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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
Cynthia Newberry Martin has commented on (17) products
As a River
by
Sion Dayson
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, September 28, 2019
"As a River" is Greer’s story--a story of leaving and returning. And we first meet him as he returns to take care of his dying mother, which raises the question for the reader of why he left. From there, the novel unfolds with chapters that alternate between the present of 1977 and a past that goes back thirty-two years and comes to us in layers, each one containing a secret that pushes the story forward. As we spend more and more time in the past, we become aware of the racial tension in this small southern town and can imagine how much relief might be found in walking along the river. "As a River" asks the reader to take a close look at the question of shame, the reach of family secrets, and the decisions we make, almost without consideration, that define our lives.
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Where the Angels Lived: One Family's Story of Exile, Loss, and Return
by
Margaret McMullan
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, June 26, 2019
If you like to read stories about families, if you're interested in finding out more about your own family before you were born, if you wonder who will remember you when you're no longer around, if you wonder what it would be like to take your family to live in a different country for a while, if you like a good detective story, if you're interested in why writers write, if you're interested in the Holocaust, if you're interested in Hungary, if you're interested in history, if you like reading a good story, THEN YOU WILL LOVE THIS BOOK. The author had only ever heard about her mother's immediate family who escaped from Hungary as Hitler began to take over; she knew almost nothing about those left behind. But when visiting the Holocaust Museum in Israel, she discovers the name of a person with her mother's last name from the town where her grandfather's family lived. "Who's Richard?" she asks out loud. "Once upon a time, [my husband] Pat told me that being game and taking risks for the sake of art was what made the two of us tick. I adored him for not only living this way but for seeing that we both could live this way." So Margaret McMullan applied for a Fulbright, and got it, to write Richard’s story. But just before they are to leave, her father is diagnosed with cancer. He encourages them to go anyway. “I buy them a crockpot and leave them with a split pea soup, which will be ready for their dinner that night. We try to make our goodbyes casual. No big deal. Just going to Hungary. Be right back.” And off they go, this family of three. This is not a history book but a fascinating, easy-to-read, beautifully written, often serious but sometimes funny, honest book about one family's adventure in Hungary to discover more about their family before them—and all the amazing things they discover.
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They Could Live with Themselves
by
Jodi Paloni
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, May 01, 2016
This collection of linked stories feels like reading a novel but with the surprise of a story collection—the best of both worlds. For these 204 pages we live and breathe along with the people of Stark Run, Vermont. How exciting to be reading along and catch a glimpse of a character from an earlier story and what pleasure to get inside the head of a character I had only known from afar. I don’t know that I’ve ever read stories with such heart.
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Casualties
by
Elizabeth Marro
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, February 02, 2016
Casualties is one of those thick novels you never want to put down, that you look forward to getting back to, and that you don't ever want to be over. In just 6 pages, Ruth becomes a real person. On the 1st page, she’s on the phone with her assistant complaining about the failures of her nineteen-year-old son who is fourteen hours late for his birthday dinner. On the 2nd page, we learn that she has a dream. And that she has a sense of humor. As Ruth waits, she tries to stay calm. The author taps into something we've all felt--waiting for someone hour after hour, knowing we shouldn't say the hurtful thing, but we’re human. Ruth is human. We make mistakes we can't take back. On the 5th page, Robbie announces he’s joined the Marines. Now he’s done something he can't take back. On the 6th page, “Ruth hears the uncertainty he is trying to hide. She hears it and, in a flash of instinct, understands that he is asking her not to hear it.” I'm so interested in these people now--each of these flawed characters who exists in my world of lasagna and Death by Chocolate cakes. And finally Ruth thinks, "He’s put himself out of reach. The balance between them has shifted. Then, through the tears, through the loss threatening to engulf her, Ruth feels something that frightens, but also exhilarates her. She is relieved." Ruth is honest with the reader. This character is going to let me in to everything, and I don't want to miss that.
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Shepherd A Memoir
by
Richard Gilbert
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, September 02, 2014
"Childhood dreams cast long shadows into a life." That's the beautiful first sentence of the short prologue, which drops us into a scene we won't get to the end of until much later in the book. The prologue places the reader right in the middle of things and leaves us craving more. Shepherd is the story not only of Richard and his wife Kathy's purchase of Mossy Dell farm, but also the story of their marriage while they attempt to make a go of Richard's childhood dream. But what makes the book such a pleasure to read are the little shoots growing off the main line. These side stories establish the authority of Richard the storyteller, who is writing the story of Richard the farmer. They increase the breadth of the memoir, opening the story to a wider world, and do wonderful things to its pacing. Why a shepherd, you might be wondering... "Sheep seemed to have an emotional life; at least they experienced joy, running and leaping when happy. Sheep didn't all look alike, I was learning, and the temperaments of the different breeds varied within the admittedly narrow parameters of sheep personality. In other words, and for many reasons, I'd discovered the hidden beauty of sheep. Physically humble creatures, they possessed a functional beauty, a rightness of being fitted to the land and its labor. Sheep weren't showy animals, but I saw they were suitable. I'd found my species. A shepherd I would become."
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Life Drawing A Novel
by
Robin Black
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, July 17, 2014
If you're looking for a good book--a sure thing, a book you can sink down into and a world you can get lost in--this is it. Before the end of the first paragraph, you will be hooked, caught up in the marriage between a painter and a writer. Black writes with lots of interiority, and most importantly, lots of honesty. The characters are as flawed as we all are, and there are no easy answers anywhere. Here's the opening paragraph, which paints a picture that will stick with you, not only the length of the book, but long afterwards: "In the days leading up to my husband Owen's death, he visited Alison's house every afternoon. I would watch him trudge over the small, snowy hill between our two properties, half the time away from me, half the time toward me. And I would wonder what he thought about as he went. Wonder too if Alison watched him from a window of her own, and whether the expression she saw on his face as he approached was very different from the one I saw as he came home." In addition to the main storyline of the relationship between the narrator Gus and her husband Owen, I loved the painting project Gus undertakes. While renovating a bathroom, she discovers old WWI newspapers, which spark a desire to paint these lost boys, and this project is as captivating as the novel is, with the dead boys moving through the rooms as though they had all the time in the world, an eerie echo of Owen's movements, and for that matter, all our movements. Often in novels about a marriage, there's nothing driving the novel forward. Not so here, where, with the retrospective point of view, we know from the first paragraph that Owen dies. In addition, the writing itself pushes the reader from page to page. I may have to read Life Drawing again, right now, right this minute.
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Wrecker
by
Summer Wood
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, April 13, 2011
Wrecker--what a great name for a little boy. And for the title of Summer Wood’s second novel from Bloomsbury. Chapter One begins with these two sentences: "It was the middle of the afternoon, January 1969, and a half-hearted rain dampened San Francisco and cast a gloomy pall over the hallways of the Social Welfare building." And then, "Len stood waiting for his life to change." On page 13, there’s a space break, and the reader thinks now we’re going to move in close to Wrecker, but no, we ricochet off him. "They thought of him as a puppy and took him in." Like those at Bow Farm, we circle him. He’s apt to run off, and we try not to lose him. It turns out the book is less about Wrecker than it is about how Wrecker affects the lives of those around him. "Len, Meg, Melody, Ruth, Willow, and Johnny Appleseed. And that narrative approach couldn’t be more fitting for a story about a little boy named Wrecker: Who at 3 “seemed to need to feel his body collide with the physical world to know he existed.” And at 8 “still harbored that same dangerous mix of curiosity and enthusiasm and utter lack of caution that he’d come with.” On page 92, Willow says to Melody about raising a child: “It’s no walk in the park.” “I don’t expect it to be easy.” “Easy?” Willow gave a little laugh. “Easy’s not even on the spectrum. Try all-consuming. Try heart-breaking. You might start by giving up everything you ever wanted just to do this one thing…” An engaging story. Lovely writing. Soft, recycled pages “made from wood grown in well-managed forests.”
