I am basically living an introvert’s dream right not (aside from going to work). With COVID-19 becoming an invading reality of everyday life, we are sheltering in place, avoiding going outside except to go to work and get groceries when needed. But even those outings seem frightening.
Stone and I have been home since March 13th when the WA state governor ordered all K-12 schools to close. The official “shelter in place” order started March 23rd. I had enough time to prepare I suppose. I stocked up on the usual – food, coffee, puzzles. I have completed five puzzles already, one 750 pieces, three 1000 pieces, and one 1500 piece.
I have a set of bookshelves in my sitting room at home. Shelves and shelves housing a variety of books. And probably half of them I haven’t read yet. With all this newfound time and a lack of motivation to clean or to any house improvements, I have gotten back into reading. Plus working nights has given even more time. I looked through my shelves to start sifting through the forgotten novels and stories and queries.
And then I bought more books….of course.
I have a problem. And with that admission, I present to you a few of my favorite books. These are all compiled from years and years of reading, from high school until recent. I had an amazing ELA teacher in high school, Ms. Woods. She had us read three massive books before we even started school. Summer reading. It wasn’t light – In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I didn’t get into them until we got to class. She expected us to READ, to fall in love with word and phrases, to daydream in class. Junior year is when I really learned to love reading.
Nonfiction
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert – This was probably the worst book to read while pregnant. It had taken me years to decide to attempt to get pregnant. And when it did happen, I wasn’t actively trying. I just also wasn’t actively preventing. Now here we are. Kolbert details the incredibly complex and beautiful ways life exists on our planet. Then hits you with the reality that those complexities are disappearing and thousands of species are dying rapidly. From tree frogs to bat killing fungus to ocean acidification to lattitudinal loss of forest. It’s heavy stuff to read when you are bringing another life into the world.
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer – I read this book with my high school students when I taught at Leshi. Their ELA teacher assigned several books that year that I ultimately read with them so I could help them with their assignments. I had always wanted to read about Christopher McCandless, the young man who left his family, abandoned his car, burned the money in his wallet, and set off for the Alaskan wilderness. It’s an idealist’s dream until it became a nightmare. Krakauer explores the human psyche, the why behind doing things others would define as reckless: scaling massive mountains, hiking thousands of miles, living in a bus with only what you can carry in. Chrisopher’s story is inspiring to those that seek beyond the regular 9-5 life we are conditioned to believe. As Albert Camus stated, “the only way to deal with an unfree world, is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion,”
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown – If there was ever a book to read about the genocide of Native Americans, this is it. Brown takes you through roughly 30 years of US western expansion that forced tribes off their land, forced children into boarding schools, and killed millions of native populations. Each chapter details the US treatment of tribes from 1860 to the massacre at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890. Published in 1970, Bury My Heart became the wake up slap after a century of the romanticized Wild West with cowboys and Indians and saloons and shootouts. Even with using original sources as documentation, the book reads as a story making it difficult to put down. In my opinion, this is one of the most important books to show the “Indian Wars” as nothing more than murder and theft. That’s our history folks. Accept it.
A Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone by Douglas W. Smith and Gary Ferguson – I bought this book when I was five months pregnant. It was April Spring Break in Yellowstone. That trip was the first time I saw a moose. It was in the yard of this house I was staying at for the week. It was also the first time I saw a wolf at Yellowstone through a telescope set up to view a pack two miles away in the Lamar Valley. They had just finished a meal and were lounging in the sun. I bought the book along with a stuffed wolf for Stone, appropriately named “Matt” after Neil’s brother. I finished the book in two days. And I would eventually buy a copy of this book through Amazon to send to my dad when he first got sick. I will never know if he actually finished it. It was next to his bed when I cleaned out his house after he died.
Hiroshima by John Hersey – I don’t remember exactly why I read Hiroshima in high school. I don’t think it was assigned. Maybe I was just interested in the full history of the event. I’m fairly certain almost everyone knows of Hiroshima, the targeted city for the first nuclear bombing on August 6, 1945. This book documents the city and in particular six characters from the time of the bombing to a year later. I vividly remember my own images of shadows burned on walls, melted eyeballs, people instantly vaporized as I read the words. This was another book I gave my dad. He got my copy and never got rid of it. It was another book on his shelf at home when I went back.
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII by Iris Chang – On the flip side of the Japanese experience in World War II, I read about the Chinese experience when my mom told me about a place called Nanking. I was probably studying the world wars when my mom brought up the 1937-1938 massacre in Nanking during the Second Sino-Japanese War. I won’t go into detail about what happened that year. It’s gut wrenching to read, and I glad that I did. I was never taught about my Chinese history or heritage since I grew up in the US. This book was the beginning of understanding and addressing the half of me that had been neglected. Fair warning, if you are going to read this, you need a strong stomach and healthy coping mechanisms.
