considered to be somewhat outside the norm since they were from different ethnic groups but that didn't stop them. During the early part of their marriage, Stalin was in power and was actively going after Chechans. When Krushchev came to power, those restrictions were being rolled back. In 1992 therefore, they moved back to Chechnya, two years ahead of the Russians bombing the area. They left for America when the going got bad, exchanging one brand of chaos for another. Not only were they on the margins but they still harbored much mistrust for the government and authorities, which further served to marginalize them. They often skirted the rules.  The boys tried to fit in as much as possible - interestingly, Jahar, the youngest, was sent to America alone way in advance of his family in his early teens (something I never knew), so he was more Americanized than his family members.

I really thoroughly enjoyed getting the familial background because it gave me the context that I had so craved. The cultural confusion that the family felt was palpable and the author did a masterful job getting the family and its friends to talk about their experiences. It was also a very interesting story. However, I left unsatisfied at the same time. I still have no answers as to WHY the brothers did such a heinous thing. The end of the book seemed just a collection of conspiracy theories, so if you're looking for an answer to WHY then this book probably isn't for you. It IS a masterful history of the most recent generation of the Tsarnaev family. 

Sofie's Choice by William Styron

This is a book steeped in contradictions.  The main character, Sophie, is the epitome of this. She is very tragic and yet beautiful, a liar that is honest in her lies, she is utterly depressed and then manically happy, she is a survivor but also a victim.  I read the book before I saw the movie so I already had a notion of what Sophie looked like before she was there on the screen. 

The narrator in this movie is William Styron's alter ego - based loosely on himself - a Southerner from tidewater Virginia - that I now affectionately remember by his nickname - Stingo.  After quitting his job at a publishing house, Stingo, an aspiring writer, rents a room in Brooklyn which he refers to as the Pink Palace and meets Nathan Landau. Nathan is a compelling but very deeply disturbed Jewish intellectual who works at Pfizer and who has singlehandedly nursed a Polish WWII victim, Sophie Zawistowska, back to health. At the time that Stingo meets them, the pair have become lovers. Stingo is drawn to his new friends but, the longer that he spends with them, the longer he realizes that there is a very, very dense fog surrounding them - he witnesses physical violence and emotional abuse in their relationship. As the novel progresses, Sophie describes her life before and during WWII to Stingo. Sophie was a Polish Catholic, married with two children and yet she was seemingly persecuted by the Nazis with the same vitriol as the Jews that the Nazis strove to exterminate. Somehow, Sophie survived being sent to Auschwitz, in the sense that she didn't die, but she was forced to make a terrible, unimaginable choice.

The book started off slowly, I won't lie. But once Stingo met Sophie and Nathan, I was absolutely hooked. What was fascinating to me was that Styron took on a number of intense themes that are still relevant today: domestic violence, the extermination of one group of people by another, mental health and its treatment (or lack of it), and oppression in America. He even attempts to draw a parallel between the oppression of African Americans in the South with those of the oppressed groups during World War II.  And yet, even with these intense themes, Styron did not sacrifice the story or plot. It is a story that draws you and keeps you interested through the entire 515 pages.  I simply could not look away from the words on the page, even though I had some idea of what was going to happen.  Styron's characters were also three dimensional. I found myself able to sympathize with Sophie as well as put myself in her shoes, even at the worst of times.  

William Styron did a wonderful job in telling a horrendously hideous story in a sensitive and bearable way. He layered the story - it didn't go in chronological order - which was a masterful way of building the tension until the ultimate moment of choice. I found myself able to digest and really think about her story and the tragedy that she experienced in a way that I perhaps couldn't if it had been done chronologically. Definitely a must read.  

Hiatus is broken, a cool website and some great book podcasts

I so want this coffee mug because I feel like it totally defines my relationship with books. Give me a good one and we can't be separated.  Anyways, I've been on a bit of a hiatus lately because I've just been so busy that I haven't gotten much done in the way of reading - between starting a new job, taking care of my home and children, the holidays and coaching soccer, i have very little time. But I'm back now and am reading two books currently:

• Sophie's Choice by William Styron. This novel is approximately 500 pages long (and I love every word of it so far!) and won the National Book Award in 1980 - it was published in 1979.  I think everyone is familiar with the premise of this story - it's become an American pop culture reference for having to make a choice between two unfathomable, terrible options.  I've always had a morbid fascination with the Holocaust in the sense that I simply can't understand what would drive anyone to commit mass murder actively or passively participate by not doing anything to work against it, making this novel right up my alley. I've read Anne Frank's Diary, The Boy with the Striped Pajamas, The Book Thief, Schindler's List, The Reader and Hitler's Willing Executioners. I also have  Night on my Nightstand, to be read. If anyone has any other good books about this topic, please post in the comments. :)
• Drums Of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon. This is the fourth book in the Outlander series. I love this series of books.  I even have a facebook group page dedicated to it (go to it and ask to join - it's a closed group but I'm happy to talk to you about joining and admit you to the inner sanctum!). I even went to see her at this showing!