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If I Loved You I Would Tell You This
by
Robin Black
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, April 30, 2010
When I heard that Robin Black was going to be the Sirenland Fellow for 2009 and that she had published a story in One Story, I moved quickly to my back issues and began to thumb through. I only save the stories I love and pass the others forward. Of course I'd saved her story. She writes the kind of stories I love. Ten stories, including "Harriett Elliot," first published in One Story, make up this collection. [no spoilers here] These stories catch the ordinary moments in life-a new girl at school, a neighbor building a fence, a father taking a daughter to meet her first seeing-eye dog: "As Jack scans the road for signs, Lila is proclaiming to him in those certain tones of hers that if it weren't for being quite so blind and having to have one, she'd definitely never get a dog. Never. Never ever." Although I don't have a favorite story, I do have a favorite first sentence. It comes in "A Country Where You Once Lived:""It isn't even a two-hour train ride out from London to the village where Jeremy's daughter and her husband-a man Jeremy has never met-have lived for the past three years, but it's one of those trips that seem to carry you much farther than the time might imply." Trees, like guides, have two sides to them. In "Tableau Vivant," Jean walks her daughter Brooke to her car. "The roof, sunroof, hood were all splattered with bird droppings. `Stupid,' Brooke said. `Acres of open field, and I park under a tree. I was thinking shade, when I should have been thinking bird.'" The stories in this collection slow the ordinary moments down so that you feel their underside; there's a pause, and then they expand with wonder. From the third story in the collection, "Immortalizing John Parker:" "A streetlight comes on. Clara waits to see how long it will take another to join it. A minute passes, two minutes. Nothing. They must have different levels of sensitivity, she thinks. They must believe different things about what darkness is." In "The History of the World," the last and longest story and the only story with more than one point-of-view character, this is from Kate: "She has been many women, she understands, has slipped surefooted through the years from one identity to the next. Daughter, sister, wife, mother. And now to be this-to be a woman without even the illusion of knowing herself. The sensation is like flight." These are the stories of our lives. They are the kind of stories that will crack your heart open. They will remind you, you have a heart, in case you've forgotten."The idea that as loved as we may be, we may also be forgotten. If only for a day here and there." In each of these stories, worlds seem as if they're about to collide, but instead, they hover-one world on top of another for just a moment so that the light all around changes. Like in an eclipse. And it's that moment that causes these stories to expand before your eyes.
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Arlington Park
by
Rachel, Cusk
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, January 25, 2009
Arlington Park is well written and digs deep into truth. It's about women-real and flawed. It's about marriage. It's about not only the lives we plan to live and choose to live, but the lives we end up living. In an article written in 2005, Cusk said, "I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back." Arlington Park was one of the best books I read in 2008, and a new addition to my all-time favorite books. It was so good, in fact, that I read it again in December--twice in one year. The first sentence: "All night the rain fell on Arlington Park." The falling of rain appears like a refrain throughout the book. The rain falls on everyone in Arlington Park. It falls on all of us. The novel is divided into ten unmarked sections: 1-the rain fell; 2-Juliet; 3-Amanda; 4-Christine, Maisie and Stephanie at the mall; 5-Solly; 6-in the park/the rain had stopped; 7-Juliet; 8-Maisie; 9-Christine; and 10-party at Christine's with Juliet, Maisie, and Maggie. The first time I read it, I was so taken with Juliet that I didn't want to leave her to switch to Amanda. This time, it did not feel like a brusque change, but felt right. Because it's not just about one of us; it's about all of us. Here's a little flavor of what you have to look forward to: -Juliet about a recording of a song by Ravel: "The sound of it brought tears to Juliet's eyes. It was the voice, that woman's voice, so solitary and powerful, so-transcendent. It made Juliet think she could transcend it all, this little house with its stained carpets, its shopping, its flawed people, transcend the grey, rain-sodden distances of Arlington Park; transcend, even her own body, where bitterness lay like lead in the veins. She could open somewhere like a flower...open out all the petals packed inside her." -Solly about her inability to communicate with a Japanese student renting out their extra room: "...she became aware of how much of her lay shrouded in this inarticulable darkness." -Solly: "Suddenly she saw her life as a breeding ground, a community under a rock...There was a lack of light, a lack of higher purpose to it all. How could she have forgotten to find out what else there was? How could she have stayed there, under her rock, down in the mulch, and forgotten to take a look outside and see what was going on? All at once she didn't know what she'd been thinking of."
