On my return to California, following 27 months in India, I didn’t have time — nor energy — for leisure reading. I hadn’t realized how long it would take to unpack, sort and find a new place for everything we own. But then I was making a special effort to lessen the load so the process went slowly; we Americans certainly have too many possessions, a lesson I learned while gone. I traveled all that time with just one mid-size suitcase (with many books tucked inside) and a backpack, rarely missing anything waiting for me in boxes back home.
Books are my particular weakness; I owned nearly 2,000 when my husband and I decided to move from Southern California to the North Coast. It took more than six months then to cull my personal library down to about 600. By the time we were making plans in 2012 for a long stay in India, despite my best efforts, my collection had grown to more than 800. Again, I released every one that I felt — with reluctance — I could part with. Many were classics I had saved to reread but were now easily put on my Kindle — a digital-world option. Others were cookbooks that I realized I no longer needed. Funny how my eating habits had changed. And so forth.
Now, I was faced with hundreds of boxed-books. This time I took a more objective and assertive mental posture as I boldly opened each box to have its contents revealed. I immediately felt as though I was choosing among old friends: which to hang on to and which to release to a new life with someone who would give them more attention. Then it became easier. As a result, some friends now have beautiful, informative, and/or entertaining books better suited for them. Another 200 were gifted to the Point Arena Library for its collection and for its fundraising book sales.
So, what is left? Virtually all fiction has moved on; fewer than 30 were held back. Most others are art, travel and cookbooks I’ll hang on to. The remainder are the chosen 70 or 80 that I am committed to read and plan to post about on this blog. They are primarily short story collections (I just finished Doris Lessing’s “African Stories” this week) historical memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, travel, essays, animal tales, and some by my favorite Indian writers.
My book posts while in India were popular (Index to ‘Good Books in India’
http://conniegoestoindia.blogspot.in/2015/01/index-to-good-books-in-india.html ) so I’ve carried over this feature. I hope you enjoy.
The Friday Night Knitting Club
By Kate Jacobs
Novel
2007—360 Pages
Penguin Group
New York Times Bestseller
Includes a Reader’s Guide
“Impossible to put down.” ~ Booklist
“Like Steel Magnolias set in Manhattan.” ~ USA Today
The Friday Night Knitting Club was the book I opened on the first evening in our new bed on the ranch we’d become caretakers for in Manchester, located on the south Mendocino Coast. I was tired but alert; I needed something light to lull me to sleep. The book is several ongoing stories in one, each is revealed slowly. It’s about women and the hurting human heart and how it gradually heals in the presence of other women who are also hurting. It isn’t the “light” read I thought it would be, but it is an important reminder that we heal best when we allow others in and when we make ourselves available to others in pain.
Back Cover: Once a week, an eclectic group of women comes together at a New York City yarn shop to work on their latest projects—and share the stories of their lives…
At the center of Walker and Daughter is the shop’s owner, Georgia, who is overwhelmed with juggling the store and single-handedly raising her teenage daughter. Happy to escape the demands of her life, she looks forward to her Friday Night Knitting Club, where she and her friends—Anita, Peri, Darwin, Lucie, and K.C.—exchange knitting tips, jokes, and their deepest secrets.
Luckily, Georgia’s friends are there for encouragement, sharing their own tales of intimacy, heartbreak, and miracle making. And when the unthinkable happens, these women will discover that what they’ve created isn’t just a knitting club: it’s a sisterhood.
This was writer editor Kate Jacobs’ first novel. Previously she had worked for Redbook, Working Woman, Family Life, and other magazines.
Celebrates the power of women’s independence and is essentially an urban counterpart to How to Make an American Quilt. ~ New Statesman
Knitters will enjoy seeing the healing power of stitching put into words. Its simplicity and soothing repetition leave room for conversation, laughter, revelations, and friendship—just like the beauty shop in Steel Magnolias. ~ Detroit Free Press
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Master’s Choice
Twenty-seven Tantalizing Stories Selected by the World-Renowned Connoisseur of the Ultimate in Mystery and Suspense
Random House
1979—340 Pages
I’ve been an Alfred Hitchcock film fan since I was a kid. In my freshman year of college, I studied his films and writings. I was fascinated then and still am. For me, he is still genius. Not surprisingly, Hitchcock books remain among my dwindling library.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents are not Hitchcock writings, but instead answer the question, what does the master of thrillers read? It contains an eclectic collection of short stories by writers Hitchcock admired and recommended. Warning: Contents may not be suitable for bedtime reading!
Book Jacket: Nobody is more expert than he [Alfred Hitchcock] in the pursuit of thrillers with a twist in the tail, or more eager to explore atmosphere, psychology, and the darker areas of neurotic and obsessive behavior.
Here we find a few of the stories:
* The most talented smuggler alive
* The voodoo goddess who can substitute herself for a real human being
* The living exception to the rule that no revolutionary man dies in his bed
* The psychotic comedy writer who begs to be cured of reality
* The dog detective
* The fourth-grade teacher and her nine-year-old pupil against a berserk father
* The gangland killer whose plans are changed by a slug of bourbon and a sticky milkshake
* The grotesque dishwasher and his little pink paper-covered boxes of smiles
* The writer who satisfies his lust to experience every sensation that life could offer by reenacting his own death time after time
* The middle-aged doctor whose friends arrange an alibi for a crime he hadn’t committed
* The handsome, sensitive husband who improves on the old adage by discovering that a murderer’s best friend is his mother
These characters and many others appear in tales of suspicion, guilt, fear, violence, irrationality, confession, vulnerability, revenge—themes that are, when all is dead and done, the recurrent motifs in all of Hitchcock’s work.
In his own words from the introduction: “I do not collect these stories with commerce in mind. I collect them because I wish to share my pleasure.”
The Maharaja’s Household: A Daughter’s Memories of Her Father
By Binodini
Original 2008
Translated from the Manipuri by L. Somi Roy
Zubaan Publisher
2015—182 Pages
I was introduced to
The Maharaja’s Household at the 5-day January 2015 Jaipur International Literary Festival ( Jaipur Literary Festival Overview
http://conniegoestoindia.blogspot.in/2015/01/jaipur-international-literary-festival.html ) when I attended the presentation with L. Somi Roy. I bought the book there and brought it back to California to read. I was drawn to Binodini’s memoir because it is the only book ever published about the day-to-day life of India’s British royalty written by a member of royalty. I was curious.
The Maharaja’s Household is really a collection of short stories (published individually in Hindi during Binodini’s lifetime) as best remembered by the child Binodini as she recalled the people and experienced the events. While the translation from Hindi to British English is at times awkward, I found the recollections of that era insightful and interesting. And not as glamorous as one might expect. It was, after all, the early 1900s and India.
Back Cover: Part memoir, part oral testimony, part eyewitness account, Binodini’s [M.K. Binodini Devi, 1922-2011]
The Maharaja’s Household provides a unique and engrossingly intimate view of life in the erstwhile royal household of Manipur in northeast India. It brings to life stories of the kingdoms long vanished, and is an important addition to the untold histories of the British Raj.
Maharaj Kumari Binodini Devi, who wrote under the single name of Binodini, published
The Maharaja’s Household as a series of essays between 2002 and 2007 for an avid newspaper-reading public in Manipur. Already celebrated in Manipur for her award-winning novel, short stories and film scripts that had brought her to the attention of international followers of world cinema, Binodini entranced her readers anew with her stories of royal life, told from a woman’s point of view and informed by a deep empathy for the common people in her father’s gilded circle.
Elephant hunts, polo matches and Hindu temple performances form the backdrop for palace intrigues, colonial rule and white Rajahs. With gentle humor, piquant observations and heartfelt nostalgia, Binodini evokes a lifestyle and an era that is now lost. Her book paints a portrait of the household that only a princess— his [youngest] daughter—could have written.
L. Somi Roy is a film curator, producer, writer and translator. He divides his time between New York and his native Manipur.
Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas
Edited by Edward Burns
Norton & Company NY
1973 — 420 pages
I had no personal interest in Alice B. Toklas per se, nor Gertrude Stein when I read Staying on Alone. It was more a study in the process of how to select writings (in this instance volumes of personal correspondence) and present them to readers in a responsible well-paced manner and have the results tell the story interestingly. Happily, I found I also liked and respect Alice. She was intelligent, humane, loyal, morally strong, strong willed when it was required and diplomatic when needed, among other welcomed characteristics, and surprisingly witty with a penchant for harmless gossipy news about the writers, artists, and musicians of that time, among her closest circle.
In preparing this collection, the editor chose letters of biographical, literary, and artistic significance to an understanding of Gertrude Stein and her circle, letters illustrating the catholicity of Alice Toklas’s friendships and the quality of her personal and professional gifts.
Back cover: If letter writing is a lost art,
Staying on Alone is a measure of what has been lost. On tissue-thin paper in a tiny, often undecipherable hand, Alice Toklas described her daily life in Paris in absorbing detail, like a latter-day Madame de Sevigne. Here are shrewd, witty observations on some of the most interesting artists, musicians, and writers of the twentieth century: Thornton Wilder, Carl Van Vechten, Edith Sitwell, Anita Loos, Cecil Beaton, Janet Flanner, Bennett Cerf, among others. There are stories about Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Juan Gris, Cocteau and Sartre — all revealing a sharp eye that was as much a part of Alice as her devotion to Gertrude [Stein] and her passion for recipes and gardening.
In the autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein characterized Alice as lady-in-waiting to Queen Gertrude, cook, loyal amanuensis, guardian of privacy, bouncer of bores and companion who talked to the wives of genius and quoted the oracle: ‘Gertrude said.’…The truth was otherwise Gertrude Stein relied on Alice for the emotional equilibrium that released her creativity. Staying on Alone, a splendid collection of Alice Toklas’s letters, covering the two decades she lived on after Stein’s death in 1946, reveals her as a remarkable woman in her own right. ~ front page, New York Times Book Review
African Stories 
Doris Lessing
Simon & Schuster Inc
Reprint 1981 — 666 pages
My summer days on the ranch have been a bit choppy, particularly during the baby season. With the addition of frequent new chicks, ranging from neurotic guineas and skittish peafowl to motherless pheasants, I’ve been involved with moving chicks and mothers to more suitable pens as they are born, grow older and larger—and seemingly never wiser. Sometimes my best contribution is to “baby” sit while the new quarters are readied. This pattern isn’t conducive to reading long, deeply involved story plots or life stories, while short stories don’t require a long attention span or uninterrupted attention.
Reading Doris Lessing’s
African Stories was a perfect choice. Some of these short stories are less than ten pages. It takes excellent story-telling and writing skills to accomplish such compelling works with so few words. But Lessing is all of this and more. There are only a few that aren’t short, the longest being
Hunger. I skipped the long tales, saving them for later when I had more time. I read
Hunger last (116 pages) and liked it best. I worried about the boy-man Jabavu from the first to the final line. I can’t remember the last time I was so caught up in a story knowing Jabavu, like Lessing’s other characters, represents any number of real Africans living the same unimaginable lives.
Preface by Doris Lessing
“Most of these stories come from earlier collections. Some have been out of print a long time, others have never appeared in America at all. Of the four long stories printed here, Hunger is the failure and, it seems, the most liked. Sometimes one writes things that don’t come off, and feels more affectionate towards them than towards those that worked.
I am happy to have them around again… I hope these stories will be read with as much pleasure as I had in [writing them]. I enjoy writing short stories very much, although fewer and fewer magazines print them, and for every twenty novel readers there is one who likes short stories.
Some writers I know have stopped writing short stories because as they say, ‘there is no market for them.’ Others, like myself, the addicts, go on, and I suspect would go on even if there really wasn’t any home for them but a private drawer.”
Back cover: This is a major collection of one of our greatest contemporary writers, the author of Children of Violence and The Golden Notebook. Here, in one volume, are all the stories [all 32] Doris Lessing has written about Africa, a collection which bridges Lessing’s entire writing career and encompasses all the complexities, agonies, joys and varied textures of African life and society, both black and white. African Stories is a brilliant portrait of a world that is vital to all of us —perceived by an artist of the first rank writing with passion and honesty about her native land.
Her sense of setting is so immediate, the touch and taste of her continent is so strong, that Africa seems to become the universe. ~ Newsweek
…the author’s love of that land and yearning for it are manifest: her description brings to life with rare brilliance. ~ Saturday Review
I plan to have fun with this blog by documenting through stories, essays, reprints and photos the places I’ve traveled; animals that I encounter and enjoy; and the people I have known, admired and respected. I’ll probably include some pages about simple gardening, vegetarian food and easy-to-follow recipes from time to time, as well. 
