Where Have All the Readers Gone?

We hear so often these days that people aren’t reading anymore, that many college graduates haven’t read an entire book since they graduated, that most Americans have not been in a bookstore in the past five years, and other—to me—shocking statistics. When I think of all I’ve gained from reading over my lifetime, and all I look forward to learning and enjoying through books, that’s pretty depressing. I feel sorry for those folks. Recently, though, I found a new source for book lovers. It’s “social networking for books” and it’s fun and fills the need to “talk books” when no one around you gives a rat’s.

It’s a partial answer to the question, “Where have all the readers gone?” Here are a few links for websites that focus on reading, what YOU are reading, what you have on your bookshelves, who else is reading what you have loved the most and who has it in their library. Book reviews and suggestions are posted and each is a good resource for checking out books by favorite authors or topics. There are special pages for author-members. Although some sites have upper levels of membership (as with many social media sites) with costs attached, basic memberships are free and probably all most of us want anyway. Check these out and let me know what you think:

http://www.deeplinking.net


http://www.librarything.com


http://goodreads.com

http://www.aNobii.com

http://www.BookJetty.com

I’m sure there are others. I especially like Library Thing. But, if you are not particularly looking for interactivity and social connections with other readers, don’t forget that FEAST offers a delicious assortment of reading suggestions in each issue. I promise that there will be a brand new issue very soon! In the meantime, you can always search the archived copies linked to the last issue and find fascinating and memorable fiction, nonfiction, art, food, film, and travel recommendations. These are selections that are not necessarily best sellers—which is often dictated by promotional budgets—but gems that may have faded from sight because there WASN’T promotional money available. Often “best selling” is code for those brought to our attention through advertising—some of those are wonderful, too—but there are many beautifully written, compelling books that drop below the horizon way too soon. FEAST tries to highlight those.

Happy spring! -- Rosemary

A Book and a Film Frame the Discussion of Racism and Discrimination

NOWHERE IN AFRICA & SMALL ISLAND

Sometimes it seems as though we look for differences between peoples as a means of making ourselves feel superior, set apart, better than. To fail to seek similarities as a means of uniting us as humans leads only to war, discrimination, and, for many, lives of unimaginable despair. Our guest blogger CHRISTINE WEEBER introduces us to a film based on a novel and a novel that deal beautifully and thoughtfully with the topic. Thank you, Chris! -- Rosemary

Racial and ethnic divisions and hierarchies separate people all over the world, not just in the U.S. We increasingly recognize these as barriers to overcome and not simply accept but, in public conversations about race, we tend to get stuck in the racist/not-a-racist dichotomy. Two works that successfully get us beyond this dichotomy are Nowhere in Africa, a German film written by Caroline Link based on the autobiographical novel of Stefanie Zweig, and Small Island by the Jamaican Brit Andrea Levy.

Both of these stories are set in the context of World War II. In Nowhere in Africa, a Jewish family escapes Nazi Germany in 1939 to live in Kenya, then a British colony. Small Island traces the story of two Jamaicans who migrate to the Mother Country, i.e., England (Jamaica was a colony until 1962), in 1948. In both, the authors capture the complexities of migration, displacement, and loss of home, as well as the day-to-day grit of racial and ethnic oppression. In addition, we get to know people who are “racist.”

In Nowhere in Africa, Walter Redlich and his wife, Jettel, move to an arid, rural farm in Kenya with their five-year-old daughter, Regina—a far world from their middle-class life in Germany. Walter learns Swahili and humbly works alongside local Kenyans—a position he didn’t have to accept as a white man, given British dominance. Young Regina forms strong bonds with the cook and local Kenyan kids, becoming more and more Kenyan as time goes on. Proud Jettel despises the locals, tries to keep her distance and distinction from them, and attempts to force them into subservient roles.

Jettel is a privileged, prejudiced European woman who looks down on the “dirty” Africans. But through arguments with Walter and ever-worsening news from home, she is forced to confront the irony and vulnerability of her position as a Jewish refugee. She is forced to search her soul for a different identity than elite, white westerner.

In Small Island, the two main characters have no choice but to deal with the racial box they are thrown into. Hortense and Gilbert grew up in Jamaica learning the King’s English but, in moving to post-war London, they are surprised to find England does not want them. This, despite that Gilbert fought in the British Royal Air Force and Hortense is a schoolteacher.

Queenie, their white landlord, is the only one in her neighborhood to take in Jamaicans. Her neighbors despise her for it. Bernard, her husband, is away serving in the Royal Air Force and takes a few years to make his way back home. When he does arrive, he says, “I didn’t defend my country to give it over to them.” Unlike Jettel, he resists change. As for Queenie, she has a greater surprise in store for Bernard than simply her rebellious room renting to “coloured” people.

Through both of these stories we enter the lives of people who inhabit different sides of the racial divide—and some who have lived on both sides. We get to know people forced to navigate racialized societies. And we get inside the heads of so-called racists—and, in the case of Jettel, to watch her work her way out of that label.

By walking in these people’s shoes, we can feel the almost gravitational pull of race and ethnicity, and it becomes clear that this pull is maintained by more than those few we might call racists. Neighbors, bosses, and government employees are among those who enforce racial codes in England. In Kenya, British settlers and government officials uphold the country as a British colony.

Our conversation deepens. We are forced to ask ourselves, when confronted with change, with “difference,” and with power inequalities, how will we react? Will we cling to a real or imagined status quo? Or will we change, grow, adapt, and learn new ways of being? How do our choices affect us and other people?

CHRISTINE WEEBER works as a freelance writer and editor. She holds an MA in cultural anthropology, a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies, and a BA in English Literature and Philosophy. Her master’s thesis focused on white South African immigrants in Colorado. She recently won the Great Lakes Story Contest for her piece Breaking Skin (see her website). Her essay, “An Unladylike Journey,” appears in the popular anthology Solo: On Her Own Adventure . For more, see http://www.christineweeber.net/. In the photo, Christine is teaching her nephew one of her favorite pastimes.

Great Reads for the Holidays! FEAST's Fabulous Finds

2007 has been a year of wonderful stories, new ideas, food for thought and palate. FEAST selects books that might not have made the best sellers’ lists because they didn’t have that high profile promotional budget, but each is a gem, a discovery, and should not be allowed to fade away. If you are looking for a special gift for yourself or someone else, here’s the best of the year’s offerings:

FICTION

A THREAD OF GRACE, Mary Doria Russell. Random House 2005. A superbly written story about a young Jewish girl who, with her father and thousands of other Jewish refugees, attempts to escape the Germans by climbing over the Alps into Italy in 1943. There have been many books through the years about the Jewish refugee experience, but we seldom read about those who hid in Italy, the Italians who sheltered them at risk of their own lives, and what it was like for those who fought there in the resistance movement. The result of five years of meticulous research, Russell brings us in intimate detail the almost unimaginable hardship of those years before the Allies came in and WWII ended. If you love to learn your history through fictional characters who “live” it, this book about the Italian front will not disappoint.

DIGGING TO AMERICA, Anne Tyler. Knopf 2006. Tyler excels at stories about families. This one touches on some important contemporary issues: marriage between people from very different cultures, immigration, adoption by a multicultural family of children of yet other cultures, issues of adoption in general, death, loss, love, and relationships. In other words, just the stuff of ordinary, everyday lives told with deceiving simplicity. In Digging to America, two couples each adopt a little girl from Korea—both the people in one couple were born and raised in the United States, the other is a marriage between an American and an Iranian immigrant. Tyler thoroughly researched Iranian culture and delved deeply to discover immigrants’ feelings when confronted with certain US attitudes, their sense of loss of their own culture as it is watered down through the years, and their inability to reconnect with a childhood era that no longer exists. This is a tender, revealing story of changing times and mores—a window onto other ways of living and thinking skillfully portrayed by a fine writer.

A SPOT OF BOTHER, Mark Haddon. Doubleday 2006. The latest from the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (a remarkable read). Haddon has an exceptional ability to access the absurdity of being human. That we are all flawed is nowhere clearer than in this story of a family’s dysfunction. It is strongly written, and hilarious, with the action and fun building like a snowball rolling down hill. As it picked up speed and I connected with each character’s nutty self-involvement and self-doubt, I chuckled and snorted aloud as they headed for certain collision, embarrassment, and disaster. Haddon proves once again that there is nothing funnier or more pathetic than family relationships—they are irreplaceable and essential, filled with conflict, all about them and never, often enough, about us. And family communications are often the most difficult of all—these people who know us the best and yet the least, who can always be counted on to misinterpret our grunts, hints, and unique qualities. Highly entertaining!

CONSUMPTION, Kevin Patterson. Doubleday 2007. Enter the lost world of the Inuit (Eskimo) in the far north near the Arctic Ocean as recreated by this talented literary writer. Victoria’s people have been brought in off the land where they have survived under the harshest conditions on earth for untold years. They now live in stark, prefab houses, shacks, and trailers and try to learn to live in one spot year-round, no longer existing on their traditional foods, but adding beer, cheez whiz, and the less nutritious diet of the “south.” With these changes comes civilization’s diseases: tuberculosis, diabetes, and others. This is the story of a young doctor who decides to practice in this difficult climate and the people he comes to know well over a period of twenty years. It’s fascinating—

THE SAFFRON KITCHEN, Yasmin Crowther. Viking 2006. I so often find that debut novels burst forth like a piñata, filled with color and delight. This one is no exception. Saffron Kitchen is set in England and is the story of a mixed marriage between an Englishman and an Iranian woman, and their daughter Sara. The story moves back and forth between past and present, London and a small remote village in Iran. The writing is beautiful and elegant, filled with captivating description so real that all your sense are ignited—underlying all is a discussion of what it is to be in exile from a place or person you love. To be rootless and unable to return, then, when finally you DO return, is the past waiting to exhale? Or has it moved on so that what you remember can no longer be visited? This is a story without a villain, only human beings whose actions have been so rash that the direction and tenor of their lives have been altered forever. It is about love, forgiveness, anger—and a lifetime of haunting memory.

JASMINE, Bharati Mukherjee. Grove 1999. A beautifully written story of a Hindu illegal immigrant from India: her flight to Florida, New York, and Iowa, and her journey to becoming a US citizen. This book is especially revealing of the barrier between Americans and illegals—the border that cannot be crossed. This author is known for her lyrical poetry—and her prose echoes that strength.

RETURNING TO EARTH, Jim Harrison. Grove Press 2007. Donald is a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. In his days of fading verbal ability, he struggles to pass along his family history before he goes. As his family and friends wrestle with their upcoming loss and how to deal with his wish to die on his own terms and be laid to rest in accordance with his own deeply held beliefs that are in conflict with contemporary laws, Donald dictates stories of three generations of his ancestors and his relationship with his personal spiritual heritage. Harrison frames the question of how we return “to earth” upon our passing, how we retain dignity and choice, through chapters by each of the characters. Through their personal journeys as they deal with their loss, a finely written discussion of life, death, and redemption is revealed.

NONFICTION

CLAPTON'S GUITAR: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument, Allen St. John. Free Press 2006. I could not put this down! I’ve often thought certain, well-used inanimate objects, like musical instruments, could tell us some amazing stories if they only had a voice: Van Cliburn’s or Ray Charles’s piano, Miles Davis’s trumpet, Eric Clapton’s guitar. Imagine the tales! Musicians form intimate relationships with their instruments; they pour their souls into them and, with the best, their souls are reincarnated and rise into the air as music that makes our hearts soar. Bestselling author Allen St. John takes us on a personal journey to watch retired rural mail carrier Wayne Henderson, one of the world’s greatest guitar builders, make such an instrument. Henderson employs experience, creativity, and more than a little down-home ingenuity—and there’s a 10-year waiting list for his heirloom acoustic guitars. St. John writes with poetry and passion, but also with a clear eye about the process—part magic, part music, and a huge helping of craftsmanship in a world where friendship, laughter, old-time music, and homemade lemon pies and barbeque count for more than who has the big bucks. This book is special if you care about music and craftsmanship.

SHADOW OF THE BEAR, Brian Payton. Bloomsbury 2006. Over a five-year period, journalist Brian Payton travels the world to see the eight remaining bear species. It’s an astounding adventure as he goes from the jungles of Cambodia, to China, to Canada, to Peru, India, Italy, and the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. This is a phenomenal story, but, unfortunately, it is also a tragedy as we learn the state of these rapidly vanishing species and the lives they are forced to live. Everyone who loves wildlife and/or is concerned about our changing environment should, as they say at the card table, “read ‘em and weep.”

