Reading in the Garden

  How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair    This book is a true account of a girl growing up under her father's strict Rastafarian beliefs, which turned to fanaticism. Smoking weed was acceptable; eating meat was forbidden. The main tenets of the sect are disdain for “Babylon,” white people’s influence and Western ways. Yet even in their homeland of Jamaica, Safiya and her siblings were outcasts for being Rastafarian, ostracized by other Jamaicans for not cutting their hair and wearing dreadlocks.   Like many religions controlled by patriarchal dominance, girls and women were held to higher and hypocritical standards and forced submissiveness, living under fear of the father's rule.  It was their mother who set them on a quest for knowledge and education in which they excelled. Safiya eventually became a poet, exemplified in this book as her words flow and form into a beautifully expressed narrative.  Overcoming such a childhood and thriving as an adult offe...

Persuasion by Jane Austen I just finished reading Persuasion in Austen’s birthday month, and like all of Austen’s novels, it’s about love, social graces, and civilities of the early 1800s England. Poor Anne was PERSUADED to reject a marriage proposal eight years prior from the man she truly loved on the grounds that he didn’t have money or significant social connections. Forget love, go for the gold!!   So Anne trudges along in a family of dolts: her dad is a silly vain man. How vain is he? So vain that he practically had a horror room of mirrors in his old bedroom, an overabundance that prompted the current tenant to haul a bunch out to make it habitable. His youngest daughter, Mary, is a look-at-me girl. She wants to be the center of attention, and doesn’t have much patience for her own children. The oldest sister is dad’s favorite and he’s not hiding that fact. She’s spoiled and arrogant and could care less about anyone but herself.  It's a glorious day when Anne’s true lov...

  The Invisible Lie of Euridice Gusmao  by Martha Bathala  What a writing talent Martha Batalha has! The words danced on the page and into my heart! I found myself smiling on every page.    This story took place in the 1940s in Rio de Janerio, and boiled down to female empowerment, or in the two sisters’ cases, female suppression and dependence on men. Euridice and Guida lacked of control of their lives, had to be subordinate to men and the social norms of the time. Euridice’s imposed aim was to  be an obedient housewife, while Guida faced the shame and destitution of raising a child as a single mother.    The narrative centered on Euridice and Guida, but it often veered off into clusters of entertaining vignettes about the other people in their lives—maybe a bit too much.   Here is a quote to give you a taste of the writing style. After Euridice’s husband tossed away the recipe book she had been working on for a long time, she said she ...

  March  by Geraldine Brooks  This book is the other side of the “Little Women” coin. While the classic book tells of the March girls growing up in the 1860s without their father, this book tells of their father's life away in the Civil War. There are no pickled limes, debutante balls, or sisterly rivalries. Instead Mr. March's musings as a chaplain in the Union Army bring us to battlefields, horrific hospital scenes, and a plantation where his duty is to educate freed slaves. Told in the eloquent voice of a bygone era, his narrative draws you back in time into the terrific drama of war, slavery, and mannerisms of the day. He has his own struggles with morality, and later is paralyzed by guilt for things he did and didn't do. There's also an unexpected relationship curve between Mr. March and Marmee that the book “Little Women" gave no hint of. While “Little Women” seemed to be geared to a general audience, this book seems darker with more realistic images of the C...

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams  This is a tragic, classic play that I had to read in high school. Yet the only thing I remembered about it was that the daughter Laura was shy and introverted and was comforted by her collection of glass animals. But as I reread it as an adult I now see and feel so much more than I did through the eyes of a teenager. I see how impossibly trapped all three characters were.   The 23-year-old daughter, Laura, is “ crippled,” not just in having one shorter leg than the other and having to wear a brace, but because she's emotionally crippled with an inferiority complex. She's terrified of everything—even of going to business school.    The mother is trapped in a life where she has no resources. She was taught to be a housewife with no outside job, only to serve the family, completely dependent on her husband for financial support—just like Project 2025 is trying to bring us back to. The play takes place in the 1930s and her husba...

  The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder This slim, 139-page Pulitzer Prize-winner was a thought-provoking read. It centers on three of five people who died in a bridge collapse (imagine a rickety, thin, wood-slatted bridge with vine rope handrails a la Indiana Jones.)  The disaster occurred in 1714 in Peru, and Franciscan Brother Juniper spent six years afterwards investigating the lives of the victims in an attempt to determine if they were fated to die on that bridge. Was it God's will? Were the dead deserving of their destinies more than others? Were their scales ultimately weighed down by their sins and shortcomings compared to their good and pious sides? Why weren't other people, who should have been karma-slapped, right there beside them?   Along with a common theme of love and loneliness in each of their interrelated stories, one particular actress and singer also coils through each of their lives.   Other characters like the Archbishop, exposes the hy...