Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Joan Didion's bestselling The Year of Magical Thinking focused on the unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, also a successful writer and brother-in-law of Dominick Dunne. The book was published in 2005, just weeks before another tragedy struck Didion -- the death after a lingering illness of her daughter, Quintana Roo, at age 39.

Didion quickly updated the book with her daughter's death, but now she has written another memoir, this time focusing almost entirely on the daughter she adopted as an infant, the one who died, slowly, in a New York hospital. The book is Blue Nights and is written in typical Didion style -- short sentences and terse, obvious repetition for emphasis yet still concise.

The book is more about Didion's response to Quintana Roo's death than it is about Quintana Roo. It also is a mirror of the aging author's own frailties and vanities. She was 75 when she wrote this book in 2009.

Didion writes, for example, of realizing only late in life that she would not again be wearing the red suede sandals with 4-inch heels she once adored. Or the gold hoop earrings. Or the black cashmere leggings. Or the enameled beads. And she realizes that even the mention of such concerns in a book about her daughter's death "will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity."

And yet ... those realizations do not seem a reflection so much of vanity as a reflection of growing old -- and doing so alone, without spouse, without child, without some of the longtime friends Didion writes of having died as well.

As an aging woman myself, I know it's a lie to say I'm middle-aged unless I plan to live well past a century. When I broke my ankle and had to have surgery, I refused a walker despite the doctor's advice. I prefer not to tell my age, but my resume with the college graduation date is a dead-giveaway. I refuse to wear old women's shoes -- if you're under 50, you know the kind of shoes I mean. I toss all mail from the AARP. I'm not retired, so I surely cannot be that old, I tell myself. I do not request senior discounts at restaurants even when I qualify. I do not worry much about makeup and hairstyles. (I tell myself I am bohemian, not just too tired to fret over such things anymore.) But I do wish I could better conceal the increasingly visible veins in my hands, the scarred ankle that still hurts and becomes suddenly and dangerously stiff; the back teeth I am missing but cannot afford to replace.

So, vanity, you see, is not a quality limited to the Joan Didions and other rich and famous. Didion is just honest, candid about hers.

As an adoptive mother, I also identify with Didion's recollections of the fears regarding her daughter, adopted when Didion was 31, much younger than I was when I adopted my daughter from China.

"All adopted children, I am told, fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents as they believe themselves to be abandoned by their natural," Didion writes. "All adoptive parents, I do not need to be told, fear that they do not deserve the child they were given, that the child will be taken from them."

Yes, I have feared such loss to the point that I borrowed money from someone I did not want to ask but did so because I felt my daughter's father and I needed to re-adopt her in this country and to do so very quickly -- just to be safe. My daughter has said don't leave me alone. -- Where are you? I can't find you, she has said. -- I was only in the other room or the back yard.

Didion recalls her daughter, as a child, speaking of her "other mommy," the biological mother. The same words have come from my daughter, who's even spoken of her four sets of grandparents -- if you count the ones in China, that is.

Ultimately, of course, Didion did lose her daughter, not to the biological mother, not to a court or to a foster parent, but to death -- at a far too young age.

If a memoir can be judged by believability, by truth, by remembrances of all things -- even the embarrassing -- Blue Nights certainly qualifies. It is not a depressing book, but it is a work that at times is so realistic it hurts, especially if the reader's life bears even small resemblances to Didion's.

Coming Up & What I'm Reading Now.....

will be reviews or commentary on:
by Annie Dillard.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larrson. I will follow up later with an item on The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the final book in Larrson's posthumously published and bestselling series.

Messenger of Truth, a Maisie Dobbs mystery novel set in the aftermath of World War I and the fourth in a series of Jacqueline Winspear.

And a mention of a couple books, both novels, I started but just couldn't make myself want to finish them. ... Oh, and I am now reading Alice, Let's Eat, a 1970s book by Calvin Trillin, whose name many will recognize from his articles over the decades in The New Yorker. And I just checked out Alice LaPlante's Turn of Mind.

The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma

The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared is Alice Ozma's account of her and her father's years of reading aloud to each other for 3,218 consecutive days. The commitment the two made to each other when Alice was a child in 1998 ended only when moved away to begin college.

