Christmas Books—Another Joy of the Season

It’s been a while since I've blogged,  but Christmas seems like a good time to say hello again, especially since I'd like to share some Christmas books you might enjoy reading.  Christmas has always been “my holiday,” the one I just have to spend with family and other loved ones. And despite all the hassles of getting ready, I love the season—the lights, the music, the calls of “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays.” It doesn’t matter which you say—the message of  peace and joy comes through. 

I love Christmas movies, too—Hallmark, anyone? But my favorite Christmas stories come in book form, beginning with the beautiful, familiar words of Luke's Gospel: 

“And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed  . . .And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem. . . To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. . . .

More modern stories brighten the season when you want to sit, have a glass of wine (or tea), and get lost in a feel-good story. Here are some that I’ve enjoyed over the years by some of my favorite authors:

Elin Hilderbrand writes delightful women’s fiction set on Nantucket, where she lives. Her Christmas series about the Quinn family shows how families can work our their differences because . . . well . . .that’s what family is all about. The books in the series are Winter Street, Winter Stroll, and Winter Storms.

Nancy Thayer, author of the Hot Flash Club Series, also takes us to Nantucket in A Nantucket Christmas. Recently married Nicole Somerset plans a wonderful family holiday, but she doesn't plan on the hostility of her stepdaughter, eight months pregnant, who arrives with her husband and son, determined not to enjoy Christmas at all.

Kristin Hannah, who writes women’s fiction and historical fiction, adds magic to her mix in Comfort and Joy. The main character, Joy, is struggling to recover from learning that her two favorite people, her husband and sister, have betrayed her. She impulsively gets on a plane to head north. When the plane crashes, she  survives and begins a life-changing adventure.

Mystery writers Mary Higgins Clark and her daughter Carol Higgins Clark have a series about a former cleaning woman turned lottery winner who has become an amateur sleuth.  I just read Dashing Through the Snow, where Alvirah and her cohorts go to New Hampshire for a small-town Christmas celebration and end up searching for a lost lottery ticket and a kidnapped young woman.

But Christmas books aren't limited to female authors.  Not to be missed is John Grisham’s Skipping Christmas, about a couple who decide to take a cruise for Christmas since their daughter won’t be coming home. Little did they know how many people that decision would offend. The book has been around a while and was even a movie, but it's still a fun read.

Also not to be missed is David Baldacci’s The Christmas Train. A former globe-trotting journalist boards a train to get from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with his fiancé. However, the trip turns out to be more than he  expected.  He meets the “one that got away,”a former love he now realizes was the love of his life. Other characters are quirky and unique, and include a thief stealing small, valuable items from cabins.  Add a blizzard and an avalanche and . . . .you get a great story. It was also made into a movie.

Last, I’ll add A Wish for Christmas, a collection of short stories from a small U.K. publisher. My story, “The Blue Christmas Tree,” is the final story in the book.

Happy reading and a very

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!

Author Paula McLain, Part 2—Love and Ruin

In my last blog I said I’d give Paula McLain’s latest book, Love and Ruin, its own post. McLain writes biographical novels that shine a light on little-known women. This latest book is about writer Martha Gellhorn. 

When most people hear her name, they think, Wasn’t she married to Ernest Hemingway? Yes, she was his third wife—the marriage lasted five years, from 1940-1945. But it would bother Gellhorn to be remembered only in relationship to Hemingway, as she was also a novelist and one of the great war correspondents of the twentieth century. She once said that she refused “to be a footnote in someone else’s life.”

Although Love and Ruin focuses on the stormy, passionate relationship she had with Hemingway, it also shows that she was indeed more than a footnote. The book’s story is how she becomes herself and holds on to that identity even when she could have been totally overshadowed by him. McLain believes that Gellhorn was the only one of Hemingway’s wives who could hold her own with him and match him in courage and intellect. “They were two strong personalities,” she says, “so it is not surprising they butted heads constantly.”

