Books read January 2021

 Every book I read this month was recommended by somebody else, and they were all good. 

1. Forty Autumns by Nina Willner was recommended by my north Orem neighbor Irene Nielsen. She is in a book club, and that was one title they had read recently. I should give the subtitle, and then you will know exactly what the book is about without me having to explain at all: A family's story of courage and survival on both sides of the Berlin wall. One daughter escaped (twice--she went back once because she was young and so scared to go on living without her family) and forty years later, the Berlin wall fell. 

2. Born a crime: stories from a South African childhood by Trevor Noah was the January book choice by a book club here in Provo that I have been invited to join. Of course, I completely forgot to get on Zoom on the night I was supposed to, so I have not "met" all the members of this book club. They chose the teen version of the book, but the one person in the club I know got the adult version and compared, and it was essentially the same book minus a lot of the F word. F words don't bother me because they are just words, but it was fine also to not have to read them. This book was very interesting to me since I have been to SA and Patrick has lived in SA. Post Apartheid, there is definitely residual racism. Which should be no surprise, because here in North America, 150 years after the civil war, there is residual racism. Humans!!

3. When I fell from the sky by Juliane Koepcke was recommended by someone--but who? Was it Bridget or Susanne? I often get ideas from them. I can't remember! But this was a great read since I had read Into the Abyss, in which there were four survivors. In this crash into the Amazon jungle in Peru, Juliane was the sole survivor. She was 17 years old. Such an interesting read! Any other teen would have died in that situation--no glasses and down one shoe--but Juliane had been raised by biologist parents living at a research camp. She followed a river for 11 days before encountering people. She said at several points in the book that even though this happened years ago (1971--and she finally wrote about it in 2011) that she thinks she is still in shock. Like, she was in shock then, and has never completely left that state. Why her? is the question that haunts her.  As a side note, her father is pretty amazing himself. He WALKED from Germany to Peru!! After the war, Germany was in chaos for a good long while, and for a research scientist to find a job was a challenge. He secured a job in Peru, but had no money and no way to get there. So he walked from Germany to Italy to try to find a boat and somehow get there. Sea schedules were erratic, and he missed the boat. So he walked to Spain to try his luck there. He was able to get on a boat that was going to an island somewhere so took it hoping that he could find another boat to get to South America. He and another guy ended up stowing away on a boat bound for Brazil, and then he walked from the Atlantic to Lima, Peru. Literally across the continent. When he got there, of course the museum he was bound for had already hired someone else--it had been two years and they had not heard from him! 

4. I know that it was Bridget who recommended Notes on a foreign country: An American abroad in a post-American world by Suzy Hansen. I think I have book marks all over the place in this book. The (American) author lives and follows her journalism career in Turkey. She said she wanted to write a book about Turkey, but one of her reviewers told her "Your book is about America." What she sees after interviewing people and getting to know people in far-flung places is not the same America that she was taught to see in school. 

5. 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff is the book chosen by the book club for February. But it is short, so I already finished it. I had read this book before, probably 40 years ago or more. It is an interesting look into post-WWII as a writer in New York gets the books she needs from a London book shop. Where in 1949 to some time in the early 50s they were still dealing with rationing. Very warm-hearted book. (Told in letters back and forth between Helene and the people she "meets" in London. Kind of like when people make online friends, only hers were penpal friends.)

Loss comes in threes

 Death, they say, comes in threes. I have found that they are not wrong--although sometimes the numbers creep up past three, in my experience. But it has been three for me in the last ten days.

On the same day that I heard of the death of Larry King, my near-niece Mary was making oblique comments about the death of a young man, who had actually died a couple of days before. But it was the same day that I heard about it.

When I heard on Saturday last that Larry King had died, I was in the middle of typing a sympathy message to his sister-in-law Emily, when Patrick messaged me about it--he wanted me to know so that I could reach out to the E family, and there I was doing it. Larry King was a celebrity, and as such, it would not really matter to me if he died or he didn't die. But we were friends and neighbors with his relatives for a long time. 

