MarysLibrary

What I'm Reading

I've finished Carl Bernstein's book, Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. It's a fine book, written from a liberal point of view, but exceedingly well researched and very readable. I recommend it.

Where has Bernstein been all these years since Watergate? I hope he's working on something else. We need to hear from him again. 

I've now moved on to Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta. It, too, is a good book, but a little dry after the Bernstein book.

Yesterday in the library I happened on a new biography by Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr. This is a bit slow going but I'm only on about page 75 so it may liven up.

Reading About Hillary

I'm still having trouble focusing on what I'm supposed to be reading. I keep putting books down and then picking up something else instead.

I was sufficiently mesmerized by the Elizabeth Bowen book to whip through that to its unsatisfactory finish. Unsatisfactory for the characters, not for the reader. Wonderful book. (Note to self: Read more Elizabeth Bowen novels.)

Now I'm reading Carl Bernstein's bio of Hillary Clinton. I've been watching Hillary perform for a long time now and I don't like what I see. I've been looking for something that even vaguely resembles an unbiased book about the Clintons. It does not now exist and it may be 2020 before it does.

So I'm reading A Woman in Charge, which is sympathetic to Hillary, and which takes the same position she has done about everything that has gone wrong in her career from Whitewater to the White House travel office firing/hiring scandal. It's the fault of her enemies. It's unfounded accusations by her enemies. Remember the vast right-wing conspiracy?

However, with nothing objective on the horizon this will have to do. It's well written, well researched, and well organized. It's just not believable.

The Death of the Heart

I don't know quite how this happened, but I've never read anything by Elizabeth Bowen. Her family's house, Bowen Court, was within walking distance of where my father's family lived in Mallow in Ireland and I've sometimes thought they might have been servants at Bowen Court. But I never got around to reading about the Anglo-Irish as portrayed by this well-thought-of author.

So today I'm soaking up The Death of the Heart. Bowen's writing is slick and icy. She delineates characters in half a page with almost no dialogue and a minimum of action. The book seems to be most significant for what it doesn't say or describe.

The main character of The Death of the Heart is a heartbreakingly innocent and hopeful girl named Portia who, after living most of her 16 years in hotels in France and Switzerland with her scatty mother, has gone after her mother's death to live with her half-brother and his fashionable wife in London.

The woman and the girl do not get on. We aren't told exactly why; it's up to the reader to decipher the body language and silences between them. It's all brilliantly done. I wonder what Virginia Woolf thought of Elizabeth Bowen's work.

Putting the Rarin' Back in Librarian

What do these folks do for a living? They're librarians. You can read about them here.

Knoxville, Tennessee

Knoxville, Tennessee

by Nikki Giovanni

I always like summer
best
you can eat fresh corn
from daddy's garden
and okra
and greens
and cabbage
and lots of
barbecue
and buttermilk and homemade ice-cream
at the church picnic
and listen to
gospel music
outside
at the church
homecoming
and go to the mountains with
your grandmother
and go barefooted
and be warm
all the time
not only when you go to bed
and sleep