More books for the challenge. I’ve completed 6 out of the 35 and read 11 books total this year so far!
Book Challenge #9: A Short Story Collection
Stone Mattress: Nine Tales, Margaret Atwood
This book was released last year, and I was thrilled to read a short story collection from Margaret Atwood. Until this, I had only read (and loved and respected) The Handmaid’s Tale (although I’m now over halfway through Oryx & Crake).
This collection is, for the most part, thematically addressing aging although in a wonderful variety of ways. The first three stories are interconnected, following a group of writers who lived and wrote together in the 1960s folk-era NYC. At some point, each character has to confront the role that those early years in New York played in who they became later. It felt like I was sort of reading about some of the people who could have been in the lovely, but dark, Coen Brothers’ movie Inside Llewyn Davis.
But other stories also addressed aging in fantastic ways. My favorite, above all, was the very last story, called “Torch the Dusties.” The protagonist is an elderly woman who lives in a nursing home; she has an eye disease called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which her blindness causes her to hallucinate tiny people who dance around. That fact alone begins to blur the line between fiction and reality. But then the residents in the home realize that someone is picketing and blocking the entrances into the facility, a group who believe that the elderly are using up all the resources and should be left to die. The situation worsens, and finally, the residents are alone in the home, with no food and no assistance or medication. It’s what I love about Atwood the most: a hauntingly relevant dystopian setting that gave me chills. I love dystopia, and no one does dystopia like Atwood. This collection was marvelous, even for a reader in her 20s who hasn’t yet begun to really consider the aging process.
Book Challenge #33: A book I started but never finished
I Never Had It Made, Jackie Robinson and Alfred Duckett
This book was on sale on the Nook last summer, and I started it in July after finishing Mariano Rivera’s The Closer, and I was so desperate for more baseball. I made the mistake of starting, however, while teaching summer school, so I stalled out after about 75 pages and finally started reading again in late December. I read the last 160 pages, however, in the last few days. Somehow, I was just as riveted at his life post-baseball as I was about his historic career with the Dodgers.
This book is one of the most authentically straightforward books I’ve ever read. It’s not the easiest book to read in that sense as I sometimes felt like someone was sitting in front of me, staring straight at me, and speaking with an uncomfortable level of candidness. Once I got used to the writing style, however, I found this autobiography to be refreshingly honest with more emotional depth than I imagined.
So many aspects of Jackie Robinson’s career are covered here: his close relationship with Branch Rickey, his tense relationship with some of his teammates, his decision to retire from baseball at the same time as he was traded to the Giants. But there was so much here that was unexpected: I didn’t realize how powerful politically Jackie Robinson became in the years after baseball. I never would have guessed his strong ties to the Republican Party and his role as NY Governor Rockefeller’s assistant. I had no idea about his roles in the various businesses and banks, either.
And I didn’t know the story of his oldest son, Jackie, Jr., who served in Vietnam, where he established a drug addiction that followed him back to the States. He was arrested and spent several years getting cleaned up in rehab and beginning to work with youth and addicts in a beautiful, powerful way before dying in a car accident at the age of 24. The last chapters of the autobiography, in which Jackie Robinson talks about his relationship with his oldest son and his family’s grief are beautifully written and devastating and a powerful testament to the love of family.
And Jackie Robinson’s work in the black community and fighting for the rights of blacks in America is, I think, his most notable legacy. His voice, speaking out against injustice and for his people, is strong and clear and inspiring.
life and love and baseball 