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In The Fold
by
Rachel Cusk
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, January 25, 2009
Although I have enjoyed many of Rachel Cusk’s books, this one I didn’t want to finish. There are other opinions: it was long listed for the 2005 Booker Prize. In the Fold is narrated by a man and full of dialogue. Perhaps an important step in a writer’s development is to try something different. It gives you a reference point: You do that better than this. And then you can go boldly forth. My favorite thing about the book is the name of the country home where most of the action takes place. It’s called Egypt–no explanation given. My favorite line refers to Egypt: “This is our home. It’s the place that matters, not the people in it.”
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Lifes Work On Becoming A Mother
by
Rachel Cusk
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, January 25, 2009
A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother is Rachel Cusk’s fourth book. My favorite line, because of the unwritten premise, comes in the Introduction, where she writes, “…so it would be a contradiction to write a book about motherhood without explaining to some degree how I found the time to write it.” The answer is that her partner quit his job to take care of the children “while Rachel writes her book about looking after the children.” In the author’s words, this book “describes a period in which time seemed to go round in circles rather than in any chronological order.” Very quickly, the baby develops colic. Surely, Cusk writes, there is a better word for this, some sort of German word meaning lifegrief. At the end of three months: “I see that she has become somebody. I realize, too, that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence.” My only quarrel with the memoir is that perhaps a better title would have been simply On Becoming a Mother, as these pages are limited to the initial weeks and months after the baby is born, to this transition time of becoming a mother, which the author so clearly does. A book to read before you get pregnant, as well as afterwards (if you can stay awake long enough to read.) And don’t forget Anne Lamott’s, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. Two books that speak the truth.
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Country Life
by
Rachel Cusk
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, January 25, 2009
The Country Life, published in 1997, is Rachel Cusk’s third novel. She is spacing them out like children–one every two years. As opposed to The Temporary, the writing is solid throughout, continuously propelling the reader forward. The first sentence tells you that the narrator is supposed to take the four o’clock train from Charing Cross to Buckley. The author then does a very good job of keeping you reading by supplying all sorts of details regarding the departure (although I wanted even more) without stating what Stella, the protagonist, will be doing when she arrives at this new destination or what specifically has caused her to make the journey. Stella is an intriguing character from the first page. Late in the novel, she says, “I don’t know what love means. If it’s just a feeling, then it can stop. I don’t see the point of trying so hard to preserve it.” The Country Life was a delightful book to read. My three favorite lines: “We are all, in our journey through life, navigating towards some special, dreamed-of place.” “In a larger house, a knock or ring is a plea for entrance; in a small place such as my own, it is a demand.” “…I turned off the light, closed my eyes, and forced myself, as one would force the head of a man beneath water to drown him, into sleep.”
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Saving Agnes
by
Rachel Cusk
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, January 25, 2009
It’s like watching a house being built–seeing how a writer develops over time. The foundation: Saving Agnes, published in 1993. Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award (now the Costa First Novel Award), Saving Agnes is chick-litty in subject matter; but after all, the author would have only been 26 when this book was published. It also takes Cusk too many words to say what she has to say. Nevertheless it’s a great beginning for a writer, and it contains some engaging images, like “a row of teenagers sat on a bench like crows on a telegraph wire,” and ”Days when she was expecting a call stretched out before her like empty motorways….” It also contains some interesting lines like “She’d never known loneliness until she’d had company.” And this combination of an intriguing idea and an image to match: “She had changed, she knew, but she didn’t quite know how or when. Like an old car, the addition of new parts over the years had left little of her original material, but her form remained unaltered. Could she, she wondered, still be said to be the same person?”
