Best Reads of 2014

The year 2014 is at an end. I'd like to take a look back at books I've read and share reactions and insights. I'd like to, but I can't, because I have the worst memory of any English teacher alive. 

If a student asks me if I've read a book, I can say yes or no, but usually I check with Stephanie to know for sure; and then when the student asks me if it's a good book, I usually give my overall impression, but that's as far as I can go, almost always: I don't remember characters, plots, styles, settings, images, endings, climaxes, any of it. If I'm handed the book because a student thinks to jog my memory, once I flip through pages and see names and places, none of it is familiar. I've had moments reading when I suddenly remember, within 50 pages of the end, that I'd read the book before. And yet, I have a resistance -- one I did not have in my teens and twenties -- to re-reading. There are simply too many good books out there. This obstinate stance raises the question why we read, or rather, why I read. To educate, to amuse, to feel, to guide, absorb? When I forget everything I pick up, the most principled of these purposes are lost to me, and the ones I'm left with don't mind a little eternal return.

I remember a moment in the middle of reading The Betrayers, a book by the author of a collection of short stories I adored (Natasha), David Bezmozgis. Something was nagging at me. This book was so similar in mood to another novel I'd read only recently, two or three weeks before, but I couldn't remember it. So I turned to Stephanie for the book I'd read recently taking place partly in the USSR, partly in Italy. The Free World, she told me, also by David Bezmozgis.

For a while, I kept a journal, so I'd know what I read and could even retrieve my responses. I liked doing it and I liked having it and then I stopped. Why are there so many routines in life that bring us pleasure but are nevertheless abandoned? Just a lack of consciousness, a little life getting in the way, and just, again, a little ridiculousness to the way we lumber and crash through the days of our year. 

So I can't reflect on a year of reading. I can reflect on exactly one week. Here they are, then, the best reads of the fourth week of December, 2014.

A couple weeks ago, I borrowed a recommended book from our friend, Alison--A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra. It takes place in Chechnya in the nineties and the few years beyond. I remember some echoes of the Chechen wars while I was in college, and I'd never looked too deeply or even studied a map; but this book took me over. While the language was a little too pretty at times, the characters and shifting points of view worked well; and I felt I glimpsed something of the war and geography. I was especially taken with the written treatment of an informant who everyone in a village knew was an informant, and who repeatedly led to deaths and harm of beloved characters, yet was not beyond the realm of sympathy himself. 

I liked the book; but what I especially liked was a list of the author's recommended reading at the very end. Half of the titles I had read before, and almost each of these was a novel that had affected me:  

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett. I've read five of Patchett's books, I think, and this was one of the very good ones. I remember reading it or discussing it in Vancouver with my friend and great reader, Rachel, and I remember this strong, mean woman in the Brazilian Amazon and her medicines.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. I liked this book (it had twins in it, right?), but I know others liked it more than I.

The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson. I read this, then had Stephanie read it, and I definitely recommended it to others. As I was reading this piece of fiction about North Korea, I was realizing how little I knew, how few images I'd seen; and everything that seemed outrageous in plot, from the little research I did, held up in dissident testimony. 

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, by Ben Fountain. I don't remember how I ended up with that book, but I loved it, bought it for others. These short stories are endlessly readable and moving.

Because I agreed so strongly with Marra for these titles on the list, or for three of them anyway, I ordered several others from the library and read them this week.

We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo, used a young narrator whose exuberance and innocence translated into humor and irony, which got me through some harrowing scenes in Zimbabwe. And who needs new names? Was it Darling, Chipo, Godknows, or Bastard? Was it Bornfee Moses, MotherLove or Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro? The book is very current. And while Bulawayo is definitely shedding light on tensions and lingering history in Zimbabwe, when Darling moves to the United States, we also get an outsider's perspective on this crazy country, its guns, its fragmentation of family, and the way poverty works here so differently than the way poverty works there. Through it all, the young narrator is likable and funny and wry.

I have a couple other books waiting for me from Marra's list, too: The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li, The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa, and soon enough, I Served the King of England, by Bohumil Hrabal.

But I also decided to find another Ben Fountain book, having liked his collection of short stories so well. Over Christmas on Whidbey, I read Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, and I was delirious with it. Billy Lynn is a soldier whose platoon's heroic three minutes are captured by an embedded reporter. They are all famous and lauded, and they are trotted around America for a two week victory tour, though they must return to duty and war in Iraq as soon as it's done. The entire book takes place during a Dallas Cowboys game the day before their return, and their exposure to Texas fans in the stands and high rollers in the VIP club from the point of view of a 19 year old narrator who is both a little stupid, horny and young but also remarkably astute is a terrific ride, satirical and absorbing. I am stilled awed by the horror and tension Fountain brings to a scene of Billy Lynn and the others simply standing still on the stage during Beyoncé's halftime performance. 

This morning I finished Garth Stein's A Sudden Light. I was looking forward to a ghost story taking place in the Highlands, a nearby neighborhood near Shoreline Community College. I enjoy the local geography, and I did learn some local history I'd never heard, such as about Billy Gohl, a serial killer from the late 1800's who murdered at least a couple dozen people near Aberdeen. I liked the plot of this book, and the imagery, but the dialogue and characterization destroyed me. Next time I read a narrative about a highly precocious child, that author is going to have to win back my trust, because otherwise I'm going to think what I think about Garth Stein here -- that he's just to poor an observer to inhabit an actual kid. The book started off with some good ghost creepiness, but the ghost of the house ends up just hanging out and talking just like every other character, leading our narrator to the perfectly revealing journal entries and letters and providing perfectly revealing dreams when more information is needed. Everything in the book is spelled out, and characters speak in stilted, aggravating cleverness. But the book did make me want to get past the guard at the Highlands (I failed the one day I tried) and see the palatial estates and their protected views of Puget Sound.

Stein also described a 300 foot tree. It was central to his imagery and his plot. I would love to see that. For now, I leave off with this picture, taken from the Boeing Creek Park nearby. 

House Renovation, Week Twenty

I've been sitting on an amazing picture of our house, one where two thirds of its walls had come down and it was exposed to the world like a fallen apple core. This was only a few weeks into the renovation, and the exhilaration of standing on the second floor, or even the attic, now just a platform before the sweeping summer world, was exquisite. Before us, the hills of the city and full mountain ranges to west and east, the blue sky of August expansive and broad; our view to life was open and full.

At the time I was afraid to publish the picture because I knew it would expose the house to Seattle burglars who pore over my blog -- the out of state ones too -- and they would rush the house and steal the suitcases of clothes detailed in images from our last blog and now lying vulnerable to the neighborhood. So I waited.

It turns out I had plenty of time to wait. Though we had originally spoken of a Thanksgiving completion date, we are now talking about Valentine's Day.  The house is safely closed up once again, and I submit these pictures as a moment of glorious expansiveness and possibility.

Despite the delay (and will it be completed by Valentine's Day?), Dad and Wendy continue to share their house next door with us. Stephanie and I still sleep in their bedroom while they come in from Vashon one to three nights a week and sleep in the mattresses we've piled in what used to be their office and now is just a landing zone. Stephanie has rearranged their furniture twice; we've brought the first Christmas tree to a home that hasn't seen one for almost a decade; we cover all surfaces with girls' coats and violin sheet music; but Dad and Wendy have been gracious every moment.

In the renovated house, there will be four bedrooms on the top floor. Stephanie and I have new windows in our room, but otherwise, our bedroom has been largely untouched. Maisie's room is where the girls' old room used to be, though it's larger now -- she has the biggest room by any measure. And why does the youngest get the largest room? Did she steal the birthright from a blind old man? When people ask -- because they always notice right away as soon as they see -- our reply is that Maisie will be in her room the longest. She is also our crafty child, cutting paper and cardboard and gluing pieces together, and the accretion of materials is better contained in this nice space, I hope.

Here is Maisie's room, in its various stages:

Here is the girls' room before it was taken down. The old eaves are apparent through the frame of their closet. This is the southerly view from their old window; we used to squeeze around this window and watch the fireworks in July. Maisie lost this view to a Sophie's adjoining wall.

Old and new are bound together here, as Stephanie is demonstrating to Amelia and Maisie, and to her sister Karen, at left.

The pictures below show Maisie's view to the west, with new windows, a dormer replacing the eaves, and a fuzzy blanket of insulation.

The final two pictures, directed at the northwest corner of the room, also have the benefit of capturing the two stages of dry-walling. And yes, Maisie gets the biggest closets too, by a factor of five or six, but one of the two seen here will serve as a house closet for towels and linens.

Sophie and Amelia's room's are the big addition. Built over what had been the a one story leaky tar of a flat roofed kitchen and bedroom below, the house now rises straight up, Both girls will have generous south facing views of the city.

Pictures of Sophie's room also give a sense of the new sharply slanted roof built high above the old one.

Though her room is the smallest, no one is as excited as Amelia. She likes a cozy spot to read, and she'll have her own built-in nook by a window (not pictured); best of all, she likes a tidy room, and sharing space with slobs has been a frustration she will no longer have to bear. And she loves the view. See Mount Rainier in the first picture, and you have a sense of it. See Amelia dancing in the second picture, and you have a share of her joy.

While the prefabricated roof trusses were lifted by hand, an idea that sounded so traditional and even Amish that I'm sorry I wasn't around to help, a crane was deployed to bring the second story drywall into the house (here's a video of the process). I present the pictures below slightly out of order to demonstrate the dramatic change of the hallway leading past the bathroom on the left and Maisie's room on the right to Sophie and Amelia's rooms, without drywall and with.

Originally, we intended to keep the walls of the 1970s addition (the kitchen and first floor bedroom), but our contractor, Joe, soon saw that these walls were not even built directly over the foundation but were cantilevered to the side. These walls came down in an extra day's work.The new kitchen will not be larger than the old one; in fact, because the former bedroom and now library is going to open more freely to the kitchen, less cabinet space (but more light and space) will be available.

 

 

Meanwhile, what had been our library will become a hall -- one with built-in bookcases, but a hall nevertheless. This allows us to expand the dining room several feet. The green floor beneath the old library are the green asbestos tiles seen in the first picture, accounting for a second unexpected expense. I am especially fond of the hallway pictures that follow: by dint of the narrow accessible viewpoints, I ended up taking the same shot at various stages, so the changes are both dramatic and easy to track.

 

 

Here is the dining room. The third picture shows the first window in the house to be completely trimmed. Every window, except those in the front of the house and those in the basement, will be likewise replaced.

Finally, here are the beginnings of our new library. It will be smaller than the old one, but more accessible and, hopefully, cozier. Stephanie contemplates on the right.

The next time I blog about the house, perhaps we will actually be living there. In the meantime, I write from Dad and Wendy's fat red couch next door, my feet up on our transplanted coffee table that leaves half a foot of space passage on one side, two and a half feet on the other. Maisie finishes a puzzle on a card table to my right, stockings and holly hanging from my father's treadmill beside her.

The pictures below represent over a month's worth of stripping and siding, now complete.

House Renovation, Week One

Our home is listed as a 2 bedroom. For all their lives excepting the year in Hungary, the girls have shared a room with each other, and that's worked out well enough. But Stephanie has long tracked the aches and pains of our house, and had more reasons than room apportionment for pursuing a home renovation.

We're not good homeowners. I like happy neglect. But a couple disasters and opportunities finally lined up enough to initiate the full project--not just adding rooms above the kitchen's flat roof and not just renovating the kitchen and not just replacing the siding but all of it--new bedrooms, new kitchen, new siding. The piecemeal cost of staging different projects over time was ridiculous if we could do all of it at one go; and we could do it in one go with the guidance of a philosophy our contractor has taken to heart: Do it "good enough." I'm still most comfortable in a happy neglect, but this is hopefully enough to appease Hestia for the next bunch of years.


The permitting process took a month longer than we expected it to, giving us time to pack up the first couple floors and move them to the basement. Below are pictures of loose stuff now in our office, and of the bookcases and mattresses against the wall adjoining.

The first week of the project is now over, and after four days, there's no going back. Here are a series of pictures taken over the course of a these few days, starting in what was once our library (and half a century ago, a kitchen for the half century before than) and what will become a hallway abutting a larger dining room.

Below is the view from our living room through the dining room and into the kitchen. 

And here's how the kitchen ended up by the end of the week.

Upstairs, our bathroom will evolve from open chambers to a room divided by two dividing doors into a washroom, a water closet, and bathing room. The architect strongly recommended two bathrooms upstairs instead, but this plan will help the five of us share without multiplying costs.

Finally, here is the girls' room. We once had the tower of girls--a bunk bed for two and a trundle that squirted out for the third. Later we pulled off the bunk and built a bed for Sophie behind a curtain on the other side of the room. The window you see in each of these three pictures is the same.

And here is the view from our attic/sky stage right now.

Dad and Wendy have been tremendous. They anticipated this for a long time, renovating their basement to make it a comfortable space for the girls. It's no exaggeration to say we could not do this project without their help. And now we've taken over their house, and they've given us carte blanche to make ourselves at home there. Dad and Wendy still come in from Vashon for their work-week, but they're sleeping on Stephanie and my much smaller bed stuffed into their office. 

Maybe we'll dedicate a tile to their great help in the new kitchen.