The book is also Ozma's way of paying homage to her father, a retired elementary school librarian who raised her and her sister alone after their mother left. It evolves -- or devolves, depending on your point of view -- into one assailing the school administrators who forbade her from from reading aloud to small children. These officials become such incompetent villains that the book cries for their side of the story. Why did they get rid of so many books in the library, as Ozma says they did? Why did they want her father to focus only on computers rather than books in a library? Perhaps, the officials are the mindless demons Ozma describes, but I wonder.

Ozma, whose name comes from Lewis Carroll's Alice and from Frank Baum's Oz books, clearly grew up in a home that cherished reading. Each chapter begins with a quote from a book she and her father shared -- from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations to Lois Lowry's The Giver and A.A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner.

At one point, I stopped reading the book because, except for those quotations, the book was dealing little with what Alice and her father read and how it changed their lives. I decided to give it a second try, though, and grew to like it the farther I got into it. Still, there was something or some things about the book I never came to like.

First, Ozma's story gets tedious, even childish, at times. Perhaps that's in part because she's young and too vividly remembering her childhood. But reading about her temper tantrums and such when they contribute nothing to the overall story is really boring, especially when I for one deal with more than enough of such behavior in my own home.

And frankly, Ozma's father seems a bit too odd. I kept thinking, in fact -- there's another reason he had trouble with school administrators. His daughter may not know it. And the reader can only suspect it.

Ozma left me wanting to know more about the reading experiences. Did she ever read to her father? That's what I thought was going to happen, but it became less clear as the book progressed. Why did they choose the books they choose? Which ones did they like, hate? Which ones helped her deal with her parents' divorce? Which ones helped her father? How did they go from Winnie the Pooh to Great Expectations -- and when? How, in other words, did their reading progress as Alice grew up?

Still, the book has some merit. It made me wish my daughter and I would read aloud more to each other. But the book could have had much more merit in the hands of a better writer.

The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

Tell me to read a book, a novel per se, about a woman who is a magician's assistant -- yes, the always-pretty woman who appears to get sawed in half but comes out of the box intact with no legs or arms missing. Tell me the magician is gay, the woman is straight but in love with him, that she even marries him and lives a chaste life with him and his gay lover until they both die and leave her alone to inherit everything. Tell me she finds out -- to her dismay -- that this most cosmopolitan of men has a family in rural Nebraska -- a mom with permed hair and lots of secrets, a sister with an abusive husband, and more. And of course, they're mostly likable folks, ableit a tad strange.

Tell me I'll enjoy this book. Tell me I'll find it plausible. I'd think you were joshing or just plain clueless. But I did enjoy it. I did find it believable -- even a bit too predictable near the end. And, yes, I'd recommend it to you -- well, maybe not to my mother but to you, the people who read my blog and who find it not so incredible that a straight woman might knowingly marry a gay man -- and be happy.

Why should that premise even sound so bizarre? How many marriages between two straight people are based on convenience or need? How many start out based on love or on what the two thought was love but change in a few months or a few years? Maybe those couples are miserable. But I'd argue that not all of them are. Some of those people likely married for other reasons -- money, gratitude, need, companionship, expectations. And perhaps some married for love, but not the kind that's always consummated in the bedroom. Or maybe the reasons for the marriage changed over time with one or both spouses. I'm not saying these arrangements are ideal. But they exist and are probably more prevalent than traditionalists realize.

Patchett, also the author of the critically acclaimed Bel Canto, wrote this less well-known novel in the late 1990s. Her writing is clear, concise, lyrical. "Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story." Well, maybe not: Those are the book's first two sentences.

This novel is about Sabine, a 40-something magician's assistant who lives in and loves Los Angeles. As the assistant, she's always been the one at the side, the one who stays out of the spotlight. But in Patchett's novel, Sabine takes the spotlight and proceeds to shine it on the other characters she comes to know through Parsifal, the man we never get to meet except through all of the other characters' shared memories.

And the fact that I loved this book, to my own surprise, perhaps speaks to the magic that literature can work in all of us.

Books About Books

Lately, I've been reading books about books. I started with Pat Conroy's excellent My Reading Life and Nina Sankovitch's Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, both reviewed earlier on this blog. Later, I read Alan Jacobs' less lively The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Jacobs works really hard, too hard, to tell us it's OK to read frivolous books and it's also OK to ignore all those must-read lists. The problem is, I ended up forcing myself to finish reading Jacobs' own sometimes tedious book.

