Tag Archives: Ruth Reichl

Bonnie Nickol’s Year in Reading, 2020

Posted on by under book review, Guest post, Uncategorized, year in review

I’ll soon be writing up my reflections on my 2020 reading year. In the meantime, I’ve solicited guest posts from friends and fellow book lovers about their own literary highlights. I’m always looking for new contributors; let me know here or on Twitter (@ds228) if you have something you want to share.

The eighth post is by Bonnie Nickol, on behalf of her long-running Little Rock book club. An artist, political activist, and founder of the Single Parent Scholarship Fund of Pulaski County, AR, Bonnie was a Clinton delegate to the ’92 convention and served in the first Clinton administration. She is a wife, mother of two, and grandmother of 4.

Our 50+ years book club, the Julie Herman Tuesday Morning Book Club (JHTMBC) seems to have read it all. We would met on Tuesday mornings, once a month, but not in the summer. The school calendar defined the club’s year because we were “stay-at-home” mothers, all of us, during the 1970’s. Our husbands earned and we maintained the Southern-voiced norm: wives belonged at home.

With no Starbucks or other venues where we could gather, these very young women with our first babies at home rotated as hostesses to offset our sometimes uncomfortable isolation. It wasn’t a European coffee shop, but it provided what we needed: new friends who read, replenished intellectual needs. We solved many local, parenting and world problems. The club was our own salon.

We read it all, every theme ever explored in fiction and nonfiction through narratives of the past and present. What did we refuse to read for discussion? We “ran off” one member who urged us to read Classics! We told her that JHTMBC was not a university. We missed her brain, but refused her professorial standards.

For the past year we’ve met together, distanced, as covid forced these proud septuagenarians to Zoom. We had already switched our evenings of sharing the comforts of wine, cheese, cake and decaf to afternoons still light enriched, when driving after dark became a passenger’s nightmare.

Discussion leaders bring the group together with challenging ideas posed by (now) mostly unfamiliar authors; the more difficult challenge is choosing a book we’ve not read.

Three recent choices are reviewed below, one by Nan Selz, one by Marge Schueck, and one by myself.

Nan chose Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry (2019):

This slim book about two old men waiting for someone in a ferry terminal manages to combine humor and melancholy. Barry’s language conveys a sense of place that, in a very few words, tells the reader just how each setting looks, smells, and feels, whether dingy ferry waiting room or dodgy waterfront bar. Barry’s characters are brought to life through their dialogue, written in Irish brogue, and their life stories which unwind as flashbacks throughout the book.

Barry’s talent is to combine opposites with ease. The book is set in both the present and the past. The prose is both lyrical and, at times, obscene. The plot includes themes of love and betrayal, innocence and guilt, brutality and tenderness, hope and despair. But it is the language which most enchants the reader, so much so that it is almost impossible to write about this book without a quote or two:

• Describing the ferry terminal itself, “Oh, and this is as awful a place as you could muster—you’d want the eyes sideways in your head.”  

• Describing the main characters, “There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. But they retain—just about—a rakish air.”

If you love language, you are sure to love Night Boat to Tangier.

Marge chose The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein (2008):

Garth Stein has given us a gift. His The Art of Racing in the Rain will warm your heart and touch your soul. You will learn, you will laugh, and oh yes you will cry.

The narrator is a dog named Enzo who believes he will be reincarnated as a person… complete with opposable thumbs and a tongue that isn’t “a horribly ineffective tool for …making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences.” He is a loyal loving protector to the Swift family as they face heartbreaking challenges.

Denny Swift is a semi-professional race car driver trying to juggle his passion for the sport with his obligations to his family. His racing serves as an apt metaphor for life. He tells aspiring young racers “the car goes where the eyes go”, and through it all his eyes never look behind.

The book ends somewhat predictably in a beautiful scene that ties up all the loose ends in a neat little package. Just the way I like my endings! 

