Some summer reads

Julie Lane Gay grew up near San Francisco but has lived in Canada for 22 years. She attends St John’s Shaughnessy Anglican Church in Vancouver and writes for garden, religious, travel and general interest magazines.  She is married to Craig and they have four teenagers, three sons and a daughter, which keeps her more on her knees than on her computer.

Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

Watching a teenager text with his friends, you instinctively know that our language – our use of words – is in great peril. Taking us through twelve “Stewardship strategies,” this book is thoughtful, practical and a delight to read. McEntyre attempts to reflect on “what it might mean to retrieve words from… misuse, abuse and distortion … and to re-invigorate them for use as bearers of truth and instruments of love.”  I just need her to write the twitter version for my teenagers.

A Homemade Life

Molly Wizenberg

For those of us who love to eat and to read, there is a whole new subgenre – foodoirs –  memoirs with recipes or, as one reviewer wrote, where “chicklit meets chicken legs.” Molly Wizenberg, known to foodies for her blog Orangette, has written one of the best, for the winsomeness of her own story, strength of her writing, and exceptionally delicious recipes.  The French Yogurt Cake and Asian Pear Salad are worth the price of the book.

So Young, Brave and Handsome

Leif Enger

While I am not usually a Western enthusiast, this cowboy romance set in 1915 America felt like a gift. Many are far more loyal to Enger’s first novel, Peace Like a River, but this one captivated me for its characters – as fallen and messy as me -- but who also struggle to get it right. Enger’s renditions of sin, grace and redemption may not be intentional but they are what my soul craves.

Hope to read:

One Amazing Thing

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

A story of nine people trapped together by an earthquake who, in sharing ‘one amazing thing’ about their lives, keep up their will to survive.  I enjoyed her other work, especially Sister of My Heart, and I am always curious about how crises make people crystallize their thinking.

Debra Fieguth is a Kingston, Ontario writer who in summer prefers to read on her patio, if possible. And yes, if there's a glass of chilled white wine available, that enhances the experience. Her non-fiction work, Keepers of the Faith was published by Indian Life Books in 2001. She expects to see her book on extreme hospitality published in the next few months.  

Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2009). I don’t know why I’m so drawn to books about the world’s trouble spots, but I am. Perhaps there’s a need to know, coupled with a search for hope. Pulitzer prize-winning author Tracy Kidder follows Paul Farmer, an American doctor (“a man who would cure the world,” as the book’s subtitle declares), through his determined effort to bring health and well-being to at least one small area of Haiti, where AIDS, poverty and so many other challenges cripple the populace. The region of Cange now boasts one of the best clinics in the country, the incidence of HIV has gone down and nutrition is better. Farmer, outspoken but passionately committed to the poor (guided by his own brand of liberation theology), works tirelessly, bringing theories and practices developed in Haiti next to Peru and then Russia. The book’s title is from a Haitian proverb, which says that even though you might overcome the first or second or third mountain, there are always more mountains to get over. Post-earthquake Haiti is likely to be reciting this proverb for some time to come.

Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2010). When a bishop visiting our diocese from South Carolina told me about another Kidder book, this one telling the story of a Burundian medical student who fled the slaughter of the civil war there and landed in New York knowing not a soul nor the English language and ended up sleeping in Central Park and fending off thugs, well, I had to read it. I’ve been to Burundi (as has the bishop), and there’s a little spot in my heart reserved for the tiny central African country. As with the Paul Farmer story, Kidder’s strength is in getting right under the skin of his subject. He tells the very personal, and sometimes very heartbreaking and horrifying, story of Deo, but along the way we learn so much more about the conflict in Burundi, and the difficulty of being a refugee in America. Against all odds, Deo got into medical school at Columbia University and is now helping to establish good medical care in his home country. This book’s title is from a line in a Wordsworth poem: “We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains behind.” Yes, there is hope.

Say You’re One of Them, by Uwem Akpan (New York: Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company, 2008). This collection of short stories, written by a Jesuit priest from Nigeria, is fiction but so sadly reflective of real life in many African contexts. There’s a home in a Nairobi slum, where children go out daily to beg and the eldest sister, all of 12, becomes a prostitute. In “Fattening for Gabon,” a pair of young siblings is being prepared by an uncle to be trafficked into slavery. Another story shows the efforts of two children to transcend the religious barriers that separate Muslims and Christians in Ethiopia. All the stories are written from the point of view of a child. And all of them experience things that children should never have to go through. Akpan is a very good writer; being African lends him credibility an outsider wouldn’t have. A caring reader will finish the book asking the question, “What can I do to make life better for these children?” The answer is not self-evident, but as with the two Kidder books, the first step is knowing what life is like for other people.

Next on my to-read list:

Beatrice & Virgil, by Yann Martel (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2010). After these serious books, I’m ready for some light fiction. You’d think a novel with a stuffed donkey (Beatrice) and a howler monkey (Virgil) as main characters would do the trick. Having been captivated by Martel’s genre-defying Life of Pi, published nine years ago, I and millions of other Canadians were anxious to see what the Saskatoon-based writer would come up with next. Reviews are mixed. Martel himself describes the book as “writer meets taxidermist meets Holocaust.” I’m still going to read it.