The Renaissance Soul – Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One (Margaret Lobenstine)

The title says it all and if it rings a bell, swallow your pride (“I’m not the type who reads self help books”) and read it. Because I think that this is one of these books that can change a life by re-framing something that is often seen as a weakness into a possible strength and instead of judging (“you have to learn to stick to something” “Jack of all trades and master of none” etc.) Lobenstine helps the reader to explore how to stay focused by developing focal points, considering umbrella careers or moving from one interest to the next sequentially without necessarily always having to start back at square one. While reading it I thought of 10 friends and relatives who I would like to give this too. One of the few library books that I want to buy after reading.

When the Ground Turns in its Sleep (by Sylvia Sellers-Gracia)

“Since my arrival in Rio Roto I’d almost always understood, in a literal sense, everything people said to me. I never had to ask anyone to repeat or rephrase what they’d said. But I often had the impression, as I had in the Malvinas, that I’d nevertheless failed to grasp the meaning behind their words. I can only describe it as a kind of unaccountable incompleteness, as though every time someone spoke to me a few of the words fell away before they reached me. Everything I heard seemed to have pieces missing.”

The reader follows Nitido Aman deep into this confusion in a book that is original in its storyline and characters. Driven by the urge to find out more about his parents’ home country and their life in Guatemala before they emigrated to the US, the protagonist rather naively slides into the depths of a community still scarred and divided by the brutal history of guerrilla warfare.

Staying Alive – Real Poems for Unreal Times (Edited by Neil Astley)

If I had only one book of poetry, it would be this one. It’s my “take to the lonely island” choice of book. Mainly contemporary poems, some straightforward, others weird but not so straightforwards as to be banal and boring or so weird as to be inaccessible. I’ve been reading it for years and still find new and touching stuff when I open it, it’s as if someone assembled my favorite poems before I even knew them. Today’s find:

Poem for a Daughter

“I think I’m going to have it,”
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
“Dear, you never have it,
we deliver it.”
A judgment years prove true.
Certainly I’ve never had you

as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart’s needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom’s end. Yet nothing’s more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their spheres together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.

A woman’s life is her own
until it is taken away
by a first particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
When we belong to the world
we become what we are.

Anne Stevenson

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (Deborah Madison)

I asked the owner of the fancy cooking store in my neighborhood for her favorite cookbook of all times and this is it. I can see why. A comprehensive, not too fancy and not too simple cookbook with just enough personal touch to make it a pleasure to read (but no star-chef-cult), a clear lay-out that fits a lot of recipes in without looking squeezed and, above all, a great love for vegetarian food (instead of a stiff, pleasure-denying, health-food hatred for meat products).

Driftless (by David Rhodes)

“The Driftless story took over ten years to complete and it’s not like I wasn’t trying. One reason may be the characters who wanted to be written about. They were for the most part not the kind of characters who usually find their way into print – very private, never satisfied with their assigned roles, always wanting their voices more accurately rendered and their feelings better dramatized”, says David Rhodes about the people in Words, Wisconsin.

Maybe this explains why I felt the way I did when I read this story about the people in this village at the end of a forgotten road: They seem to have a life and depth beyond the pages of this book, every one of these many intertwined stories could fill a whole novel of its own. While I have never met characters like this – they are all a bit bigger than life in a somewhat hillbilly way – Rhodes makes me believe that they actually do exist and leaves me with a yearning to continue knowing them, after I finished devouring this book.

The story? Well, it’s not really one story, it’s everybody’s life entangled, the dairy farmers who want to fight against the dirty business of their milk cooperative and don’t know what they are getting themselves into, the preacher who is annoyingly rightous but so true and “the real deal” that she just can’t help it, the blond little lady in the wheelchair with a will of steel and her sister who defines herself by being her care-taker,  the Amish, the militia and the dog-fighters. The most beautiful and sometimes philosopical moments are those when the unlikely meet and show each other a glimpse of their world.

(Mental note: Driftless won the “Milkweed National Fiction Prize”. Check out the other winners)