I chose Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table by Ruth Reichl (1998):

During the early months of covid shutdowns, I saw a Zoom program featuring Ruth Reichl as she discussed Jewish cooking and recipes. I knew some of her professional background, but I was unaware of her humor and her struggles to survive a family that could be a psychiatric model of dysfunction.

Tender at the Bone, Reichl’s 7th book, which I expected to be nothing more than a collection of recipes bound together by vignettes of her life, is the autobiography of a lonely child living in a household ruled by her bipolar mother and ignored by her emotionally absent and complicit father.

Food was always an important factor in her life as she learned to guide dinner guests away from concoctions her mother served—dishes that often sent them to the hospital with food poisoning. Cooking became her strength, it taught her flexibility and a path to love as the housekeeper/cook brought Ruth into the kitchen to help prepare meals. Mrs. Peavey “proved her mettle the day she tripped coming through the kitchen door, dropping the beef Wellington two feet from where my mother stood waiting to serve it. ‘I’ll just go and get the other one, Mrs. Reichl’… “One minute later Mrs. Peavey reappeared, bearing a new beef Wellington…”

When Mrs. Peavey resigned, she left Ruth with three pieces of advice”: “The first is not to let other people tell you how to live your life.” She continued, “The second is that you have to look after yourself.” When Ruth asked for the third, Mrs Peavey reminded Ruth, “Don’t forget the extra pastry when you make beef Wellington.”

As a preteen, Ruth’s mother sent her to “Mars”—to boarding school in Paris where Reichl (who spoke no French) was miserable. “For as long as she lived my mother asked, at least once a year, ‘Aren’t you glad you speak French?…Total immersion is the only way to learn a language’…”

Beatrice, a derisive and dismissive schoolmate, soon became a friendly conspirator and invited Ruth for a weekend visit to the chateau that was home to these regal friends of Charles de Gaulle. Beatrice’s father was so delighted by Ruth’s unique love of French specialties, he began to spend time discussing gourmet foods with her though he had rarely had conversations with his daughter. Beatrice loved his newfound attention and with Ruth’s help baked him a lemon soufflé (recipe included). She admitted to Ruth she thought it was his favorite gift from her. Ruth “thought about her mother’s moods and poisonous messes” and returned to Paris for three more years.

Reichl’s pairings of recipes and stories detail her triumphs and her release from her mother’s illness. An adult friend says, “Nobody knows why some of us get better and others don’t.” Throughout her life cooking was Reichl’s strength, a way to bring her success, caring and warmth, close friendships and love. Reichl writes, “I thought of my mother. And then, suddenly, she seemed very far away.”

She was praised and admired as she moved from the little girl cooking for family and friends, growing to sous chef to chef, organic foodie to secret restaurant critic for the New York Times. Her writing pulled me into her life just as her descriptions of meals and the plated delicacies are so good the reader will read to the conclusion, starving for a taste and the smell of sweet aromas.

JHTMBC members are fewer now. This band of women—most of whom would otherwise not have met—miss the voices and reactions of those who have moved or died.

One loss we can’t bring back is Julie Herman; she and her young family moved within a year of her gathering the initial group. Even in today’s world of digital knowledge, we have never been able to locate her. Perhaps Julie started dozens more book clubs in other towns where other aging women are still reading and discussing and solving problems older than themselves. I like to think so, anyway.

Hope Coulter’s Year in Reading, 2020

Posted on by under book review, Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

In the next week or so I’ll be writing up my reflections on my 2020 reading year. In the meantime, I’ve solicited guest posts from friends and fellow book lovers about their own literary highlights. I’m always looking for new contributors; let me know here or on Twitter (@ds228) if you have something you want to share.

The sixth post is by Hope Coulter (@hopester99), who I’m lucky to work with. A fiction writer and poet, Hope directs the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation at Hendrix College.

2020 stole a lot of things from us. One thing it didn’t steal—the Tiffany box sitting in plain sight on the dresser, which the burglar miraculously forgot to swipe into his pillowcase—was reading. When the pandemic struck and life was suddenly curtailed to the home front, a number of factors that normally compete with reading in my waking day, such as daily commutes and shopping, disappeared. The news was one competitor for my attention that remained, but if I wrenched myself away from updates on the latest case numbers and chaos I could turn, with more time and greater relief than usual, to books. And so the weeks went by and I read: through nights where an uncanny stillness muted my neighborhood, in corners of the house (and the day) that were newly open for visitation, on dog walks with earbuds jammed in my ears.

