Fiction faves published in 2021

I'll start at the top with the Nancy Award winner, The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles. And not just because I'm from Nebraska! I'll be reading it again after the demand calms down a bit at the library.

More focused, intense, and beautiful than Overstory, Bewilderment weaves a warning about our endangered planet through beautiful observations of nature and a powerful father and son portrait.

Hell of a Book has a hell of a structure telling a powerful story in a fascinating way. Is this the layer of the onion, or the memory of the onion, or a dream of an onion?

In the undiscovered gem category, I am pleased to present one of the most enjoyable books of the year, Raft of Stars. It's perfect for fans of Where the Crawdads Sing. Two ten-year old boys think they’ve committed a horrific crime, and light off into the Northwoods of Wisconsin. Four adults track them in the forest and down a river, including a sheriff recently arrived from Texas and doubting his future in law enforcement.  The wonder, the ferocity, and the healing power of nature make this a great adventure in reading. A terrific story well told, with characters worth caring about.

In the mystery and suspense category I recommend Bullet Train and Velvet Was the Night. Yes, Barack, I liked Harlem Shuffle, too. 

Should you happened to be annoyed with the governor of the Lone Star State and his disingenuous  nonresponse to the FEBRUARY WEATHER EVENT and POWER GRID FIASCO, I suggest Melanie Benjamin's The Children's Blizzard. Benjamin does a great job describing northeast Nebraska in 1888. While this blizzard is the stuff of lore where I grew up, it is not as famous in other places. The novel is an appropriate read when you are wrapped in quilts with just a flashlight for illumination.

 
Honorable mentions:

David Eggers has an idea where to stick those algorithms.

It's weird calling a novel historical fiction when it's set during my lifetime. It's like hearing David Bowie in the grocery store...or Opal and Nev.

Even if you don't need to read children's book for work, I recommend The Beatryce Prophecy to brighten your life. Definitely the best literary goat of the year, and way more fun than Lauren Groff's Matrix. Keep your library card right next to your vaccination record, kids!

 © 2013-2021 Nancy L. Ruder

Ask your doctor if nonfiction might be right for you.

Let's think about advertising. There are many horrifying parts to the Sackler history revealed in Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain. As a person old enough to remember television before direct to consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals, I blame the Sackler family for all those awful ads with side-by-side bathtubs.

Sifton's cookbook is inspiring, and also a fun cover-to-cover read.

Tasked with writing about a golf book for work, I was surprised to enjoy this audiobook.  While Coyne travels in search of “the Great American Golf Course,” he also ruminates about the future of golf, what makes a great course or hole, the ties across generations created by the game, as well as the changes in America since his newlywed parents first drove across the country during the Korean War.  He meets and golfs with an assortment of interesting characters along the way. Fun listening, but it made me miss my golfing father and championship golf enthusiast mom.

The late author's autobiography, allegedly for middle grade readers, is a fascinating, detailed story of a horrifyingly neglected childhood during and just after World War II. I recommend it to adult biography readers.

Spending time with Saunders exploring Russian short stories made me a better reader without that old English class feeling of having the story "spoiled."

Or, how to get the Texas lieutenant governor's undies in a bunch. 

© 2013-2021 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

Pit stop heaven

Being kidnapped and taken to Buc-ee's is a Texas thang. Your friends feel sad for you if you have not experienced the roadtrip wonder that is Buc-ee's. So they take you to the nearest one and watch as you go slack-jawed. Welcome to the cult!

Buc-ee's is not a truckstop, nor a convenience store with gas pumps. Buc-ee's  is a Texas phenomenon with World Famous Restrooms.  The restrooms are clean and huge, and the stalls are large enough for a mom and several kids. They are the restrooms you wish for in every airport you've ever had the misfortune to visit.

Except for the Buc-ee's Ugly Christmas Sweater-style t-shirts I wasn't tempted by the branded merchandise. Planning ahead for next year's employee ugly sweater contest didn't seem worth $15.00.

The exciting news for this old litter educator is that Buc-ees and the Texas Department of Transportation have a cross-branded campaign to reduce litter on Texas highways. Don't Mess With Texas with Buc-ee's should be a powerful ad campaign.

My kidnapper and I are old enough to remember entering the gas station to get the key to the Ladies' Restroom out around the back of the Sinclair or Texaco station. Once in Utah the key was not required because the door had fallen off its hinges the last time the restroom was cleaned.

My mom, Fritzi kept a travel notebook in the glovebox. She noted mileage between clean restroom locations along highways AND places t o get a good piece of pie. Fritzi would have been a Buc-ee's cult convert!

On this day in 2010 my sister and I drove our dad from Lincoln, Nebraska's Eastmont Manor to the Life Care Center of Plano, Texas, the most difficult road trip either of us ever undertook. Today's adventure lacked the snow, the dementia, and the Depends, thank heaven.



Bob Daddy-O Wade passed away this week. Thank you, Daddy-O for the inspiration of your giant frog sculptures at Carl's Corner Truck Stop. They set me on a papier mache adventure of great creative joy.

Road trip reminiscence references:

• Stuckeys rhymes with Buc-ee's. A feature of mid-Sixties travel on Interstate 80. 

•  Sapp Bros. "Big Coffee Pot" truckstop west of Omaha.
• Bosselmans in Grand Island, Nebraska.
• Wall Drug in South Dakota.

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

BIG DANG WASP

One of these days is not like the others, to paraphrase a Sesame Street song. For instance, this afternoon we had a black wasp bigger than a hummingbird flying around the library. It could have been a spy drone for all we knew.

Our library is a gem wrapped in a jewel box, all crevices, cornices, coving, coffered ceilings, tray ceilings with recessed lighting, and assorted architectural doodahs. Much for an espionage wasp to explore. Now that I think about it, the wasp looked a lot like a young Pierce Brosnan.

Just before closing time the wasp took a low and close buzz into the library director's office. Deep in end-of-fiscal-year acrobatics she'd been unaware of our Hymenoptera intruder. Now, under attack, the director blasted out of there, slamming the door, and laughing in gleeful terror. The evil fiend was trapped! Trouble is, when you lock a velociraptor in the kitchen, or a  wasp in your office, your keys, purse,  phone, and ID badge are locked in, too.

What would Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht do in this Worst-Case Scenario? They've been bringing us useful and/or hilarious disaster survival tips for twenty years now. Now when we need it more than ever!

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

Social media posts as picture postcards, just faster

Summer reading of the best kind--I got a postcard from my grandson in the mail from Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo. How awesome is that? Personal hand-printed mail that traveled across geographic space over ticking hours and minutes and days to land in my physical mailbox. Woo-hoo! Sting rays and bats and tigers, oh my!

I'm struggling with my lunch break reading of Gretchen McCulloch's consideration of social media linguistics, Because Internet.  I'm intrigued by our turbo-changing informal writing culture. My problem is keeping track of McCulloch's cohorts of internet and social media adopters: Old Internet People, Full Internet People, Semi Internet People, Post Internet People and Pre Internet People. Really, they just need catchier names. The important idea is that we are in an era of unprecedented informal written communication  activity. People who would never have picked up a pen or typed out a memo are communicating by text, tweet, and post. They are creating new ways to add intonation, layers of meaning, emphasis, breath pauses, and speech-mimicking spellings.

McCulloch compares Beatle George Harrison's postcards with brief messages and doodles mailed in the '70s with use of emoticons and emojis today. Brief informal written communication isn't new, but the number of people participating is vastly different. Doodles and tiny faces are just attempts to indicate mood in a tiny box for a message.

Across cohorts and generations we still have some gaps of interpretation and understanding. My "NEW fiction" may just indicate a special library shelving location, while my coworker takes it as a shouted criticism of her shelving efforts.

We may need to identify and acknowledge those internal critics, editors, and even mentors perched on our shoulders with red pens and twinkly star stickers. Who is grading us for spelling, punctuation, legibility, and turning in our work on time? How do we feel about what goes into our Permanent Record? On my shoulders sit toga-clad judges who happen to be my great-aunt Emma and Miss Helen Madsen from seventh grade English class.

I am often guilty of being too flip, too blunt, too esoteric in speech and writing. Social media is a complex Venn diagram of audiences -- those we have in mind when we post, those with access to the post now, those viewing the post in the unknown future, those lacking the Rosetta stone to unlock the meaning.

What about the sensory experience of texting or posting? I don't get the joy of twirling the display rack of color postcards  (5 for $1.00) in the corner of the souvenir shop. Across the generations I DO get the XOXOX hugs and kisses I received from my grandmothers via the U.S. mail.

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

Tattoo gushing

If you must gush, gush softly.

Standing in a long line to check out at CVS, I could not help overhearing the cashier getting all in a bubbly lather about an admittedly hunky young dude's bicep tattoo. He had you and me sister on his arm. He had Mercator projections on his arm. He had latitude and longitude on his arm.  He had the whole world on his arm.