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I have found a number of really good reading/book podcasts that get me through the seeming drought of reading.  I faithfully listen to all of them and urge you to give them a try!

• Books on the Nightstand - generally weekly and they have conferences called Booktopia during the summer!
• Literary Disco - yay for book nerds!
• Dear Book Nerd

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There are some really nifty book websites out there that you should check out!

• Goodreads - I use it to organize what I'm reading and what I've read. There are also discussion groups that are a wealth of knowledge. My profile is here.
• Serial box - online serialized novels. Pretty cool.

Girl at War by Sara Novic

The past is always with us. Most people even believe (correctly in my humble opinion) that the past is what makes us the people that we are today and will be in the future. It always seems that the more painful memories linger longer and are more deeply etched into our psyche than the happier ones. This is the case in this novel, Novic's first novel.

Ana is the protagonist and lives suspended in between the worlds of the living and dead. She witnessed numerous atrocities during the Croatian War of Independence. Violence quickly becomes the main staple of her life and consumes her along with her mom, dad and baby sister.  At the time that the war is occurring, she is the ripe old age of 10. At ten, she doesn't understand the magnitude of the dangers and violence that she faces so she and her best friend Luca ride bikes, go to school and try to otherwise be normal children. When it finally takes a personal toll, it's on a magnitude that can only be described as all or nothing.

We meet Ana at 20 as well, where she is a college student in NYC and refusing to discuss her history with anyone outside of her family. She is constantly aware of the pain and attempts to find a resolution to her history.

Novic is amazing in capturing the pain and inner turmoil that Ana must feel as she goes through life.  She does a wonderful job changing the voice to reflect the age, maturity and development level of her narrator. Novic's voice is remarkably self assured in detailing the horrors experienced during this war.  This is truly a remarkable and compelling story about one girl's struggle with war. 

Trigger Warnings by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman isn't your average joe. In fact, he's really quite odd, but that's what makes him a truly great author. He writes everything from comic books, to adolescent fiction, to more mature stories and novels/fiction for adults, making him, in my opinion, one of the better authors out there. His newest collection of short stories, "Trigger Warning," encapsulates everything from Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Who (I'm sorry, but if you don't like Dr. Who, we can't be friends or even associates!!).
As one might expect, however, in a book with this title, the stories usually don't end well for the protagonist. There is material in the book that will mess with your head - and he's up front about that in the introduction. If you can't handle that, this book isn't for you. For instance, there's a woman who wears a bone from her dead son as part of a necklace. Yeah, it's just that weird and haunting. There are ghost stories as well. For instance, there's one story that is literally just a list of answers to questions about aliens and abductions that leaves the great majority of the best holes to the readers' imagination. And yet, I loved them. They were like the box of chocolates or the bottle of wine that I wanted to just sit down and indulge in, knowing that it could help or be absolutely terrible for me at the same time. You just need to get this book. Now.  

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

In this day and age, it's very unusual to go a month or a week even (sometimes days) without hearing about some sort of injustice in the criminal justice system. It just seems that there are so many exonerations and overcrowded jails. Our politicians are trying to figure out ways to reduce the prison population. Studies are constantly coming out that cast doubt on parts of cases that were once considered airtight. But most recently, in addition to the racial dynamics that exist between police and suspects, there has been much debate about capital punishment, particularly in light of botched executions.
I heard about this book on NPR and saw it being sold in Starbucks.  In a prior life, I did criminal defense work so I'm always interested in books that come out on this subject and this book in particular intrigued me because it was written as a memoir by a guy that actually practiced and did capital work.  Bryan Stevenson grew up poor and a minority in Delaware and his great-grandparents had been slaves in Virginia. He attended Harvard Law school and afterward began defending poor people in Georgia through the Equal Law Initiative. He eventually moved to Alabama and began capital work.
This book focuses on that work with Walter McMilian's case forming most of the story for it. Stevenson was representing him in the late 80's after he got put on death row for murdering a white woman in Monroeville, AL - if that name sounds familiar it's because it's been made famous by To Kill a Mockingbird. I found myself quickly drawn in to the story. The book does have quirks though that sometimes made it hard to get through. A lot of the stories are 30 or more years old and yet, you get the impression that they just happened last year or are currently happening now. Dialogue has to be reconstituted - there's no way it can be verbatim. There is little that makes you feel connected or intimate with the person in the story, even though Stephenson tries.  I think much is probably because of confidentiality issues, but it still leaves much to be desired.
That being said, we are very familiar with how he feels about things.