Favorite Books

hard at work on a book review
photo by my daughter

I don’t usually do memes, but this one I couldn’t resist. From the Desk of Bee Drunken posted a list of her favorite books and asked me to do the same. Bee and I first connected through a favorite author, Lionel Shriver. I have loved so many books; it was hard to choose. I’ve limited myself to 10 per category. Many of these novels have inspired my own writing.

The “childhood favorites” are the authors I read and re-read during my childhood. I love Roald Dahl now but found him too scary as a child. I remember the thrill of Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising Sequence coming out, like this generation’s Harry Potter. There are many new YA authors I’m only just discovering with my daughter. Another post….

A fun category was “comfort reading” which are the books I’ve returned to over the years. My mother read me Jonathan Livingston Seagull as a bedtime story, and it was one of the first books I read by myself. I’ve revisited it over the decades. Leaving the flock to fly farther and faster but sometimes crashing in the sea is a good metaphor for writing and revising novels. There are no limits.


Even more amazing than hatching an egg, Horton survived 3 generations of my family.

Childhood Favorites

Dr. Seuss
C. S. Lewis
E. B. White
Judy Bloom
Susan Cooper
Walter Farley
L. Frank Baum
Madeline L’Engle
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Lucy Maud Montgomery

Comfort Reading
T.S. Eliot
Robert Frost
Tracy Kidder
James Harriot
P.G. Wodehouse
William Shakespeare
The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Favorite Novels
Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
The Cider House Rules by John Irving
The House of Spirits by Isabelle Allende
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Unforgettable Literary Heroines
Scout
Nancy Drew

Bridget Jones
Scheherazade

Hedda Gabler
Scarlett O’Hara
Daisy Buchanan
Ayla (Clan of the Cave Bear)
Rosalind (As You Like It)
Sethe (Beloved)

Commercial Fiction
Jane Green
Jodi Picoult
Anita Shreve
Tom Perrotta
Alice Hoffman
Jennifer Weiner

Humor
Dave Barry
Woody Allen
David Sedaris

Books on Writing
On Writing by Stephen King
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Elements of Style by William Strunk & E.B. White

Most Memorable Novel I read in
2009: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (YA)
2008: The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly
2007: The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver
2006: Intuition by Allegra Goodman
2005: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2004: Empire Falls by Richard Russo
2003: Bel Canto by Anne Patchett
2002: The Secret History by Donna Tart
2001: Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
2000: Moo by Jane Smiley
1999: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Book I'm reading now: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Note: I'm taking a week off from blogging.
Next post: Wednesday June 24.

Dog Beaches and Dogged Beginnings

Dogs aren’t allowed in most Maine wildlife sanctuaries, as I noted last week, but there are other options. I just found this Maine dog hikes site. Although Popham Beach State Park bans dogs (except off-season November-April,) Fort Popham State Park allows dogs all year long.

A minor fort has been at Popham in Phippsburg since the American Revolutionary War. The current fort was built in 1862 to defend the mouth of the Kennebec River during the Civil War. Upstream is the ship building city of Bath. The granite fort was only half-completed and manned during the Spanish American War and WWI. It’s fun for kids to explore.

There’s also the historic life saving station.

Fort Popham Beach is about a mile and a half long. Off season you can continue for another mile and a half along Popham Beach. Fort Popham is also the best beach for spotting seals that fish in the cross-currents. We once counted 30. Be careful of rip tides where the Kennebec River mixes with the Atlantic Ocean.

Beware of big yellow dogs too!

As you walk on the soft sand, you’ll pass 2 islands with lighthouses: Seguin Island (above) and Pond Island (first photo). On a misty day, the foghorns will serenade you. I took these photos on the first day of autumn.

I believe my Golden Retriever is half seal. My children joined Stella and the seals to jump waves. This would be Stella’s dream house:


If you’re hungry, go to Spinney’s right on the beach. You can pick out your lobster from the tank or get fish and chips or lobster rolls. There are plenty of non-seafood choices too and excellent desserts like fresh-baked pies and strawberry shortcake. A more limited menu is available take-out if you can’t leave your dog. We’ve been enjoying the mild beach weather this September.

Last weekend, however, was a stormy washout. I walked Stella to the pond by our house and admired the turning leaves. It was duck weather:

The skies are grey as some maples are hitting peak color.


Most of the time I’m at home, working on my novel. I become a total hermit when I begin a new book. Beginnings are challenging because there are so many possibilities, and you don’t know the characters well. I have two central characters, two time periods and three locations. What narrative structure will work best?

Anne Lamott has a good book on writing, Bird by Bird. The title comes from a childhood anecdote. The author’s brother was falling apart writing a science report on birds. Their father, a writer, told the boy to write it “bird by bird.” To this advice Anne Lamott adds, don’t be afraid “to write really, really shitty first drafts.”

I find the only way I can get started is to hole up in my office. A neighbor/friend complained that I might as well still be in England as she’s seen so little of me. I’ve been home for two months, but most people probably aren’t aware that I’m back. Even on weekends, while my family sleeps in, I start working and find it hard to stop.

I’m setting aside Wednesdays and half of weekends for social time – catching up with friends and visiting other blogs. After writing two books, I now understand the importance of pacing myself and not alienating my friends and family (sorry!)

A novel is a marathon, only the writer hits “the wall” on mile one instead of on mile twenty. Those first pages are painful, but by page thirty or so I find my stride. A new book is also fun. I wake up every morning eager to find out what will happen next. It’s getting easier.

Only today both kids are home sick and builders are at work in my house making it shake. The Herculean trials of a mom-writer-at-home . . . . Can you believe it's October already?

What works best for you when you start a new project?
It doesn’t need to be about writing.

UK readers: it looks like you can order Charlotte Agell's Shift (reviewed last week) in the UK through amazon.co.uk.

Dog Walkers and Photographers: please read Linda’s comment about legal restrictions.

Uprooting to England

I type to the whine of chainsaws. Most of our hundred year old white pines, towering high above our home, have died of a mysterious infection. Feeling the thud of falling trees brings home my own uprooting. Or is it transplanting?

We are moving to England for the year. My husband, Henry, is taking a research sabbatical at Oxford University, his alma mater. Our children will be attending English schools, and we’re even taking the dog along. Henry and the kids have dual citizenship, but my visa states that I’m a “settlement wife!” I do feel like a pioneer venturing into a new life.

In England I will be researching my third novel, NOT CRICKET (renamed A MATCH FOR EVE). My first two novels were set in my home state of Maine. NOT CRICKET's Evelyn Levesque is a Maine native on a junior year at Oxford University. She returns 20 years later to track down her first love who disappeared mysteriously (plot changed).

Like my central character, I spent my junior year at an English University. I had a rather dramatic trip overseas. My flight to London was cancelled when the plane exploded on its way to NYC over Lockerbie. Henry was beside himself until he learned that I was not on that doomed flight.

The next day I flew to London undeterred, assuming security would be top notch. My hometown of NYC changed so much after 9/11, but the shadow of terrorism has hung over England for decades. You learn to live with it.

My last long stint of living in England was in 2004. Henry ran the Colby-Bowdoin-Bates study abroad program in London for six months. Our children attended an English school like Hogwarts. My son won enough house points to attend a cricket match at Lord’s. We had many good adventures which I relayed to friends and family via bi-weekly e-mails. This time it will be easier with a blog.

England already feels like a second home. Raising a mixed nationality family, it helps to spend time in both countries. We are lucky that academia and writing provide the flexibility to do this.

I’ve always planned to write a novel about the Anglo-American experience. Despite a common language, there are cultural barriers leading to amusing misunderstandings. I consider myself bilingual after 17 years married to a Brit. Do I have stories to tell!

It may take a couple of weeks for me to get back on line, but I will keep this blog running weekly about our adventures abroad. We plan to travel to France, Italy, Kenya and other countries. It won’t be just vacation. I will be alternating research on NOT CRICKET with revisions on S.A.D.

First I need to finish packing and preparing the house for our lodgers (already thinking in English vernacular!) Next Wednesday we will be flying across the Atlantic and won’t return home until July 2008. After friends and family, the hardest thing to leave behind is my personal library, but I hear there are a lot of books in Oxford!

And now to answer the desert island question:

Books for the plane:
Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights
(it takes place in Oxford if in a different dimension)
Kirin Desai’s Inheritance of Loss
(well recommended literary fiction)

Books I shipped:

For Writing:
Strunk and White – the classic writer’s manual
The Brief English Handbook- another for checking grammar
Points of View – a collection of different narrative points of view
A new journal

For S.A.D:
Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener for my Bartleby character– I still have my copy from high school
Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes since S.A.D. is also set in public high school
Four nonfiction research books

For NOT CRICKET:
Valerie Martin’s The Unfinished Novel – brilliant short stories about artists and writers
Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants-excellent example of first person present and past tense interwoven narratives, a form I’m considering
Ian McEwan’s Atonement – as an alternative form, a book in chronological parts, also very English

Books I will buy in England:
A dictionary, a thesaurus and a baby name book
Does Cricket for Dummies exist?

Test Flight

Coming back home to Maine, I was in for a shock. My fluffy golden retriever . . .

. . .had become a Labrador retriever.

Or perhaps a naked mole rat? Poor Stella had been dying in the summer heat so a buzz cut was in order. She spent the first couple days chewing her tail, but now she is much perkier on her walks. Her feathers will grow back by autumn.

A mother’s solo vacation is more like racking up a debt. My husband coped well during my 5-day absence but didn’t get any work done. With a home office, I’ve learned to work with interruption if not gracefully. My children had so much to tell me they had to talk simultaneously. The laundry, camp forms, home repairs and bills had stacked up.

The piles only grew as my first priority was finishing manuscript revisions for my first reader. Henry is taking S.A.D. to England where he’s visiting family. Call it a test flight for an airplane book. With both of my books I gave my first chapter to my husband to read, and then I shut the door to my office. He waited patiently for years the first time and for months the second time for me to finish.

Henry must have read Moose Crossing six times. My first draft of that novel was a ridiculous 660 pages – more than twice what it is now! I’ve learned. The first draft of S.A.D. is 260 pages with room to expand. True love is the patience to proof carefully and offer constructive criticism.

Henry welcomes the fictional characters and their problems into our home but also entices me back to the real world. My son pointed out some people live in the past, others for the future, but I live too much in my imaginary world.

Stephen King (another Maine author!) wrote an excellent book On Writing in which he describes his creative process as writing for the ideal reader. For him that is his wife. His writing style, like mine, is to lock himself in his office, not sharing half completed work.

There is no one right way to write. The trick is finding the method that works best for you. I need privacy and big chunks of time; others need more feedback and write better in short bursts. All writers need readers because it’s hard to see the fault lines in one’s own work.

Although I write women’s fiction, my ideal reader is my husband. He’s a demanding critic, my most avid supporter and has a great sense of humor. He’s also an excellent writer himself. My comments on his political writing tend towards critique of theory. Academia is geared towards a narrow audience but good writing is all about communicating and entertaining.

Entertaining was the theme of last weekend. My youngest child just turned ten and invited SEVEN girls to what could only be called a wake-over. One parent described the next day as giving your child a hangover as a party favor. Not from alcohol but from sleep deprivation after watching Pirates of the Caribbean and giggling all night long.

P.S. Does anyone know who took the naked mole rat photo? If so leave a comment so I can credit the photographer.