The Year of Reading Happily, Part I

by

Lauren Roberts

End-of-the year columns possess a unique joy. It’s when I take the time to reflect on the books I’ve read throughout the year, on what I liked and disliked, on what I learned and what difference there has been in my life because of what I read.  

Those reflections are not necessarily profound or life-changing. They need not even be positive. But there must be something that I took away from each book, something that said to me, “This was a book worthy of your time.”

Many of those I read met that criterion so I believe they are worth your time too. In no particular order, here are some of the many books that made 2006 a good reading year for me. Some are new, some are old, some are on publishers’ backlists, some are out of print, but they are all books I read (or reread) this year and loved.

Blithe Tomato by Mike Madson (Heyday Books)
Reading Blithe Tomato felt like eating a farmers’ market tomato only hours removed from the field, a truly juicy, flavor-saturated and slightly messy but ultimately perfect experience. Madison lives in northern California, but his experiences are undoubtedly familiar to any small farmer. What makes them such a delight for the market aficionado is that these short essays (ranging from funny to poignant and philosophical to pragmatic) are a delicious tour through the joys and difficulties, dreams and reality, people and experiences of a small farmer’s life.

Madison’s eye for intriguing details is fascinating. Quite a few of the essays are about people: customers at the market, fellow farmers and family members. Others concern produce: persimmons, dried tomatoes, apples, grapes. And still others are about experiences: baking a cake, buying a roller, appendicitis. Regardless of the topic, Madison has a superb ability to enrich it with large dollops of sympathy, insight and values.

In “Eat Bitterness,” Madison explores the move toward sweetness in foods such as corn, grapes, apples, beets and carrots, and wonders if we aren’t moving downward toward “the lowest common denominator of human taste.”

“A traditional Chinese curse translates ‘Eat bitterness,’” he writes. “To a child this is indeed a curse, but to an adult to eat bitterness is not such a bad destiny. I think of Turkish coffee, escarole, unsweetened chocolate, wild almonds, quinine, winter melon, endives. Bitterness is complex and interesting; it lingers on the palate, and like music in a minor key, it sets a mood of contemplation and regret. The truly terrible curse, which I sometimes suspect is being aimed at all of us, is ‘Eat sweetness.’”

If as Socrates noted, the unexamined life is not worth living, then the life worth living should be examined. In Blithe Tomato, Madison’s life is—wonderfully. It is, in fact, the “finest kind” of examination as a friend would say: encompassing and intimate, funny and sad, thoughtful and lighthearted. In short, it is an exemplary read and a superb gift for anyone who loves gardening, farmers’ markets or food.  

              

Hotel Kid: A Times Square Childhood by Stephen Lewis (Paul Dry Books)
When finely done, memoirs can be superb reading. Hotel Kid is certainly that, an engaging, delightful memoir of growing up in New York’s famous Hotel Taft during its glory days of the 1930s and 1940s. Lewis’ recollection of his years of being waited on and indulged in by hotel staff, of his mother’s dominance (though his father was the manager, she is the real star of this story), of the differences between his privileged life and that of those on the bread and unemployment lines so prevalent at the time. “We hadn’t learned how to react to people whose agendas didn’t begin with making us happy,” he writes in a poignant revelation.

It’s the grip of hotel life, of its charms and its drawbacks, that infuses their lives and the book with something that seems unreal to most of us. Maybe it’s like room service. For this kid growing up in the Hotel Taft, it was a fact of life. For the rest of us, it would a special treat to be savored if we were lucky enough to be invited in. Here is that invitation—and what a superb gift it will make for those who like reading about that era, hotels, quirky families or who simply enjoy excellent writing.  

Rounding the Horn: Being the Story of Williwaws and Windjammers, Drake, Darwin, Murdered Missionaries and Naked Naives—A Deck’s Eye View of Cape Horn by Dallas Murphy (Basic Books)
Rounding the Horn takes the honors for having the longest subtitle of any book I own. Indeed, it was the subtitle that attracted me—who could resist a book that promised so much?—so perhaps it was intentional. It is reflective of its storyline which has an occasional tendency to verbosity—specifically, the author’s detailed descriptions of things that could be of interest only to boating fanatics—where concision would have not only moved the story along but prevented my eyes and mind from wandering.

Nevertheless—and I mean this—I enjoyed this book immensely because of the extensive and well-written history (natural and cultural) of Cape Horn. Though I knew its name from school textbooks, its story is as captivating as its description: “a pyramid of naked rock standing 425 meters above the sea in 55 degrees 59 minutes South latitude by 67 degrees 16 minutes longitude—at the foot of South America. There is no land to the west, none to the east, all the way around the world. Antarctica is the nearest continental landmass, 600 miles south . . . The myth and legend of Cape Horn—the sea stories—are rooted in the conditions. Extreme weather is the antagonist.”

In autumn of 2000, Murphy was part of a private party that sailed to and landed on Cape Horn to, as he writes, “understand the myth in the light of reality.” His story alternates between their adventures and the reality he came to understand, and he writes with an intensity that often matches the storms so vividly described. From Magellan’s first and Drake’s second world circumnavigations to Captain Willem C. Schouten’s first true rounding of the Cape in 1616; from the discovery of the Yahgan people who occupied this remote and almost uninhabitable island to Robert Fitzroy who took four of the Yahgans (“specimens”) back to England; from the missionaries whose interactions with the Yahgan ranged from friendly to disastrous to the single little wooden house that today houses a Chilean Navy family, Cape Horn’s story is one of astonishing complexity. Yes, this book’s flaws are noticeable, but its power is unmistakable. And it is definitely worth reading.   

