The other evening, I listened to Mary Ward Brown reading the final section from her new memoir, Fanning the Spark, about her bookcases and books in her house. As she came to the penultimate paragraph, I was struck by what she said:

When I was writing the stories in Tongues of Flame, nobody, including me, thought that what I wrote would ever be worth the effort, so I was thought to be deluded and was generally let alone. When “The Amaryllis” was published in McCall’s and a newspaper reporter tried to find me, he was told that I was something of a recluse. It hurt my feelings, because I’ve never wanted to shut myself away from the people or the life around me. But to write, one does have to somehow be shut away. In bed every night, I think of people I haven’t stayed in touch with, letters and emails I haven’t answered, opportunities I’ve let go by, even flowers I haven’t put on the graves of my family.”

This idea of the necessity of separation, that the artist must be removed from the world in order to create art and comment on the world, and furthermore the difficulty of re-entering and re-engaging the world when the artistic process is complete, reminded me of a section of Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos.

What is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into the orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by the problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What to do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of Light in August? Get drunk for a week. What did Dostoevsky do after finishing The Idiot? Spend three days and nights at the roulette table. What does the reader do after finishing either book? How long does his exaltation last?

[…]

For a writer to reenter the world he has written about is no small feat. At the least, it is a peculiar exercise, even uncanny — like Kierkegaard going out into the street every hour during work and blinking at the shopkeepers. At the worst, it proves impossible, issuing in the familiar catastrophes to which writers fall prey.

[…]

Theoretically, it is possible for the abstracted self to reenter the world as easily as a doctor leaving his office for Wednesday afternoon golf or the Chartres sculptor goig home to sup with his family.

Was this not in fact the case with William Faulkner, doing a morning’s work, then strolling in the town square to talk to the farmers and have a Coke at Reed’s drugstore? Not quite. Though Faulkner went to lengths to pass himself off as a farmer among farmers, farmer he was not. A charade was being played.

Was it not the case with Soren Kierkegaard, who, ever hour, would jump up from his desk, rush out into the streets of Copenhagen, and pass the time with shopkeepers? No, because, by his own admission, he was playing the game of being taken for an idler at the very time he was writing ten books a year.

Only one example comes to mind of a writer who, though performing at a very high level of twentieth-century art, nevertheless manages to live on one of the few remaining islands of a more or less intact culture, in the very house where she was born, to enter into an intercourse with the society around her as naturally as the Chartres sculptor, to appear as herself, her self, the same self, both to fellow writer and to fellow townsman: Eudora Welty. Perhaps also William Carlos Williams.

If you do not think this remarkable, imagine that you have lived your entire life in the house where you were born. For an American, an uncanny, even an unsettling fantasy.

We are indeed lucky for writers like Welty and Mary Ward Brown, who share not only their art but their lives and selves with us.

Several years ago when The Shadow of the Wind was first published I said it was the best book I had read that year. Well, Carlos Ruiz Zafon has done it again. So far, The Angel’s Game—a prequel to The Shadow of the Wind—is the best book I have read this year. Undeniably!
Its protagonist is David Martin, a young man with a troubled past, who writes sensationalist novels—quite successfully—under a pseudonym. He makes enough from this endeavor to move from a dingy apartment into a home. He finds, however, that his new home is full of shadows and a past—-so much mystery hidden in closets and attic rooms.
He also receives an offer he cannot refuse from a French editor, Andreas Corelli, to write a book like none other—a book that will change hearts and minds. As he proceeds, however, he is riddled with doubt, then fear. So begins a beautifully written story of intrigue, impossible love, and passion, all woven into the fabric of a well-told story.

-Yvonne

Well, everyone I am about to write about does indeed have a brain but that is not the problem. The problems stem from the chaos that erupts when a brain goes haywire.  It’s not just the medical problems but the emotional, spiritual and relational effects that also prove to be devastating. Each of the following books describe in vivid details the extent of a person’s life that brain trauma effects and the toll taken on those in care-taking roles.

