Where there's smoke

 

With wildfires raging, the air quality has made it too dangerous to be outside. Luckily, I had picked up a second batch of books curbside before it all started. What better way to escape from the tragedies of reality than to dive into those of fiction?

Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano

A plane crashes. Only one young boy survives. As we watch Edward struggle with his recovery, newfound fame, and the pain of achieving milestones his older brother never will, we also live through the hours of the plane ride.  Intermittently, we meet some of his fellow passengers and slowly discover what went wrong that day. The suspense of this novel lies not only in the mundane minutes of the plane ride that lead up to the crash, but in those everyday moments in the years that follow when Edward begins to hurt a little bit less.

A Death in Harlem by Karla F.C. Holloway

This lyrically written mystery set in Harlem in the 1920s features Weldon Thomas. As the novel opens, Thomas, the area’s first Black police officer, is expecting a quiet night working a literary awards banquet. By the end of the evening, two women from different social classes end up dead. After some weeks pass without an investigation, the women of the community approach Thomas to look into the matter. In the end, he discovers not only the culprit, but a host of secrets that those with enough wealth can conceal.

Curbside

This week I went to the library for the first time since early March. This visit, as you might have expected, was a little different than usual. This was no spontaneous trip on my way home, but a scheduled appointment I made the day before. Instead of making a beeline to the new releases section, I sat in my car and waited for my order. Rather than perusing covers and reading plot summaries, I opted for the "Grab Bag (surprise me!)" option.   

Here’s what my local librarians picked out for me:

Big Lies in a Small Town by Diane Chamberlain

I probably wouldn’t have picked this book based on either the title or cover, so I was pleasantly surprised by both the unique story and character development. Anna is an artist chosen to paint a post office mural during  the early 1940s. Morgan is an art student chosen to restore the mural eight decades later. Despite their different circumstances, art becomes the outlet with which they wrestle with their personal demons.

Moral Compass by Danielle Steel

Despite, or perhaps to spite, her popularity, Danielle Steel hasn’t been an author I’ve ever read. Although I don’t regret the afternoon I spent with this book, I probably won’t seek out others she’s written unless I happen to be in an airport or doctor’s office waiting room.

Treason by Stuart Woods

I have to admit, I enjoyed the snappy dialogue. It was also mildly entertaining to read how one goes about buying a private jet. But the endless Caesar salad lunches and objectification of women got tiresome. By the third phone call (of roughly 300) in the novel, we understood it would be scrambled, but were told again anyway. 

"when things are sad and awful, crying is an appropriate response"

As one of the characters remarks in Goodbye for Now, “When things are sad and awful, crying is an appropriate response.” Turns out laughing is too. Two of Laurie Frankel’s novels will have you doing both.

Although I haven’t see it, apparently there’s a show on Prime that imagines a world in which life goes on in a digital afterlife. A similar premise is at work in Frankel’s Goodbye for Now. After Sam and Meredith are matched in an online dating program that Sam developed, their tenuous relationship is tested by the death of Meredith’s grandmother Livvie. To help Meredith through her grief, Sam develops a program that draws from Livvie’s digital footprint to generate and respond to emails and eventually simulates her video chatting. They develop the idea into a new venture they call RePose and, for a price, offer the service to others who have recently lost a loved one. (spoiler alert) When an unforeseen accident occurs, Sam discovers first-hand the comforts and caveats of his creation.

Although Frankel’s humor and spot-on dialogue are apparent in Goodbye, she kicks it up a notch in her subsequent novel This is How it Always Is (another winning pick of Reese’s book club). Rosie Walsh, a physician, and her husband Penn, a writer, have a house-full of boys. When she gets pregnant with their fifth child (“Are you Catholic?” friends ask), they hope for a girl. Instead, tumbling into their messy lives is Claude. Precocious, he announces at three that he wants to be a chef,  a scientist, an ice cream cone, and a girl. The transition takes some time, but eventually Claude becomes Poppy. 

When the family moves to Seattle, Rosie and Penn introduce their four sons and daughter to their new friends and neighbors. Entangled within the story is Penn’s fairy tale about a prince and a magical suit of armor through which he grapples with the life lessons his family is learning and re-learning about acceptance. Frankel, who draws from her own experience raising a transgender child, portrays in Rosie the tensions of feeling hopeful and anxious that every mother can instantly recognize as her own.