I discovered several fiction writers last year who were new to me. Dorian had tipped me off to Paulette Jiles, whose gritty historical fiction is a delight. Mostly set in the U.S. Midsouth and West, her novels feature authentic dialogue, grainy characters, galloping plots, and accurately rendered settings (at least as far as my own knowledge of horses and birds can confirm). Her News of the World has been made into a movie starring Tom Hanks that just came out. I started with that book and followed up with Simon the Fiddler, Enemy Women, The Color of Lightning, and Stormy Weather.

Another new pleasure was Maggie O’Farrell. I ran into her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, which may be my favorite—especially with the twist that the final section puts upon the whole. While I was devouring her Instructions for a Heatwave, set in London in 1976, I happened to hear an NPR interview of O’Farrell discussing her new book, Hamnet, which came out last year to lots of accolades: it’s a fictionalization of Shakespeare’s family life. I dipped into more O’Farrell through online samples and wasn’t as taken by them as I was with these three books, but I’ll probably try again with other works of hers.

Curtis Sittenfeld is a fiction writer a friend had mentioned in the context of her novel Rodham, about Hillary Clinton. At the time I didn’t follow up. Then late one night, when I was prowling the spotty “available now” shelves of my Libby app, embarrassingly like an addict knocking on doors for a fix, I came across Sittenfeld’s Eligible. The title rang a bell, and I remembered that a favorite podcaster, Liz Craft, had also touted this author. I saw that the book was an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and inwardly rolled my eyes, because I’m often not a fan of Austen adaptations, either books or movies (why not just go back and reread the real thing?). But I was desperate for a hit, and as soon as I plunged into the sample I was hooked. Eligible was my best 2020 read for sheer fun. Set in contemporary Cincinnati, the book reimagines the Bennet family in ways that are both clever and true to our times, and its fidelity to the story of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy should please even the most stringent of Jane devotees. It’s funny, raunchy, and thoughtful—a romp with depth. I wish I could have made myself enjoy it more slowly, but I couldn’t help racing through.

After that I turned to Sittenfeld’s story collection you think it: i’ll say it, and was underwhelmed. Still hopeful of reexperiencing the Eligible high, I turned to Rodham. Again, I was suspicious: was this book going to be a polemical feminist rant? (Well, kind of.) Was it going to misrepresent Arkansas and Arkansans? (To my surprise, it didn’t.) And the big question: would it shed light on my own complicated opinions of Hillary and Bill; could it embody these two individuals persuasively and give me new insight into their relationship? (Resoundingly, no.) This book receives my Dorothy Parker “not a book to be tossed aside lightly—it should be thrown with great force” Award for 2020. The first part was curiously engrossing, if uncomfortably so, as it nailed Hillary’s voice with cringeworthy persuasiveness and dramatized details about Bill and Hillary’s dating and sex life that only they should know. (Okay, I’ll admit I haven’t read either of their enormous memoirs, and maybe Sittenfeld drew her torrid-romance imagery from their own words—but I doubt it.) The minute that fictional Hillary breaks off with fictional Bill and returns to the East Coast for a solo career, the novel becomes a huge yawn, and I couldn’t make myself finish it. The book could contribute, if tediously, to such eternal questions as the line between fiction and nonfiction, the obligations of the author, whether it’s ethical (or even a good idea aesthetically) to render first-person fiction about a still-living person… but, warning: if you want to use this novel to flog such issues, you may just end up feeling icky.

