Today, our This is Childhood series is about THREE. As Nina Badzin so beautifully puts it, “three is climbing, dancing and understanding the rules of a game.” Please click over to read Nina’s words on the age of independence and stumbling, of “I do it myTHELF.”
I am delighted and honored to be joining the team at Great New Books. I am proud to be a part of the site, whose motto is sharing our favorite books one week at a time. Our reviews are published on Wednesdays, and we will also be featuring authors talking about what they love to read. We’ll often be hosting giveaways, so please follow us on twitter (@GreatNewBooks), check out our site (GreatNewBooks.org), or visit us on Facebook, to make sure you don’t miss anything.
This week I am reviewing Katrina Kenison’s gorgeous new book, Magical Journey. As you know from yesterday, I adore this book. I adore everything Katrina writes, in fact, and Magical Journey just takes my appreciation to new heights. I hope you will click through and read my review, and while you’re there, explore Great New Books. I know you’ll like it there.
Following the lead of my friend and fellow GNB contributor Nina Badzin, I’d like to introduce you to the incomparable team I’ve joined. These women are all passionate readers. They also happen to be excellent writers. Come to Great New Books to see us all.
Nina Badzin is a writer who lives in Minneapolis with her husband and four children. Her stories have appeared in various literary magazines, and her essays have appeared on numerous blogs, including Huffington Post’s books, parenting, religion, and technology pages. Find her on Twitter @NinaBadzin, or at http://ninabadzin.com, where she blogs weekly. Some favorite books “of all time” include East of Eden, The Age of Innocence, Love in the Time of Cholera, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Recent favorites include Gone Girl, The Age of Miracles, and Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. Nina loves to read. Period. She keeps track of her weekly reads and let’s you know what she thought of them here.
Jennifer Lyn King is a writer and author who loves to read and share great books with others. She’s an American expat living in Prague with her husband and three sons, and enjoys photography, oil painting, tennis, and traveling. She is currently at work on a novel set in New Orleans and coastal Italy. Her 5 favorite books are (in no particular order) Jane Eyre, The Language of Flowers, State of Wonder, The Shell Seekers, and The House at Riverton. For more about Jennifer, visit her website and blog at http://jenniferlynking.com. She can also be found on Twitter @JenniferLynKing.
Jessica Vealitzek is a mother and writer near Chicago. She recently finished her first novel, The Rooms Are Filled, and is at work on her second. When she’s not blogging at True STORIES, writing for Rebellious Magazine, or composing ditties for her children, she enjoys writing anything else. Some of her favorite books are To Kill A Mockingbird, anything by Steinbeck, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, and The Killer Angels. Recent favorites include If Jack’s in Love, Train Dreams, and Up from the Blue.
Hallie Sawyer is a freelance writer/blogger with a passion for history, photography, travel, and books, of course. She lives in the Kansas City area with her husband and three kids, as well as her goofy Wheaten Terrier. She has been published in local parenting magazines and blogs for a local website called JOCOmoms. She is currently writing a historical fiction novel that she hopes to complete before the end of time. Her favorite books are Outlander, Ride The Wind, Little Women, The Fault in Our Stars, and Life of Pi. You can find her at her website: www.HallieSawyer.com and on Twitter @Hallie_Sawyer.
I’m closing comments on this post, and hope to see you over at Great New Books!
At the end of this review, see details about how to win a signed copy!
To say that I was excited to read Katrina Kenison’s new book, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment, is an almost ridiculous understatement. I read The Gift of an Ordinary Day a couple of years ago in one breathless gulp, astonished to have found someone whose writing so closely – albeit more beautifully and more eloquently – mirrored the contents of my own heart and spirit. Quickly, I read Katrina’s first book, Mitten Strings from God, which moved me as well. And then, in a twist of events that reminded me of how benevolent this universe can be, I bumped into Katrina at a coffee shop less than a mile from my house. Although we had never met, we recognized each other immediately. After that, we began corresponding, and I am now privileged and honored to call Katrina a teacher, a mentor, and a friend.