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In 1996, Dr. Jill Taylor, a 37 year old neuroanatomist, experienced a massive stroke that erased her abilities to walk, talk, do mathematics, read, or remember details. What follows is a gripping first hand account of her recovery and unique understanding of what exactly happened inside her head as the stroke was in progress. She uses her knowledge to formulate a plan for her complete recovery. I’m a sucker for books like this and was fascinated from start to finish. I was amazed at her level of awareness and cognizance to what was occurring medically and emotionally inside her body. I’ve always wondered how much people realize in the moment when something catastrophic is occurring. Taylor calmly watched as her speech, mobility, ability to process and think faded away. Since the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her right side took over rapidly and she felt an immediate sense of well being, completely absent of fear. Though not the same person now that she was before her stroke, she claims to like herself better! This book would be a god send for anyone with a friend or family member who has experienced traumatic brain injury due to illness or accident. Taylor outlines very clearly what a patient needs and doesn’t need in order to regain as much brain function as possible. She went on to be named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2008. Somewhat surprisingly, this book has flown off the shelves everywhere and is well worth your time.

To Love What Is is Alix Kates Shulman personal account of living with a brain injured spouse. A fall from a loft in their Maine vacation home changes both of their lives forever.  Her 75 year old husband, Scott experienced a devastating long term brain injury as a result of his fall from their bed loft. The medical result is a litany of problems ranging from broken bones to internal bleeding to long term memory and personality changes. How all of this affects them as individuals and as a couple is widespread and heart wrenching. As Shulman says on the book flap: “one day it happens: the dreaded event that will change your life forever, the more dreadful because, though you’ve half expected it, you don’t know what form it will take or when it will come, or whether or not you will rise to the challenge.” Shulman is a gifted and beautiful writer, whose previous twelve books include novels, memoirs and children’s books. Her prose and descriptions bring you into the very heart of their marriage and their world. She takes the reader back to what their lives and marriage was before the accident which was poignant and moving. Frankly, I found the book impossible to put down. The subject matter is somewhat depressing but this is real life….real love…real commitment….in a time when commitment seems an antiquated ideal. She lives out her love every second of every day. Shulman is brutally honest and uses raw, throbbing words to envelope you in what seems at times to be a living hell. I ached as she talked about her loneliness and her isolation from the vibrant life she lived before. I felt her sense of responsibility as well as her desperation to create some new life for herself so she can continue to do, in part, some of the things she used to do while living up to a responsibility to be with her husband in sickness and in health. A reviewer had this to say:

“…A haunting meditation on a love more enduring than the body or mind…a potent reminder that even an irreparably altered life is still a life to be cherished. Shulman describes life on the other side: the ongoing anxieties, risks, and surprising rewards she experiences as she reorganizes her world and her priorities to care for her husband and discovers that what may have seemed a grim life-sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich.”

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The last (brain) book on my radar, this week, is Still Alice by Lisa Genova. There really is something captivating about this story. Even though it’s fiction, the story and the characters are very much alive and kicking. It’s the story of Alice Howland, who at 50 is a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and world renowned linguistics expert. She has a husband and three grown children. The horrifying punch line is that she develops early onset Alzheimer’s. This is Genova’s first novel but she shows a wonderful sense of maturity and is a beautiful and rich writer. There are times I wished I could close my eyes and not have to watch scenes from her rapidly advancing forgetfulness, confusion, and denial of what is happening to her. Of course the reaction of her husband and children will tear your heart out for all of them. I couldn’t look away though. This book was so good in fact, that I am convinced I have this disease and everyday, I seem to amass more evidence as to its validity! A haunting but powerfully important book to read.

-Norma

Ok, I took Mississippi history in high school, and I have lived in Mississippi since birth, so I am a little embarrassed to admit that until recently, I knew nothing of Jones County’s secession from the Confederacy during the Civil War. Horrible, I know. To offset this awful deficit of personal knowledge, I began reading the newest book on the topic: The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer.

To begin with, and I can’t believe I am saying this, I am enjoying this nonfiction book. I am not a nonfiction reader, (usually they just put me to sleep) but the longer I work here, the more often I find myself interested in nonfiction. While some say that it is easier to write nonfiction, I usually say that it is easier to read fiction. However, this is the second well-written nonfiction as of late (the first being Public Enemies by John Walsh) that has not only grabbed my interest, but with its flowing prose has kept my interest peaked. A good nonfiction book can sometimes be hard to find for some of us, so I find myself gushing about this book as often as I can.

