Confused / inspired

I just looked at the "Chronological" page, and I finished no books between 10/22 and 11/10? That can't be right. In fact, I know it's not right - just off the top of my head, as I consider it now, I know I read some okay book with Siena in the title. But I guess I never got around to noting it.

Anyways, I know for a fact that I both started and finished a book on Saturday, November 10, 2012 because I was on a plane, headed San Diego, and it didn't even come close to lasting through the Boston to San Francisco leg of the trip. The book: Cane River, Lalita Tademy.

It was kind of okay, though, which was cool. This was one of the last books I got well over a year ago (probably a couple years at this point), early in the days of this blog, when I was SUPER hung over one day and grabbed a stack of paperbacks from the bargain carts outside of the Harvard Bookstore. There was a PD James it took me over a year (I think) to read, the first of those mysteries about the female Episcopalian exorcist (Merry something?), one or two others (?), and this. It sat on my shelf for a while because the Oprah seal of approval, prominently displayed, worried me a bit - I was being snobby.

But last Friday evening I got the the BPL at 4:59pm and wasn't able to get in to pick up the book I had ordered for the trip, and I didn't want to waste money, so I made myself pick something to read on the plane from the unread paperbacks I had at home. This one was pretty fat (500+ pages) so I figured it would work.

It ended up being relatively interesting, both as a story and as a concept. The author started investigating the history of her family, and ended up learning a lot about the women in her family who had been slaves in Louisiana and then lived through the period preceding and following the Civil War and Reconstruction. Then she ended up writing a novel featuring the people she had learned about. It's kind of a cool idea, and I think I was especially drawn to it on Saturday (I plowed through those 500 pages) because I recently took up the challenge of writing, with the help of my grandfather, the story of the women in his life, his mother and grandmother, who dealt with the challenges of being black in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Northeast with some help from men (fathers, brothers, friends), but largely on their own. There were also illustrations of documents the author had unearthed (slave bills of sale, wills) and old portraits, which definitely enhanced my reading experience and is also something I had been thinking would be important for me own project. Cane River was explicitly the story of generations of women, who persevere sometimes with the aid of, but largely despite the shortcomings of, the men in their lives. I think I forgot it under my bed at R&M's place, but it was good. And a good reminder to me that even non-historians - maybe ESPECIALLY non-historians - can do decent research and tell a good story.

My grandmother passed away on Tuesday after declining for a few weeks; it was in the midst of all of that that I asked my grandfather if he'd help me with "our" project. I wanted something to keep him busy, and also to remind him that even if we're not blood, since he's my father's stepfather, he's my family, my grandfather in every way that matters, and nothing, including my grandmother's death, will change that. Potentially this project could turn into the subject of a class I'm planning on taking next semester, on writing a nonfiction book, but it's important to me because of him, and of my grandmother, a strong woman in her own right who would have loved the story and loved that my grandfather and I are doing it together even more. But it's a daunting project whatever I do with it, so Cane River was a nice reminder and inspiration, even if it wasn't the best book ever.