H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald – Neil recommended this book to me after my dad died. MacDonald’s memoir of training a goshawk after her father’s sudden death. It’s like letting the wild completely take over your life, focusing all your attention and love and energy into another living thing all while grieving for a life that you will never see again. I guess Neil had a point in suggesting this one. I was solely focused in keeping an infant alive, keeping my head above water, and retreating into myself. What MacDonald experienced, I too experienced: denting dad’s car (I absentmindedly backed my dad’s truck into a cart corral and then again when my garage door wasn’t fully up), breaking things, and running away to the wild.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed – I avoided this book when it came out. EVERYONE was in love with it. Then the movie came out. Then I got a hardcover copy for free at a garage sale and quickly learned why so many people love it. Strayed’s life falls apart, and she tries to find herself again on the Pacific Crest Trail. She breaks and breaks and breaks again. Before this book, I had not heard much about the PCT. I grew up in Arkansas so I knew the Appalachian Trail and the lesser known 223 mile Ouachita Trail. While the movie gives us beautiful scenes of the Mohave Desert, the Sierras, and the Bridge of the Gods, the book gives so much more. I knew how she felt when she swallowed the charred remains of her mom’s ashes. Those images stay with you forever.
Fiction
The Awakening by Kate Chopin – Another high school reading requirement my junior year. This was my favorite book for the longest time. Edna Pontellier struggles between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood and the normal social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. This was the first book I remember destroying by highlighting and writing in the margins. Phrases were so beautiful. And the ending is haunting. Funny now looking back, this book probably played a powerful role in shaping my definitions of feminism.
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger – If it’s possible to love a fictional character then I love Henry. And his love for Claire. And the fact that he is no where near perfect. Yes, the book had time travel as Henry is plagued by Chrono-Displacement Disorder. There is so much more though. The subtle layers of each character, the foreshadowing, the sadness and the happiness, the idea of love through space and time. This book proved I am 100% a romantic.
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut – “It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again.” So it goes…
The Call of the Wild by Jack London – Who would think that you can relate to a dog’s perspective in a book. Buck talks about the horrors of being a sled dog in the Yukon. He finds real love and companionship. Buck’s yearning to find his place back to his wild ancestry while experiencing the cruelty and beauty of humans is such a beautiful tale. It’s short. It’s brutal. It’s stirring. I had hoped to take Stone to see the just released movie in theaters but timing was not on our side.
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck – This is another novel that I don’t remember being compelled to read. I was probably in the 6th or 7th grade. I was looking at different books beyond The Babysitters Club or whatever series was popular at the time. Buck grew up in China, the child of missionaries (once again another problem to address at a later time). Her novel about a farming family in a Chinese village is realistic and sympathetic, sad and heartwarming.
Junky by William Burroughs – The story of the ugliness and confusion of drug addiction, specifically heroin, in the post-war 1950s. Burroughs can write. And he can make you feel, see, smell, taste what it’s like to be a junky looking for his next fix or going through painful withdrawals. Based on his own life, this book is probably one of the best anti-drug books out there. I think this book combined with the movie Requiem for a Dream fucked me up for a long time in college. I was in my own head for a few days after.
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien – This was one of the last books I read with the students at my school. I vividly remember seniors in my art class those last weeks before graduation frantically trying to finish their work, trying to find the movie, asking me for help. I was fully invested in this book from the start. It was a glimpse into a world my dad never talked about – the Vietnam War. It started out with the weight of their packs, describing in detail how much each item weighed, the lucky guy that got to carry the radio, necessities for medics. As the story moves forward, you see what they continued to carry throughout the war and after they returned home.
Currently I am reading Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, a novel about his summit of MT Everest and the chaos involved. I have only just made it through the first two chapters. Krakauer explains his own love for mountaineering, how Everest became the highest peak after British expeditions (I will talk about colonialism and conquest another time), and how Krakauer was asked by Outside magazine to write an article on the commercialization of summit expeditions. He convinced them to foot the bill to summit.
Krakauer also described his early years of climbing. Life throws some weird curve balls. Krakauer wrote about two men, Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, the first to summit Everest via the difficult West Ridge in 1963. The reached the summit at 6:15pm and soon found they couldn’t go back down the way they came so they decided to climb down the other side. only problem was time and daylight. So they camped out. All night. In the cold. Thankfully there was no wind. Unsoeld lost nine toes due to frostbite. Here’s the curve ball. I have held his toes. The ones that were frozen. They weren’t amputated, they fell off while he was recovering in a local hospital in Nepal. You’re probably wondering how I got the toes. Another curve ball. I work with his son randomly through the education program at the crisis shelter. Once he told me the story of his dad, I immediately asked to see those damn toes. Who knew I would be holding a famous man’s toes…in a jar…in a classroom on the third floor of an alternative high school.
Life is wild kids…. Keep on reading.