A new year of books and book reviews!  I’m hoping to match my reading and reviewing goals from last year and do them one better (i.e. 51).  These three books were a great start to the year.

• People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks is an enthralling fictionalized account of the history of a book, the Sarajevo Haggadah.  The story starts in 1996 after the ceasefire in the Bosnian War when a rare book conservationist is brought in to restore the illuminated Haggadah, the book Jews use for the Passover seder.  While taking apart and then re-binding the book, Hanna Heath finds a few clues that might shed light on the remarkable history of the book that spans 500 years of European history.  Interspersed between the main narrative of Hanna’s sleuthing are short pieces from the book’s history such as when it was saved from destruction at the hands of the Nazis during WWII.  Other moments give glimpses into Vienna in the declining years of the Austro-Hungarian empire and Spain at the time of the expulsion of Jews in 1492.  It’s all rather riveting as the moments are about people—Jews, Muslims, and Christians— who have some connection to the book.  I’m kind of a sucker for books about loving books, at least if they are done well (e.g. Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, or Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose).  It’s not very deep, but I enjoyed it a great deal.

• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is a book I’ve read before and hope to read again someday.  In other words, it’s a classic, and deservedly so.  It’s a novel that somehow encompasses so much of life even though the main action only takes up a day.  Periodically we hear the tolling of the bells marking the hours of a day in London of 1923.  It starts with one of the famous lines of literature: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”  From there, we follow Clarissa Dalloway (and other characters) through all the preparations for a party that evening at her residence.  The guest list includes the Prime Minister, revered physicians, pompous bureaucrats, a poor cousin, an old suitor of Clarissa’s, and one of her oldest friends who, though living in Manchester and thus uninvited, happened to be in town and came anyway.  Running parallel to the story of the events leading up to the party is the story of Septimus Smith, a veteran of World War I who is suffering from shell shock (what we would now call PTSD).  Through the use of flashbacks we find out some of the backstory of how Clarissa chose Dalloway instead of her old suitor, and how Septimus is haunted by the memory of his officer who was killed in the war.  The narration floats and glides from character to character, in and out of minds, seamlessly transitioning from one to the next, like a butterfly flitting here and there.  It can be disorienting, but it is also so fluid.  We get to experience life through so many eyes and minds.  It’s exquisite.  It’s not an easy read despite being a tad under 200 pages, but it’s totally worth it.

• Our List of Solutions by Carrie Oeding is a collection of poetry full of longing and insight and barbecues.  One thing I noticed is that this collection works as a cohesive book and not merely a random selection of poems by one author.  Characters and objects and themes recur throughout the book, filling out the neighborhood feel to the proceedings.  There’s Sandy who says “No more!” before being introduced to the concept of Beauty by a neighbor and finally closing the book with her own list of solutions.  There’s the neighborhood barbecues where people eat meat and someone is always on the edge of the group, where there’s gossip and someone disappointing someone else.  And then there’s the way the world works, first its prelude and then its understanding.  It’s an understanding that’s really a curse.

  Some who curse knowing the world, punch who we love saying, This can’t be

  how the world works!

  And some of us cursers learn

  to just watch those in the world who don’t know how it works.

  Of course those aren’t the only two options, and that’s not the only way to curse.  It’s a complicated book, and these are intricate poems that don’t follow the same narratives or structures I’ve seen before.  A speaker in one of these poems is just as likely to imagine a lengthy discourse on a new enemy before fumbling towards complete stasis as imagine that an old high school band mate had the key to beauty and freedom in a great bike metaphor, but that it was now lost.  The poems do new and interesting things like revise themselves as they go along as in “Ruby, Give Leo One More Chance”: “You can know a person […] You can know a person too well.  You can know a story. / You can feel nothing at all. // I can walk up to a stranger and, and I— / who cares what I could say. / This isn’t about talking to strangers.”  It’s intriguing, and it’s a neighborhood I’d like to visit again, even if all the deer have left.

  [disclosure: Oeding and I were in grad school together, but I didn’t know her very well.  I actually decided to read her book because of a review by Angie Mazakis, another grad student and mutual friend.  Angie’s review is much better.  You should probably read that one instead of this one.]