Being non-working (until Tuesday) and without television as a form of entertainment has left me with plenty of time to read. Since I’ve been here, I’ve finished one book that I had started at home and read two others.
First, The Longings of Women by Margie Piercy. The novel tells the intersecting stories of three Boston area women. The first Leila Landsman is a part time professor and author whose husband’s infidelities have finally gone too far, leading her to reexamine her life and twenty-five year marriage. Becky Souza hails from a poor Portuguese fishing family who spends her whole life looking for a way out of poverty. When the husband she marries to pull herself into the middle class turns out to be not what she expected, she finds herself accused of murder. The third woman is Mary Burke, a former housewife who has spent the last eight years working as a housekeeper, all the while hiding from her employers that the divorce and its aftermath have left her homeless. She survives by sneaking into the homes she cleans when their owners are away.
I’d read the book before, but it’s very good story telling, so I decided to read it again. It was also the last book I hadn’t packed up. The stories are very compelling as each woman seeks to find her way in life, in ways that they least expected.
The second book is Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, a collection of his short stories. The funniest stories, I think are the tales of his life in France where he tries to learn French and confronts obnoxious American tourists. The whole book is very entertaining, though you have to be careful about reading it around other people, lest they notice you laughing out loud.
The last book is Schindler’s List the book on which the excelent movie is based. Though I knew the story from the film, I was surprised to find the book both incredibly similar to the movie, yet very different in tone. Thomas Keneally’s book is filled with details based on this work with the 1300 Jews who survived the Holocaust thanks to Schindler’s factory. The prose is almost lighthearted at times, when he describes the old fashioned courtship, for example, of a couple in a concentration camp, or how Schindler plies inspectors with difficult to find alcohol so that they will not notice the relative good health of the Jews who work in his factory. In the end, I do think the movie is more moving. Who could forget the scene where Schindler, played by Liam Neeson, despairs that he could have saved more people?