TRUCK: A LOVE STORY, Michael Perry. HarperCollins 2006. If “Truck” were a candy bar, you could say it contains humor and homespun wisdom in every bite. Perry’s latest memoir weaves three stories together—restoring a 1950s International Harvester truck, attempting to cultivate his own garden, and discovering romance after a lifetime of failed relationships. Truck is a book that both men and women will love, but perhaps it will be most enjoyed by the man who understands the attraction of working on something mechanical, the nature of relationships between men, and the desire to be self-sustaining through growing food and hunting. It gets a bit literary in its references at times, but otherwise is the clear-eyed view of someone who grew up in farming country in northern Wisconsin.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE LEADERS GONE? Lee Iacocca. Scribner 2007. Legendary auto executive Lee Iacocca poses this pertinent question as the 2008 presidential election campaign hits its stride. Every point he makes hits the bull’s eye of where the United States is today and what we’d better know about the capabilities of our next president. It’s a no-nonsense look at how “Rome” is burning while the present administration, including Congress, fiddles around with non-priority projects, rhetoric instead of analysis, and, in some notable cases, filling their own pockets with OUR money. This is an easily read, fact-based view by a man who knows first hand about organization and leadership and who speaks plainly. You’ll smile wryly if it doesn’t move you to tears. We need to get cracking!

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver. HarperCollins 2007. Kingsolver shares her family’s experiences upon moving to southern Appalachia to live on a farm. They pledge to “eat local” for one whole year, raising as much as possible of their own food. Kingsolver mixes personal details and challenges of their lives with deeply researched material about what is happening to the US food supply due to corporate farming and global trade. It’s pretty scary stuff and makes you want to do more to support your local farmers and farmers’ markets, to encourage your supermarket chains to carry local meat and produce. Well done on an important topic for us all.

THE RIVER OF LOST FOOTSTEPS: Histories of Burma, Thant Myint-U. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006. Pure history about the past, present, and future possibilities for Burma/Myanmar. Most of us know little about this country except for a few exotic literary or musical mentions of the road to Mandalay or Rangoon. Born in 1966, educated at Harvard and Cambridge, in 1988 the author was living in a Burmese rebel base camp, “a sometimes dusty and sometimes muddy sprawl of bamboo and thatch huts, the misty malarial rain forests of the Tennasserim hills in the near distance and young, determined-looking men and women in emerald-green uniforms milling all around.” With the awarding of the Nobel peace prize to dissident Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, more of us had an inkling that there was a country out there—next to the old kingdom of “Siam”—that was poor and embroiled in a bitter struggle for democracy against a repressive military regime. If you’ve ever been curious to know more, this is an excellent presentation of the history with some small amount of analysis and a proposal for the country’s future prospects in a global environment.

KEEP ON COOKIN’ – my favorite cookbook for the year!

ARABESQUE: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, & Lebanon, Claudia Roden. Knopf 2006. Not only is this cookbook beautiful to look at or display in your kitchen, with its turquoise and gold, middle eastern design cover and the stunning photo layouts of foods and dishes inside, but it is filled with stories and bits of history from each of these three countries, plus recipes that are not “Greek” for the average cook to create. They are manageable, use ingredients that most can find (some have been reworked with contemporary ingredients), yet have retained the alluring touches of spices and complex flavor combinations that are new to many US palates. This is food for real people, not gourmands or food elitists. It gets my vote for the best of its kind!

IF YOU HAVE ENJOYED THESE SELECTIONS and are not on the subscription list for FEAST, the award-winning quarterly eZine about books, art, food, film, and travel, go to http://www.carstenscommunications.com/feast.html and check out a recent issue.

Happy holidays to all – and may 2008 be filled with great reads!

-- Rosemary Carstens, Editor

Guest Bloggers' Series Begins

FEAST is beginning a new program today featuring a series of special guests who will post about one of our five topics: books, art, food, film, or travel. Each will bring a unique perspective to the topics and I think you will enjoy reading them and seeing where their links lead. Be sure to sign up for the Atom or RSS feeds so you don’t miss a thing!

OUR FIRST GUEST OF THE SERIES is DONNA DRUCHUNAS, author, editor, and freelance writer, who is passionate about following her dreams and combines writing and traveling as a large part of her personal journey. Welcome, Donna!