Now, I'm reading Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home. It is absolutely delightful. It's the kind of book I grab when I wake up in the middle of the night and read another page or two. I take the light-weight paperback -- just 236 pages -- to the restroom with me. I carry it to work in the hope of a few free moments. I knew I could identify with Hill when she dared to admit she dislikes reading Jane Austen. Gasp!... At last, I realized: I am not alone among so-called educated people who struggle to enjoy Pride and Prejudice.

Somewhere in between Howards End Is on the Landing and Jacobs' book, I read and largely enjoyed Richard Horan's book, Seeds: One Man's Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers From Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton. Horan's book is an offbeat combination of travel writing, botany and literature. It's full of interesting facts about the writers whose homes and trees he visits while collecting seeds to start legacy trees.

We learn, for instance, that the Tree of Heaven in Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is now considered invasive. We also learn that George Washington's legendary false teeth weren't wooden but were ivory. Outside the home of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, Horan gathered cherry seeds from her Pennsylvania yard, where nature thankfully is not yet silenced. At Carson McCullers' home, he collected bright-red magnolia seeds. He tells us how to transplant those seeds -- something I now hope to do with my own small magnolia tree and its seeds.

Books about books may sound like a waste of time. But I find I sometimes get other reading ideas in them, and it's also interesting to learn what others think about literary works I've sometimes loved, sometimes hated or just never got around to reading.

Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows

Deborah Fallows' book Dreaming in Chinese offers a readable look at Mandarin and the ways language and culture interact. Even neophyte students of Mandarin such as myself will recognize and appreciate some of the words and phrases in Fallows' book -- Wo ai ni (I love you) and and Ni hao (Hello), for instance. Other Chinese statements such as Ni de Zhongwen hen hao (Your Chinese is very good!) are a tad more foreign to native English speakers. (Forgive my inability to include tonal marks.)

Throughout her book, Fallows adeptly explains some of the incredible differences between Mandarin and some other languages, particularly English. Mandarin, for example, has no verb tense. So, Americans should not be surprised when Chinese speakers have trouble with English tense. Likewise, the Chinese should not be appalled when native English speakers of Mandarin might vainly grasp for a male pronoun vs. a female pronoun and never find it -- not, that is, until he or she (ta) learns to read and write in Mandarin rather than only speak it. There are different Chinese characters for he and she but only in writing.

Fallows brings a doctoral degree in linguistics and three years in China to the book. She has lived in Shanghai and Beijing, cities that we learn have been big rivals over the years, in language and culture. Her book is interesting and informative. It's humorous at times, such as when she talks about the intense yet inexplicable dislike some Beijing and Shanghai residents have for each other. It's touching when she talks about the "tender" side that emerged among the Chinese after the deadly earthquake (dizhen) in May 2008.

I heartily recommend the book, most especially to readers with a special interest in China, Mandarin and linguistics.

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy

Readers need not be a fan of Pat Conroy's bestselling novels to enjoy his newest work of nonfiction, My Reading Life.

Conroy has written other nonfiction, but he is best known for his novels, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music and South of Broad. In reading this latest book, divided into chapters that resemble essays yet are not independent of each other, Conroy gives us insight into the reader who became the famous novelist and the people who helped played key roles in his life: a loving mother; an abusive father; an English teacher who was first Conroy's mentor and later his friend. The book gives us a glimpse not only into Conroy's reading -- and writing -- habits but also into his life, a sometimes troubled one with severe depression.

Conroy -- who writes self-effacingly about his love of adjectives, lots of adjectives -- tells the reader how books have shaped his life and how his life has shaped his books. His mother passed her own reading obsession, especially of Gone With the Wind, down to him as a young boy.

Literature, whether by Leo Tolstoy or James Dickey, Tom Wolfe or Jane Austen, became Conroy's ticket to the world, to places, times and people unseen. They also became his solace and his inspiration. To this day, he keeps a copy of Dickey's book, Poems 1957-1967, on his desk and calls it "the finest book of poetry ever published in America." Conroy begins each day with a poem, whether by Dickey, Rumi, Dylan Thomas or another.

"The poets force me back toward the writing life, where the trek takes you into the interior where the right word hides like an ivory-billed woodpecker in the branches of the highest pines," Conroy writes.

Conroy owns thousands of books and apparently has read thousands.