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The Lucky Ones
by
Rachel Cusk
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, January 25, 2009
The Lucky Ones is Rachel Cusk’s fifth book. In it, there is a Contents page, which announces five sections. Each section stands by itself. There is a passing reference in each section to at least one character in another section. With a lovely circularity, the last section ends with, I believe, the only reference to the main character in the first section. A wonderful collection of linked stories. But the book, on its cover, calls itself a novel. I don’t think so. Still, the author’s writing throughout is even better in this book than her last. The final section of The Lucky Ones is my favorite. In it, she goes into that depth of truthfulness that characterizes a work of substance. “'You’re doing well for yourself,' said Vanessa sourly. 'And all that happened,' mused Serena, 'was that I finally worked out that people prefer what’s true to what’s right.'" Cusk writes about shaping a day: “It seemed to Vanessa that she should do something to please Colin on his return from work, and this ambition immediately rose like a great spire from the humble structure of the day.” Finally, perhaps my favorite paragraph: “It was in the mornings that Vanessa most often suspected the existence of a problem. In the rumpled dawn camouflage of her bed she would open her eyes and think of the coming day and sometimes, just as when sometimes she turned the key in the ignition of her old Honda, nothing would happen. She lay there, paralyzed by the image of what she had both to construct and then to dismantle before being returned to this same bed, like a book being returned to its shelf, intact and yet somehow depleted of her information.”
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Good Thief
by
Hannah Tinti
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, December 03, 2008
How do you tell a story? First sentence: “The man arrived after morning prayers.” In this first paragraph, we are there with the man, his horse, and the boys. “The man waited, and the boys watched…” The second paragraph drops back to explain: “Men often came for children.” There were some boys more likely to be chosen. There were others more likely to be passed over. “Ren was one of them.” The third paragraph continues: “He had no memory of a beginning…” If you want to read a good story, The Good Thief, by Hannah Tinti, is the book for you. It is a solid, old-fashioned story–as in, something happens and then something else and then something else. On December 1, it won the 2008 John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize. In a New York Times review, The Good Thief was described as “an American Dickensian tale with touches of Harry Potterish whimsy, along with a macabre streak of spooky New England history.” I couldn’t put it down.
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Falling Through Space
by
Ellen Gilchrist
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, October 12, 2008
Recently I was looking through Ellen GIlchrist's Falling Through Space trying to find the passage where she writes about getting down on the floor to play with her books. Well, I couldn't find it, but in the process, I discovered that Falling Through Space had been republished in 2000 with the addition of fifteen new esssays. I ordered a new copy. It came yesterday, and I read the whole book again. I couldn't stop. I love the way she writes, her honesty, her outlook on life. I may read it again today. I found the passage, by the way. Apparently she had said on a radio program that "we should all learn from two-year-olds and go to work by different routes and take all our books off the shelves and throw them on the floor and play with them." She writes, "I can talk a good game but where is the action." Then, "...I walked on home and went into my house and started pullng all the books off my bookshelves and piling them up on the living-room floor. Pretty soon I had a carpet of books." She describes it as "one of the best weekends I've ever had." This process of "being into everything" is so important to her that she mentions playing with books again later in the book.
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Olive Kitteridge
by
Elizabeth Strout
Cynthia Newberry Martin
, October 12, 2008
“Her father turned around. ‘Pancakes?’ he asked her. Winnie didn’t want pancakes. ‘Sure,’ she said.” You will find these simple sentences, which take you to the heart of Winnie, at the end of the story “Ship in a Bottle,” which, with twelve other linked stories creates the book, Olive Kitteridge, new this year by Elizabeth Strout. I had loved Amy and Isabelle, but Abide with Me, not as much. Olive Kitteridge is beautifully written. The second story, “Incoming Tide,” will make you pause–in an attempt to hold onto the moment. OK takes off from there.
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