I think the first book I remember my mom giving me was a big yellow hardcover of Maybelle the Cable Car by Virginia Lee Burton (she also wrote Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel). I loved that book and kept it until I was a parent myself. I gave it to my son. He ripped it, which nearly broke my heart. I think that was the first time I yelled at him. It gives you an idea of my rather intense relationship with books.
Over the years, my mom has suggested books to me and I’ve pulled them off her shelves. We don’t always have the same taste. She really likes mysteries, I’m really into Lit-Ra-Chur and books on the biology of the brain and animal behavior. There have been some successes — we do have some common loves, like Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott.
When I was nine or 10, I belonged to this library group called the Bookworms (you can imagine how cool the members were) and every week we’d talk about a book we read. When we had read 20 books we’d get to pick a free one from a group chosen by the children’s librarian. None of them really interested me. For about a half hour after each session, we could browse the library. I’d spend my time in the adult section — usually history, usually looking at books about World War II with topics like Hitler’s Ayran breeding program. I was a weird kid. Often, the librarians would try to shoo me back to the kids section, but there wasn’t a lot there I liked.
Next stop: my mom’s bookshelves. There was a book there called The Best of Both Worlds that had short stories and bits of novels from both adult and children’s literature. She gave me Betty Smith’s novel Maggie Now, and then A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, also by Betty Smith. Giant came next, and then To Kill a Mockingbird. The day that The Thorn Birds arrived from her book club, I took it upstairs and started it and came back down at dinner, having devoured it in one gulp. I was around 13 or 14.
After I decimated my mom’s shelves, I moved to her sister’s. My Aunt Carol is probably the only one I know who comes close to reading as much as I do. I borrowed books every Rosh Hashana, Passover and Thanksgiving. The Shoes of the Fisherman was one of hers. So was a pair of books about the Holocaust, but by that time I was of a more appropriate age to read about them. They were All But My Life, the story of a survivor named Gerda Weissman Klein. She is perhaps best known for hijacking the microphone at the Oscar’s after a documentary about her life won an award. The second was Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary, the story of a Hungarian Jew who trained in Israel as a partisan and ran secret missions into Hungary before being captured, imprisoned, and executed. It’s a story widely known in Israel and a lot of the Jewish community here knows of her through one of her poems, Eili, which was turned into a song.
But I digress from my mother. After college, my mom would occasionally suggest a book she loved, but it didn’t usually speak to me. She did give me one book recently which I really liked — and it was a mystery. Death in the Garden by Elizabeth Ironside, the pseudonym of Lady Catherine Manning, the wife of a former ambassador to Britain. It’s a good book. Well devised plot, intelligent language, interesting characters. It’s the first time in a long time that my mom has directed me to a book whose author I’d like to seek out again.
So what about the other way? Do I recommend to my mom? Sometimes. But like I said, our tastes are different. I once told her to read Schindler’s Ark (the original name of Schindler’s List) because I found it uplifting. She called me and was horrified that I related that book to that word. But I did. Schindler should have been a model Nazi, but he was redeemed. That redemption, the ability of someone to go against all that is around him, and to do so when it is a grave danger, is uplifting.
I do have other ideas that are more Austen-esque. First I’d like to introduce her to the 13 or 14 novels by Molly Keane, also known as MJ Farrell (I can’t be sure how many books she wrote precisely because titles differ between the US and Ireland). She wrote novels of manners, told from a female perspective, set in the decaying Anglo-Irish community after the creation of the Irish Free State and subsequent Republic of Ireland. Some are comic, some more serious. Another good author that reminds me of Austen is GB Stern. I think her book The Matriarch would especially resonate. It’s the first part of a trilogy called Mosaic. I think it’s the best of the bunch.
More recent books would be good for my mom, too. One is a modern take on Sense and Sensibility called The Three Weissmanns of Westport. I dare someone not to make a movie of it. A woman and her daughters, all in various stages of being down on their luck move to a dilapidated house by the sea. Really nice read.
A book by a freelance friend of mine, Allison Winn Scotch called Time of My Life might also appeal. It’s about a woman who gets a chance to return to a fork in her road and see what might have been. It was a very pleasant book — not too light, not too heavy. Good for airplanes and soaks in the tub. Her next book is due out in June, The One that I Want.
My last recommendation made me think of my mom nearly the whole time I read it — not because of the content, but because I kept thinking she’d like it. Jane Hamilton’s book Laura Rider’s Masterpiece. It’s about a marriage gone platonic, the way the Internet has changed relationships, and how we can find happiness at any time of life.
So, Mom, should you decide to read my blog (I know, you don’t read blogs — but if you do this time because Edgar calls you and says you have to…), here’s some reading for you this summer. When you’re done with that list, I’ll have more for you. Just read the blog.