Of War and Peace, he writes, "Tolstoy performs that rarest and most valuable of tasks, one that has all but disappeared from modern fiction. He wrestles with the philosophical issues of how people like you and me can manage to live praiseworthy and contributive lives."

Conroy shares a touch of literary gossip in his book, too. A solemn Alice Walker gave him her autograph but was rude, Arkansan Miller Williams dedicated a poetry reading to him during a writers' conference, and Conroy delivered the eulogy at Dickey's funeral.

Conroy also takes us into the world of those who love and collect books, chiefly himself. We peek into the now-defunct Old New York Book Shop on Juniper Street, where he bought between four- and five-thousand books, including 500 books of poetry. There, he encountered a haunted but sweet young man wearing "a terrific hat and expensive sunglasses." The man, accompanied by three large, muscular men, came in one day looking for books on freaks and bought several hundred dollars worth of merchandise. Conroy later learned the shy young man was Michael Jackson.

Reading Conroy's book is as much about his life and writing as it is about his reading. His book is one I would like to keep in my own humble library. It is an inspiring story. Upon reading it, I picked up a book of Maya Angelou's poetry that had sat untouched in the same place near my bedside for weeks. I also decided to tackle the great book I've never tackled -- War and Peace. I soon began reading Alan Jacobs' new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. And perhaps, most importantly, I resolved to take a lesson from Conroy and not let my own troubles and insecurities keep me from pursuing my own reading, and writing, life.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Henrietta Lacks, a mother of five in Clover, Virginia, was the wife of a poor tobacco farmer and a black woman in the South at a time when blacks were treated in hospitals' "colored" wards and forced to use separate restrooms. She had something else also working against her -- incredibly aggressive cervical cancer cells.

Treated at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, Lacks died at age 31 in 1951. But first, her doctor took a biopsy and, more significantly, cultured the cells without Lacks' permission, without her knowledge and, without even his own realization of the way they would alter history.

Unlike other cells that medical researchers had been unable to study as successfully, Lacks' were incredibly aggressive and resilient, reproducing to the extent that ultimately they contaminated other research. Along the way, though, Lacks' cells, called HeLa by researchers, traveled to laboratories around the country, the world and outer space. They have played a role in an immense range of medical history -- from the development of the polio vaccine; treatments for Parkinson's disease, leukemia and AIDS; and advancements in in-vitro fertilization and gene mapping.

Yet Henrietta Lacks' own family, including a daughter named Deborah who was only a baby when Henrietta died, did not know until 1973 that her cells had even been saved, much less that they had been the subject of so much research. Nor did they know that people had sometimes made money off the cells, though Lacks' relatives -- too poor to afford health insurance -- were never paid a dime.

To author Rebecca Skloot's credit, she has established the Henrietta Lacks Foundation -- www.henriettalacksfoundation.org -- to help needy people who, the website says, "have made important contributions to scientific research without personally benefitting from those contributions ... particularly those used in research without their knowledge or consent."

At times, Skloot's writing gets a bit scientific and tedious for the lay reader. Mostly, though, it is an easy yet important and moving read. It is hard to read this book without getting angry at the racism that permeated scientific research far into the 20th century.

Skloot addresses the ethical issues involved in medical research without a person's knowledge -- a subject far less clear-cut than one might think. Skloot does not advocate either side of the issue, and even Deborah is grateful that her mother's cells have helped save lives. Skloot does, however, advocate for the memory of Lacks and for Lacks' family, especially Deborah who did not live to see the book published.

Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna

Arto Paasilinna's short, entertaining novel, Year of the Hare, was written in 1975. But what better year to read it than 2011, the Year of the Hare in much of the Asian world? It need not matter that this charming novel was translated from the Finnish, not Chinese, Japanese or Korean, and that it all takes place in Finland, except for the main character's accidental trek across the border into Soviet-controlled Siberia.

The story opens with the main character, a journalist named Vatanen, riding in a car with a photographer through the Finnish countryside. I don't recall what story the two were pursuing. It's irrelevant to the story line anyway and, as it turns out, also irrelevant to Vatanen's life. Suddenly -- yes, suddenly -- the car strikes a hare (not those little rabbits hopping about many of our back yards, but a hare, mind you).