Gellhorn was born in St. Louis in 1908. She was an adventurer from the time she was a child and hid in an ice delivery cart because she wanted to see the world. The trip wasn’t very successful, as the cart just circled around and brought her back to where she started. But when she was older, Gellhorn did indeed see the world.  

She left college before graduating in 1927 to concentrate on a career as a journalist. She worked and wrote both at home and in France, but her life changed in 1936 when she met Hemingway in a Key West bar while vacationing with her mother and brother. They quickly became friends. She was intrigued to learn that he was about to leave for Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, in which the elected government was trying to fend off General Francisco Franco and his army. Volunteers came from all over the world to help. Encouraged by Hemingway, Gellhorn decided to cover the war as well, and she and Hemingway made plans to meet if she could get over to Spain. Initially using fake papers and saying she was a correspondent, she did get to Spain where she joined Hemingway. They covered the war and also began an affair that eventually led to marriage.

As a correspondent, Gellhorn covered the war differently from most of the male reporters. While they wrote about battles and statistics, she focused on what happened to ordinary people whose lives were ripped apart. Her stories featured women with no homes who had to stand in line for bread, knowing they and their could be children killed at any time, or on fathers searching desperately for their children.

Back home, Gellhorn and Hemingway settled down together in Cuba, where she found a house in the hills, restored it, and for a few years lived her dream with Hemingway—two writers working under the same roof. 

In World War II, she lost her correspondent credentials when Hemingway, now her husband, offered his byline to her publisher. Their marriage was already having problems, and this only added to them. Still, she got herself to England and had a real scoop on D-Day. When the legal correspondents were on one of the invading ships, she stowed away on a hospital ship, which turned out to be the first to arrive at the Normandy battlefield. Gellhorn worked as a stretcher bearer, bringing wounded soldiers to the ship. No matter how much horror she saw, she never got used to it, never lost her compassion for the people she met, and never stopped writing about the human side of war.

It is said that after their divorce in 1945, Gellhorn refused to have Hemingway’s name spoken in her presence. She wanted to be known as herself. Paula McLain’s Love and Ruin is a good step in that direction.

If you've read the book, I'd love to hear what you think.

Author Paula McLain Shines a Light on Little-Known Women

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged, and I’m glad that my life has settled down so I can come back to it. I’ve missed reflecting on “reading and writing” and am looking forward to sharing my thoughts again. We’re spending the summer months this year in Northeast Ohio, not too far from the lovely town of Hudson. A great plus for Hudson is its fabulous library which seems to have something for everyone—not only books, CDs, and videos to enjoy, but quiet spaces for reading or writing, private rooms to work in, three different book clubs, meeting rooms, and a variety of programs, including an outstanding author series.

Last week I was thrilled to meet best-selling author Paula McLain, most known for her three biographical novels—The Paris Wife about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson; Circling the Sun about aviator Beryl Markham; and Love and Ruin about Martha Gellhorn, one of the twentieth century’s great war correspondents and Hemingway’s third wife. 

“I want to find little known women and shine a light on their lives,"she said, "so you feel you know them and have a better understanding of them and their lives.” By choosing to tell these women’s story in novel form, I think McLain accomplishes that goal by bringing them to life in a way that a strict biography might not. The books are in the “can’t put it down” category. 

When I went to her talk, I expected to learn about McLain’s life and books. I didn’t expect that she would be such a dynamic speaker, drawing her audience into her world. She spoke briefly about her childhood, telling us that her mother left when she was four, leaving her and her two sisters to grow up in California’s foster care system. After turning eighteen, she managed to support herself and go to college, eventually getting an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. 

“And I used loans to get it!” she said, laughing “You can imagine what everyone said: Poetry? You paid to study poetry? Nobody buys poetry.” 

Well, maybe not nobody, but she knew she wouldn’t make a living with poetry. By that time she was married and divorced with a two-year-old son, and worked several jobs, while also writing a novel. It was published, but didn’t sell well. Still, she knew she couldn’t stop writing—writing was who she was.

