Family Memories

It's a familiar plot line. A traumatic event causes a character to examine his life, dredging up memories of his past in order to come to terms with a tragedy. In the case of Martin Lambert in Dennis McFarland's first novel The Music Room, the event is the suicide of his younger brother Perry. The call comes from the New York police just as Martin is cleaning out his San Francisco apartment and struggling to accept the ending of his marriage. He heads east to try to sort out the reasons his brother chose to end his life.

What follows is Martin's search, both in the past and in the present, to make sense of what has happened. McFarland beautifully describes Martin's memories of his unconventional childhood, fragments that slowly fit together to reveal some of the reasons for the difficulties he and his brother faced as adults. In his search for answers in New York, Martin becomes involved with his late brother's girlfriend as they both look for understanding of Perry's loss in each other.

The two brothers and their father are all musicians, and McFarland's writing often seems to have a musical quality, not just because of the beauty of his prose, but also because of the layered non-linear way that past, present and even Martin's dreams are woven together. Although it may sound relentlessly dark, there are moments of humor and an ending that offers a sort of redemption.

What's a Parent to Do?

Or a grandparent or a teacher or anyone having contact with children? Nurtureshock by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman is a fascinating book which raises as many questions as it may seem to answer. The subtitle of the book is New Thinking about Children. It is a collection of 10 chapters that can generally stand alone but which taken together turn the world of child development upside down - depending of course on your vantage point. (Example: Is emotional intelligence really such a good thing if imprisoned felons have higher emotional intelligence that the population as a whole?) And though most of the chapters deal with very young children, a couple of the chapters do concern teenagers (their sleep requirement, driver's ed, rebellion).

It is hard to escape the attention of late that the media have given to the advances in neuroscience but, with deference probably to the large number of baby boomers, the emphasis has been on the developments affecting life's later years. It turns out as you will learn from this book that there have also been astounding discoveries by neuroscientists with respect to the very young. And the designs of the experiments with the very young are ingenious!

When my children were younger the popular parenting approach was STEP (Systematic Training for Effecting Parenting) with its emphasis on "I" messages and logical consequences. More recently the approach seems to have been "All praise all the time" and helicopter parenting. No doubt this book will not be the last word on children and their development. Children's lying, sibling fighting, racial tolerance, language development are complicated and important issues for which there is no one magic formula. But understanding the principles set out in this book is important. It is also a call to action - to change the way we test for gifted children, to talk to children explicitly about race, to re-think the benefits of Sesame Street, ...

Bittersweet Vacations

Richard Russo’s latest novel “That Old Cape Magic” is different from his past novels that have garnered so much praise and an almost cult following. This novel does not take place in upstate New York, where Russo was born, nor does it deal with the blue collared workers who he is so famous for bringing to life.

“That Old Cape Magic” takes place at two weddings, a year apart, that are set in Cape Cod and Maine. The “hero” of Russo’s latest story is Jack Griffin, known as Griffin. Griffin is a 55 year old college professor at a liberal arts college in Connecticut. And Griffin is having a mid-life crisis. Griffin’s father has died and he is carrying his father’s ashes to disburse at Cape Cod, where Griffin and his parents spent every summer. It is here that Richard Russo unleashes his skills as a comedy writer. The dilemma of where exactly to throw these ashes gets ridiculous.

Griffin’s parents were Ivy League educated academics that ended up at a boring college in, as they will only refer to it, “the mid fucking west”. But every summer they spent a month on Cape Cod. It was their dream to live there some day and as they drove over the Sagamore Bridge to Cape Cod, Griffin’s parents would sing “That Old Black Magic” substituting Cape for Black. But Griffin’s parents were miserable where ever they were.

The story progresses as Griffin relives his childhood thinking about what horrible parents they were but unable to let them go, or to forgive them. What he does do is alienate his wife of thirty some years and try to recapture the glory of his days as a screenwriter in Los Angeles.


Russo has written a novel about family, nostalgia, and discontent. Griffin realizes that he cannot escape his parents, shut out their voices in his head, or return to the fantasy of his youth. Richard Russo has added some hilarious scenes and witty dialogue to his repertoire. This may be a new direction for Mr. Russo and it’s fun to read. A mid-life crisis with some hilarity mixed in with introspection makes for a great story.

Living2Read Roundtable

One of the reasons that people join book groups is to have a forum for discussing books that they read with others who have read the same books. To date, our blog has not been like that. It has functioned more as a resource for finding interesting books to read, for answering the question: What should I read next? We hope that you have taken some of our suggestions and felt rewarded.

Now we would like to introduce the Living2Read Roundtable to provide that much-desired forum for discussion. We want to have a real conversation with you, albeit in cyberspace, about some of our books. If by reading we are able to broaden our understanding of others and deepen our understanding of ourselves, then how much more enriching to share that understanding.

We have selected the week of Nov. 2 - 6 to talk about The Secret River by Kate Grenville. It is a prize-winning novel set in the New South Wales colony in what would become Australia. (Available in paperback). Our hope is that, with this advance notice, more of us can read the book and then, during that designated week in November, post Comments to share our thoughts and opinions about it.

So mark your calendars and start reading - we hope you'll join in!