If nothing else, I was drawn to this cover. All those books? And the title? The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared. Perhaps I love the thought because my father and I are on the same path of reading. Generally, we read the same type of books. It is fun to read and pass on or get a recommendation from him.

I read a review of this book somewhere when it first was published in May. I read only a portion of it and knew I had to add it to my list. A few days later I was in need of a read, so I jumped into the lives of Alice Ozma and her father.

Young Alice and her father, a hard working school librarian, both love books. He is a single father who works hard and strives to be both a mother and father in Alice’s life. He succeeds. As a school librarian, his love for books carries over from school straight into his home. He and Alice start out with a promise. A reading promise. They set out to read 100 nights in a row. Once that 100^th night passes, they enjoy it so that they decide to continue on.

In her brilliant new memoir, called Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Alexandra Fuller returns to her African roots for a closer look at her parents’ own experience as white settlers on the Dark Continent. In so doing, Fuller wisely anchors much of her narrative on the reminiscences of her memorable, larger than life mother.

As Fuller explains it:

Our Mum—or Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she has on occasion preferred to introduce herself—has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember, not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them ( the way she likes large, expensive hats and like to appear in them) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe.

Alexandra's mum, Nicola, with Stephen Foster: www.alexadrafuller.org

From this rather lighthearted opening, one might anticipate an equally light-hearted read —sort of an Auntie Mame of Africa. And though Fuller does portray her flamboyant mother as almost zany at times, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is much more than that. In her non-linear, very fluid style, Fuller skillfully weaves moments of laugh-out-loud humor with incidents of heartbreaking sadness as she offers a vivid account of her parents’ dramatic and often tragic lives as British colonialists in East Africa.

Along with this very personal story, she seamlessly incorporates some fascinating history of a rapidly changing era of turmoil and upheaval, when Africa was beginning to shed the yoke of white colonialism for good. Her evocative glimpses of the African landscape and vistas and of the animals and people of a land she clearly still loves only add to the depth of the work itself.

Alexandra's Mum, Nicola, Le Creuset Pots: www.alexandrafuller.org

Born on the Isle of Skye, her mother, Nicola, moves with her parents to Kenya as a child. Meanwhile Fuller’s father, Tim, born in England to a British naval officer, rejects his father’s career path and comes to Kenya as an adult.

Nicola and Tim meet and soon are married and so begins their long love affair with Africa—an affair that proves to be one of continuous adventure and enormous challenge. They spend several happy years in Kenya (where their first child, Vanessa, is born), but after it is declared independent they move to Rhodesia where colonialism still reigns.

After several financial set-backs (including losing his job managing a farm) and the devastating loss of their second child (a son), they return briefly to England (where Alexandra is born). But as Fuller wryly puts it :

However much my parents tried to ensure a colorfully chaotic life for themselves, there was an underlying sense that as long as they stayed in England, they would always have to be the source of their own drama.

Alexandra Fuller with her dad, Tim: www.alexandrafuller.org

So it’s back to Africa and Rhodesia, where this time they buy a farm of their own and where, not incidentally, there is a full scale civil war going on. Her father, Tim, is conscripted into the Rhodesian Army Reserves. Her mother carries an Uzi in the Land Rover when they drive into town.

In the meantime, they face drought, constant danger and uncertainty, and most heartbreaking of all, the loss of two more of their five children—little two-year-old Olivia accidentally drowns and later their new baby boy dies. It is then that Nicola descends finally into depression and madness.

Somehow with amazing courage and resilience she manages to recover. And as the book ends, she and Tim are happily and peacefully ensconced on a farm in Zambia.

In Fuller’s first memoir about her family, written several years ago (Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight), she chronicles her growing up years in war torn Rhodesia through the eyes of the child she was then. Though generously laced with her often irreverent humor, it is a ruthlessly candid, even a disturbing book.

It is also one in which her mother comes off as a rather dark figure. Fuller approaches this latest effort from an adult’s vantage point, and thus expresses much more compassion and understanding for her parents’ situation and actions. She clearly recognizes the sheer determination and perseverance it took for them just to survive.

But while Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is ostensibly about the lives of both of her parents, it is, at its heart, her mother’s story. In fact, it becomes something of a tribute to her mother—a woman who could be quite outrageous, volatile, and sometimes even frighteningly unstable, but who also ultimately refused to be defeated by tragedy or circumstances and whose courage and resilience enabled her in the end to be reconciled to her past and to forgive herself at last.

The Tree of Forgetfulness: www.alexandrafuller.org

Written by Billie Green

Visit www.alexandrafuller.org

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller, The Penguin Press: August, 2011.

It is such a hard question when someone asks you to name your favorite book. I have so many and  often that depends when I read the book. I feel certain that some books I liked at one time tend to have to do with when I read them, how old I was, what mood I was in…the list is endless.

Charlotte’s Web is my all time favorite. My parents read it to me when I was young. I read it in elementary school, in middle school and again in high school. I most recently read it to a class of 3rd graders. If you had seen that class sit and listen so intently, you would might also think there is not a better story.

E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web, grew up amidst animals and stables on a farm. His surroundings in life were much like the scenery so well described in the book. The book jacket of the newly released, The Story of Charlottes’ Web: E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic by Michael Sims, states that Mr. White follows the maxim “Write what you know.”  Boy, does he ever? There are numerous readers who have lived on that farm with him.

That being said, books have a certain appeal when they are coming directly from the author’s being and heart. Perhaps that is why Charlotte’s Web is adored by so many. There is a sweet little farm somewhere–where the story unfolded to E.B.White.

Now an award-winning poet, essayist, and editor, Sandra has written a captivating memoir about a subject that has only been addressed in either medical guides or recipe books: a cultural history and sociological study of food allergies, melded with her own humorous and sometimes heartbreaking experiences.

From her short-lived gig as a restaurant reviewer to the dates that ended with trips to the emergency room, Sandra writes with verve and style about the struggle of a modern young woman to come to terms with a potentially deadly disorder.

Join us this evening at 5.00 for a signing and reading with Sandra Beasley!

Here’s how the book came about. Katie Couric was asked to give a commencement speech, and as this was not the first time, she decided to try something new. She began e-mailing people she had interviewed over the years asking questions about life lessons. In Katie’s book you will find advice from Jay Leno to Margaret Albright to Gloria Steinem to Whoopi Goldberg to Chelsea Handler and Tavis Smiley.

This book is wonderful. It’s probably the one you were looking for as you searched for something meaningful yet not too heavy for the graduate in your life.

As Kathryn’s essay seems to have escaped Katie’s book and found its way into cyberspace, I’ll share it with you here in honor of Kathryn’s visit to Lemuria today at 5:00.

Don’t Give Up, Just Lie by Kathryn Stockett

If you ask my husband my best trait, he’ll smile and say, “She never gives up.” But if you ask him my worst trait, he’ll get a funny tic in his cheek, narrow his eyes and hiss, “She. Never. Gives. Up.”

It took me a year and a half to write my earliest version of The Help. I’d told most of my friends and family what I was working on. Why not? We are compelled to talk about our passions. When I’d polished my story, I announced it was done and mailed it to a literary agent.

Six weeks later, I received a rejection letter from the agent, stating, “Story did not sustain my interest.” I was thrilled! I called my friends and told them I’d gotten my first rejection! Right away, I went back to editing. I was sure I could make the story tenser, more riveting, better.

A few months later, I sent it to a few more agents. And received a few more rejections. Well, more like 15. I was a little less giddy this time, but I kept my chin up. “Maybe the next book will be the one,” a friend said. Next book? I wasn’t about to move on to the next one just because of a few stupid l-etters. I wanted to write this book.

A year and a half later, I opened my 40th rejection: “There is no market for this kind of tiring writing.” That one finally made me cry. “You have so much resolve, Kathryn,” a friend said to me. “How do you keep yourself from feeling like this has been just a huge waste of your time?”

That was a hard weekend. I spent it in pajamas, slothing around that racetrack of self-pity—you know the one, from sofa to chair to bed to refrigerator, starting over again on the sofa. But I couldn’t let go of The Help. Call it tenacity, call it resolve or call it what my husband calls it: stubbornness.

After rejection number 40, I started lying to my friends about what I did on the weekends. They were amazed by how many times a person could repaint her apartment. The truth was, I was embarrassed for my friends and family to know I was still working on the same story, the one nobody apparently wanted to read.

Sometimes I’d go to literary conferences, just to be around other writers trying to get published. I’d inevitably meet some successful writer who’d tell me, “Just keep at it. I received 14 rejections before I finally got an agent. Fourteen. How many have you gotten?”

By rejection number 45, I was truly neurotic. It was all I could think about—revising the book, making it better, getting an agent, getting it published. I insisted on rewriting the last chapter an hour before I was due at the hospital to give birth to my daughter. I would not go to the hospital until I’d typed The End. I was still poring over my research in my hospital room when the nurse looked at me like I wasn’t human and said in a New Jersey accent, “Put the book down, you nut job—you’re crowning.”

It got worse. I started lying to my husband. It was as if I were having an affair—with 10 black maids and a skinny white girl. After my daughter was born, I began sneaking off to hotels on the weekends to get in a few hours of writing. I’m off to the Poconos! Off on a girls’ weekend! I’d say. Meanwhile, I’d be at the Comfort Inn around the corner. It was an awful way to act, but—for God’s sake—I could not make myself give up.

In the end, I received 60 rejections for The Help. But letter number 61 was the one that accepted me. After my five years of writing and three and a half years of rejection, an agent named Susan Ramer took pity on me. What if I had given up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60? Three weeks later, Susan sold The Help to Amy Einhorn Books.

Above: A glimpse of Kathryn Stockett in the film due out in August.

The point is, I can’t tell you how to succeed. But I can tell you how not to: Give in to the shame of being rejected and put your manuscript—or painting, song, voice, dance moves, [insert passion here]—in the coffin that is your bedside drawer and close it for good. I guarantee you that it won’t take you anywhere. Or you could do what this writer did: Give in to your obsession instead.

And if your friends make fun of you for chasing your dream, remember—just lie.

This essay appears in the anthology The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons from Extraordinary Lives, edited by Katie Couric and published by Random House in April 2011.

The cool thing about that is we sometimes think up new ways of grouping the books. This time, I’m working with memoir. Memoir’s not a new category by any means, but it is one that Lemuria’s done without for quite a while. We had a biography section years ago, I’m told, but it eventually got distributed throughout the store, so Faulkner bios got shelved with Faulkner’s books in southern fiction, so the Churchill biography was able to be with the British history books, so the Patton biography was placed in World War II.

But what about the memoir? What about those biographies that, though they aren’t about remarkable figures in history, nevertheless speak to everyman by either carving out a fascinating though little-known life, or fascinatingly carving out an ordinary one?

Well, now they have a place. (It’s in the psychology and business nook behind the front desk.) And just to prove how much we needed this grouping of like-minded books, now I’ll show you how much we love ‘em.

Jeannette Walls and Mary Karr both came to Lemuria in the past year. They were brilliant! Here are Lisa and Norma on Jeannette, and Billie on Mary Karr. We’ve had visits from Andre Dubus III and Mark Richard (click here for Lisa’s blog), and though their memoirs still live in the fiction room with their novels, you may find a copy or two in the memoir section. Rodney Crowell and our own Teresa Nicholas — the new section is six shelves and growing! Come in to get a peek at someone else’s dirty laundry, find out about that ill-fated relationship, read that story of hope despite the worst odds.

i realize that i’m way too young to remember when bozo the clown was portrayed by larry harmon but i do remember the  show when bozo was played by joey d’auria.

“Harmon had the vision and drive to take advantage of the growing television industry and make a better future for Bozo. He renamed the character “Bozo, The World’s Most Famous Clown” and modified the voice, laugh and costume. He then worked with a wig stylist to get the wing-tipped bright orange style and look of the hair that had previously appeared in Capitol’s Bozo comic books.” -wikipedia

the most vivid memory i have of the show is the bozo bucket bonanza grad prize game where kids had to toss the ping pong balls into the the numbered buckets in sequential order to win a prize.

to keep with my last blogs theme of amazing book art, the design and layout of the book is quite remarkable.  the book was designed by Meat and Potatoes, Inc.

“Kick off your shoes, take a deep breath, and pull up a seat next to your ol’ pal. You’re many fingers old now, so I can tell you things I never dared to share when you were younger.  Let’s start off by talking about love.  Yes, love.  Because as long as there’s love, there are going to be kids.  And as long as there are kids, there’s going to be a world.  And as long as there’s a world, there’s going to be a Bozo, which means there will be a me.  And this is my story.  It is also Bozo’s story.  And what a story it is…” -from the back cover

Drummond explains, “I planned to attend law school in Chicago and live in a big city, but plans changed when I met and married my husband, Ladd Drummond, a fourth-generation member of a cattle ranching family, whom I call “the Marlboro Man.”

She began blogging in 2006 on topics ranging from ranch life; her transition from city girl to country girl; her four children to her very cute husband. After about a year she posted her first recipe on “How to Cook a Steak” accompanied by 20 photos explaining the cooking process step by step and the rest as they say is history. Her blogs are filled with family stories; country living, and step-by-step cooking instructions. Not to forget her elaborate food; life and ranch photography. Her blog, Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, won honors at the Weblog Awards in 2007, 2008, and 2009, and in 2009 it took the top prize as Weblog of the Year. As of September 2009, Drummond’s blog reportedly receives 13 million page views per month. (You might want to read that again).

In 2009, she published a cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl which shot to the top of the New York Times Best Sellers List. It exudes her trademark charm, pictures and really great recipes!

On her blog, she also wrote a series titled: “From Black Heels to Tractor Wheels – A Love Story” which detailed her move from Los Angeles to Chicago after she met said rancher/ cowboy and changed her life plans. That series has just been published as a book on Valentine’s Day 2011.

On the fly leaf, Ree explains the book this way:

“Read along as I recount the rip-roaring details of my unlikely romance with a chaps-wearing cowboy, from the early days of our courtship (complete with cows, horses, prairie fire, and passion) all the way through the first year of our marriage, which would be filled with more challenge and strife—and manure—than I ever could have expected. This isn’t just my love story; it’s a universal tale of passion, romance, and all-encompassing love that sweeps us off our feet. It’s the story of a cowboy…and Wranglers…and chaps…and the girl who fell in love with them.”

To make all this even more fun the movie rights have been sold to Columbia Pictures. Reese Witherspoon is rumored to be playing Ree. How cool is that. -Norma

One of Ree's pictures of her Marlboro Man

There’s a reason this is on my mind — I am reading Frank Brady’s new book, Endgame, about Bobby Fischer. I loved playing chess as a child — I remember learning the game sometime in the 3rd or 4th grade, and playing frequently at school and with friends. I remember reading a few “Chess for Beginners”-type books. I was never a particularly strong player (my chess zenith was beating a teacher who had once won a match against the Junior Champion of Britain whilst said champion was watching TV and eating a sandwich), but I enjoyed it. And then, I stopped playing. Not intentionally. Other parts of my life just crowded it out.

Endgame has forced me to question why I dropped chess. It’s really the story of a troubled genius, not a book about chess, but it brought chess back into my mind, and made me remember why I enjoyed it. I’ve caught myself thinking through old chess questions or problems I had, Googling for more information, and looking for chess apps for my phone. Not because I plan to make chess a central part of my life — but because a book made it interesting to me again.

I said that Endgame is not really about chess, and I think that’s true — chess is the background, not the story itself. As I’ve read it, I’ve been struck by the parallels to The Fall of the House of Zeus. I don’t know that Dickie Scruggs counts as a “genius” in quite the same way that Bobby Fischer did, but there’s no question that he saw angles nobody else did and accomplished things nobody else could. And both Bobby and Dickie, heady with their own success, ignored the cautionary voices around them and indulged their own fantasies of invincibility. And both fell hard, in their respective arenas.

I know I’ve rambled a bit here, but sometimes I feel like that’s the appropriate response to a book — to ramble from thought to thought, to ruminate and consider. Some books throw everything into sharp contrast, and demand an immediate response, but other books are quieter. They may not change your life, but they can still add something to it.

And to put the icing on the cake, yesterday, the New York Times came out with their list of the Top Ten Best Books of 2010 and Cleopatra was right there!

As Schiff said in a recent interview:

“Cleopatra was born a goddess, became a queen at 18 and at the height of her power she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler. For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the Western world in her hands. Having inherited a kingdom in decline, Cleopatra would go on to lose it, regain it, nearly lose it again, amass an empire and then lose it all.”

She continued:

“I wanted to take a story we have completely mangled – few as effectively as Cleopatra – and make this both a factual book and a readable book, for people who are not trained historians. I wanted to make her approachable but also strip away the incredible gossamer myth floating around her all the time. After Eve and Mary, Cleopatra may be the most written about woman ever.”

I think it’s fabulous when such a well known, respected writer takes on a person whose life has been completely misunderstood and gives them their due. Certainly, we all think we know a lot about Cleopatra; she looks like Elizabeth Taylor; wore an incredible amount of eye liner and seduced a lot of really famous men–Julius Caesar and Marc Antony for starters. And oh yeah, she committed suicide by bringing a poisonous asp (snake) into her bed. Truth is, only the barest of facts are known about her and from an historical perspective, her life can be proven in only the tiniest of bits and pieces. Schiff has uncovered every one and the result is a definitive biography on a truly fascinating woman. -Norma