Hot Milk - by Deborah Levy

Last month I visited my wonderful child in Chicago where we enjoyed a visit to the Bourgeois Pig which featured two of our favorite things: coffee, and a Little Free Library. The LTL looked like a little Gnome house and from it I picked Levy's book. I hadn't heard anything about it before, but the back cover description indicated that it had some dark humor. What the cover description didn't tell me was that one of the main characters was a librarian.

Little Free Library (zip code 60614)
Image from Yelp.

The story revolves around Sofia and her mother Rose (the librarian). The two have traveled to Spain in order for Rose to get treatment for a mysterious illness from Dr. Gómez, whose unconventional methods include taking the two women out to lunch and insisting that Sofia not utter word throughout the meal.

As Rose is no longer working (only partly due to her health) there is little in the book about her job. We do know that her "duties were to catalogue. index, and classify the books". It was made clear on each of the three occasions in the book in which Rose's occupation is mentioned that cataloging and indexing were her most essential duties. However, as Sofia reflects upon her mother she comes to the realization that working with words doesn't necessarily translate to an ability to use them well.

She cataloged a billion words but she could not find words for how her own wishes for herself had been dispersed in the winds and storms of a world not arranged to her advantage.

Librarians most certainly don't like things that are not arranged to their advantage. Rose was also very clearly a difficult person to satisfy. And that may be the closest we come to understanding why Rose would want to leave library work.

A Year of Living Prayerfully - by Jared Brock

Our One Book One Community (OBOC) steering committee is looking for a light-hearted book with a spiritual theme to read next spring. We had a suggestion of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - And Doesn't by Stephen Prothero which I started to read, and do like, but I am not sure it is a good choice for a community read. Our community likes to read stories, and Prothero's book is not only not a "story" it is also rather didactic (as the title would suggest). These are two things that make the book a less-than-ideal choice for OBOC. With this in mind I started to look for other books - specifically something with a plot. Then I remembered that during my "Year of Reading 'Year of' Books" I read two religiously-themed humorous books that were about spiritual quests: The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs; and My Jesus Year by Benyamin Cohen. I correctly surmised that more such books must have been written the last few years and selected Brock's book as one that had potential for OBOC. Brock's story features a genuine inquiry into what prayer means. He travels across the globe, often with this wife, to talk to religious leaders about their own spiritual journeys and ultimately finds more questions than answers.

As a Unitarian Universalist I respect and support each person's search for truth and meaning (see our fourth principle). I was intrigued with Brock's quest, and especially appreciated his final comments regarding having more to learn

After an intense year of learning about prayer from some of the best sources on earth, I don't feel like I'm further along. If anything, I feel like a first-year university student-I now know all the things I don't know-all the things I haven't yet learned, understood, or experienced. I am not, in any way, a prayer expert. I'm a failing student who's playing catch up, at best. Rather than coming to the end of a journey, I've only just begun.

As he continues his inquiry I hope he branches out beyond Judeo-Christian traditions. His interactions with Muslims were limited and I don't recall him meeting with any imams. Nor did he talk to any Buddhists (he did meet with one who had converted to Christianity) or Hindus. Likewise, his dealings with women religious leaders were rather narrow. I think the woman with whom he had the longest conversation was Rachel Phelps-Hockenbarger, daughter of Fred Phelps of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. I have to give him credit for his perseverance in getting the interview, though.

Brock's travels took him to, Israel, several parts of Europe, his native Canada, the United States, and also to North and South Korea. I was impressed with his courage in voyaging to North Korea, and his refusal to bow down to the body of Kim Il-Sung. There were no visits to any African or Latin American countries, however, and I suspect that if he had spoken to someone in Central or South America about liberation theology, or talked to anyone in Africa about colonialism, or attended a religious ceremony on an Indian reservation in the United States, he might not have simply and naively accepted the comments he found in Christianity Today that

Missionaries brought about reforms, fought colonialism, taught people to read, and rallied support for struggling peoples around the world. The conclusion the article makes is striking: "Want a blossoming democracy today? The solution is simple-if you have a time machine: Send a 19th-century missionary."

I was, of course, glad to see that he began his globe-trotting voyages at his local library. On page one Brock tells us

Michelle and I decided to live prayerfully for an entire year. It was a nice, shiny idea. But where should we start? 

With For Dummies, obviously. I borrowed a copy of Christian Prayer for Dummies from the library.

