The Uncoupling

Unless you've taken a Humanities or Classics course, you likely haven't read (or seen performed) Aristophanes' infamous play, Lysistrata.  But I highly recommend it.  It's the story of a group of wives and women living in Ancient Greece who band together and commit to end the Peloponnesian War by...wait for it...withholding sex from their men.  Needless to say, the ban on sex infuriates the men...but the women ultimately bring peace.

Meg Wolitzer tells a modern-day version of this story in her newest book The Uncoupling.  This version centers on a group of teachers, students and couples from Eleanor Roosevelt High whose new, edgy drama teacher selects Aristophanes' Lysistrata to perform for the school's annual play.  While her motive for performing the play isn't political as was Aristophanes' original manuscript, it certainly inspires community conversation.  And an accompanying mysterious wind that blows through the town touches each of the female characters, magically calling them to action within their own relationships. 

Readers will likely laugh out loud at the dialogue and unromantic situations of the characters, unable to side with either the men or the women.  Perfect for the poolside.

Year of the Tiger?

Well, no.  But there are three current books which would make you think otherwise:

The first, The Tiger's Wife, gets my top recommendation.  Author Tea Obreht tells a haunting story of family, generations and folklore involving a young female doctor (Natalia) in search of understanding her grandfather's life and death.  Obreht's beautiful prose and adept storytelling has won her recognition by The New Yorker as one of the 20 novelists to watch under 40.





The second, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan's A Tiger in the Kitchen, is a quick and easy food memoir about the author's return to native Singapore to reconnect with her family while learning to cook all of her favorite childhood dishes.







The third, perhaps most notorious book on this list, is Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.  Chua's book swept the news early this year because of its sometimes controversial outlook on parenting "the Chinese way". Though I've not read this one, my friend (also a librarian), highly recommends it.  To read more about Chua's book and the craze it's created, check out this The New Yorker article from January 31, 2011.

Especially for Mothers & Daughters

Readers may recognize the name Sue Monk Kidd from her bestselling book turned film, The Secret Life of Bees.  Her most recent work is a co-authored travel memoir which she writes with her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, entitled Traveling With Pomegranates:  A Mother-Daughter Story.  The memoir alternates between the voices of these two women, as they explore the many ancient and sacred places Greece, Turkey, and France.  What they end up finding, as many people who travel do, is a greater sense of themselves.  Kidd, for example, describes her unusual inspiration for writing The Secret Life of Bees, while her daughter uncovers her life's calling.  What's most engaging is the way in which the experiences of these two women coalesce.  Female listeners may very well find themselves recalling their own mother-daughter experiences, as they read.  Note:  I strongly encourage readers to listen to this one on audio.  Kidd and Taylor read their own work with a melodic South-Carolinian dialect which is lovely to listen to.

The Lotus Eaters

Every once in awhile a book comes a long that quite literally takes my breath away.  For that to happen requires the following features to coalesce:  a complex or complicated subject matter (oversimplification isn't interesting to me); dynamic characters (who often struggle with the complex or complicated subject matter); a new lens through which to examine a moment in time; believability; good writing.  For me, this includes Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried; Toni Morrison's Beloved; Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, to name a few.   And now, The Lotus Eaters, by Tatjana Soli.

Like Tim O'Brien, The Lotus Eaters is a haunting story about the Vietnam War.  The twist is this:  our protagonist is an American female photo-journalist who falls in love with a ruined country, and like many of the journalists and soldiers who precede her, becomes addicted to its war.  What's particularly lovely about the work are the many nuances Soli effortlessly incorporates:  the extended metaphor of Homer's Odyssey, or the ever-present Vietnam landscape, for example.  Soli brings the Vietnam War to life--rewarding readers in unforgettable ways.  Highly recommended.

Check out the author's website
http://www.tatjanasoli.com/TatjanaSoliAuthor.html

More "Living Locally" Blogs

For further viewing and reading on living locally, check out these blogs, recommended in the most current edition of Radish Magazine:

Crosswinds Farm

Brazy Creek Farm

Antiquity Oaks

Farm Genevieve

Front Porch Indiana

Living Locally

Sometimes the best read is the one that I have no expectations about.  Such is the case with an audio-book I found while mindlessly browsing the shelves at Davenport Public Library entitled Farewell, My Subaru, by Doug Fine.

