Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain

Author: Michele Morano

I came across one of the essay from this book in a lit magazine. I started reading it because I knew Michele was a Chicago author and sometimes taught in my program and then just got sucked in. I think that essay ("In the Subjunctive Mood") is really the best one in the book, but all her writing is smart and clever and just really put together. I bought the book and read the rest of it while I was in Italy. Even though she was writing about her time in Spain, there was a lot just about travel and the idea of "translating" that umm.... translated to my own experiences abroad. Like, The Horizontal World, this book is another example of a collection of essays that can each stand alone, but have deepened meanings/effects when all read together.

The book's website is also very put together.

Genre: Nonfiction, Essays

Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn

Author: Larry Colton

I was excited when I found this book in a thrift store (and surprised that I hadn't come across the title sooner) but I was also skeptical about the idea of an old white guy, an ex minor league baseball player at that, writing about an American Indian girl playing basketball. I read the introduction and first chapter ready to underline ignorant lines and write angry responses in the margin. As I continued to read, I found that Colton was indeed ignorant about a lot--he hadn't spent much, if any, time on Indian reservations before beginning the book and his original intention of course was to write about the boy's high school team, not the girl's--but he was also honest about what he didn't know and that made all the difference. In fact, I began to kind of like this old white guy. I felt like he gave a very honest and respectful portrait of the team and the girls on the team and he did so by also including his own story of how and why he was first attracted to this team and the relationship he forms with them throughout the writing of the book.

Genre: Nonfiction, Journalism
Subject: Women's Sports, American Indians

Publisher

Who will run the frog hospital?

Author: Lorrie Moore

Book Details: I found this book at the Bayfield Public Library the first time I ventured out of the kids/young adult section when I was about ten. Over the next eight years, I probably checked it out twenty times, but I haven't read it again since I graduated from high school. As I read A Complicated Kindness, I was reminded of this book and I was curious to return to it and figure out why. Both authors write with an affecting humor. Both novels take place in a small town near the US-Canadian border (one on the Canadian side, one on the American side) that has a small amusement park frequented by French Canadian tourists in the summer. Both have female narrators: one a sixteen year old writing in present tense, the other a middle-aged woman on vacation with her husband in France and reflecting on being sixteen. Both are about how the place we have grown up (and the people in this place) have simultaneously pushed us away and pulled us back.

"I never knew what to do with all those years of one's life: trot around in them forever like old boots--or sever them, let them fly free? Of course, one couldn't really do either. But there was always the trying, and pretending. And then there was finally someplace in between, where one lived."

Genre: Novel

a complicated kindness

Author: Miriam Toews

Author details: I just read an interview with her and I think I understand so much more why I like her. She grew up Mennonite in a small town (like the narrator of her book) and then she moved to Montreal. The interviewer asked her about her transition and Miriam responded, "It was exciting and it was stimulating. I loved the cosmopolitan culture and its physical beauty, but at the same time I was stuck in between worlds and wondering where I was going to best fit in. I felt like an outsider in my own town as a teenager, and I certainly felt that way in Montreal. I'm not a part of this community, clearly, but I can't go home." Ummm... yeah. I feel ya, Miriam.

Book Details: Funny and sad and with an underlying feeling that people are innately good and well-intentioned, but also complex. Mariam comments on the characters in the novel in her interview: "The people of the community, the individuals, are like individuals everywhere: there are good ones and bad ones, but most of them are in between, like all of us. It's the culture of control that complicates their decency."

I thought this sentence (well, two actually) captured the essence of the novel well: "I miss kids. The way they react to everything like they're alive."

Genre: Novel
Subject: Family

purchase from W&CF
she also wrote a memoir.

The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere

Author: Debra Marquart

Book Details: I bought this book at a used bookstore a couple months ago based solely on the cover and the description on the book flap. I had read a few pages of it here and there put never really got into it. And then I picked it up again recently, started reading from the beginning, and became thoroughly consumed with her writing. I finished over half of the book in that first day, and the rest of it by the end of the week. She touches on a number of ideas around growing up in the Midwest that I am just beginning to dig up in my own writing, and she weaves it all together beautifully. I hope I am eventually able to do the same.

Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Subject: Home, Rural Midwest

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Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary

Author: Nelson Peery

Author Details: Michael had Nelson come talk to our class last quarter and read an excerpt from his forthcoming book. They met while Michael was teaching a writing workshop at The Guild, but it is clear that the relationship between the two is one of collaboration, of mutual respect in each others lives and work. It made me value the relationships I have that emulate this (Davi) and look forward to discovery of other such relationships.

Book Details: I've always had a hard time learning about history and politics because so much of what I've been taught has been dates, names, and events--the facts. And facts are never really that interesting to me unless they are grounded in a story, in a person. Reading Jane Addams biography earlier this year, I felt like I finally was able to begin to understand the time period that inspired her to create Hull House. Similarly, with Nelson memoir, I have a whole new understanding of American before and after WWII, especially from the perspective of the black men that served.

Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Subject: Standing Up

Buy from Publisher.
Also, his new book comes out next month.

The After-Death Room: Journey Into Spiritual Activism

Author: Michael McColly

Author Details: Before I had gotten into my grad program at Northwestern, I had tried to get into one of Michael's undergrad classes. Even though I didn't have the prerequisites for the class, I had already visited his website and knew I needed to work with him, mostly because of this statement of one of his goals for his work:
"To highlight the many effective programs I have witnessed around the world and the creative and courageous people behind them who are defying the popular image of the AIDS pandemic by showing that it need not be a devastating plague but rather an empowering agency of change for individuals and communities."

Book Details: The After-Death Room also won the 2007 Lamba Literary Award for Spiritual Writing.

Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir, Travel
Subject: Spiritual Activism