"rehearsing fake smiles before toothpaste-flecked mirrors"

With all the talk of back to school, I’ve almost forgotten it’s still summer. Normally, I would have posted a summer reading list or list of beach reads by now. Since this year has been anything but normal, I haven’t felt as motivated to do so.

But whether you’ve managed to find a beach, or are sticking with the couch, here are two books by Colson Whitehead that will transport you to a different time and place – the hallmark of any beach read, worth, well, its salt.

Sag Harbor 

It’s the summer of 1985. Benji has settled in for his stay at his family’s beach house in Sag Harbor. During the school, he's one of a few Black students at his private school in Manhattan. During the summer, he looks forward to, and at the same time has doubts about, fitting in to this summer community of African-American professionals established by his grandparents.  His ambitions –  meet a girl, get a job, and keep his affection for The Smiths to himself.  

During the week he and his brother are left to fend for themselves, only the threat of their parents’ arrival on Friday keeps the  house from sinking into total disrepair. Working at Burger King and the local ice cream shop keeps them stocked in Campbell’s and beer purchased by older cousins.  The weekends his parents do stay bring home-cooked meals, but also the tension of his parents’ troubling relationship.

The Underground Railroad 

That misperception you had in elementary school that the Underground Railroad was, like, a real train,  is brought to life in this novel. Cora, the protagonist, flees from the Georgia cotton plantation where she is enslaved via an underground train to the north. Each subsequent station offers the promise of freedom, but something nefarious is always lurking. It’s hard to tell which is more terrifying – the slave catcher Ridgeway or the well-meaning white people in power she encounters along the way.

radical amazement

Last week I finished up the course work for a Master’s degree in Pastoral Studies. Over three years I took classes in scripture, systemic and historical theology, pastoral skills, and worship and liturgy. I was blessed to take classes with professors and students from a variety of faith traditions. More importantly my conception of “God” expanded.

As did my bookshelves.

Although I have shelves full of many more titles (and notebooks with TBR titles scribbled in the margins), here are four that stood out during my time at Seattle University.

Models of God by Sallie McFague

“God is incarnated or embodied in our world, in both cosmological and anthropological ways. The implication of this picture is that we never meet God unmediated or unembodied.”

Radical Amazement by Judy Cannato

“Our vitality depends on the connections we establish and the communion we share.”

The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman

“The Hebrew Bible would offer an unparalleled source of solidarity and identity to countless communities in the centuries that followed. The details of its stories, drawn from a treasury of ancient memories, fragmentary histories, and rewritten legends, possessed power not as an objective chronicle of events in a tiny land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean but as a timeless expression of what a people’s divine destiny might be.”

The Powers that Be by Walter Wink

“God at one and the same time upholds a given political or economic system, since some such system is required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive of fully human life; and presses forth for its transformation into a more humane order. Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third. The Christian is expected to hold together all three.”

Doing My Homework

I really haven’t known what to say. 

But that's the thing about white privilege that I'm beginning to understand. I haven't had to say anything. 

So I’ve been doing my homework: listening to and reading work from political and religious leaders and writers. And the plan for now is to do more reading and talking with my kids, praying, and offering financial support.

In looking for books about combating racism, I started here. The consensus of what to read first, from a variety of sources, seems to be White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. I'll start there.  

“Close enough to hear the cameleers’ campfire snap”

“Well, then, that’s so. What we see with our hearts is often far truer than what we see with our eyes.” 

Lurie Mattie is an orphan.  While fleeing a marshal who has a warrant for his arrest, he hides himself among a group of soldiers traveling west with a herd of camels. Eventually he parts ways with this group but gains a new traveling companion in Burke. Theirs is a journey of rivers which Lurie chronicles by drops added to his canteen throughout the pages of Inland by Téa Obreht.

Meanwhile in the Arizona Territory, Nora and Emmett Lark have been trying to subsist on a desert homestead by running a community newspaper. They soon find themselves in the center of the controversy of where the county seat should be established.  As the day of this novel unfolds, Nora slowly realizes that her husband and sons have been caught up in the violence of this controversy. As she is trying to figure out their whereabouts, Nora is also desperately trying to find water as their household is literally down to the last dipperful. Adding to the chaos is the appearance of a mysterious beast which only the most unreliable members of her household have claimed to see.

Having just been charmed by Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, I was delighted to find similar twists of magical realism, tenacity, and humor in her latest work. 

“ 'Where in all of Christendom did you get a camel?’ she said. ‘Texas.’ There was no truer answer.”