What Are We Reading?
September 2006
I've been a little distracted from my usual fictional pursuits, at least in part by all the 9/11 five-year anniversary remembrances. So much focus on fear. A few years ago, my husband, daughter and I visited the Cabinet War Rooms, a truly absorbing exhibit housed underground where Winston Churchill actually lived and conducted government business during the London Blitz of World War II. On the Council table sits a placard-where it sat during all his wartime meetings-Churchill's own words: There is no depression in this room. And we are not entertaining the possibilities of defeat; they don't exist. This with bombs falling on London nightly. We could all benefit from an injection of pluck and courage and the possibilities of living without fear in a world that may not have ever been entirely safe.
Okay. So here are a few things I can recommend:
Referred Pain and Other Stories (Counterpoint) by Lynne Sharon Schwartz-Sometimes a writer reads a story so good it makes her wonder why she's even bothering. That's how I felt about "Referred Pain," the 70-page novella at the center of this very good collection. A seemingly happy young man's life begins to unravel after a painful dental emergency, and we get a beautifully observed, often funny study of survivor guilt. The story ends on a note of perfect, if heartbreaking, resolution.
Envy: A Novel (Random House Trade Paperbacks) by Kathryn Harrison-This book was pretty soundly trashed and occasionally praised when it came out in 2005. Now out in paperback, I'm not sure what enticed me to read it, except that I'm usually fascinated by Harrison's explorations of the dark undercurrents of sexual attraction. She goes after connections very much like a psychoanalyst, so it shouldn't be surprising that she chose that profession for her protagonist, Will, a man forced to see that the small, nearly ignorable seed of unhappiness in his marital bed, is the clue to a devastating web of lies and betrayal. It may not be her best book, but it's still am absorbing read.
Thirst: Poems (Beacon Press) by Mary Oliver-After the death of her partner of 40 years, Mary Oliver takes on grief and the thirst for spirit. There are moments of savage longing in some of these poems that I have not seen before in her work.
A Breath of Snow and Ashes (Delta) by Diana Gabaldon-The paperback edition of her most recent installment of the now six-book Outlander series. I've always been a huge fan of these books, which might be described as historical sci-fi adventure romance novels. The last two books haven't been quite up to Gabaldon's usual standards, but with A Breath of Snow and Ashes she brings the focus back to her intriguing (and sexy) main characters, Jamie and Claire, who by this time are middle-aged landowners in colonial North Carolina who still find themselves in the midst of adventure and controversy. The subsidiary characters and plots are engrossing, and the historical detail quite convincing, particularly those of making a home in the wilderness.
Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she works as a free lance journalist and teaches creative writing to middle schoolers. A fiction writer and poet, she is at work on her first novel, Travel for Agoraphobics.