Reading Katrina’s writing is a unique experience for me. It feels like a call and response chant with my own thoughts. In her trademark sensitive, lambent prose, Katrina touches on things, topics, and feelings that are among my most fiercely-believed, deeply-buried, and profoundly-felt. Many times as I read Magical Journey I gasped audibly, when I read lines from my very favorite poem or the description of a sentiment I know so well it feels like it beats in my own chest. Perhaps most of all, Katrina and I share the same preoccupation with impermanence; our spirits circle around a similar wound, which has to do with how quickly this life flies by, and with how irreplaceable these days are. Both The Gift of an Ordinary Day and Magical Journey are suffused with a bittersweet awareness of time’s passage that is keenly, almost uncomfortably familiar to me.
Magical Journey opens with enormous twin losses: Katrina’s sons have both left the house (her older son to college, and her younger son to boarding school) and soon thereafter one of her dearest friends dies after a multi-year battle with cancer. These two events form a cloud that stands between Katrina and the sun, and the book takes place in their shadow. Magical Journey is Katrina’s reckoning with life on the other side of these two farewells, and with entering the “afternoon of life,” when she is “aware as never before that our time here is finite.”
Though different, each of the losses that Katrina experiences are both irrevocable and life-altering. I related to both. I read about Katrina grieving the years when her children lived at home with tears running down my face. She describes the particular, poignant reality of life with small children at home and I weep, because while I am in those years, right now, I am already mourning them. No matter how I avert my gaze, I can’t stop staring at the bald truth that these days are numbered; I cry daily for the loss of the days I am still living.
At times my nostalgia for our family life as it used to be – for our own imperfect, cherished, irretrievable past – is nearly overwhelming. The life my husband and sons and I had together, cast now in the golden light of memory, seems unbearably precious.
I can’t read this paragraph without active sobs, because if I am aware of the preciousness of these days to the point of pain now, how will I possibly exist with their memory when they are gone? This question stymies me regularly, and brings me to my knees with its resolute, stubborn immovability. Luckily for me, Katrina provides a guide, lights a lamp, and has she has for several years now, shows me that there is a path forward.
Katrina’s other seminal experience, that of walking with her friend Marie through cancer and, to death, is familiar to me because my mother did the very same thing with her best friend, my “second mother,” who died at 49 of cancer. Katrina shares with Marie the intense intimacy of late-stage cancer and death. “Staying – in mind and body and spirit – was in itself a kind of journey, and traveling quietly at her side to death’s door was, apart from giving birth, the single most important thing I have ever done.” Katrina’s description of the last weeks and days of Marie’s life evokes the immense power in simply staying. This theme, of the vital importance of abiding with our friends, our emotions, our lives, recurs later in the book, when after a month at Kripalu, Katrina observes that “going away, even for a short time, taught me something about it means to stay.”
Marie dies only a few weeks after Katrina’s second son leaves home. Though she returns to her own home and her own life, Katrina finds both changed and foreign. She is reminded that “no matter how much effort I pour into trying to reshape reality, I am not really in control of much at all.” Thus commences a dark season for Katrina, months of finding her balance in a world that looks the same as always but that is in fact utterly changed. Her empty house swarms with memories, she watches dusk fall early over the mountains outside of her kitchen window, and she finds herself turning more and more to her long-time yoga practice.
I have to surrender all over again to the truth that being alive means letting go. I have to trust that being right where I am really is some kind of progress, and that there is a reason I’ve been called to visit this lonely darkness.
It is literally fall and winter when Katrina enters this phase of change, of letting go, all over again. She decides to participate in a month-long teacher training program at Kripalu, and finds herself profoundly moved by the experience. Katrina is drawn to Kripalu by some power that she cannot name, some force that has directed all of her perambulations since Marie’s death and her son’s departure. Of this time she writes, “…I have been lonely and adrift, as if some current is tugging me down, pulling me beneath the surface of my life to go in search of something I have no words for.” At Kripalu Katrina does indeed go beneath the surface: of her life, of the lives of her roommates, of her own expectations, of all that has been known. And she emerges feeling “as if I’ve put on a pair of 3-D glasses and the whole world, instead of being out at arm’s length, is right in my face: intense, complex, exquisitely beautiful.”
