Book By Book

One of my book groups recently chose Katharine Graham’s autobiography, Personal History. I don’t normally write a review of a book that I haven’t finished, but I spent almost three weeks reading through page 405 of this hefty tome, so I think I got a good perspective on both its positive characteristics and its flaws.

In case you aren’t familiar with her, Katharine Graham was the renowned owner of The Washington Post for many decades. Having inherited it from her father and her husband, Katharine took over the job of publisher of what became one of the nation’s top newspapers at a time when it was very rare for women to even be involved in business at all, let alone in such a powerful position. However, as an autobiography, Personal History covers her entire life, not just her time with The Washington Post.

In fact, the book begins well before her birth, with background and histories of both her mother’s and father’s sides of the family, going back many generations. Her father’s family was Jewish, with roots in France, while her mother’s family was Lutheran, originally from Germany. Their interfaith marriage was unusual for the time, but her parents were prosperous and popular public figures, first in New York state and later in Washington, DC, as her father became more involved with politics. Katharine had a privileged childhood, surrounded by wealth and opportunity, with her family splitting their time between multiple huge houses in the city and the country.

When Graham’s father first purchased The Washington Post, it was the smallest and least profitable of 5 major newspapers in the DC area, but he was determined to make it successful. Under first his leadership, then that of Katharine’s husband, Phil Graham, and finally, with Katharine herself at the helm, the family newspaper eventually became the top-notch, respected newspaper that it is today. Along the way, Katharine experienced a fair amount of tragedy in her life as well, including the death of her husband.

At 625 pages, Personal History is a very long book but also a very dense book, packed full of details, names, dates, and other minutiae. Despite its title, it is far more than just a personal history of Katharine’s life but also a chronicle of her family history, a detailed history of The Washington Post (and the family also owned Newsweek), and an intricate insider’s view of politics from the 1920’s through the 1980’s.

For my taste, there was just too much packed into one book. While I found much of it interesting, it was a very slow read, and I would have preferred more personal and less business. The best part of the book was when she wrote about her husband’s illness and eventual death because those sections were imbued with an emotion that was often lacking from the rest of the book. I’m not a fan of celebrity memoirs/autobiographies to begin with – I’d rather read about “regular” people – and the constant name-dropping in this book was tiresome to me. Finally, the book could have used a good editor to help cull and shorten it a bit to highlight the best of it. I had to wonder whether her editor was afraid to suggest too many changes to such a high-ranking, renowned journalist/publisher!

Not everyone agrees with me. For instance, the Pulitzer committee must have thought highly of Personal History because it won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography in 1998. Although I wasn’t able to attend our book group discussion, I heard that ratings on our 10-point scale ranged from 3 to 9.5! Most readers in our group agreed the writing wasn’t great but some felt the fascinating content outweighed that.

This book is fascinating, in many respects. Besides Katharine’s personal life story, you can see the entire history of modern politics in this book. The Grahams were very close to several U.S. Presidents, and that inside view is interesting – being in the hotel room when Jack Kennedy decided on his running mate at the Democratic National Convention, being whisked off to Lyndon Johnson’s Texas ranch for an impromptu weekend, etc. And, of course, The Washington Post was instrumental in breaking the news of Watergate. Katharine’s story also presents an interesting view of the changing role of women from the 1950’s to the present day.

All in all, I learned a lot reading (65% of) this book and found some of it very interesting; however, it was dense and overcrowded with details and not an easy read. I enjoyed it enough to spend a few weeks on it for my book group…but not enough to spend another couple of weeks finishing it! If you have a particular interest in U.S. politics, journalism, or the role of women in the workplace, then you will probably like this book more than if you are just looking for an interesting read.

625 pages, Alfred A. Knopf

I kept hearing rave reviews of the graphic novel Here by Richard Mcguire from a wide range of sources, including my favorite podcast, Books on the Nightstand, so I requested it from my library. It’s going to be hard to describe this very unique, fascinating book, but I will try to do it justice.

Here is not a typical graphic novel. In fact, it’s not typical of anything but is a wholly unique creation. The entire book is made up of 2-page color spreads showing one corner of a house over different periods of time, ranging from 3,000,000,000 BCE to 22,175, though most of the pages fall somewhere within human history (and obviously, there was no house on that spot for some of those years!). I had expected the book to be in chronological order, but the time periods jump around throughout the book, though there are a few pages that show a sequence in a particular year. So, within the first ten pages of the book, we see that corner of the house in 2015, 1957, 1942, 2007, and 1623. Sometimes, there are small insets of a different time period layered on top of the base picture of the room in another year.

On each two-page spread, the view is of the corner of a ground floor living room in some unmentioned location (but East Coast, given the colonial goings-on in the 1770’s). We see the house go through all sorts of different styles in interior design but also its varying inhabitants carrying on their normal daily lives. Sometimes, when there are a few pages in sequence, we even see those inhabitants growing up or growing older. As I mentioned, the pages are not chronological, so you might see a 1950’s living room on one page, Native Americans in a pristine forest on the next, a futuristic scene on the next, and a present-day view of the living room on the next.

The book is an absolutely fascinating history of the world as seen from one small spot. There is plenty of nostalgia in the 1950’s furnishings or the 1970’s fashions, and it is interesting to peruse the changes in human history from one century to the next. It may sound impersonal, but some years are returned to multiple times, so there are some recurring “characters,” even if we don’t know their names, and on those sequential pages that follow the same scene, we get glimpses of little human dramas.