The not fully grown, injured creature flees, hopping into the forest. Vatanen, being the gentle soul that he is, gets out of the vehicle to check on the animal, eventually finds it and proceeds to nurse it -- leaving the impatient photographer wondering why his colleague is spending so much time with a hare.

Alas, the photographer gives up and leaves. He calls Vatanen's wife to tell her that her spouse -- indeed, her "better" half -- has apparently become lost in the woods with an injured hare. It's the middle of the night when she takes that call, and she's a bit perturbed, understandably wondering if the photographer is drunk. She hangs up on him and gives the reader an early glimpse into her and Vatanen's marital relationship (not the most romantic on the block).

Meantime, back in the forest, Vatanen realizes his photographer has left and he has no way to town other than walking or hitchhiking. So, with the little hare in his pocket, Vatanen begins a journey that ultimately takes him across Finland and into the lives of one quirky character after another. Suffice it to say, a hare in your pocket is usually a good conversation starter.

Ultimately, Vatanen decides he's fed up with his job, his wife and his general life and flees all -- with hare gently tucked in pocket, of course. The adventures of Vatanen and the hare yield a funny yet symbolic storyline, with the twosome's adventures ranging from a jail stint to near-death experiences with an animal sacrificer not to mention a mighty ferocious bear.

If you've ever thought, I'm sick of my life and I want to start over -- whether with a hare, your dog, a secret lover or just yourself -- (And who hasn't?), this novel will find a place in your heart. It's the kind of book you read and recommend to others. And now, I want to read more books by Arto Paasilinna.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch

I first heard of Nina Sankovitch more than a year ago when I read a feature in the New York Times about her blog, readallday.org. Sankovitch an Evanston, Ill., native and now a Connecticut resident, was reading and reviewing online a book a day for one year. I began checking her blog occasionally, found good reading tips and decided to start my own blog.

With a full-time job and a preteen daughter, I couldn't read a book a day, but I could read more and share my thoughts with others. Writing about literature forces us to think about what we have read. Does it relate to our lives? Does it teach us about others? Does it take us to places we have never been and may never go? Does it take us to places we may never want to go? Does it help us deal with the trials that we all face at one time or another? Yes to all.

In Sankovitch's case, someone else also obviously read that New York Times article. HarperCollins recently published her book, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading.

I didn't realize until shortly before I read Sankovitch's book that she had begun her year-long adventure to help cope with one of her own life's trials -- death, specifically the premature death of a sister who, like Nina, also loved good books.

Sankovitch's book is not a mere series of reviews. She still puts those on her blog and on Huffington Post. Rather, her book successfully tells us how reading affected and effected her life both now and when she was a child listening to her immigrant father read to her and her sisters. She tells how reading helped her dying sister -- and herself -- in those final months. It gave them something other than death to talk about; it gave them something other than death to think about. But reading was more than a distraction. It became an adventure for both sisters to anticipate when they were both alone and together.

Sankovitch's resume includes a Harvard law degree. A former corporate lawyer, she was not working outside the home at the time of her year-long reading project. But with a husband and four children, she wasn't swimming in free time. She shares with readers the difficulties in finding the time to read and review a book a day, especially when it's a long one such as the one her son suggested, Watership Down. Sankovitch reads good books, literature. But she is anything but a reading snob. She can enjoy a bestselling mystery while also feasting on a centuries-old classic. Her reading is diverse, from Tolstoy to Laurie Colwin to graphic novels.

One leaves Sankovitch's book, realizing she won't continue to read a book a day, but she will always be a reader and a writer. Along the way, she has no doubt already helped plant a love of reading in the minds of many other people around the country and the world. In my own case, I was already a reader but now make time to read more good books. I hope to work with my 10-year-old daughter to start a book club for her and a few of her friends if she wants, and I've started talking with her about reviewing children's books for my blog. After all, only a child can fully appreciate whether children will love a book written for children.

If you've not heard of Sankovitch, please check out her unusually well-organized blog. After you're over being stunned at how she did so much so well in so little time, read her book. It is not, as some might suspect, a mere diary boasting of her reading exploits. It is a book sharing the joy of reading with others, including every single person who reads even a single chapter of her book. It's a good, informative read. It's also the kind of book that can be read a second time and enjoyed over and over.

Thank you, Nina Sankovitch, for sharing your experiences -- the joys and the heartaches -- with us and passing on this inspiring journal of your reading year. I look forward to reading about your future adventures with the written word.