This book was reviewed in the New York Times Review of Books on Sunday, and David Reynolds brings to light certain discrepancies in the facts presented in this rendition of Jones County’s history. Reynolds refers to Victoria Bynum’s The Free State of Jones (published in 2001) as being well researched and questions whether this new telling is factual or fictional.

Much of the book centers around the biography of Newton Knight, a citizen of Jones County who led a group of over fifty men in a fight against the Confederacy. While Jones County never officially seceded from the Confederacy, fifty-three Southern men from Jones County did make it to New Orleans to enlisted in the Union army. Knight’s whereabouts during most of the Civil War can only be guesstimated, a point Reynolds does not hesitate to bring to light in his book review.

Many books have been written about the internal conflict that plagued the South during the Civil War – here are a few I find worthy of note:

The Free State of Jones by Victoria Bynum: written in 2001, Bynum not only focuses on the history of Jones County and Newton Knight, but also the class, gender, and race issues that afflicted the South’s people during the Civil War from the perspective of the white yeoman farmer.

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Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War by David Williams: Williams shows that the South was more divided internally than it ever was with the North.

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A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 by Anne Sarah Rubin: Rubin argues that the South’s national identity, now something we call Southern pride, did not truly form until it became apparent that the Civil War would not end quickly.

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How the South Could Have Won the Civil War by Bevin Alexander: Author of such book as How Hitler Could Have Won World War II and How America Got it Right, Alexander focuses his book on the small set backs that led to the eventual demise of the Confederacy.

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Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War by David Eicher: Again, Eicher draws on information about the internal workings of the Confederacy, such as Jefferson Davis’ constant fights with his own cabinet, the Confederate House and Senate, and state governors, to show how the Southern states brought their own failure in the Civil War.

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The State of Jones by Jenkins and Stauffer may not be completely accurate, but it has opened my eyes to a whole section of history I would otherwise been unaware of.  To end, here is a quote from the prologue of the book:

“[Newton Knight] was a slave owner’s grandson who never owned slaves; a dead-eyed shot who could reload a shotgun before the smoke cleared; a father and husband who after the war had two families, one white, the other black; a white man who in his later years was called a Negro. He fought for racial equality during the war and after, and he envisioned a world that would only begin to be implemented a century later.

“Those were the facts. The full story was even more complicated.”

Sometimes you need a book to pick you up and take you somewhere else. That is exactly what Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is doing to me.

Meet Quentin Coldwater. When I did, I immediately fell in love. He’s a nerd so pure he actually manages to transcend  his own stereotype. He loves math and physics. He is still obsessed with his favorite childhoods books. He learns magic tricks in his free time, and he’s head over heels in love with a girl who dates his best friend. And, best of all, he wants to believe that our world contains portals to the worlds beyond.

Readers can relate to Quentin right off the bat because, just like us, he reads as a form of escapism. And, just like us, he wishes that that magic worlds exist.

Of course, within the first 50 pages Quentin finds out that a magical world does exist. But before you write off this book as another fantasy with that “same old, same old” plot, read on.

I’ll admit I’ve only just begun the book but already it draws elements from some of my favorite fantasy stories. Of course with fantasy literature it is almost impossible to write something devoid of cliche, and there are traces of the typical “misplaced boy who finds a magic world” story (e.g. Harry Potter, The Subtle Knife, The Magician’s Nephew), but The Magicians is not a children’s book. The language alone defines the novel. It is written with the skill of someone who has planned a masterpiece and demands to be taken seriously. The fast pace of the novel draws you in. The plot delivers a complexity by the second chapter, and each subsequent chapter ends with a faint abruptness causing you to quickly turn to the next page.

More credit should be given to books that are written purely for escape. Far too often when I work in Oz I see adults creep back to the fantasy shelf and act ashamed as they select the next Olympian or Eragon novel. I make it a point to applaud their choices. Everyone needs to read something that gives them a breath of the impossible, which is exactly what The Magicians is doing for me.

-Nell