Katrina begins to reimmerse herself in her “ordinary life,” one whose shimmering beauty she now appreciates more fully. She revisits her undergraduate alma mater and has an encounter with a shop owner that reminds her of how the past continues to echo into the present. Even when those vibrations are not consciously felt, they are there. Katrina reconnects with college classmates and sees their connections in new ways; she and a roomful of her exact contemporaries end up in a deep, honest conversation about what it is to face this next season of life. In keeping with Magical Journey‘s theme that letting go of what we thought allows us to touch what is, Katrina notes how differently she measures her life now than the 21 year old starry-eyed college graduate thought she might:
How could I have known that the freedom that seemed so desirable and elusive in my twenties would come not from escaping myself, but from finally accepting myself? Or that liberation – that world we threw about so earnestly as undergraduates – would turn out not to be about grabbing the brass ring, nailing the dream job, or getting the life I always wanted, but rather about fully experiencing the startling beauty, the pain, the wonder and surprise of the great, winding journey itself?
My copy of Magical Journey is full of underlined passages, stars and exclamation marks in the margins, and indentations where tears fell, dark on the page, and dried. I have always loved Katrina’s writing, found wisdom that makes me gasp and expressions of things I’ve long felt and held dear, and this book is no different. Magical Journey is composed of gorgeous sentences and full of images I will never forget.
Magical Journey is a powerfully hopeful book, one that starts in a morass of loss and winds up, with a palpable sense of both peace and freedom, in a cabin in Maine. Katrina’s journey – which is indeed a magical one – is internal, quiet, invisible to the eye. She is grappling with nothing less than her own mortality. Mortality – and its irrefutable handmaiden, impermanence – is the heartbeat of this book, running through every line, limning the entire volume with the piercing, and temporary, beauty of this human life. The conclusion of the book’s titular journey is that there isn’t one. Life, and particularly the second half of it, is about learning to embrace paradox, to release expectations, and to look carefully around so that we don’t miss a minute.
Perhaps the central work of aging has to do with starting to realize that each of us must learn how to die, that falling apart happens continually, and that our own experience of being alive is never simply either/or, never black or white, good or bad, but both – both and more. Not life or death, but life and death, darkness and light, empty and full. Two currents sometimes running side by side, yet often as not entwining into one, our feelings and emotions not separate and discrete but instead streaming together into a flow that contains everything together and in constant flux – all our love and loss, all our happiness and heartache, all our hope and our hopelessness as well.
I wish I could convey how powerful and beautiful this book is. Unfortunately I don’t have the words. I hope you will read it and see for yourself. Happily, Katrina has offered a signed book to a reader of this blog. Please comment and I will pick a winner on Thursday evening.
The book’s video, below, offers another lovely glimpse into Magical Journey. I keep watching it, and every time I’m touched anew.
My go-to gift for everyone, from child to husband to parent, has always been books. Each year, more than a handful of people ask me for ideas for books to give to people in their lives. I know it’s late (though not too late for a gift certificate with some suggested titles!), but here are some of the books I read in 2012 that I have been recommending this year:
A Thousand Mornings – Mary Oliver’s new book of poetry is a balm, as is the rest of her work. The slender volume practically radiates wisdom, and I know a great many Oliver worshippers who are looking forward to reading this.
Help, Thanks, Wow – Similarly, Anne Lamott has a legion of committed and adoring readers. Her latest work is a worthy addition to her canon; I read it in a single sitting, wiping away tears, giggling out loud, and underlining madly.
The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy – Priscilla Gilman’s gorgeous love letter to her son is a great book for any of us who have been surprised by life not going precisely as we thought it would. And for any of us who have found tremendous joy in the surprising and sometimes disorienting terrain of real life. Which is to say: all of us.
The Light Between Oceans – I loved this beautiful novel, in particular the first half, which contains some of the most breathtakingly gorgeous imagery of light, ocean, space, and the sky I’ve ever read.
Wild – Cheryl Strayed’s memoir lived up to all of the hype. This book is inspirational, comforting, and a powerful testament to the human spirit’s ability to grow, overcome, and see beauty. Plus, Adrienne Rich’s work, The Dream of a Common Language, on which I wrote my senior thesis, beats through the story like a pulse.
The Age of Miracles – I read this book in a plane ride and it floated, gossamer, shimmering, in my mind for weeks. I felt like I’d woken up and couldn’t quite tell if the story, a thought-provoking meditation on change, fear, the wild unpredictability of the universe, and our human need for control – was real or imagined.
The End of Your Life Book Club – I loved Will Schwalbe’s memoir of the end of his mother’s life for the palpable love it exudes for his mother, but also for the ways it celebrates a lifelong love of reading. This book made me want to re-read some of my most treasured books, first and foremost, Crossing to Safety. That’s next on my list.
The Fault in Our Stars – John Green’s narrator may have my favorite voice ever, in all of literature. This book made me weep but also reminded me of the immense bravery and strength that is contained in some of the youngest, most ostensibly fragile people. We all want love, and wow, does Green give it to us.
There are so, so many more books I loved in 2012, and of course a long list from other years. These are just a few that came immediately to mind. If you are giving books for Christmas this year, which?
one of the very many bookshelves in our house
When Amy tagged me several weeks ago with a meme about one’s top five books, and then Kristen wrote about her dream bookshelf, I decided it was time for me to think about this. It’s heroically difficult for me to name my favorite books, and on any such list I know I will have left off some important titles and writers. But I love reading lists like this from other people, so I wanted to give it a try.
I come by my passion for books honestly. My father has said, famously, early, and often, that “home is where you keep the books.” I grew up tripping over stacks of books (in English, French, and German) and in an environment where it was a game to flip open the Norton Anthology, read at random, and ask the person listening to guess the writer and piece of writing. Dad read us Treasure Island and Swallows and Amazons and Mum made me a Pippi Longstocking Halloween costume one year.
Anne Lamott wrote of her family in her beautiful column for the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, “Books and wine were our glue, and so also our grace.” This is such an apt evocation of my own family that it brought tears to my eyes.
With that, here is my attempt to list my favorites. In some cases I’m cheating and listing a few I love from a writer or even a category. People, this is still really hard for me. I know I’m leaving some important writers and words out.
Annie Dillard: Holy the Firm, the Writing Life, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Annie Dillard, more than anyone else, shakes the truth in my eyes that divinity is right here in front of me in the natural world. Her voice is a clarion call that reminds me to open my eyes and to see.
Devotion by Dani Shapiro. To say this book changed my life isn’t an exaggeration. I read Dani’s book and Katrina’s (below) within a couple of months and my entire sense of the world shifted. I felt known and seen – by people who were, at that time, strangers – in a way that was eerie, unsettling, and profoundly reassuring. I understand in a new way the power of memoir and personal writing. I felt a surge of fierce hope: I want to (try to) do even a fraction of that. And then the universe, in its incredible grace, introduced me to both Katrina and Dani. I’m wildly honored to call them both mentors and teachers now. My life has never been the same.
The Gift of an Ordinary Day by Katrina Kenison. See above. I’m certain that Katrina’s new book, Magical Journey, will join this list immediately upon my reading it. I’m counting days.
Harry Potter: the whole series by JK Rowling. I’ve written endlessly of my passion for Harry Potter and the world of Hogwarts. I’ve named Dumbledore as my favorite fictional character. School as safe haven, teachers as protectors and guides, the magic that is revealed in learning, the quest to find out who we are, the power of love. Rowling’s world has it all. I’m on my third reading through of the series, and I love it more each time. My faith in this series to transform the reader’s sense of the world and of self is so strong that when I meet someone who is not a Harry fan (which has only happened a couple of times) I am instantly skeptical of them as a person. Literally.
Poetry: The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems by Mary Oliver, The Selected Poems by Wendell Berry. Poetry is my lingua franca. I love novels and memoir but it is in poetry that I feel most at home and to poetry to which I turn when I need solace. Lines of poetry that I know deep in my marrow run through my head all day long, pulled from their residence in my brain – my spirit! – by some subconscious need or impulse whose order I would love to divine. It’s very, very difficult for me to pick favorites, but I think these three are they.
Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient, Divisadero, The Cat’s Table. Ondaatje’s prose is poetry. His lines, like those of Rich, Oliver, and Berry, recur in my thoughts several times a day. The novel I’ve been working on on and off for years is named for a line from one of Ondaatje’s books. His stories stay with me, shimmering, and their messages reveal themselves over time, layers and layers of image and metaphor and sensual detail. If I was forced to name a favorite novelist, it would be Ondaatje.
What is on your dream bookshelf? Please tell me! “What are you reading” is among my most-asked questions, and the various ways that people respond tells me a lot about who they are. “What are your favorite books” is also on that short list of common, and telling, questions.