After reading a bit of the work though, he found himself unimpressed and

called it quits, returning the book to the library, where [he] assumed it would remain until next year's Friends of the library book sale. 

He also visited the library at the Monastery of Vatopedi (and even borrowed a book there) and while on Mount Athos talked to Father Philotheos who, when asked to define prayer, responded

Prayer isn't one thing...You can read a whole university library full of books that have been written just on the Jesus Prayer.

Brock made at least one other attempt to visit a library while on his journeys. Sadly, however he found the library (and the museum) at Monte Cassino closed (this after he paid his entrance fee). The gift shop, however, was open.

Ultimately, I think I will keep up my own search for a One Book One Community read and look for something that explores religion beyond what one will find in the Judeo-Christian traditions.

El hijo - por Alejandro Palomas

I have blogged occasionally about children's books in Spanish, or bilingual English/Spanish books, but it has been a long time since I read a whole novel in Spanish. When I saw that the last name of the author of this award-winning book was "Palomas" I really had no choice but to read it. Paloma is the Spanish word for dove. It is also the name of my wonderful, artistic daughter.

This is the story of an enigmatic young boy, Guille, who lives with his father. His mother, a flight attendant, has been away for over a year. His only communication with her comes in the form of weekly letters. When Guille tells his teacher that he wants to be Mary Poppins when he grows up he is referred to a counselor, María, who helps him solve some mysteries he wasn't even aware of.

Regular readers know that it only takes one mention of the word "library" (or in the case of this book "biblioteca") to earn a post on this blog. Guille uses the map in his school library to find the distance between Pakistan (from whence his friend Nazia hails) and Dubai (where his mother is).

I learned some new Spanish vocabulary reading this: most notably ojeras (the bags under one's eyes); and mirilla (peephole).

This book is the winner of the Premio Joaquim Ruyra, and Spain's 2016 Premio Nacional de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil.

Paloma de Palabras

The Vacationers - by Emma Straub

This story about a batch of unlike-able characters on a vacation that none of them want to be on in Mallorca, Spain, was good reading material for the airplane ride I took recently. It had a lot of places to break, and didn't require much thought to keep the plot lines and myriad of characters straight. Franny and Jim Post; their two grown children, Bobby and Sylvia; Bobby's much older girlfriend Carmen; and Franny's best friend Charles, and his husband Lawrence negotiate personal issues, and private spaces in the house they rent together.

None of "the vacationers" actually took a trip to a library, although Lawrence did receive an e-mail from the New York Public Library, which he deleted as "junky" along with the forwarded cartoons from his mother, and the J.Crew ads. The other two times any library was mentioned made clear that these folks just didn't see libraries for the spectacular places they are.

Philandering Jim remembers his high school library as the only place he could get attention from girls (to join their study sessions), before he had his growth spurt.

Carmen doesn't see how "being locked up in this house on Mallorca" is a real vacation and likens it to "the day in fourth grade when [her] mother had forgotten to pick her up at the library after school." Of course this Spanish-speaking librarian/blogger would consider being in a library on Mallorca a truly satisfying vacation. To be fair though, I don't blame her for not wanting to spend her vacation with her boyfriend's morose family.

Perhaps if these people knew how to enjoy a good book they would have been happier.

The Time Keeper - by Mitch Albom

This fable about "Father Time" was a bit too sappy for my taste. I normally like a bit of fantasy in which worlds collide, as was the case with this book, but the religious overtones, the way in which everything was wrapped up a bit too tidily in the end left, in addition to a rather obvious moral left me feeling uninspired by this work. It is the story of Dor (Father Time) who is sentenced to an almost-eternity of listening to others beg for more time for his "crime" of being the first chronologist. Eventually released from his prison he finds himself in a time (2012) he could never have imagined, in which everyone is obsessed with time. He also is bequeathed an hour glass which allows him to slow time to an almost stand still so that he can explore things in this new world, and catch up on 6,000 years, at his leisure. He makes use of his hour glass at a library in Madrid, Spain "reading more than a third of the volumes. He read history and literature, studied maps and oversized photo books. With the hourglass turned this took mere minutes, although in real time, decades would have passed."

This was a quick read, and it was good to have along at the conference I attended over the weekend since it has a lot of natural breaking points, so I could read bits of it between sessions. I imagine it will have some appeal to others, beyond the fact that it has a library in it.