Roll out the red carpet for the 2020 Coveted Nancy Award Winner!

As soon as I finished Interior Chinatown I had to start over and read straight through again. That still might not be enough. While the tv cop show screenplay format makes the book fun, the explorations of racism, marginalization, aging parents, and self-limiting interior monologues are heart-breaking and revealing. 

Mostly, I've been more aware of the way I flatten my experiences and limit my options by my own interior monologue. Now I am wondering whether all women my age become invisible, or if we allow ourselves to become Generic Gray-haired Female in the background.

Highly, highly rec! Of course. being the National Book Award winner for fiction might be almost as good as  winning a Nancy Award

Favorite childhood picture book...

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Living in Non-fiction 2020

When the whole year was a bad case of non-fiction, my reading choices veered to fiction. I do recommend three books, only one a new release.
Annoyed with the lack of historical basis in the satirical series, "The Great," I am currently devouring the lively, well-written, thoroughly researched Catherine the Great : Portrait of a Woman by Pulitzer prize-winning historian Robert K. Massie. I plan to read more about Russia and by Massie in 2021. 

The long anticipated Churchill book by Erik Larson was definitely worth the wait. Reading The Splendid and the Vile in midsummer gave me perspective on real sacrifices and deprivations compared to the minor inconvenience of wearing a mask in the Covid era. We are such a bunch of whining weenies!

Hampton Sides's 2011 book, Hellhound On His Trail, reads like a novel, but the research into James Earl Ray's assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is impressive. Planning to read James Patterson and friends' Last Days of John Lennon to compare the approach.

 

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

A tree skirt of books and a train running round and round

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

In the giant hamster ball

Three Coronavirus novels for your consideration.

Early in the pandemic when I could still concentrate I read Lawrence Wright's The End of October about a global pandemic as told by an epidemiologist. The fictional doctor's explanations and musings helped me get a grip on the terminology and the workings of our nonfiction virus. Over half a year later, I mainly remember the description of the U.S. vice president placed in a giant hamster ball to keep him safe from the virus, and to protect the succession of power. 

There are many persons of power and influence I've wanted to put in giant hamster balls this year, more for my protection than theirs.

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks, considers the social aspects of a 1666 pandemic. How could a small village stop the spread of Bubonic plague to the rest of the country? How could the residents not destroy each other in the process? Told by a young widow who becomes a midwife and later n a healer, this is satisfying historical fiction with cautionary tales for our time. Rather than become a superspreader, the village self-quarantines at the urging of a popular pastor, but the experience brings out the worst in the residents' natures. The need to blame, to spread fake news, to hunt witches, and the struggles between religion, superstition, and science resonate in 2020.

The Silence, by Don DeLillo, is a very short, spare novel about a different cataclysm, a different type of disease, an existential epidemic that could happen any day now.

On Super Bowl Sunday 2022 an unexplained event makes screens go dark, and airplanes fall from the sky with no flight control, no technology. No media can bring an instant 24/7 news blitz about the cause, because there's no media. The novel is the best dark DeLillo distilled down almost to poetry. 

To paraphrase artist Paul Klee, science explains the visible, but fiction makes visible.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Breaking Amazon

If you don't get your order in time for Christmas, it'll be my fault. I broke Amazon.

First I broke my cheapo immersion blender. It came all to pieces in the sweet potato hummus, which really needs more lemon juice and garlic than the recipe said.

So I ordered a tiny tot food processor. Then I ordered eight little stocking stuffers for a work gift exchange. Jeff Bezos thought it would be fun to combine the two orders in one very oversized packing box with a lot of bubble wrap. After bouncing back and forth a few times between Phoenix and Louisville, a delivery person managed to wedge the box into the Amazon hub locker in my neighborhood by crushing it a bit. 

I could not budge the box to slide it out of the locker. So I ripped the visible end of the box apart to pull out my orders and a bunch of bubble wrap. Stuffed the bubble wrap back into the mangled box and slammed the locker shut. The touch pad screen for the locker hub started freaking out. It kept telling me in larger fonts to reenter my code and remove the contents of the locker. 

So, if I can't bring down the whole grid, at least I can break Amazon! Sorry about your late order...

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Long, strange book trips

We joke that the library has the World's Largest Collection of Travel Guides, like it should be a giant ball of string or maybe Wall Drug. We've got your Fodors,  Frommers, and Rick Steves, Insight and Eyewitness, National Geographic and Lonely Planet, Michelin and Off the Beaten Path.  We've got at least a hundred places you must golf before you die. We are branching out into Falcon Guides for hiking , biking, and waterfalls. Whether you are into glamping or food trucks, we probably have your guide.

2020 was unfortunately the year of no travel. True, my buddy kept her Jeep filled up just in case Texas did something so incredibly embarrassing she had to drive off toward the horizon. This being a frequent occurrence, just saying.

Of the four long, strange trip books I read this year, the standout is Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder, by Kent Nerburn (the 25th anniversary edition). A white writer is challenged with telling the story of a Lakota elder. How do these two learn to trust and listen to each other, and preserve the story for future generations? How can spirituality bring healing to both? By driving an ancient car off-road in the South Dakota Badlands. 

Out of Darkness, Shining Light tells how the African expedition leaders and slaves enabling Dr. David Livingstone to search for the source of the Nile carried his body 1,500 miles from the interior of the African continent to the east coast so he could be buried in his homeland. They also carried the doctor's expedition journals. The heavily researched novel considers colonialism from the Africans' viewpoint through the voice of an outspoken slave cook and road wife, and a pompous freed slave educated by Christian missionaries. Recommended by Nancy Pearl.

The Last Great Road Bum: a Novel, by Hector Tobar is an experiment that doesn't quite work, but has some good spots along the journey. It is the very Sixties tale of a real person, Joe Sanderson of Urbana, Illinois, who did a great deal of no-budget traveling, writing letters and diaries for a great road bum novel, without ever managing to learn much in the process. Tobar discovered the real diaries and in the course of his fictionalizing them the nonfiction Sanderson keeps interrupting.

Sometimes I just like the book jacket! Natural History, by Carlos Fonseca, is an even more complex experiment. Again a writer is given a packet of letters and notes, and embarks on geographical and philosophical journeys in search of truth or reality, or camouflaged butterflies and masked revolutionary guerrilla leaders. I didn't understand it, but it was appropriately surreal reading for the Covid shutdown. Oh, and there's a famous fashion designer with a mysterious disease.

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Nominees in the Exploding Reptiles Fiction category

No year in my memory, at least not since I escaped Millard Lefler Junior High, has needed ravenous, swamp dwelling fictional reptiles like this one, 2020. 

Snakes, dragons, and alligators remind this reader that irreverent humor and satire are essential to good mental health in this messed up moment. Still, keep wearing your mask and using vodka hand sanitizer. And remember, next to bleach injections, laughter  is the best medicine.

Squeeze Me, by Carl Hiaasen:  Skink, the former governor of Florida, hides out from the world in the Florida swamp just a bit down the road from the POTUS golf course. Enter a female wildlife relocation expert and very hungry pythons.

Highfire, by Eoin Colfer:  Vern, the last-of-his-kind fairy tale dragon hides out from the world in the  Louisiana bayou bingeing on Netflix. Enter a crooked sheriff, and let the airboats explode.

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder