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Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha

March 19, 2008 – 7:38 am

“But now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”

I appreciate these last sentences from Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha even though my life is starkly different than the main character who is reflecting on her life. It speaks of accepting the twists life takes beyond our control. As a reader you enter the foreign world of geisha culture with Golden’s vivid detail and the heart behind it. The book jacket touts the novel as alluring, brilliant and dazzling. Did it live up to these accolades in your opinion?

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Obama’s Powerful Words

March 18, 2008 – 7:42 am

“At the core of the campaign is the fact that words matter. Central to the idea of his candidacy is the idea that a speech can change the world. You can’t have a campaign that has that notion at its core and then point to other people’s words and say, those don’t really matter.”

Republican Strategist Todd Harris is talking about Barack Obama’s emphasis on oratory and that he needs to address the racial remarks said by his pastor. Can words change the world? In this age of instant around-the-world news, are they more important than reality? If the words and reality don’t match, would we know? With so many campaign leaders practised in “spin,” I hear message points more than heartfelt words. Do you believe all the carefully crafted sentences you’re hearing in this presidential race?

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Bohjalian’s Midwives

March 17, 2008 – 8:12 am

“She would recall in the courtroom that tearing the uterus was as easy as tearing damp pasty dough, but she was nevertheless finding it hard to breathe as she worked.”

In Chris Bohjalian’s 1998 novel Midwives, he does two remarkable things. He writes convincingly as a teenage girl (the midwife’s daughter) and he describes the occurrence of birth and death in breathtaking detail. I’ve made a lot of apple pies in my time so that sentence made me squirm while I admired the image he wrote. Were his descriptions compelling to you?

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Weekend Words: NEA Says We’re Reading Less

March 15, 2008 – 8:44 am

You may have heard this news — the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) reported we are reading less. The NEA released To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence in November 2007. The study shows a decline in how much and how well Americans read. It links a decline in reading with a decline in community involvement. The age groups reading the least are teens and young adults. The electronic age is partly to blame, with young people sitting in front of various screens.

This is too sad! So as book lovers, let’s take action. Read to the little people in your life. Visit www.starfall.com with beginning readers. Ask a young person what they are interested in and find a book on the topic. If not, write it! Suggest young people write their own life stories. Start dinner off with a poem. Read about Japan, then go out for sushi. Read the life of Kandinsky, then paint in his style. Share this blog with students and young people to encourage them to share sentences that excite them. You can bring this life-long joy to the children in your life. I’m off to read Little House to my Sweetpeas!

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Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible

March 14, 2008 – 7:31 am

“This forest eats itself and lives forever.”

In the first paragraphs of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, she describes the jungle in Africa where the cycle of birth and death is constant and seedlings grow out of rotted tree stumps, “sucking life out of death.” The novel follows an Evangelical Baptist missionary who takes his wife and four daughters to live in the Belgian Congo.

Thanks to a writer for emailing this sentence to my blog which she found “brilliant.” Having lived in Oregon’s coastal temperate rainforest, she was “familiar with its lushness and ruthless habit of growing new life, not out of soil, but other live and dying plants and animals.”

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Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars

March 13, 2008 – 7:38 am

“The inside of the tree felt private. He felt they would never be discovered here. The walls surrounding them were glossy and golden. It was surprising how much green-tinted light entered from the cedar forest. The rain echoed in the canopy of leaves above and beat against the sword ferns, which twitched under each drop.”

It is passages such as this one that brought awards and bestseller status to David Guterson for his 1995 novel Snow Falling on Cedars. This sheltering tree is important to describe since it provides a private place for two young lovers. I see the soft green light inside and the ferns bending under the raindrops. The book is rich in atmosphere, which extends it beyond a love and mystery story. Did he continue this beautiful writing style in subsequent novels?

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Tan’s Joy Luck Club

March 12, 2008 – 8:05 am

“Over the years, she told me the same story, except for the ending, which grew darker, casting long shadows into her life, and eventually into mine.”

Aren’t you curious what comes next? I read Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club many years ago but remember it for sentences like this in which family mysteries unfold and layers are peeled back. A story need not be a suspense, chapters need not end in cliff hangers. In the hands of a good storyteller, the reader is compelled to keep reading. I think this sentence is strong because Tan punctuates it with “mine,” making us wonder what shadows reach into her life. What non-suspense books couldn’t you put down?

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Jacoby’s American Unreason

March 11, 2008 – 7:35 am

In The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby writes about the debasement of the nation’s speech, the blurring of clarity, and intellectual discrimination. This book, her eighth, is scholarly and well-reasoned with fitting examples of fuzzy language. I knew I’d agree with her premise but I didn’t expect the book to be funny. As important as her points are, this isn’t a hard book to slog through. Instead it’s witty and gives one food for thought. I’ve only just begun reading but had to tell you about it. One example:

“Consider the near-universal substitution, by the media and politicians, of “troop” and “troops” for “soldier” and “soldiers.” As every dictionary makes plain, the word “troop” is always a collective noun; the “s” is added when referring to a particularly large military force. Yet each night on the television news, correspondents report that “X troops were killed in Iraq today.” This is more than a grammatical error; turning a soldier—an individual with whom one may identify—into an anonymous-sounding troop encourages the public to think about war and its casualties in a more abstract way. Who lays a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Troop?”

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Fitch’s White Oleander

March 10, 2008 – 7:52 am

“I was thirsty for the way she felt, the way she looked, the sound of her voice, the way her front teeth were square but her second teeth turned slightly, her one dimple, left side, her half-smile, her wonderful blue eyes flecked with white, like new galaxies, the firm intact planes of her face.”

These are the details you know about a face you love. In this sentence from Janet Fitch’s White Oleander, the daughter is visiting her mother after she has spent months in prison. Fitch captures the intensity with specifics so we feel how the young girl missed her mother, adding “she didn’t smell of violets anymore, only the smell of detergent on denim.” Near the beginning of the book, the daughter sees “new galaxies” in her mother’s eyes but those endless possibilities don’t pan out and that face she loves disappoints. I think it’s minutia which sears images and characters in our minds and allows a book to soar above the ordinary. What books stay with you because the story was rich in detail?

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Weekend Words: Tufte

March 8, 2008 – 9:55 am

I recently found a book with a similar theme to this blog. In Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte delves into the grammar of sentences. The book is organized around syntactic concepts such as short sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, appositives, and parallelism. Reviewers said it’s a delight and an inspiring book for writers. Tufte is distinguished emerita professor of English at the University of Southern California. This is next on my must-read list!

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