The Sweetest Dream

Finished December 16

The Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing

This novel takes us from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, following generations of one family and their friends. We see relationships, both intimate and friendly, come and go, and we observe how the political landscape changes over time. 

In the early part of the book, the main character is Frances Lennox, a divorced woman, who sacrifices her own dreams to support her children, Andrew and Colin. Her ex-husband, Johnny, is deep into communism, travelling and speaking about his politics not just across the country, but internationally. Johnny's mother Julia had tried to give money to Frances when he didn't pay maintenance, but Frances found work and managed. Both boys agreed to go to schools funded by Julia, Andrew to Eton and Colin to St. Joseph's. It was only when Frances realized how much their living situation was resented by the boys, that she agreed to move into Julia's house, with Julia living on the top floor and them having the rest.

Frances soon found herself catering to more people, as the boys friends and girlfriends, ex-friends and girl-friends came to meals and some ended up moving in. 

The reader can see how Frances is resigned to her situation, and keeps Johnny at a distance as much as she can, but accepts whoever of the younger generation appears at her table, and even those young African men that Johnny brings as young communist idealists. She deals with the issues of the time, rebellion against her generation, rebellion against traditional expectations, experimentation with drugs, the sexual revolution, and more. She even deals with the added presence of Tilly (Sylvia) the daughter of Johnny's second wife, when she is moved into the house. 

The later part of the novel follows Sylvia as she goes to Africa as a doctor, working in a remote community and trying to help the local people who are starved for medical, and educational assistance. The country she goes to, Zimlia, is a fictional one, but has strong parallels to the former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. 

The writing is so good, and the story interesting. The only issue I had with the novel is that there are no chapters, just occasionally a few blank lines, indicating a change in time, setting, etc. For me, as a reader, I like to have a feel for when I can make a pause in my reading and the lack of chapters in a book is something I find personally frustrating. 

That aside, this is an amazing read, with so much depth, both of characters and of setting, that it is worth reading. It immersed me into the story. 

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club

Finished February 12

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson

This novel was a delightful read. It takes place in the summer of 1919, and follows several young people who are adjusting to life after the war. Many of the women worked during the war, and have now found themselves without those jobs. Some are trying to survive on the small war widows pensions by augmenting it by other work. They aren't the only ones seemingly locked out of the work they had been doing. Men who were injured also find themselves treated as incapable. 

The central character here is Constance Haverhill. Constance's mother grew up with another woman who married into a titled family, while Constance's mother married a farmer. They continued to call each other best friends, but it seems like Lady Mercer treated her friend as an unpaid worker, often calling on her to help with childcare and other household endeavours. During the war, Constance worked as estate manager for the Mercers, but found herself quickly ousted when the war ended. With her mother dead from the influenza epidemic, she found herself called on to nurse Lady Mercer's mother, Mrs. Fog when she was ill. Her 'reward' is to act as companion to Mrs. Fog while she convalesces at a seaside hotel. 

But it is in this town that both Constance and Mrs. Fog encounter second chances. Constance meets another young woman her age, Poppy Wirrall. Poppy is also the daughter in a titled family, and she spent the war, along with other young women, working as motorcycle messengers. Poppy has started a small company offering motorcycle taxi (using sidecars) and delivery services, with a variety of young women employed part-time doing this work. Some have other jobs or widows pensions that they augment by working for her. 

Poppy's brother was a pilot during the war, and lost part of one leg in action. He is back at home, but depressed by the loss of many men he considered friends, and the inability of others to consider him employable. 

Constance is a calming force to Poppy's impulsiveness and exuberance, and as she begins to take chances, and open herself up to other possibilities in her life, I found myself hoping for a more promising future for her than she expected at the book's beginning. 

I also enjoyed Mrs. Fog, watching her go from recovering invalid to putting her own wishes first, despite the pressure of those she'd given into previously. 

