Reading in the Garden

Mexican Firecracker Frida by Bárbara Mujica is a fascinating historical novel about a fascinating woman. Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter born in 1907.  She was firecracker of a woman who painted with gusto despite the fact that most of her life she was in great pain. At the age of six, she contracted polio which left one leg thinner than the other.  When she was a teenager, she was on a bus when a trolley collided with it and Frida was impaled by an iron handrail through her pelvis.  Throughout her life she had to endure numerous operations and spent a lot of time confined to her bed. Some of her paintings depict the gruesome pain she suffered.  Most famous are her self-portraits. Many times she would paint looking in a mirror from her bed.  Mujica explains, “Art kept her going. Creating beauty out of pain helped her make sense of things.”  Frida married Diego Rivera, a famous Mexican muralist.  Their relationship was volatile as both their artistic temperaments collided.

Happy Birthday Renoir! (February 25, 1841-December 3, 1919) Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland is a historical fiction telling about Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s life during the time he created the famous painting by the same name as the book.  Renoir wasn’t some stuffy old guy we see in art books. This book brought him to life as a lively and passionate forty-year old man. His friends and models became real. I was fascinated that his friend and artist, Caillebotte, sat patiently in what turned out to be a very uncomfortable pose. I discovered that the son and daughter of the restaurant owners are in the painting as well as a journalist, an actress, and even Renoir’s future wife. I was amazed at what a huge undertaking it really was to create this masterpiece. And I was intrigued at how quickly he painted it, how quickly he had to paint. I loved getting lost in the time and Paris, and I loved the descriptive writing in this book. I found this book in the bargai

Oscar! Oscar! The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde   is about the timeless quest for youth and beauty. The desire to find a fountain of youth rings as true today as it did in 1890 when the story was first published. Dorian Gray is a young and dashingly handsome man. When he looks at a portrait that was painted of him it stirs up the regrettable fact that he’s at the top of his game now and will never look better.  He’s irritated that the portrait will continue to look the same and in a sense mock him as he ages in real life. What’s a man to do?  There was no such thing as plastic surgery back then, and Botox was unheard of. Dorian laments: “Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now!” [1] Boom. He gets his wish. That brings us to the old adage, be careful what you wish for. While he stays crispy, fresh, and pure, his painting bears the devastatingly hideous marks of age and the dark bubbling hot tub of sin into whic

The Bridge to Forbidden Love When The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller came out in 1992, it was THE book to read.  Everyone was talking about it—with good reason.  It’s a good book, a short but satisfying read.  It’s a love story—an affair to remember, so to speak.  In the summer of 1965 Francesca Johnson was a farm wife who meets Robert Kincaid, a National Geographic photographer, passing through town.  He’s interested in photographing the covered bridges in the area and asks Francesca for directions. When she offers to show him, there’s an instant chemistry spark that slowly ignites into full-blown passionate fireworks.  Her family is out of town, which is quite convenient for them.  But this isn’t just a “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am” relationship.  Robert and Francesca find true love. He heaps on the romantic mush she longs for and her husband is not built for. He tells her he loves her and cinches the deal by saying things like: “In a universe of ambiguity, this

The Oscars Are Coming! The Oscars are Coming! (Academy Awards,February 24, 2013) I love to watch the Academy Awards. Now, I’m not one of those people who resurrects her old prom dress and dons a tiara or invites a load of girlfriends and makes a great party out of the event.  I don’t think that would fly very well in my house.  Usually, my husband will pretend to be totally enthralled in some show hoping I would forget about the Oscars. He particularly dislikes the preshows. He’d rather poke his eye out than watch another star on the red carpet telling us who designed their gown.  Frankly, I don’t care either.  It’s not like I’ll be buying any of those dresses soon. I do want to watch the show, though. And I will print out a list of the nominees ( http://oscar.go.com/nominees ) , circle my choices, and root for my teams.  Last year I took it one step further in that I sent my husband downstairs to watch TV then set myself up with a nice glass of red wine and some dark o

Magical Romance I hope you had a magical Valentine’s Day filled with all the love and romance you dreamed of. But if you didn’t find that in real life, no worries.  You can always find it in a book. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel is a magical novel about romance and forbidden love set in Mexico. In this novel, Tita, the youngest daughter of Mama Elena is doomed to live a life without love.  Her controlling widowed mother forces poor Tita to continue the tradition of the youngest daughter devoting her life to her mother.  She is forbidden to marry. This is a cruel fate for a girl who has found her soul mate, Pedro.  And it’s even worse when her mother arranges for her oldest daughter Rosaura to marry her beloved Pedro. He consents because he sees that it will be the only way he can still remain in Tita’s life. When Tita was ordered to make the wedding cake for Pedro and Rosaura, she couldn’t help but weep into the batter. And then something magical happ

Double Helping of Love Love means many things to me.  For me love is building one more project for her when he really doesn't want to.  Love is getting the stains out of his shirts when he doesn’t even notice them.  Love is wanting to spend time together doing the little things like running errands.  And for me, love is fidelity, being faithful and true to the one person you love.  I realize though, that’s not the case for everyone. The Seasons of Beento Blackbird by Akosua Busia is about a man who gets a double helping of love. He has two wives, each of which he loves in a different way.  His first wife lives in the Caribbean, the second one lives in Ghana.  Solomon divides his time spending winters on a beautiful island with Miriam, his first and older wife, summers with the younger Ashia in Ghana, and the remaining time in New York where he works as a children’s book writer under the pseudonym Beento Blackbird. Both women are in agreement with the arrangement, though ma

Isn’t Love Lovely?    Alphabet Weekends by Elizabeth Noble is about love, actually the many stages of love.  It’s about the love of a couple married forty years facing health issues. It’s about the exhausting love of a newborn baby in the family. It’s about another couple in the throes of unlovely complications.  And finally, there’s the pursuit of love. The main storyline revolves around Tom and Natalie.  They have known each other since they were kids. Tom has always liked Natalie but she considers him more like a brother than boyfriend material.  After Simon, her self-absorbed boyfriend of six years, dumps Natalie, the thirty-five-year-old is suddenly loveless.  That’s when Tom steps in to see if he can change all that.  He proposes a game of sorts where they would spend twenty-six weekends going through an alphabet of activities designed to see if they could find happiness together.  She’s skeptical; he’s enthusiastic. We start with “A is for Abseiling,” which translated fr

Ghosts of the Past The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan is as captivating as any of Amy Tan’s works including The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Bonesetter’s Daughter .  Kwan enters Olivia’s life in an unexpected way when Olivia’s father dies and his daughter from his first marriage comes to live with them in America. Five-year-old Olivia would have preferred a new turtle or a doll; instead she got an older half-sister. Seeing Kwan at the airport Olivia thought she looked like a chubby old lady with braids dressed in pajamas bellowing a loud “Hall-ooo!”  Kwan is a built-in embarrassment. She’s awkwardly unfamiliar with American culture. She’s tactless, loud, talkative, and annoyingly upbeat.  She’s the crazy relative you don’t want anyone to know about.   But she’s also very tolerant and kind with the more self-absorbed Olivia. In her endless prattle, Kwan tells Olivia about Chinese superstitions and ghost stories.  She explains to Libby (Kwan can’t pronounce her name right, so c

The Privilege of Books In continuation of Chinese week and Mao Tse Tung’s (aka Mao Zedong) tyrannical rule, I would like to recommend a short and poignant book that follows the Great Chinese Famine of 1958-1961 which Lisa See brought to light in  Dreams of Joy . Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie relates the story of two boys during Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).  In this political/social revolution, intellectuals including scientists, writers, engineers, physicians, and other educated people posed a threat to the government. They, along with anyone in opposition to the government, were persecuted, publicly humiliated, harassed, imprisoned, and even tortured.  Schools were closed, books were banned, and youth were exiled to the peasant mountainous regions to be “re-educated.” In this book two boys, who are working in the mountains, discover that one of the workers in another village has a secret suitcase full of books. They set about on

Two Sisters, Two Countries, Two Books Chinese New Year is almost here. I thought it would be a perfect week to look at books relating to China.  Shanghai Girls by Lisa See got thumbs up from our book club. Growing up in Shanghai, May and Pearl Chin are both models for Z.G. Li, a painter and photographer, whom they both fall in love with.  As “beautiful girls” the sisters live a life of parties and glamour until their father loses the family fortune and sells the girls to prospective husbands.  The girls refuse and during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937, they attempt to cross the countryside to make their escape.  Along the way they have a horrific encounter with Japanese soldiers. Brace yourself. It’s a disturbing scene that’s not for the faint of heart.  Eventually they make it to America and are interned at Angel Island for a long time. In order to stay in America, the sisters marry the Louie brothers who are strangers to them. In Los Angeles Chinatown, under on

Noteworthy Exhibition, Noteworthy Book In continuation of “Girls Week” I want to recommend The Crystal Palace by Frances Mary Hendry. When I first learned about the “Crystal Palace” in one of my gardening books, I was fascinated.  The Crystal Palace was a huge glass structure held together with cast iron, built for The Great Exhibition of 1851.  This World’s Fair exhibition hall was a temporary building. It had 293,000 panes of glass and took 2,000 men eight months to complete. It was a conservatory on steroids! Over 6,000,000 people visited it! And what’s even more mind-blowing is the fact that this grand glass structure was only on display for six months before it was disassembled and relocated at the end of the fair, only to burn to the ground in later years. I was intrigued and I wanted to know more. I looked for books about it, but one of the few books I could find that didn’t seem daunting was this Scholastic kids’ book, The Crystal Palace: The Diary of Lily Hicks, Londo