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

Faulty memories

Uncovered the ugly truth of my childhood today. No, not Granddad, although he was a scary character. Not Grandmother's lavender hair. I am talking about those dining room drapes!

This is not the dining room of my memory. Geez! The curtains in this Christmas 1964 photo were sort of yellow-green and a euphemistic "ochre," with black brush strokes on textured off-white. The bamboo blinds above were faded orange-brown with an ever-present dust coating. The glass shelf above the curtains was a head-bump waiting to happen. What color were the walls? For sure the linoleum tile was the black-speckled crumb-concealer, as we had that for a long, long time!

Repressed memories on those self-help cassettes I listened to in the nineties were usually sexual and physical abuse. Melody Beattie and Gerald Jampolsky were healing bigger stuff than bad drapes. But I definitely repressed this aesthetic affront.

© 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

Sticking the dismount

It's been five years in this apartment, with plenty of odd experiences dealing with management. This is the first time I ever received a bad report card!

My plants aren't dead, I said. They are just resting up for spring. And the item I'm storing on the porch is the watering can to refresh the not-dead plants.

Between this blemish on my permanent record and my bum knee waking me to the realities of aging, I'm getting the urge to move on down to a ground level apartment.

Seemed like an old-time tv show sketch when three guys in blotchy coveralls started roller-painting the stair rail before I did my creaky descent to leave for work.

Thanks to Hugh "Lumpy" Brannum aka Mr. Green Jeans aka Bainter the Painter.


© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

Painting my mom

Digitizing my life is an admission that no one will ever be interested in the physical memorabilia I haul around but am not quite able to send to the landfill. Scanning just sends the items to a place where images never get sorted or become searchable.

I'm getting better at letting go,  though, so I did not scan all the Camp Fire Girl certificates in my first scrapbook. Didn't even scan the paper napkins from Sixties wedding receptions--Crys and Jim ; Jan and Bill ; Catherine and Frank. This is sooo healthy!

Mom is a different story. I had to scan Mom, the first portrait I painted from life at my little easel down in the laundry room with Prang watercolors. All the neighbor kids were making pictures of their moms for the big competition at the new Gateway Bank up at Gateway Mall on "O" Street. The competition was called, "My Mom's a Picture."

The neighbor kids made fun of my painting. My "Mom" was not pretty and she did not have glamorous lips. She looked like she was crying because the paint dripped. There was no time to draw a new picture making Mom look more like Disney's Sleeping Beauty. I wrapped Mom in Saran Wrap and glued her to purple construction paper.

The new bank awarded me the big prize of one crisp dollar bill. That was big bucks for an eight year old in 1963, a time when the tooth fairy brought a dime. The money wasn't important. My mother was the whole picture to me.

The jewelry worn by my mom in the painting.

© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder

School supply envy

Typical. The grand Trunk Project began as an effort to cull, weed, lessen, unload, clear out, deselect, downsize, ship off, digitize, or all of the above, the contents of a decaying old trunk so as not to burden my sons when I am nearer the cul-de-sac on the road of life.



Allegedly, we can discard items that do not "spark joy." Trouble is, most items spark curiosity. I untied the bundle of letters, and opened the envelopes. Next thing I knew the contents of the trunk were fanned out all across the floor demanding to be read, related, curated, contained and preserved for perpetuity.

My father's letters home to his mother during World War II are now encased in seventy dollars worth of archival clear sleeves for 3-ring binder. The zippered giant binder with shoulder strap, accordion file, and zippered pouches was a bargain on clearance, just $10.75. It's not archival, but it is an ode to junior high school supply Spiderman fans everywhere. It is the Peter Parker of nerd notebooks. I should have bought two.

Maybe it's all about junior high school supply envy.

© 2013-2018 Nancy L. Ruder

Stormy weather and amazing grace

It gets more difficult to blog. I've already told my stories. I worry my memory is an unreliable narrator. My personal mythology resembles a disintegrating comic book from the twirling rack in the dust motes of the Rexall Drug window on Main. Each week it gets more difficult to pass the quiz of current events past and future. The choppy water doesn't smell all that great. Rot stirred up from the bottom. Cherry blossom petals blast in a sideways storm. The saturated brush hovers low over the damp thick paper.

Choppy water on the Tidal Basin

Storm front approaching 

Fifty years since King's assassination

  

So many wreaths and speeches in fifty years. So little action in the cause of mankind as a whole.

Loyalty to mankind as a whole

Field trip kids copying quotes

© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder

Thanksgiving memories first and ten, Alps and zen

Football memories in black and white on a very small, snowy screen--

Football and pitted black olives on Thanksgiving. Corralling my siblings to make construction paper, toilet paper tube, and crayon holiday table decorations for Pilgrims + Indians, and Cornhuskers vs. Sooners. For many years this Big 8 Conference rivalry held the gridiron centerpiece on Thanksgiving Day, right after the parades. The 1971 meeting was dubbed the "Game of the Century." In my mind Jeff Kinney is not the famous creator of the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series, but the Cornhusker teammate of Jerry Tagge and Johnny Rodgers.

GO BIG RED

1971 The Husker offense was led by junior flanker Johnny Rodgers, a future Heisman Trophy winner, senior quarterback Jerry Tagge, and bullish senior tailback Jeff Kinney; the latter two were first round picks in the 1972 NFL Draft. The Sooner defense was anchored by all-Big 8 defensive tackle Derland Moore, a future All-American and NFL Pro Bowler.^[

In 1971, in what has become known as college football's "Game of the Century," Rodgers returned a punt 72 yards to score the first touchdown which set the tone for his team's 35-31 victory over the University of Oklahoma Sooners. ESPN describes Rodgers' performance as "unforgettable." However, some observers consider his greatest single performance to be in the 1973 Orange Bowl when he led his team to a 40-6 victory over the University of Notre Dame. Rodgers ran for three touchdowns, caught a 50-yard pass for another touchdown, and threw a 54-yard touchdown pass to a teammate. He did all this before leaving the game with 21 minutes still to play.^[1]

Brand new at the library, Chuck Carlson's book about the "Ice Bowl" of New Year's Eve, 1967, set off this personal pigskin reverie.  Bart Starr was my favorite as a kid growing up in the Vince Lombardi/Bob Devaney years.  Good was good. (Evil was Oklahoma). That the game was played at minus 45 degrees was abominable evidence that grownups made some questionable decisions -- and not just your father's necktie.

Perhaps a book about the "Heidi Bowl" will be next.  Joe Namath vs. alive-hilled Alps. November  1968.  Curt Gowdy announcing.  The network leaving the tense game to show the scheduled family movie, "Heidi."

Practiced a "mountain meditation" in class Tuesday. We imagined a mountain, observed every detail of the mountain through the hours of the day and the seasons of a year. Then we brought the mountain inside ourselves. I felt very calm and heavy and immovable. No goats, cheese, or embroidered aprons on my mountain.

And because this is a post-Thanksgiving post, I will leave you with the Leon Lett fumble in the 1993 Classic  between the Cowboys and Dolphins in the snow and sleet in Dallas -- view here.

© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder

Abby Normal

Our favorite yard decorations on the every Sunday morning walking route are these delightful dancing ghosts. The slightest breeze gets them doing a bit of a shimmy. In the early dark of October evenings the ghosts are lit by a long string of lights that form their "arms." It is the ghosts' second year in the neighborhood. My walking buddy and I find they make us ridiculously happy in the era of dismal news, disasters, lies, predators, massacres, and on and on. I don't know if Trump has brought back Christmas as he proclaims, but I am sure glad for Halloween. If I had a yard and a tree, I would sure make some dancing ghosts! Here's how.

When the "Addams Family" television series premiered in 1964, my dear parents, Howie and Fritz, took their big book of New Yorker cartoons off the high shelf and introduced me to the cartoons of Charles Addams, William Steig, Saul Steinberg, Syd Hoff, Peter Arno,  and James Thurber. Dad would patiently explain the historical and political back stories of cartoons I did not understand. I've been hooked on political cartoons ever since. They gave me an insight into history, but also into my parents' takes on the history they had lived through. Later they would introduce me to World War II through Bill Mauldin's cartoons in Up Front.

Saying "Merry Christmas" again.

Instead of cartoons, I've spent the day studying a cookbook! Talk about abnormal behavior! This is one very practical and inspiring cookbook, with great color photos and explanations. Since it is finally cool enough to consider cooking, I am hooked. Look for it at your library, and request it if they don't have it! America's Test Kitchen's One-Pan Wonders may change your life.

And just in case you haven't taken this trip:

Get on the bus, Gus.

© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder

Motivational seekers

Nobody expected the flurries would stick or go on so long. The TV weather guys said there was a 10% chance of  waltzing snowflakes. How did each snowflake feel about getting up, lacing on those toe shoes and going to work knowing the gig might never happen? 

These are not the star snowflakes, mind you. They won't get the frozen sparkly glory. These are just the corps of interchangeable snowflakes making slightly over minimum wage. Did these random snowflakes ever get the overhead view of a June Taylor Dancers kaleidoscopic production to find their little roles in the big production?

Word rippled in drifts through our workplace. The boss and his #2 were outside sweeping the snow off our cars, cleaning our windshields for a safe drive home. How chilly awesome is that?  I felt appreciated and acknowledged. My personal life and safety seemed valued. I was amused by two men of a certain age out playing in the snow in the guise of cleaning our cars. 

Motivation is the unplanned theme of the week. Reading Payoff on lunch breaks. Listening to Norbert Leo Butz's terrific performance of Phil Knight's memoir, Shoe Dog, on my slow commutes.

What motivates me? Being able to get that big occasional view of the grand scheme and my place in it. Having my ideas acknowledged. Being in the loop. Verbal thanks.