He also had a Snickers ice cream bar to purchase. The cashier switched from admiring the "very unique" tattoo to recommending her preferred Twix ice cream bars. I had to avert my eyes and cover my ears, while fumbling for my drug store reward keytag in the bottom of my purse. The cashier's nose ring was all a-quiver.

A pirate's life is a wonderful life a-rovin' over the sea. I was glad to purchase my get-well-soon card and leave for the PG-rated parking lot.

Yo-ho-ho and a frozen novelty to go.

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

Over the edge

There's one piece of the jigsaw edge very nearly fitting perfectly, except not, and it is throwing the whole framework off square. The color matches perfectly. The shape is just a sliver off.

The stand-off between our ridiculous Congress and the asinine President comes down to just one edge piece or one hammer.

Using a  hammer will not solve a jigsaw puzzle. It will just knock pieces off the table. Don't nobody vacuum!!

Young children use a combination of force and insistence on the rightness of their puzzle piecing. I expect a bit more reasoning and careful consideration of the shapes and colors from elected officials. Go stand on the other side of the table, turn on a lamp, or squint for heaven's sake.

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

Long-listed for [the coveted] Nancy Awards

In this year when I could not find a creative project to propel me, and felt the lack all year. I tried to fill the hole with books. Fortunately, there were some great reads crossing my desk. These are ones that have stayed with me long after the last page. Thank heaven for these books, fiction and non. In this dark year I am so grateful for sagas and modulated voices and atmosphere, for science and reason and introspection, for fresh viewpoints and researched history, for ambiguity, poetry, and scenic vistas, for close observation, moral dilemmas, context and humor, and especially for breathing room. The world is so much bigger and more beautiful than the shouting and harassing, the propaganda, the rats and the overalls.

  

    

      

    

  

All aboard! Discoveries by rail.

On my recent Colorado visit we played Ticket to Ride, a board game for three generations, ages six to almost Medicare.  If you have family get-togethers or blizzards in your fall/winter schedule, I highly recommend it.

After blogging Sunday about my dad's letters to his Ma during WWII, I could not let go with such a meager sampling of the contents. Reading through all the letters was delightful and revealing, as I found clues to later family dynamics reaching ahead for decades.

Let's start with delightedness on a train, or as Sam-I-Am might ask, "Could you would you on a train or in the dark or in the rain?" Not yet twenty-years-old, my dad took his first long train trip courtesy of the U.S. Army in April 1942, and it was a mind-blowing education. I am envious of his opportunity and enthusiasm for seeing the landscapes, the cities, and understanding physically the sizes and distances and time of our country. When we fly, or drive with movies playing for the kiddies in the back seat, we don't get that spatial feeling in our bodies or heads.

"I have decided to travel east this year. It shall be rather interesting."

Who wrote that? Marco Polo? Samuel Clemens? 

The  very young men riding from their Army intake at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to their basic training spa and resort at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, went by way of St. Jo and Hannibal, Missouri to St. Louis. "The steamboats on the river were of great interest for me." Illinois and Indiana had cherry orchards in bloom, oil fields, and small coal mines. On to Cincinnati!

"I will hate to sleep tonight for fear I will miss so much. But it will be dark anyway."

Another tunnel.

Roast beef and rolls with butter in the dining car! The next day the train went through Harper's Ferry to D.C. The Potomac River made a big impression, winding slowly through the country. I wonder if Dad was reassessing those stories about George chopping down a cherry tree or throwing a silver dollar across the river.

"I'm afraid I walked around with my mouth open most of the time.

"
© 2013-2018 Nancy L. Ruder

My tails of woe-lets

My problems are too little to be capital W Woes.  They are just woe-lets. Therefore, my tales of woe are just tails of woe-lets, especially since the doctor asked me to draw a spiral, but I thought she said spider. Well, sure, I can draw a spider, but the real problem is the ants.



What ants? The tiny ants displaced and irritable about the foundation repairs to the apartment building.

Hmm. The doctor made notes on the chart, and scheduled a hearing test, even though I have a vision appointment next week between the mammogram and the dermatologist.

  

I can draw spirals on the ends of my toes to look like the tails of woeful piglets. It's not so easy, though, to take toe self-photos of those tails of woe-lets.

   

The front end of a pig looks like a snorting button, but the tail end is a spiral in a circle. The best diagnosis is I've forgotten my problems by writing my petty piggy toe woes.

© 2013-2018 Nancy L. Ruder