I also found the story of the German waiter Klaus Zeiger touching. He is the quintessential waiter, always observant, mindful of propriety, and empathetic to the needs of those he serves. He is also highly aware of his ethnic baggage and how it has affected his life both during the war and now. I really appreciated that Constance saw him as a person, beyond his role. 

This is a novel of a time of great changes and adjustments and not all of them are fair or pleasant. This novel has moments of outrage, sadness, and joy. Well worth reading. 

The Mountains Sing

Finished August 24

The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

Covering nearly a century, this is a tale of one family, the Tran family, through multiple generations in Vietnam. Told by grandmother Dieu Lan who was born in 1920, and her granddaughter Huong, born in 1960, this story is also a history of Vietnam during the 20th century. Dieu Lan was a farmer, a teacher,  and finally a trader, the last a profession frowned upon by the government, but one that was more lucrative than her former teaching job. 

We see Dieu Lan's story as she relates it to Huong after they've survived the Vietnam War and Huong is struggling to understand her family as they all deal with the traumas they've undergone. 

The first is the time of Great Hunger, when the Tran's and their neighbours are dying due to lack of food. Two neighbours emerge from this time as close supporters from then on, Mrs. Tu, who takes on a role as a sort of honorary grandmother and housekeeper for the family; and Mr. Hai, who helps them find a source of food. Dieu Lan's father treated her as an equal to his song Cong and both her and Cong make good marriages. When she, Cong, and their father were taking a load of potatoes to market, they find themselves attacked by Japanese soldiers who have moved into their area, and her father is killed. 

Cong and Dieu Lan escape, but the event is a blow to the family, and soon after that the Vietnam forces that liberate them from the Japanese occupation engage in an act of Land Reform, and disgruntled peasants turn on all landowners, even those who treated their workers well, and landowners were driven from their homes and land, and, in many cases killed. Dieu Lan loses more family members during this time. 

Dieu Lan must find a way forward with her remaining family members. She had six children: Minh, born in 1938, who may have escaped with his life, but she loses contact with; Ngoc, born in 1940, and became a doctor, who goes on to marry Hoang and is the mother of Huong who also tells a large portion of the story of this book; Dat, born in 1941 and left his girlfriend Nhung to go to war against the Americans; Thuan, born in 1947, who also went to war; Hanh, born in 1948, who found a life in Saigon; and Sang, born in 1954 and who was still an infant as the family fled.

During the war, Huong was with her grandmother in Ha Noi, but they often fled to the nearby mountains during bombing attacks, sometimes for long periods. When they returned to the city, they had to rebuild and hope that the other family members who had left to either fight in the war or support those who were fighting will return home. Some do, but all suffer from trauma of different types. 

The author is a well-regarded poet and the writing here shows her skill with language and storytelling. 

I was totally captured by the story and the family members' stories, wanting to know how each one dealt with their issues and found a way forward. 

A book that was both enlightening and captivating. 

X + Y

Finished December 31

X + Y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender by Eugenia Cheng

I was looking for a book to help meet a reading challenge and came across this book which got me thinking about many things in different ways. The author is a mathematician and an artist. She teaches mathematics at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. In her career, and in other aspects of her life, she has encountered sexism and racism. She has thought a lot about this and how often gender issues are substituted for behaviour issues. She outlines how our society favours more aggressive, competitive, individualistic behaviour, and about how that behaviour has come to be seen as masculine. 

She has come up with new descriptors for this issue around behaviour that take the gender out of the discussion, eliminating one red herring to change. She describes two behaviour types as ingressive and congressive, where ingressive is the current valued type of behaviour that values competition, winners, contests, and individual success. The other type of behaviour, congressive, values understanding, sharing, working together, collaboration, and societal success. She makes a great argument for this new set of descriptors and how using them and thinking of them more in the behavioural sense and not tying them to gender norms can overcome not only gender bias, but also other biases in our society that favour the status quo. 

I found myself easily understanding her descriptions of category theory mathematics (I was a math major in my first year of university) and seeing how it applies to this idea of behavioural categories. She advocates gradual change, using congressive approaches and responses to replace ingressive or passive ones, and finding a way forward that will benefit not only society as a whole, but individuals more broadly as well. 

This is a fascinating book that needs to be read by more people and have them seriously consider her suggestions. 

Changing Habits

Finished September 12

Changing Habits by Debbie Macomber

This novel follows three young women as they grow from girls into women and make a choice to become nuns. They all entered the same order in the late 1950s or early 1960s, and eventually their lives crossed. For a variety of reasons they took their vows, and around ten years later, in the early 1970s, they each separately left the convent to return to ordinary life. 

Angelina Marcello lost her mother at a young age, and as an only child spent a lot of time with her father at his restaurant. She also grew close to one of the teachers at her convent school, and questioned her closely about how she knew she wanted to be a nun. Angelina has a gift for tasting food and identifying the ingredients and knowing how to improve it. It is one her father takes pride in and he plans that she will become a partner to him in the restaurant one day. Her growing attraction to taking clerical orders is one he doesn't understand, and doesn't want for her, and their love for each other as the only family they have, but the different futures they want comes between them.

Kathleen O'Shaughnessy is the fifth of eight children, and has been aware that she is destined to be a nun for as long as she can remember. Her mother believed it when she was a very young child and Kathleen had no doubts that her mother was right. As the time to join the convent grows nearer, the family shows that they are proud that she is making this choice. It is only her oldest brother Sean who questions whether she really wants this and hasn't just gone along with what's been expected of her. 

Joanna Baird began nursing school soon after her boyfriend went to Vietnam, and promised to wait for him. She did, but found that he hadn't waiting for her, and her decision to renew her childhood dream of being a nun comes partly as a consolation for her loss. 

We see the three women enter the convent, and follow them as postulants and then as they take their final vows. The author gives a lot of insight into what life was like for these women at the time, and what they did at the convent and in the professions they took on once their vows were final. 

We also see the social upheaval that occured during the sixties and seventies and how these outside events and the actions of the church also had an effect on their eventual decisions to leave and return to a life as ordinary women. I found this novel very interesting and each of the women was well developed as a character. A fascinating read. 

Caste

Finished November 30

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

I bought this book more than a year ago and have been slowly reading it for the past couple of weeks. It is a book that looks at the origins of the American caste system, and how it relates to two other caste systems, the centuries-old caste system of India, and the one that arose under the Nazis. I was aware that Nazi's had studied how America treated its non-white citizens, particularly those who descended from earlier slaves, but this book made the connections more clear about how they tried to implement some of the same concepts and how the American situation went beyond in what it dared to define for castes and for how it had evolved to be ingrained in the American culture.

In India, the lowest caste is that of the Dalit, often called Untouchables. Wilkerson, on her first visit to India and meeting Dalits was introduced as one of America's Untouchables, and after the initial surprise, she had to see the similarities. 

She often gives examples of her own and others experiences to illustrate the various norms in America that arose from the caste system there, and how it is still having its effect, despite the laws and regulations that purport to eliminate it. 

Released in the last year of Trump's presidency, it is a book that is very pertinent to what the country is going through now, a test of its democracy, an awakening of those in the lower castes to the inbededness of the beliefs that have tried to keep them in their place, below the dominant caste of white European-origin males, and how the actions we are seeing today are part of a struggle to keep the system from changing. . 

This book should be required reading in every American history and culture course, as it looks at the history of the culture in a way that has seldom been explained in such straightforward terms. Wilkerson gives homage to those researchers who came before her in this area, and talks about their work and how she discovered it and built upon it. 

There is so much I could say about this eye-opening book, but the best is for you to read it yourself.

Because Internet

Finished July 1

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

This book was fascinating. I've always been interested in language, poring over my mother's old linguistics textbooks when I was a kid, but this book brings a lot of linguistic theory into the now with its focus on how the internet changed the way we use language and the way that we communicate.

It sometimes looks back further at how other technology changed communication as well and looks at how societal change feeds the way language changes. For instance it looks at the telephone and how greetings were suggested and adapted for that new broadly adapted form of communication and compares that to the way that different pieces of the internet changed language and communication.