Knight quotes General Patton several times, and this may be my long-term takeaway from the book:

'Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do

 and let them surprise you with the results.'

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Walmart dropping

So many reasons to resist a trip to Walmart, but there it is. I feel Wendell Berry angst every time I go pick up a prescription at the small rural community killer, thanks to Bert Evans, Studs Terkel, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Centennial College.

Mostly I dread the post-apocalyptic flocks of mutant grackles grackling at full blast in the parking lot and taunting me from the roof of my Buick. Plus, one never knows what one will step in alighting from one's carriage.

Last night the grackles could not be heard over the howling wind. Steering my shopping cart against the gale was nearly impossible. Wind chill was eleven degrees.

Just six hours earlier I strolled in balmy seventy-degree air snapping phone photos of glorious leaf colors. And what weirdness propelled my mission to Walmart's pharmacy?

The voice mail said only, "Noses. I'm not getting Libby." It had to be code.


© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Percolation palpitations

Ruth Ware's  The Woman in Cabin 10  is dredging physical memories of anxiety episodes twenty years past. Probably not the safest audiobook for my long commutes! Factor in the realization I forgot to turn off Mr. Coffee before my drive, and just blast me on-beyond-caffeine back to the panic planet.

How astonishing it is that our brains can connect squiggly black marks on a page or the syllables of a storyteller to personal memories of actual physical experiences deep in our past! Brain imaging would show an aurora borealis lighting up in our heads. And yes, "Aurora" is the name of the luxurious ship in Scandinavian waters in Ware's novel. Unfortunately that same astonishing brain can't remember to turn off the coffee maker.

The neglected old Mr. Coffee did not burn down the apartment building, but I'm not going to push my luck. That small appliance has the certain smell of doom. I need a coffee maker with an automatic shut-off.

...So the new miniature Brew&Go only makes enough coffee for one travel mug then turns off. I get a full sensory memory of every time I've made a tiny carafe of coffee in a hotel room without that twinge of concern about my memory halfway to work.

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Upside of an unbearable campaign

Can't listen to the radio on my long commutes. The news makes pledge drives seem delightful by comparison. Best audiobooks of this excruciating presidential campaign:

    

  




© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Toast-it postie notes

Fear itself. OR death, taxes. Oh! No! Public Speaking!

Maybe I'm just too ______________________ to worry. (Choose one)

• Old, crusty, cantankerous
• Proud, happy, relaxed
• Rich, famous, beautiful

Memory options:

• Teleprompter
• Writing on my arm with Sharpies
• Post-it notes
• Index cards
• Outlines with Roman numerals and indentations typed with carbon paper

Friendly advice:

1. NO potty-training stories
2. Practice in front of a mirror
3. Using sock puppets would cover up my pretty manicure

Preschool teaching experience suggests:

• Bring visual aids
• Use sensory vocabulary and images
• Ask everyone to sit criss-cross applesauce

Examples from a Toast Yoda:

• A toast is a gift
• It's not about me
• Enjoy the moment 
• Make it personal for the audience
• Make them laugh

On the third rewrite of the fourth attempt of a toast for the wedding reception of my all-grown-up youngest son and his stellar bride I had one of those flashbacks our Health teachers predicted. I think I hyperventilated.

But then Jolene Walker, my junior high speech teacher seemed pleased I've finally fought my fear of public speaking to a draw. Really, now. Would you rather debate Donald Trump on national t.v. or deliver a three-minute how-to speech about broiling T-bone steaks to a classroom of junior high smart-ass teasing tormentors?

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

IMG on a memory stink

This just in from the You'll Wish You Labeled Your Files Division of the Overloaded Memory Stink Department, (YWYLYFD of the OMSD):

IMG is a LaBrea tar pit of searching frustration. I meant to get back to those scanned photos and documents to identify them, but it never happened. The photos I seek are on one of several unnamed flash thumb stick gizmos. Each gizmo has hundreds of files with only IMG and a number for a name. Doing a Henry Fonda "On Golden Pond" imitation wondering who the hell is in these photos.

Just laughing about these IMGs from a 1946 parade in Pierce, Nebraska, especially the truck that looks like a crepe paper streamer Pekingese pooch. Bet it was quite the event in this one stop-light town.

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

IMG on a memory stink

This just in from the You'll Wish You Labeled Your Files Division of the Overloaded Memory Stink Department, (YWYLYFD of the OMSD):

IMG is a LaBrea tar pit of searching frustration. I meant to get back to those scanned photos and documents to identify them, but it never happened. The photos I seek are on one of several unnamed flash thumb stick gizmos. Each gizmo has hundreds of files with only IMG and a number for a name. Doing a Henry Fonda "On Golden Pond" imitation wondering who the hell is in these photos.

Just laughing about these IMGs from a 1946 parade in Pierce, Nebraska, especially the truck that looks like a crepe paper streamer Pekingese pooch. Bet it was quite the event in this one stop-light town.

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder