The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

The first three weeks of the New Year are heaven for the football lovers in my family as the college football season presents its champions. This year the football bug has hit my six-year-old for the first time. He matter-of-factly spouts off facts such as, “A safety is when you get tackled in the end zone” and “mostly you don’t go for the fourth down even when it’s four and one.”

Unlike my son and husband, the closest I get to listening to sports is if this guy happens to be on the radio. And actually it’s been his voice I hear in my head as I read The Sportswriter by Richard Ford.

“If sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret.” 

Frank Bascombe is the sportswriter of the title. As he takes us through a play-by-play of his week, his ruminations touch on his marriage, divorce, the mourning of his son, his town, travels, and of course, his career as a writer. 

Patience with his musings is rewarded: “It was her voice I loved first, the sharpened Midwestern vowels, the succinct glaciated syntax: Binton Herbor, himburg, Gren Repids. It is a voice that knows the minimum of what will suffice, and banks on it.”

Although reading about a sportswriter isn’t as thrilling as, say, [insert sports metaphor here], it may end up being just as heartbreaking.

“airport, car door, buy a shower curtain, get divorced”

“Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon let in the summer of 1979.” So begins the novel All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. In it, Yoli’s family can’t seem to catch a break. In childhood, it’s because her family balks against the rules of their conservative Mennonite village in Canada. They harbor a forbidden piano to foster her sister Elfrieda’s musical talents. When not at the piano, Elf spray paints the letters AMPS (“all my puny sorrows”) around the village in further rebellion.

In Yoli and Elf's adult years, the family suffers from Elf’s unhappiness. Elf’s career as a concert pianist is overshadowed by her multiple suicide attempts.Yoli has been traveling back and forth from Toronto to support her mother and brother-in-law and sit at her sister’s bedside. When not at the hospital, Yoli can be found sitting on her friend Julie’s porch. It is here the novel provides cathartic humor to balance the sadness of the rest of Yoli’s day. 

Toews brightens the pages of this devastatingly sad novel with Czech violinists, Italian agents, huffy nurses, and eccentric aunts. The brightest character, however, is Yoli. Her struggles to see her sister’s point of view, her texts with her teenage children, her endless to-do-lists, her trysts with mechanics and violinists, and her sometimes flinching optimism all carry the reader onward - even when the Kleenex box is empty.

Memorable Reads of 2014

From the books I've read over the last year, images and characters from the following books have stayed with me.

The Visitors by Sally Beauman
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
The Perfume Collector by Kathleen Tessaro

Year in Quirk

1. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman 
2. The Explanation for Everything by Lauren Grodstein 
3. The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee by Marja Mills 
4. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami 
5. The Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland 
6. The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion 
7. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

"The pulse of the post-strip-club shopping crowd"

I took the opportunity this past summer to take my kids here. Rather than finding it intriguing, they were spooked. I have not doubts they would have found Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore equally spooky.

Clay, an out of work web designer, begins working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s. Of his job search he says, “At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission that I believed in…After that I decided it just couldn’t be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.” Eventually it is not evil but boredom that drives Clay to begin investigating the customers. Rather than buy books, these characters check out titles from the mysterious multistoried collection in the back of the store. He goes through the log of book loans and maps the patterns of their borrowing. In doing so, he begins unraveling the mystery in weeks that most customers have spent lifetimes solving.  

Sloan manages, in the course of these events, to bring a little romance into Clay’s life. Clay falls in love with a Googler who attempts to help him to crack the mysterious code. “Books: boring. Codes: awesome. These are the people who are running the Internet.” But ultimately the romance fails since he and his other friends have a more romantic view of the world: “I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.”

I shudder to think which side my kids would choose.  

Barely Rational Decisions

“I have found a solution to the Wife Problem. As with so many scientific breakthroughs, the answer was obvious in retrospect.”

So begins our narrator of The Rosie Project. Genetics professor Don Tillman is hung up on clean bathrooms, apricot ice cream, and punctuality. Since his social skills have failed him in finding a suitable life partner, he turns to science. Thus begins the Wife Project.

After carefully crafting a written survey intended to weed out all but Mrs. Perfect, Don submits it to his best friend, a psychology professor. The next thing he knows, his friend has sent over Rosie.  Thinking she aced the questionnaire, Don invites her to dinner without preamble.  Soon, he discovers she fails almost all of his important criteria. However, it turns out to be the best night of his life. 

Funny and sweet, Graeme Simsion’s novel proves that not only do opposites attract, they accept (and embrace) the differences.

Do you like it?

Ours was a quick courtship. We had been dating for five months when we first started talking about marriage. So I did what any sensible girl would do when faced with a prospective groom, I began to look for a ring. By June, I had found it. My next move was to leave a message on his voice mail with the item code and ring size. His next move? A proposal a week later. 

But as anyone who is married knows, the true story begins after the vows are exchanged. J. Courtney Sullivan smartly adheres to that principle in her novel The Engagements. But first, she introduces Frances Gerety.  In the opening pages, we meet Frances who not only creates an ad slogan, but the tradition of proposing with a diamond engagement ring. Following Frances through her career, we discover with each new ad campaign how she remakes the diamond’s image according to the mineral resources, and pocketbooks, of each decade. 

Interspersed throughout Frances’ tale, are the stories of four couples. We read about their courtships, engagements, affairs, and disappointments. And of course we find out about their rings, which reflect the expectations and fashions of each time. By housing each couple in a unique setting and only revealing their story in parts, Sullivan succeeds in building genuine interest.  

Although she skips from Philadelphia to Paris, from 1947 to 2012, Sullivan rewards the patient reader by cleverly tying the five stories together toward the end of the novel. The ending is almost as gratifying as hearing those four little words. And saying yes.