Choosing a new book to read is important business. Particularly when we're talking about nonfiction as I tend to just stick with one book at a time. I loved Ruth Reichl's memoir (have turned down some pages and will share some excerpts that were quite hunger/desire for a good meal-inducing), but for now I think the weekend calls for a little book selection talk.
This is actually the second pile of books I have created. I pulled a few books from my bedroom piles, but then I started thinking of some other books that appealed and so went in search for them in my book room and you know how that goes. Standing in front of bookcases and your eye starts to scan the titles on the shelves and here we go. Pile number two, which is made up of books that have long sat in piles or on shelves. I seem to be leaning in a memoir/history (particularly WWII) direction.
A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile, Marjorie Agosin -- "In this unique memoir, Marjorie Agosín writes in the voice of her mother, Frida, who grew up as the daughter of European Jewish immigrants in Chile in the World War II era. Woven into the narrative are the stories of Frida's father, who had to leave Vienna in 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer; of her paternal grandmother, who arrived in Chile later with a number tattoed on her arm; and of her great grandmother from Odessa, who loved the Spanish language so much that she repeated its harmonious sounds even in her sleep. Agosín's memoir is a moving testament to endurance and to the power of memory and of words."
Kisses on a Postcard: A Tale of Wartime Childhood, Terence Frisby -- "Carefully labelled, and each clutching little brown suitcases, Terry, aged seven, and his elder brother Jack, eleven, stand amid the throng of children which crowds the narrow platform at Welling station awaiting the steam engine which will pull them and their fellow evacuees across the country towards their unknown destination - and their new lives...Warm-hearted and moving, "Kisses on a Postcard" is a vivid and intimate portrait of our wartime history; a compelling and uplifting memoir of growing up in an extraordinary time."
Eight Women, Two Model T's and the American West, Joanne Wilke -- "A blend of oral and written history, adventure, memoir, and just plain heartfelt living, Eight Women is a story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Weaving together a granddaughter’s essays with family stories and anecdotes from the 1924 trip, the book portrays four generations of women extending from nineteenth-century Norway to present-day Iowa—and sets them loose across the western United States where the perils and practicalities of automotive travel reaffirm family connections while also celebrating individual freedom."
Millions Like Us: Women's Lives During the Second World War, Juliet Nicholson -- I have read and enjoyed her books before which are very interesting social history. Once again this appears to be anecdotal pieces. "In Millions Like Us Virginia Nicholson tells the story of the women's Second World War, through a host of individual women's experiences. We tend to see the Second World War as a man's war, featuring Spitfire crews and brave deeds on the Normandy beaches. But in conditions of "Total War" millions of women - in the Services and on the Home Front - demonstrated that they were cleverer, more broad-minded and altogether more complex than anyone had ever guessed. Millions Like Us tells the story of how these women loved, suffered, laughed, grieved and dared; how they re-made their world in peacetime. And how they would never be the same again ..." (And I see an extensive bibliography in the back of the book--always a good thing).
Maiden's Trip: A Wartime Adventure on the Grand Union Canal, Emma Smith -- I read an earlier memoir by her about her adolesence (and I have a novel as well that is published by Persephone Books!). "In 1943 Emma Smith joined the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company under their wartime scheme of employing women to replace the boaters. She set out with two friends on a big adventure: three eighteen-year-olds, freed from a middle-class background, precipitated into the boating fraternity. They learn how to handle a pair of seventy-two foot-long canal boats, how to carry a cargo of steel north from London to Birmingham and coal from Coventry; how to splice ropes, bail out bilge water, keep the engine ticking over and steer through tunnels. They live off kedgeree and fried bread and jam, adopt a kitten, lose their bicycles, laugh and quarrel and get progressively dirtier and tougher as the weeks go by."
A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York, Angelica Huston -- "In her first, dazzling memoir, Anjelica Huston shares the story of her deeply unconventional early life—her enchanted childhood in Ireland, living with her glamorous and artistic mother, educated by tutors and nuns, intrepid on a horse. Huston was raised on an Irish estate to which—between movies—her father, director John Huston, brought his array of extraordinary friends, from Carson McCullers and John Steinbeck to Peter O’Toole and Marlon Brando. In London, where she lived with her mother and brother in the early sixties when her parents separated, Huston encountered the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac. She understudied Marianne Faithfull in Hamlet. Seventeen, striking, precocious, but still young and vulnerable, she was devastated when her mother died in a car crash. Months later she moved to New York, fell in love with the much older, brilliant but disturbed photographer, Bob Richardson, and became a model. Living in the Chelsea Hotel, working with Richard Avedon and other photographers, she navigated a volatile relationship and the dynamic cultural epicenter of New York in the seventies."
The Liar's Club: A Memoir, Mary Karr -- "The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as “funny, lively, and un-put-downable” (USA Today) today as it ever was."
It's sort of funny how you think you know what you want to read but when faced with a bookcase full of books, other books leap out at you. The joy of choosing. And with July soon approaching, it will be time for a new prompt (I guess June's book is going to overlap with July's . . .).