Other stand-out fiction that I read this year, on the positive side, includes Edwidge Danticat’s Everything Inside; Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow; Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again (yes! more about truculent Olive!);and Gail Honeyman’s haunting Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. I reread Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and—while waiting for the fifth in the series—re-listened to two of Robert Galbraith’s utterly satisfying Cormoran Strike books. Less happily, I buzzed through Carl Hiassen’s Squeeze Me, which is crummy even for a guilty-pleasure book, and finished off my last four books in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series with the absent-minded “why am I doing this” of someone swallowing stale potato chips. [Ed.–What?? Who could be unmoved by the last book in the series?]

At Hendrix, where Dorian and I are colleagues, I teach only one course a semester, because I also have administrative duties. As it happened, this year I taught the same course back-to-back in spring and fall: a tutorial on Irish short stories. The rereading I did for teaching was that wonderful kind of deep, slow reading that opens window after window into the text. My selection spanned from 1894 to 2017, from folk legends recast into stories by W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge to modern love fables by Lucy Caldwell and Sally Rooney. Along the way we read some dark jewels by James Joyce, Edna O’Brien, and Frank O’Connor; Roddy Doyle’s delicious “The Pram”; and Seumas O’Kelly’s one-hit wonder, “The Weaver’s Grave.” Discussing these works with the students was a rich experience, even in the online format that had so unexpectedly become a norm. I’ll be returning to these stories, and gladly, in future semesters.

In nonfiction, my reading year’s unexpected highlight was Mark Vanhoenacker’s Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot. As a 747 pilot for British Airways, Vanhoenacker wrote columns for a number of magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker and The New York Times. In lyrical, exact prose he serves up a cockpit’s-eye view of what it’s like to fly these elegant machines around the globe. Much of the book is terrific description of cloud formations, land patterns, and celestial sights observed on his long flights; I plan to use it as a teaching model. There is also lots of information about the pilot life—what it’s like to cross vast time zones so routinely; how a long-distance crew prepares for flight; and how this long-distance flying affects pilots’ friendships and their outlook on the world. This book was especially good to read during a time when I longed for travel, and when its absence made me see it in a new light. In the long summer hours of 2020 as my husband and I sat on our deck, noticing the planes crossing the sky and speculating as to their destinations, Vanhoenacker’s perspective often came to mind.

Less ecstatically, 2020 prompted me to read on the troubling fronts of race and inequity. Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a masterpiece, compellingly written and somber. It permanently shifted the way I view systemic racism in the United States. Natasha Trethewey’s memoir, Memorial Drive, is—true to her poet’s nature—much briefer, and evocative in its own way of the caste-based divide in this country. I also read Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, which gave me new understandings of the housing crisis and how deeply it’s enmeshed with other social problems. (I hope Biden and Harris have read it.)

Susan Orlean’s The Library Book has, as Rossini or somebody said about Wagner, wonderful moments and dreadful quarters of an hour. Orlean herself reads the audio version; when will authors learn that, no matter how skilled they are with the pen, they are not trained voice actors? It was only by turning the speed up to 1.5x that I managed to push through her slow, grating voice to the end. Still, the tome includes memorable anecdotes about the history of libraries and L.A. that make it worth the slog.

Early in the pandemic, The American Scholar published a list of recommended food writing from its archives. In our desperation to entertain ourselves my husband and I, like so many others, were lavishing new attention on cooking, so I thought it would be fun to try some of these cookery classics in my reading. Turned out I wasn’t in the mood for How To Cook a Wolf  by M.F.K. Fisher or The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. James and Kay Salter’s Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days had flashes of fun but, as can happen with food writing, the fussiness became downright shrill—This is how you make a martini! This and only this is what the cool people do with the chicken! By contrast, I absolutely loved Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires: the story of how she became the New York Times food editor, complete with droll—and insightful—accounts of doing restaurant reviews in disguise.

Well, I’ll stop for now. Thanks, Dorian, for giving me the chance to share. It’s an honor to step into this venue: I’ve added so many recommendations to my to-read list from books mentioned here, both in the main blog and in the guest posts and comments. If any of y’all ever come to Little Rock, post-pandemic, let’s grab a drink and fill in the gaps. I want to hear more about what you think and what’s on your nightstand. The plague will be over and the question will still be germane: Read any good books lately?