What I’m Reading This Week
There is this wonderful tiny bookstore in Wiesbaden, Nero39. It’s a five minute walk from my home. The owner is also the person who greets you when you come in. You can have a cup of coffee as you browse through a book by the fire (if it is winter) or browse the shelves, not many perhaps but filled with a really well curated selection of books.
This tiny bookstore sells German and English books. When Paul Auster’s Baumgartner came out, I wanted it now. Auster is one of the writers I don’t purchase in ebooks. I like to have the hardcover copies of his books. Amazon said it would take two weeks to send it to me. I had a hunch that this bookstore would have it. Freedom and I walked to the bookstore and there in the window was Baumgartner. This is what I love about small bookstores where you and the owner seem to click on what to read. I find here books by authors I’ve never heard of, African writers, Eastern European writers, Japanese writers and there has not been one single book that I have bought there that I didn’t enjoy.
Sandwich by Catherine Newman was a book I bought there a while back. I loved the cover, loved the name. On the inside sleeve it said… But every family has its secrets and hers is no exception. My kind of reading. Then somehow life got in the way and I didn’t read past the first three pages. In time it got filed away among my other books.
This past weekend after a long illness, I decided to cut back on social media scrolling that was draining my energy and reorganize all my books. I usually have them on the shelves according to subject, genre, author etc. This time realizing how many books I had accumulated over the four and a half years I’ve been living here, I decided to make two categories: the ones I’ve read and the ones I haven’t. I did not expect to discover that I had 144 unread books. And that is not counting all the ebooks and audiobooks on my various devices. I decided I had created my own library and there would be no more new books until I had gotten through at least half of the unread ones.
The following morning I glanced through the many shelves of unread books and did what a friend of mine had once suggested. My friend used to give workshops on bibliotherapy and one of the things we did in that workshop was to go to our bookshelf every week and pick five books that seemed to call out to us or resonate with us. I picked:
The Mind is Flat - The illusion of mental depth and improvised mind by Nick Chater
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro
Aftermath - life in the fallout of the third reich by Harald Jähner and
Sandwich by Catherine Newman
That morning instead of scrolling through social media, I got a cup of coffee and started reading Sandwich. I was through half the book in an hour and a half. It is so raw, so real and so close to everyone of us in our frail humanness that I found myself underlining sentences, passages that I wanted to back to later, to think over, to write from.
Rocky is a woman entering menopause. Her marriage could be any one of our marriages with all it’s flaws and all it’s simple wonderful quiet moments. The story takes place over a weeklong holiday in Cape Cod. Rocky, her husband, their two grown children, the girlfriend of her son and Rocky’s mother and father have spent a week at the same house in Cape Cod for years. But this year will be different. I don’t know how yet. :) Still reading.
As I lay the book down to go and prepare breakfast, I remembered how a book can fill you, whereas scrolling can suck you dry. I went back this morning to visit Rocky’s world and tonight I will finish reading her story.
As with any writer I have loved reading, be it for the story or the language or the topic, after breakfast, I went online and picked a YouTube video interview with Catherine Newman. I was pleasantly surprised and how the voice I heard in the interview was the voice I had read on the pages of the book.
If you want to learn more about Catherine Newman (you do) CLICK HERE
I’m also leaving that interview here. If you aspire to write, perhaps this interview will be one you want to watch.
Writing Prompt
Here is a wonderful line from the book Sandwich. In this part of the story Rocky is anxious about her parents coming to the holiday home. She seems to have some issues with her father and remembers a conversation they had many years ago, a conversation which exasperated her. Her husband Nick, seeing her anxiety says:
“He’s just wrong,” Nick says now. “He’s imperfect. This is not new information. It’s okay. You still get to love him.”
Often when we are creating characters, we tend to give them singular feelings. They like something or hate something. But that is not really how humans function. We are a chaotic mess of feelings and thoughts that clash with one another. And that is maybe what makes this story so wonderful, the way it captures that aspect of our human being.
So, think about someone in your life that exasperates you, makes you anxious, maybe someone you really want to love and get close to but find they make it so hard to love them. Or think of someone you hate and love at the same time. Maybe someone you love but can’t be around for longer than a couple of hours. Write a scene where you are anticipating this persons arrival.
Have a great week, see you soon.
Yesim