Fortunately for McClain, she picked up the book A Moveable Feast, a memoir of Hemingway’s Paris years in the 1920s. Based on his manuscripts and notes, it was published three years after his death. McClain was “entranced” by 1920s Paris when so much was going on in the arts. Still a struggling writer, Hemingway partied, drank, and became friends with literary figures such as such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein.

That’s when McLain got her “big idea” to write about little-known women. Although Hemingway’s wife Hadley was mentioned only twice in A Moveable Feast, McLain wanted to tell the story of those Paris years through her eyes, the years when Hadley was loved and betrayed by Hemingway. Her agent asked her if she could write the book fast. Now remarried and the mother of three children, McLain sat in a Starbucks in Cleveland Heights, OH, and went to Paris in her imagination. She read Hemingway, immersed herself in the period, and took Hadley “out of the shadows.” She also managed to write the book in seven months!

The rest, as they say, is history. The Paris Wife went on to be a best-seller, and McLain went on to write Circling the Son, a book about aviator Beryl Markham. She heard about Markham from a brother-in-law who was reading Markham’s own book, West with the Night. “I was hooked after the first few paragraphs,” McLain said. She told the world about this ground-breaking woman, raised in Kenya, who went from horse training to flying and became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.

McLain signed Love and Ruin for me
and my DeLand Book Club. We all
love her books.

Love and Ruin, about Martha Gellhorn, is McLain's most recent book. I just finished it and can only say thank you to McLain for shining a light on this amazing woman. I’m going to talk about Love and Ruin in next week's blog because Martha Gellhorn deserves her own post.

Have you read Paula McLain’s books? Do you have a favorite?

Good-News Story—Third-Grade Students Help Save Local Barnes & Noble

A belated Happy New Year to everyone! My resolution this year is to focus on the good and positive, to be optimistic.  The idea began with my first Facebook post of the year on January 1^st:

        2017 was a difficult year for me, as constant attacks on things I value made

        me worry about the future of our country. So I'm determined to face this 

        new year with hope and optimism, a belief that things will get better.

I decided to look for and post a positive/optimistic quote every Monday to keep me inspired. Sometimes we need to see what's good in the world—especially with so many negative and hurtful things being said and done today. I also decided I’d make my first blogpost of 2018 a positive one, too. So here's a heartwarming story.

Last fall, I heard that our Daytona Beach Barnes & Noble had lost its lease and was going to close. I was terribly disappointed because every trip my husband and I take to Daytona ends with a stop at the book store. But it never occurred to me that I could do anything about it.

Fortunately, it did occur to a group of third graders and their teacher, Shaina Belsky, at Tomoka Elementary School in Ormond Beach. As reported in the Daytona Beach News-Journal, they decided to write to Barnes & Noble CEO Demos Parneros:

“We are very sorry to hear [about the lease] and very upset that we won’t be able to visit and shop and browse and learn new things. Some of us love your sale items (using math).  Some like to study there and even eat there.  . . . Please don’t leave us without our favorite book store!”

           

Encouraged by Belsky, they even found alternative sites and suggested Paneros come see them. As an added enticement, they offered, “If you come, we will take you to the beach with us and teach you how to surf!”

Their appeal resonated with the CEO, and the company came to an agreement with its landlord on a lease extension. In addition, the vice-president of retail operations, Frank Morabito, was sent to visit with the students. He shook hands with each student and gave out $25 B&N gift certificates. He also said how moved Barnes & Noble staffers were to be able to share the “really great story.”

It was a great lesson to the students that they can make a difference. “They just have to try,” their teacher said. “They can make positive change for themselves and their community, and they just have to try.”

That’s a reminder to all of us. Sometimes we think that our letters to senators, congressmen, and business leaders fall into a black hole, but you never know when your message just might hit the right chord with someone and make a difference. I’m going to think of these kids the next time I’m ready to say, “What difference can my letter make?”

[The information and quotes in this story come from the December 9, 2017 edition of the Daytona Beach News-Journal. I applaud the editors for focusing on the good that kids can do—and for  placing the story on the front page!]