It looks at both formal and informal types of communication and generational differences between broad groups as the internet grew and changed and became part of everyday life. 

There was so much here in terms of ideas that made me think and bits of communication history I hadn't been fully aware of before. 

My favourite part was in the section on memes where the author talked about an embroidered piece that she made based on a common meme, that she then adapted to be more personal to herself.  She comments

Both memes and needlework are collective folk texts that spread because people remix and remake them. The words "text" and "textile" have a common origin, from a Proto-Indo-European root teks, "to weave." Writing and weaving are both acts of creation by bringing together. A storyteller is a spinner of yarns, and the internet's founding metaphor is of a web. If we go far enough back, before printing presses and cameras and photocopiers introduced the notion of faithful reproduction, all transmission is re-creation. Teks is also the root of the word "technology," which at one point meant a systematic treatise on an art or craft, or even a grammar, before it referred to a study of mechanical or industrial arts (a 1902 dictionary gives the examples of "spinning, metal-working, or brewing") and then to digital tech.

Since I am a needleworker, this really hit home for me. Since I also work with a lot of internet pieces, and have helped others navigate the internet as part of my job, this all connected for me. 

A fascinating look at language, social change, and human adaptation. 

Fed Up

Finished July 3
Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward by Gemma Hartley

This is a book that will speak to many, if not all, women. In most cultures, it is the woman who does the emotional labour in a relationship, who keeps things up, who organizes things, who makes sure that things get done. It is the mental load of this tasks, noticing what needs doing, what connects to what (if your son has soccer tomorrow, you need to ensure his uniform is clean and ready, dinner is organized to be quick to be done before game time, and any transportation is planned). It isn't just about putting things on the calendar. It's about seeing the connections between things, between people, between tasks, and noting the minutiae in the big picture.
This can be draining, even more than the physical tasks that accompany it are. Gemma looked at this in her own life, and in the lives of many others, doing a lot of research as she wrote this book. Her husband Rob was a man who wanted to do better, but didn't understand emotional labour, and didn't know how to engage more. (Notice that I didn't say "how to help"). They eventually worked out how to share emotional labour more in their relationship, not only because it improved life for both of them, but also to avoid having this dynamic pass on to the next generation.
When Gemma realized that she had to change her own approach and attitude big time, it was an aha moment. They had to figure it out together. If she really wanted this change, and she did, they had to work it out as a team, not as a leader and a helper. She notes that keeping things in balance is an ongoing challenge, but that they both look forward to figuring it out together.
This was an eye-opening and inspiring look at the issue of emotional labour, and offers real solutions to recognizing the value of this work and finding more fulfillment. Highly recommended.

The Middleman

Finished October 5
The Middleman by Olen Steinhauer

This thriller revolves around a man, Martin Bishop, who wants to create peaceful change. His hope for change is common to many of us today, who see big corporations wielding too much power, and see the wealth gap growing. Bishop's followers are mostly young people, stuck in dead-end jobs and seeing no promising future.
The book opens with one of them, Kevin Moore, ex-military, living in San Francisco. One day he receives a cryptic message that he has been waiting for. He dumps his wallet and phone, and walks away from life, waiting at a pre-arranged spot to be picked up. He is one of hundreds of people going through similar actions that day and on the coming few days.
Bishop's movement is called the Massive Brigade, and while some think of them as peaceful as Martin makes them out to be, using the threat of violence to make change, rather than violence itself. But others think of them as terrorists, and, when the group takes responsibility for a series of violent acts, acts that Kevin is made part of, it seems that the question has been answered.
Rachel Proulx of the FBI has been following Martin for years, and believes she understands him to a large extent, and these actions surprise her. Another FBI agent, is assigned to her group, and seems to not always be doing what Rachel expects him to do. When she finds him responsible for an event she did not condone, she starts to ask questions.
But Rachel is sidelined and attacked, and it will be many months before she and others start to ask questions again. This time, will anybody listen to them?