Fine (humorously) tells the story of his settling in the Southwest with the sole purpose of living locally.  So, he purchases his ranch, along with two goats, a coop-full of chickens--and yes, forsakes his beloved Subaru for a car which runs entirely on bio-diesel fuel (which he feeds, by the way, with grease from local eateries).  We learn of his missteps and adventures along the way:  managing his mischievous, child-like goats; or, protecting his chickens from preying coyote.  As rustic as the whole experience sounds, it's also appealing to the adventurous of heart, and of course, to anyone who tries (even in the smallest of ways) to live locally.

Worth listening to, then check out Doug Fine's "living locally" blog.

Revisiting Betty Friedan

I caught wind of Stephanie Coontz's new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s,  while listening to a recent episode of NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.  My ears perked immediately:  I've long been a fan of Coontz's theses, which include The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992) and Marriage: A History: How Love Conquered Marriage (2006).  I love both.  So, I didn't wait to order a copy of her new work, which was inspired, she tells Gross, when her publisher asked her to write a biography of Betty Friedan's controversial feminist work, The Feminine Mystique.  I've not been disappointed.  Coontz provides first-hand accounts of women who recall their reaction to reading Friedan's work when it was first published in 1963.  But she goes a step further to draw connections between the dissatisfaction of our mothers and grandmothers, to the social pressures of women and young girls today.  And, while she applauds the relief Friedan brought to many housewives of the 1960s, she recognizes that her work excluded many other sectors of women, including the working class and ethnic minorities.  The combination of perspectives makes for an engrossing work.

Best Books of 2010

In case you missed a good read last year, here are some well-respected lists of the best of 2010, including fiction and non-fiction:

Publisher's Weekly

National Public Radio (NPR)

New York Times 

Barnes & Noble

A Real, Readable Mystery

The Scent of Rain and Lightning is a readable, subtle mystery-drama.  It begins with protagonist, Jody Linder, as she learns that the man sentenced for murdering her parents has been released from prison.  The narrative then unfolds, as we are taken back in time to Jody's childhood and what came before and after her parents' death.  As Pickard moves effortlessly between past and present, we begin to understand the family dynamic, and a budding, yet forbidden, relationship between Jody and the son of the accused murder. Like a good mystery should, the novel holds us until the very unpredictable end, when the evening of the murder is fully revealed.  What is further enjoyable is the recognizable mid-western landscape, and the way in which Pickard utilizes the landscape in combination with the acts of mother nature to create a larger metaphor.

The Scent of Rain and Lightning  follows Pickard's  well-reviewed The Virgin of Small Plains.

For Optimists & Skeptics Alike

I have to admit:  I wasn't the huge fan of Elizabeth Gilbert's now famous Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search For Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia that almost every other American woman my age seemed to be.  Yes, I enjoyed the mind's travel; yes, the vicarious romances.  But I always ended up setting the book down because Gilbert's tone seemed to me, well, whiny.  And this is why I avoided, for a long time, her newest book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage.  But unlike her first best-seller, Committed relays a mature voice that I found myself clinging to. 

Narratively, Committed picks up where Eat, Pray, Love leaves off.  She and Philippe are together, (somewhat) settled, and living in happy agreement that they will never marry, despite their love for one another.  But this all changes when Homeland Security discovers that Philippe has overstayed his welcome in America, and must acquire a permanent visa to reenter.  Of course, the Homeland Security Officer tells them that the only likely way for Philippe to do this is to marry his American born love.  From this beginning, Gilbert takes readers through a story that is part memoir, part history, part anthropological study, and yes, part travel narrative.  She and Philippe continue their travels, not because they want to this time, but because they must.  In the meantime, Gilbert feverishly researches marriage from the culture at large, and delves into an analysis of her own parents' marriage, all while trying to secure a life with Philippe and do the thing that both of them swore they would never do:  marry.  Highly recommended for anyone who's ever married, divorced, or contemplated either.