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
I had read this play several times before an opportunity arose six years ago to see actor Brian Dennehy perform the title role. I can still remember how powerful was the performance of all the actors who made what was already a stunning work of art even more haunting. I have never forgotten it, and when I reread it this year I heard those voices, saw the stage and felt the strength of the hopelessness in their lives, of the use-them-up-and-dump-them attitudes of American business toward its employees, as strong in 1949 as now.

Rightfully considered an American classic, Death of a Salesman is the story of Willy Loman, a man whose life is shattering around him as he himself shatters, alternating between quick bouts of madness, misunderstood love and desperate anger at changes he cannot understand. It is a bitterly hard thing to read. It is also one of the most important things anyone can read. It should be read and, most of it all, it should be understood.

Guilty Pleasures: Indulgences, Addictions and Obsessions edited by Holly Silva (Andrews McMeel)
A short book of even shorter essays by eight members of a writers’ group who, one evening, wondered what would happen if they all had the same writing assignment. What happened was this: “How about essays on stuff we know we shouldn’t do, but we do it anyway just because it feels good at the time?”

The result is a delightful, intriguing collection of  essays on private indulgences—chocolate, shoes, antidepressants, crossword puzzles,  marrying money, golf, jewelry, non-parenthood, luxury cars, naps, toenail polish, baba ghanoush, soap, smoking, eBay, gossip, food, television, tennis and more—written about in ways that reveal their importance to the writer. Some are ripe for societal scorn, others might be scandalous, some just seem silly while a few are wonderfully rather than selfishly self-indulgent. Which ones are which probably depends on where the reader comes from, but all are honestly and vividly written. An unusual book, but one that I find myself returning to again and again when I need a grounding in my own womanhood.

Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X by Deborah Davis (Tarcher)
Anyone who has seen the famous painting, Madame X, by John Singer Sargent knows what a powerful impression it conveys. The reason is not exclusively Sargent’s talent. Certainly his subject, Virginie Amélie Gautreau, a New Orleans child who became the toast of Paris society in the 1880s, had a great deal to do with it—as can be seen in this fascinating portrayal.

At the time they met, American-born Sargent was an up-and-coming artist in Paris. Gautreau was a young married, ambitious woman, and the result of their collaboration so shocked the 1884 Paris Salon that one would be ruined and the other nearly so.

In order to make a living, Sargent originally turned to portraiture commissioned by royalty or the wealthy. His submissions to the annual Salon (an art event of extraordinary importance where one could move from obscurity to the front row of public notice) were critically acclaimed, and by 1881 he was given permanent status ensuring his success.

He became obsessed with painting Gautreau shorting after meeting her and in early 1883, she agreed to sit for him. It was a difficult process with many interruptions, and it wasn’t until six months later that he was able to move forward. It was a briliant work, and he had high hopes for it when he entered it in the 1884 Salon. But the public’s strong and negative reaction shocked both of them and altered their lives in ways neither could have foreseen.

Davis’ access to various papers—in particular a letter written by both (one on each side of the sheet) in which she expresses her true feelings about the painting—gives this story an expressive richness equal to that of the painting. For anyone interested in Paris, painting, Sargent, Madame X or just a superb read, this is the perfect gift.  

Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold by Michael Benanav (Lyons Press)
I love adventure books, particularly if they situate themselves within a larger context—nature, history, culture—that encourages the reader to explore implications beyond that of the adventure itself. Benanav uses all three of the aforementioned frameworks to structure his story of a journey so at odds with today’s connected, Americanized world that it seems almost a time travel odyssey.

It is the story of a salt journey. Not just any salt, but the solid blocks of Saharan rock salt known as “white gold,” which are harvested in desolate Stone-Age conditions deep in the country of Mali. Benanav, an American journalist, is quickly thrust into the lifestyle of these specialized desert travelers as his initial worry and uncertainty slowly give way to a sense of connection to the life in which he participates—sand walking, caring for his camel, preparing dorno (“the nomad version of an energy shake”), tea drinking, making camp, exhaustion, the nearly unbearable heat, dung beetles, bleeding sores and sidewinders (snakes).

The salt mines—“situated on utterly lifeless desert flays; not a single leaf, or even thorn, grows from the parched, crusty dirt, which is so sharp it bites into the soles of my bare feet”—are so desolate that the area was formerly used as gulag for Malian political prisoners. Workers’ huts are composed of stacked rocks cemented with mud. No windows, furniture or decoration exist because the huts are temporary, used only for the duration of a particular mine. When the mine (actually a pit approximately 20 feet square and dug directly into the ground) no longer yields the high-quality salt, the workers move on and open up another, building new huts next to it.

Benanav’s writing is as crisp and rich as the desert he describes. More than a fascinating travelogue or memoir, Men of Salt is a tribute not only to a people and their way of life, but rightful homage to the complex, difficult relationship of nature and human. And it is definitely worth reading.


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines have reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 750 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it