My 2018 in Books

Nebula NGC 6302

This beautiful photo by the Hubble Space Telescope is of a nebula sometimes called the Butterfly Nebula. This vision from 3,800 light years away. From so far away and so long ago. These cosmic wings are the perfect metaphor for the flight of 2018.

I'm a writer and many years can be measured in what I've written. But not last year. I have not been writing like I have in years past. 2018's flight must be measured in the books I read.

Not all the books I read in 2018. I can't remember them all. And I didn't make notes -- which I should have done, because at my stage in life I've read so many and forgotten so many that sometimes I realize two chapters in that I DID read that one and I don't have time to read it again when there are so many out there that I haven't read once.

Sometimes I do remember that I've read them before, but I wonder if I would still think they are as good as I thought the first time through. This year I reread John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany. For years I've said it's my favorite book ever. I read it again, because I recommended it to a friend and she didn't like it. I still like it, though maybe it's not my all-time favorite anymore.


In June I went to Washington, D.C. for a History Vacation with my son and his two sons. Thinking I would read to them in the evening after full days of exploring the city and the histories it tells, I took Tuck Everlasting. I hadn't read the children's book by Natalie Babbitt published in 1975, the year after my son's birth. So I read it before we went to D.C. and took it with me but never opened it again while we were there. The book's premise is that immortality isn't a wonderful thing at all. "You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.” Our days were too full of living.

While in D.C., as my souvenir, I bought The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. It's nonfiction -- a history of three families who went north during the Great Migration and the Second Great Migration. It was the time when African Americans moved in great numbers out of the Southern United States into the Midwest, Northeast and West, a period of time from about World War I until after World War II. Being white and having grown up in the South, I knew nothing about the Great Migration. Like a lot of African American people in the South, I always thought of the North as being sort of a promised land, where people were treated equally and fairly regardless of their color. Boy, did I have my eyes opened.

As it turns out, The Warmth of Other Suns was good preparation for Michelle Obama's Becoming, my first book in 2019. ( For my review of  Becoming Click here.) Her grandparents had come North in the Great Migration.

A retired librarian friend of mine (Everyone who loves reading should have librarian friends!) introduced me to Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley mysteries. Mysteries are my goto for fiction and, of course, I'd seen the TV productions on PBS's Masterpiece Mystery. But I gotta tell you, Sergeant Barbara Havers is even better in the books than she is in the TV series.

There were other nonfiction books -- I wouldn't go a whole year without David McCullough. 2018 was the year of "The Great Bridge." I know, I know -- it was published in 1972, but I didn't run into it until last year. It's the story of the building of The Brooklyn Bridge, the very one that still carries six lanes of traffic across the East River from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Before the bridge was built, crossing the river depended on ferries.

McCullough's book follows the bridge's building from the suspension-bridge-builder John Augustus Roebling's efforts to sell the concept of bridging the East River and the start of construction in 1869  just four years after the end of the Civil War, to its completion in 1883. With a main span of 1,595.5 feet (486.3 m) and a height of 276.5 ft (84.3 m) above mean high water, it was the world's first steel-wire suspension bridge. It originally carried horse-drawn vehicles and elevated railway lines. This is an epic story about the problems they encountered and solved -- steel cables long enough and strong enough, laborers afflicted with the bends, political conflicts between the then separate cities of Brooklyn and Manhattan (New York City), and the ever present problems of financing any public project of any size faces.

It was a good year for nonfiction. September found me at the Jaipur Literature Festival in Boulder. JLF, a wealth of writers of every form, from all over the world -- an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, a Nobel nominee playwright, poets, novelists, journalists, historians, and much more. And they sell books. "Oh, no, don't throw me into that briar patch!"

I met Wade Davis, Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society. I bought his River Notes: A Natural and Human History of the Colorado and read it. Since I've moved to Colorado, I've become hyperaware of the importance of water in the Western United States, the Colorado being the major source of water for seven southwestern states so it was perfect. It's very well-done, as dense with information and as engaging as are his lectures.

Astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, Yale professor of astronomy and physics was there. She writes science so people like me can understand. Her Mapping the Heavens follows astronomy/cosmology from myth to string theory. Brilliant!

And then ... I went to Houston in October and heard Barbara Kingsolver read.  So of course I bought two more of her books, her most recent Unsheltered for a friend and Flight Behavior from 2012 for myself.

Flight Behavior takes on Climate Change and personal growth. Her main character Dellarobia Turnbow is an intelligent young mother, trapped in her own lack of education and her too early marriage to the wrong man. Climate Change has brought migrating monarch butterflies to her wrong valley in Tennessee instead of their right valley in Mexico. Change is inevitable.

Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible may be my favorite novel now. I read it back in 2014. Check out my review of it.

I ended 2018 with another John Irving novel, Avenue of Mysteries. Irving writes books for writers. His main characters are often writers who think about things writers think about. In Avenue of Mysteries, the main character Juan Diego gives good advice to writers -- "Characters in novels are more understandable, more consistent, more predictable. No good novel is a mess; many so-called real lives are messy."

Certainly not an exhaustive list of the books I read in 2018, but these are the ones that I particularly remember. I hope your 2018 in books was as enjoyable as was my own.

Becoming by Michelle Obama -- a review

Michelle Obama's memoir is perfect to start 2019. It's open and eye-opening. This book scatters seeds of Yes-we-can, gently telling us little bits about people who are not to-the-manner-born, but learn, do well, and make a difference. It's her view of herself and her experiences and of the people around her that strengthens my optimism about America. And about humanity in general. Optimism that is being sorely tested.

Wikipedia identifies Michelle Obama as "Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (born January 17, 1964) is an American writer, lawyer, and university administrator who served as the First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017." This paragraph identifies her as her, not just the wife of Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States, first black President of the United States. Not just as first black First Lady of the United States.

More than half the book is about her life before her husband ran for president. And that life was amazingly normal, working class, American. Her father, Fraser Robinson III, worked for the City of Chicago at a water treatment plant. And her mother, Marian Shield Robinson was a stay at home mom until Michelle went to high school. Both were born in Chicago to people who'd come North during the Great Migration. (I knew nothing about the Great Migration until I read Isabel Wilkerson's book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, published in 2010 by Random House.)

Like my own family, there were only two children -- Michelle and her older brother Craig. Being less than two years apart, they were always close (also like my brother and me, although I'm the older one.) The Robinsons maintained close ties to their extended family, grandparents, aunts and uncles, great-aunts and -uncles, and lots of cousins. All, of whom lived close enough to get together easily and often. And, let me tell you, from personal experience, a small family of four doesn't feel small at all with that many kin close by.

Michelle says she wasn't really aware of racial problems until she was older.

When she was small, Michelle's South Shore neighborhood was more diverse than my white one was. Oklahoma was determinedly segregated.

Bryn Mawr, her elementary school was considered one of Chicago's best public schools when she started kindergarten there. The children in her class picture are described by a classmate as "five little white faces and 23 shades of brown faces and one Middle Eastern face.”

By the time she finished the 8th grade, there were only brown faces. The children may not have questioned where their white and wealthier classmates went, but the grown-ups knew what was going on. At least some did.

When Michelle was entering the seventh grade, the Chicago Defender, a newspaper widely read by the African American community ran an OpEd describing Bryn Mawr as a "run-down slum" governed by a "ghetto mentality." Michelle's school principal, Dr. Lavizzo wrote his own letter to the editor in which she says he made it clear that "he understood precisely what he was up against. Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It's vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear."

She says "There were predatory real estate agents roaming South Shore, whispering to home owners that they should sell before it was too late, that they'd help them get out while you still can." They used the word everyone was most afraid of -- 'ghetto' -- dropping it like a lit match."

In Oklahoma City, it was 'busing.' My parents bought it and moved us to the suburbs.

Mrs. Robinson did not. Michelle describes her mother -- "She'd lived in South Shore for ten years already and would end up staying another forty. She didn't buy into fearmongering and at the same time seemed equally inoculated against any sort of pie-in-the-sky idealism. She was a straight-down-the-line realist, controlling what she could." A yes-we-can kind of mom.

And one thing Mrs. Robinson could do was to lobby for "a special multigrade classroom ... grouping students by ability rather than by age -- in essence, putting the brighter kids together so they could learn at a faster pace.

 Dr. Lavizzo's background is a yes-we-can seed. The multigrade classroom "was the brainchild of Dr. Lavizzo, who'd gone to night school to get his PhD in education." Night school.

The importance of education is emphasized throughout this book. Michelle's brother Craig was offered basketball scholarships to the University of Washington and Princeton. Washington's offer was a full ride. Princeton would cost $3,500 per year. Although Craig told his father he'd rather accept the University of Washington offer so it wouldn't cost the family anything, Mr. Robinson, being a yes-we-can kind of father, wouldn't hear of it. He wouldn't let his son choose based on saving them money. They'd figure out a way. And Craig chose Princeton, no doubt, breaking trail for his sister.

Michelle was a determined student. She was salutatorian of her high school graduating class. Her inspiration to follow Craig to Princeton? A high school counselor told her that she wasn't the sort of student to go to Princeton. Hah! Another yes-we-can seed. She graduated cum laude from Princeton then went on to Harvard where she got her law degree. And, yes, she was a normal, working class daughter who achieved a big salary at a prestigious law practice back in Chicago which she needed even though she continued to live with her parents in South Shore so she could pay back her college loans. And that's where she met Barack Obama. She was his mentor. It was part of her job to lure him to work for the law firm when he graduated Harvard Law.

As it turned out, he lured her away. And into the White House.

There is so much in this book. So much. So much. Becoming is a good read, an inspiring read. I could fill pages with Michelle Obama's words. Her fears. Her aspirations. The places she went and the people she met.

And she explained something to me that I did not understand. Why, or at least part of why, we could celebrate electing an African American man to be our President, a face to prove that America truly does hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. From that to the shameful situation we have now.

Here's what she said:
         "For more than six years now, Barack and I had lived with an awareness that we
          ourselves were a provocation. As minorities across the country were gradually
          beginning to take on more significant roles in politics, business, and entertainment,
          our family had become the most prominent example. Our presence in the White
          House had been celebrated by millions of Americans, but it also contributed to a
          reactionary sense of fear and resentment among others. The hatred was old and
          deep and as dangerous as ever.

        "We lived with it as a family, and we lived with it as a nation. And we carried on,
          as gracefully as we could."

I do believe that we, as a people and as a nation, will survive this regressive period in our history and again move forward. We will work toward the American dream of true freedom and equality of opportunity for all.

Yes we can.