Writing and Living

All Over But the Shoutin’ is Rick Bragg’s autobiographical tribute to his mother. Raised in extreme poverty in the south, Bragg tells the story of his alcoholic father, his amazing, self-sacrificial mother, and his eventual rise to writing for the New York Times. If you think it sounds a lot like a southern version of Angela’s Ashes, you’d be right.

The good: Bragg was honest about the troubles of his childhood, but he managed to still tell the story with honor and joy. We sympathized with his mother, but he didn’t make her pitiful. He did a great job explaining the bitterness and anger that sometimes drives people to overcome poverty and achieve success.

The bad: When Bragg was talking about his mother and his childhood, the story was great, but when he starts recounting his rise in the world of journalism, I found myself skimming and wishing he would just get on with things. And as much as it worries me to accuse a Pulitzer prize winner of overwriting, I’ve got to. I got a little weary of the colorful country metaphors after awhile.

Final Grade: C. The last half of the book dragged the whole thing down. I wish he had been able to reign himself in, because he got off to a great start.

Jamie Ford’s first novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is set in Seattle during World War II and tells the story of a friendship that develops between a Chinese boy and a Japanese girl during the internment of Japanese Americans.

The good: The writing is good. The story is told in flashbacks, and Ford does a good job taking the reader from WWII to present day without causing whiplash. The story is intriguing, and Ford made me aware of some aspects of WWII that I didn’t know much about.

The bad:. Many of the characterizations were either flat or inconsistent. The good guys were thoroughly good, and the bad guys were thoroughly bad. Most people aren’t that one-dimensional. Since the story is told in flashbacks, you know from the beginning how things are going to end. During the last third of the book, however, the author either relied on plot devices so overused that most book publishers warn against them in their submission guidelines, or had characters acting in ways that didn’t ring true. It was almost as if Ford wanted so badly to keep the ending from being predictable that he made it unbelievable.

Final grade: B. The writing was so good that I’ll forgive plot weaknesses. If you’re only going to read one book about the problems between 1st and 2nd generation Asian Americans, read The Joy Luck Club. But this is a rich subject that can be visited in more than one way by more than one author.

I’ve decided to participate in the Book Blogger Hop at Crazy for Books. This week’s question: Tell us some of your favorite authors, and why they are your favorites.

Since I mostly read Christian theology and fiction, I’ll give my favorite in each.

Christian theology: Jerry Bridges. His books are so helpful, thoughtful, and biblical that I always leave one of his books a better person than when I started it.

Fiction: Anne Tyler (who is not, by the way, a Christian author, lest anyone be confused). I love her quirky, funny characters. As anyone who has lived in a small town or worked with the public can attest, people are strangely amusing. Anne Tyler is a student of human nature – she portrays people as they are, but still manages to make them sympathetic. But despite the laugh-out-loud moments in her books, her writing is deep and thought-provoking.

Bonus: Writer’s Digest interviews Anne Tyler

It seems like every blog I read has told me to get The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Usually when everyone is doing something, I go out of my way to point out the negative (it’s one of the more delightful aspects of my personality, I’m sure). With this book, though, I have to agree. It’s really good.

The Help is set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the the 1960s. It is told through the eyes of the black domestic workers and the white women they serve.

This subject has been visited in fiction before, but Stockett uses a fresh voice and I believe she adds fresh insight. Some of the mistreatment she recounts was borne out of ignorance, some out of cruelty. And while the black women in the book did wish for things to be better, she does an excellent job of portraying both the feelings of fear and loyalty that kept them where they were. Stockett is a native of Jackson, and she has a wonderful ear for dialect. It’s difficult to write in native dialect without bogging down the reader, but she managed to pull it off.

Recommending books is a tricky thing. A lot of the books that I love fall flat when others try to read them. This is one of those books that I think most people are going to enjoy.

Crossing to Safety is the first book by Wallace Stegner I have ever read. As Magistra Mater said when she recommended it, it’s “full of phrases that reverberated in my bones.”

This book follows the friendship of two couples from early marriage on. It’s told through the eyes of Larry, an English professor and writer.

I may have groaned when I realized that the narrator was an aspiring writer working as an English professor. That particular type of character has been overdone, and I braced myself for pages and pages of plotless navel-gazing about the minutiae of life and why the guy writes. I was pleasantly surprised.

This book made me think. It made me think about why we befriend some people and not others. It made me think about how marriages look to outsiders, whether those perceptions are accurate, and why we do the things we do. And yes, it did make me think about why writers write and how they portray the world, but it didn’t beat me over the head with it.

I wish more writers would read this book and take a cue from Stegner. I’ve long bemoaned the fact that many current writers of literary fiction think that good writing must focus on the basest parts of human nature and wallow there without leaving us any hope (or plot). Oprah and her book club only reinforced this notion. Stegner made a strong case that writers need to paint with the darker colors, too, but reminded us that the shadows don’t obliterate the light, just contrast it. Since Stegner would have been a contemporary of my grandparents, I just hope this type of writer is not gone forever.

This is not a light read, but it’s not difficult. You can probably find it at your library (I did), and it would be worth your time.

I first heard about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society from Catherine, who has yet to lead me wrong. It was also one of ten novels reviewed in World Magazine for good summer reading. Told entirely through letters written after World War 2, this novel recounts the German occupation of the Channel Islands. It was delightful in every way. It makes me want to move to Guernsey and spend my time writing clever, witty letters to all my friends.

I’ll pause to give my sister a chance to wipe her coffee from her keyboard. I’m terrible about answering letters.

You knew it would only be a matter of time before I would go back to the Puritans. Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices was recommended by Tim Keller in this article on Puritan resources for biblical counseling. As Keller says, the Puritans had a deep understanding of both the human heart and the Scripture, a combination not often found today. But let me tell you, you’ll get a couple of funny looks at the pool if you sit there reading a book with “Satan” in the title. I’m not quite finished with it. I can’t say that I’m enjoying reading a book about Satan’s devices, but it’s helpful. The Puritans are always helpful, and worth the effort.

Speaking of Tim Keller, I ended up buying Counterfeit Gods. I bought it in St. Louis, as there’s not a copy to be had in town. I suspect a local church must be doing a study on it. It’s very good, and would be excellent for a small group book study. It was also a quick read, but after struggling through a 17th century book on the devices of Satan, Tim Keller’s clear writing is bound to feel easy. My only complaint is that I paid full list price for it (20 dollars), and though it’s 192 pages, it’s small in size. Unless you feel this book is pertinent to a current struggle, I would either make sure to get a good price or wait for the paperback.