You can’t just read this book from the beginning to the end and then set it aside. It just begs to be picked up again and again and studied intently. I found myself flipping pages back and forth to remind myself of what had been shown for a certain year or where a person had showed up before. It is endlessly fascinating. The beautiful hardcover book would be perfect to keep out on your coffee table for people to peruse, except they would probably keep walking off with it, unable to tear themselves away from the history and drama playing out on its pages…all within one corner of one house.

Pantheon Books

I recently listened to the audio book The Law of Loving Others by Kate Axelrod and enjoyed this emotionally charged, realistic novel about a teen girl dealing with her mother’s diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Emma is in her junior year at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, heading home to the metro NY area for winter break with her boyfriend, Daniel. Emma doesn’t have a lot of close friends at school, but she and Daniel connected at the end of September and have been inseparable ever since. Emma is looking forward to a fun break split between time with her parents, time with her best friend, Annie, and trips to visit Daniel in Manhattan.

When Emma arrives home that day, though, something strange is going on. Her mother is acting oddly, first thinking that someone somehow snuck into her closet and swapped out all her clothes and later, that damaging rays are bombarding the house. Emma is freaked out because her mother has always been a calm, rational force in her life, always there for Emma. She tries to talk to Daniel, Annie and her father, but they just reassure her everything will be fine.

Within days, her mother has been taken to the hospital, and Emma learns a startling secret: that her mother has had schizophrenia since she was a young woman (normally controlled by medications) and that she is now suffering a schizophrenic break. Suddenly, Emma’s whole world feels like it is spinning out of control. Not only is her mother very sick, but this is the first she’s heard of her diagnosis – or even that there was a problem at all. Is her whole childhood a lie?

The rest of the novel is focused on Emma’s response to this crisis and her attempts to try to make sense of it all. She worries that Daniel won’t understand, that he won’t be there for her. She worries about how much to tell other people. And, she worries about the cute boy she meets at the mental hospital, a young man named Phil whom she vaguely knows from Annie’s brother. Phil is in the hospital visiting his twin brother, and he seems to be the only person in the world who truly understands what Emma is going through. She is also worried that she might develop schizophrenia herself, once she finds out there is a genetic component to the illness.

Coincidentally, this is one of several teen/YA audio books I have listened to in the last few months dealing with mental illness, and they have all been very moving and educational for me. In this case, Emma doesn’t always make good choices or select healthy coping mechanisms, but I thought it was a very realistic portrayal of how a teen girl might respond in such an unthinkable situation. The Law of Loving Others is an emotionally powerful novel about a teen trying to cope with a life-changing situation.

Listening Library

NOTE: This novel is best for older teens or young adults, as it includes plenty of drinking, drug use, sex, and adult language.

 Other teen/YA novels dealing with mental illness:

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

I Was Here by Gayle Forman

Falling Into Place by Amy Zhang

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick

It's Tuesday and that means it's Top Ten day over at The Broke and the Bookish! Head over there and join in on the fun. I love top ten lists and used to do my own Tuesday list, even before this meme began, but I haven't had enough time to participate lately, so I'm enjoying this today.


Today's topic is Top Ten Books from my Childhood/Teen Years I'd Like to Revisit. Great! I loved reading when I was a kid. Only one problem: I have already revisited almost all of my childhood favorites as an adult, many of them to share with my own two sons.

So, I am splitting my list into two parts - first, those old favorites that I have already reread and then a shorter list of those I still want to revisit:

Childhood Books I Have Enjoyed Revisiting:

• Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren - one of my all-time favorites when I was a kid. Who didn't want to be Pippi? I read it aloud to my sons who loved it just as much as I had.
• The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis - My 2nd grade teacher read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe aloud to us, and I was hooked - I ran to the school library and read all the rest of the series! As soon as my boys were old enough, my husband and I read the entire series out loud to them, and of course, they loved it!
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle - my all-time most favorite childhood book. I read it over and over again and even starred as Meg when our 4th grade class put on a play of the story. I was so excited to read this to my sons that I started too young, and they got scared, but a few years later, they each read it and loved it and read the rest of the series (all of which I still have!)
• The Borrowers by Mary Norton - Again, what kid didn't want to be a Borrower? I also read this one aloud to my sons, and they liked it just as much.
• Harriet the Spy by Louis Fitzhugh - another favorite of mine when I was in elementary school, but when I excitedly read it to my sons, they didn't like it much. They thought Harriet was mean to her classmates, which just goes to show they are much better people than I was at their age!
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott - No, I didn't read this one to my sons! But I loved it as a teen and re-read it a few years ago, after March by Geraldine Brooks peaked my interest. Just as good as I remembered.

Childhood/Teen Books I Would Like to Revisit:

• Nancy Drew series by Carolyn Keene - oh, the hours I wiled away with Nancy, Bess, and George! It's been decades since I've read one and would love to revisit them. I have a few here somewhere. My youngest son loved to read the Hardy Boys and developed a serious obsession with the 70's Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys TV show!
• The Rest of the Series That Starts with A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle - as I mentioned above, I read the whole series when I was a kid, as did my oldest son years later. I still have all the books on my shelf and would love to revisit the rest of the story.
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens - This was my first Dickens' novel, read for 9th grade English, and I remember enjoying it but only vaguely remember the plot and details.
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte - Read for my 10th grade English class, with one of my favorite teachers. I remember I loved it and have been meaning to reread it - again, it's right upstairs on my shelf!

How about you? What books from your childhood or teen years would like to revisit or have you enjoyed rereading?