Even more so, his youngest son Cannon was a frequent visitor to our Primary class at church. Emily's son Hayden and Cannon are the same age, and were the best of friends. I guess if you are Larry King's son, then you can quickly travel from California to Utah to spend time with your cousins--because we saw a lot of Cannon. He was such a familiar figure in our Primary that he didn't need to be introduced as a visitor. It was never "who are you?" but "nice to have you here today, Cannon." 

So, even though I know that Cannon is a young adult now, it was ten-year-old Cannon who I thought of immediately, and my heart was so sad for him to lose his dad at such a young age--for him. Clearly, his dad was an old man. But still his dad, and its hard to lose your dad. And I do know that all the E children loved their uncle. 

So even though he was an old guy (but died of COVID) I was sad for the people I know who love him.

When Mary finally posted about who died, it turned out to be the son of one of my co-workers. I was on the hiring committee when we hired his dad. That was a particularly difficult hire, not because of Cory, who we hired, just because there were a couple of internal things that happened, which caused long delays. Some of our applicants for the position dropped out; Cory was a long-hauler. He doesn't know it, but I really advocated for him. Many people on our committee didn't even want to consider him because he was a school librarian. Their reasoning was, if he wanted to be an academic librarian, what was he doing in a school library? My reasoning was, Hello!!! When you finish graduate school and you have a family to support, you apply for ALL THE JOBS. And eventually you HAVE to take one because MONEY. Seriously!! So, thanks to me, really, he got a phone interview, and ended up being the chosen candidate. Now he is university archivist. He was a good hire.

So, I feel more connected to him than he probably does to me! And therefore, I was so sad to hear about his son, not quite 20 years old. And then Mary told me it was a shooting accident, and that just makes me soooooo sad. Because if it was a shooting accident, then there was a shooter. I don't know if he accidentally shot himself, or if someone (friend? family? ROTC buddy?) else did, but wow, that just is awful. It is no secret that I am not a big fan of guns. This situation did not help. So very sad. I listened to his Zoom funeral. His parents spoke. His dad was very much crying. His brother spoke and SANG. When people can SING at funerals--like, I have trouble even singing congregational hymns at funerals. He sang with a group of young men, but had a few lines of solo. My hat was off to him.

Today was my cousin Doug's son Adam's funeral. Adam had a rare kind of lymphoma, and he died on Wednesday afternoon. He had been living with his brother Chad and Chad's family (wife Melinda, daughter Abigail) for the downhill slide of his life. I did not know Adam, but have been pretty good friends with Chad since we connected at my cousin Burt's funeral. We "talk" via e-mail and on FB pretty regularly. He is a lawyer and a thinker, and we get along. So I got to know Adam post-mortem, and I think he was a pretty stellar individual, with some emphasis on individual, because he did not want to walk the beaten trail in life. He has been very much a person who lived his life online, both for work and for pleasure, and so there were people from all over the world attending his funeral, and some talked about what knowing him meant to them.

Chad had planned break-out rooms after the large group meeting, and so I got to spend some time with my brother Bruce and Burt's sons James and Jon. One thing we talked about was how it seems to be the way that Conrads roll that cousins are also very good friends. James and Adam were the same age, and were very good friends with each other. Burt and Bruce were friends in the same way. Also, not to the same extent, but also John and Harold. A generation back, our dad was very good friends with his two male cousins who were born the same year, 1915--Louis (Burt's dad) and Wayne. And also their female cousin Thelma, who moved to Utah as soon as she finished High School, but our dad always made a point to visit or at least call her when visiting in Utah. 

And I thought that it was true of the girls, too. I would have been a very lonely teenager, especially after Arlene finished High School, without Margaret and Marie. Singing with my cousins, just doing things with my cousins, was such an important part of my life.

Makes me sad that my grandkids don't have that. While Kelli and Abbi's children are about the same ages, they just have not connected in the same way--mostly due to distance. And the rest of my kids are apparently all going to have their children one at a time! :o) Nancy's turn is over, so hopefully David will pick up the baton! When he is done, I don't know, maybe he will pass the baton?

Well. This is all to say that my heart has been feeling very tender. None of these losses is particularly painful for ME--I am just aware of the grief of others. And also learning lessons from the lives of these people who have died and left a void in the hearts of people I care about. And reflecting on the people that I love, and how grateful I am for all of them, especially my family, immediate and extended family.

Books Read December 2020

 Wow! It is a New Year! So far, it feels the same as the last year :o) but I have hope!

So--books read last month--

1. Undercover Princess by Connie Glynn

I can't really decide how I feel about this book. I liked it, but I didn't. The basic premise was imaginative--that a princess might have a person called a portman who is like their double, except that this person doesn't necessarily look anything like them, which in this case the princess and her portman look very different. And a princess might also have a partizan who is more than a bodyguard--like, a person who is a trained assassin. Okay, so far so good. I can get into that and imagine these things could happen. Until you tell me that these people are 13-14 years old!! And then--my ability to suspend disbelief kind of tanks. Like a super-disciplined trained assassin who can beat just about any other trained assassin and he is a 14 year old boy? I dunno. Hard for me to go along with that. Also some of the stuff going on between these, honestly, children--not a fan of some of that. If they were 16, okay. But they are not. Probably not going to read more of her books.

2. Into the Abyss: How a deadly plane crash changed the lives of a pilot, a politician, a criminal and a cop by Carol Shaben

This was on Bridget's reading list for last month, and it sounded intriguing, so I read it, and I am very glad I did. (Thank you, ILL and the Westmoreland Library Network in Greensburg, PA!--You gave me a very short loan period, but I finished it with time to spare, and I salute you!) In her review, Bridget did not say where this plane crash happened, or when. So, when I looked the book up and saw that it was published by Random House Canada, I was even more intrigued. Guys, this crash happened on October 19, 1984 near High Prairie, Alberta! So this happened in my province, during a time that I (we) lived in Alberta! This was the plane crash in which Grant Notley was killed--like, that was important news in Alberta in 1984. Mr. Notley was the guy who got the NDP off to a start as official opposition party in the province. Before his influence, it was always Social Credit and PC. Whether you like it or not, when Alberta finally had an NDP premier, 2015-2019, it was Rachel Notley, Grant's daughter. Anyways--super interesting book! You feel like you get to know these guys, the four survivors of this plane crash. And I was impressed to know that Alberta had a Muslim legislator from 1975-1989. Carol's dad, Larry, was the son of Lebanese immigrants to Canada. Like, there was no buzz about this--he was just a politician at the time! I was very into politics in the 1970s, and there was NO buzz about the religion or ethnicity of this man when he was elected in 1975. Oh, for a world like that again!! I want to look back and see if his background was even mentioned during the 1975 election, but unfortunately, my online access to the Edmonton Journal only starts in 1989. Also, when Grant Notley died, Premier Lougheed and the whole Alberta Legislature was in mourning!! Like, such respect for Notley was shown, even though he was from a different political party than the majority. Well, those are all asides--just things I am noticing in this awful political mishmash that is 2020, that were not mentioned in the book. Anyways!! Such a well-told story, not just of the crash, but about its lifelong impact on the four men who survived. Probably my favorite non-fiction book of 2020's reading.

3. She wrote the songs: Unsung women of sheet music by Patricia Hammond

What luck! My next non-fiction reading choice of the month was also by a Canadian. Patricia Hammond grew up on the coast of BC--I am not sure exactly where, but going into Vancouver was an "occasion" for her as a young girl. She lives and works in the UK now--she is a singer. And I was so charmed by the book that I looked her up and wrote to her, and she wrote back, and now I kind of have a new friend. Patricia collected sheet music as a child. She was very into antiques, but she didn't have the money or the space to collect furniture, so she started to collect old sheet music, and noticed that a lot of Victorian era sheet music was by women. The book delves into how dismissive of this music the higher education system is, even though as a musician using this music, it is clearly obvious that these women wrote good stuff--like, just as musically interesting and accurate as music written by men. We (meaning the HBLL) happened to buy this book--I mean, I selected it, but from the GOBI approval plan. Which didn't tell me that the book has an accompanying CD which is sold separately. (I am going to buy it, too, for the library.) Anyways--the last chapter really resonated with me. It was called "The Use of it all" and she discusses sort of what people who have a musical education should do--which is not all about becoming a "star" but about using music to enrich the lives of ourselves and others and make the world a better place because of it. Lovely book. Probably my second favorite non-fiction book of 2020's reading.

4. The widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey

Another great book! Bridget had recommended another Sujata Massey book about Perveen Mistry, but this one came first, and since I had to use ILL to borrow either of them, I decided to read the first book first. I will ILL the other one soon! Such a great book--Perveen is a solicitor. She can't be an attorney because they argue cases in court, and as a woman in India in 1921, she cannot do that. But she can do the background work on cases for her employer, who is her father. Doing such work leads her to the widows of Malabar Hill. The three widows of a Muslim man must make decisions about their inheritances--they are women who live in seclusion so a man cannot go and talk with them, so having a female solicitor is an advantage. Much intrigue results. I learned so much about Parsis as well, since Perveen and her family are Parsis and of the Zoroastrian faith. Such an interesting story backed up by strong research!

5. Black brother, black brother by Jewel Parker Rhodes

Trey and Donte are mixed-race brothers. Their father, of Scandinavian descent, is tall and blonde with blue eyes. Their mother, of Jamaican descent, is short and dark with brown eyes. Trey looks very like their father; Donte looks very like their mother. They move to a new school, and Donte becomes a target. If anything goes wrong, he gets the blame. School administrators press charges, and Donte finds himself in juvenile court. He sees his own privilege clearly because his mother is an attorney and his father is a tall blonde dude. He only gets community service hours (for having done nothing wrong, actually) but he knows that other black kids are having the book thrown at them, and they might be innocent, too. Learning to Fence, and the discipline that comes with the sport, is also important to the story. A good read.

6. Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park

The author is Korean-American and as a child, she was a great fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books. She liked to imagine herself into the stories, but it didn't quite work, because there were no Koreans in North America in the mid to late 1800's--they did not come to this continent until the early 1900s. But there were Chinese children on the prairies, and you wouldn't know it from reading the fiction about that era. So this is the story of a little half Chinese girl whose mother has died leaving her with her Caucasian father and moving to Dakota Territory in 1880. Three years ago, still in Chinatown in Los Angeles, when her mother died, they had set out to get away from the sad memories and start a new life. They meet a lot of prejudice along the way. And we, the readers, get a look at how life might look like from the point of view of a child who does not "fit in." Park makes the child Hanna's mother a half and half herself (half Chinese and half Korean) since it is entirely possible that early immigrants who were Chinese might have been half Korean, since those two countries did in fact mix it up a bit. Another great book!

7. The Oldest Student: How Mary Walker Learned to Read by Rita Lorraine Hubbard

I do not usually count picture books in my reading--but then again, I do not have occasion to read picture books much these days! I was fascinated by this story of a woman, born a slave, who was too busy working and trying to keep herself and her family alive to take the time to learn to read once she was free to do so. Until she was well past 100, and then she took advantage of a literacy program in her seniors center to learn to be a reader. Mary Walker was born in 1848 and died in 1969. Wow. Of course, since this was only a picture book, I wanted to know more than the book's restrictions allowed it to tell me, but it was really good. I am glad I read it.