Ah, nothing better than curling up an entire gloomy rainy Sunday enjoying a good book. Today I almost finished "the namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri, a story of a first-generation Indian boy as he tries to cast off his parents' ways...

Nothing to Declare

The first book I'm sharing here was my favorite book through my twenties, and that's saying something because generally if I'm asked what my favorite is (color, food, movie, etc.) I say I don't pick favorites. This book, though, spoke to so many things in my life: wanderlust, an internal conversation about what I want out of life, a sense of adventure, the loneliness that sometimes comes with life's biggest adventures, being willing to embark on something risky... all things that occur again and again in life. I've come back to this book after years away and love it now, too. It is a beautifully written memoir:

Mary Morris Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone

One Thousand White Women

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
by Jim Fergus

Just finished this yesterday. Very entertaining! You couldn't ask for a spunkier heroine. As someone who keeps a journal, albeit not a 'written' one, I love this fictional journal genre. I'll bring it back to Boulder and you guys can pass it around there.

Here's the review:
One Thousand White Women is the story of May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women who, under the auspices of the U.S. government, travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians. The covert and controversial "Brides for Indians" program, launched by the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, is intended to help assimilate the Indians into the white man's world. Toward that end May and her friends embark upon the adventure of their lifetime. Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time.

Books I want to read or have heard about

Anyone have others to add or know of these?

My Life So Far
Jane Fonda

A Lotus Grows in the Mud
Goldie Hawn

Mother-Daughter Wisdom
Christine Northrup

Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini

Bean Trees
Barbara Kingsolver

Living History
Hillary Clinton

Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell

Helen's Favorite # 1

The Red Tent
Anita Diamant

I believe it was Jen Garone who turned me onto this amazing beautiful tale. I can't even begin to describe how much the fullness of the womens' experience moves me. We read this when we started our very own little four person book club way back in 2000 and it was usually just she and I who would show up and also the only ones who would read the book.

The red tent is the place where women gathered during their cycles of birthing, menses, and even illness. Like the conversations and mysteries held within this feminine tent, this sweeping piece of fiction offers an insider's look at the daily life of a biblical sorority of mothers and wives and their one and only daughter, Dinah. Told in the voice of Jacob's daughter Dinah (who only received a glimpse of recognition in the Book of Genesis), we are privy to the fascinating feminine characters who bled within the red tent. In a confiding and poetic voice, Dinah whispers stories of her four mothers, Rachel, Leah, Zilpah, and Bilhah--all wives to Jacob, and each one embodying unique feminine traits. As she reveals these sensual and emotionally charged stories we learn of birthing miracles, slaves, artisans, household gods, and sisterhood secrets. Eventually Dinah delves into her own saga of betrayals, grief, and a call to midwifery.

"Like any sisters who live together and share a husband, my mother and aunties spun a sticky web of loyalties and grudges," Anita Diamant writes in the voice of Dinah. "They traded secrets like bracelets, and these were handed down to me the only surviving girl. They told me things I was too young to hear. They held my face between their hands and made me swear to remember." Remembering women's earthy stories and passionate history is indeed the theme of this magnificent book. In fact, it's been said that The Red Tent is what the Bible might have been had it been written by God's daughters, instead of her sons. --Gail Hudson

Helen's Favorite # 2

Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden

I read this the first summer I went home to Maine with Ryan, nervous and terrified to meet his family! I spent three months there and realized quickly that Ryan had never given his mother an end-date. He told me I was welcome to stay as looooong as I wanted but clearly that was a little awkward! So, I booked my outbound flight (to Kiva's wedding) for three weeks later. In the meantime, I stumbled upon this fabulous great read. I was so absorbed I read it within three days (record time for me). Ryan's stepdad, Scott McMullin, is a sophisticated reader and over our many visits "home" (as Maine came to feel) he recommend some great reads.

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it.

Helen's Favorite # 3

The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Kidd

Just plain adorable.

In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their Georgia peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words "Tiburon, South Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily's beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more about her dead mother. Although the plot threads are too neatly trimmed, The Secret Life of Bees is a carefully crafted novel with an inspired depiction of character. The legend of the Black Madonna and the brave, kind, peculiar women who perpetuate Lily's story dominate the second half of the book, placing Kidd's debut novel squarely in the honored tradition of the Southern Gothic. --Regina Marler

Helen's Favorite # 4

Prodigal Summer
Barbara Kingsolver

Incredible. I found this one on my mom's shelf. My mother is such a voracious reader that she reads allllll the time, and I mean all the time. Famous funny family stories include her reading while she blows her hair dry (UPSIDE DOWN), reading in the shower, reading while driving. Anyhow this book is simply luscious and alive, like the fertile earth, coyotes and butterflies she describes.

The "she" is Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist observing the coyotes from her isolated aerie--isolated, that is, until the arrival of a young hunter who makes her even more aware of the truth that humans are only an infinitesimal portion in the ecological balance. This truth forms the axis around which the other two narratives revolve: the story of a city girl, entomologist, and new widow and her efforts to find a place for herself; and the story of Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley, who seem bent on thrashing out the countless intimate lessons of biology as only an irascible traditional farmer and a devotee of organic agriculture can. As Nannie lectures Garnett, "Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don't see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that's the moral of the story."

Structurally, that gossamer web is the story: images, phrases, and events link the narratives, and these echoes are rarely obvious, always serendipitous. Kingsolver is one of those authors for whom the terrifying elegance of nature is both aesthetic wonder and source of a fierce and abiding moral vision. She may have inherited Thoreau's mantle, but she piles up riches of her own making, blending her extravagant narrative gift with benevolent concise humor. She treads the line between the sentimental and the glorious like nobody else in American literature.