Unpacking

This weekend, D and I tackled the piles of boxes we'd stuck in the room that will eventually become D's office. Since our arrival, the space has essentially been an extra-large walk-in closet for us, but now that my parents and Newly Graduated Sis are coming to visit in a week, we're inclined to get it somewhat tidied -- so it can fit the boxes that have spilled over into the guest bedroom.

We got through the majority of D's stuff by Sunday night, which leaves the rest of this week for me to figure out what I want to do with mine. Much of it is memorabilia from school that needs to be organized so it can be sifted through more easily should I ever need to access anything from a specific time, and being on the point of starting to write this thesis has made me reluctant to toss things that provide potentially useful information about my past. Not the best mindset to be in when you're trying to make space!

It doesn't help that the texts I've been looking at as possible models for my work all incorporate the use of personal documents and other such things to really interesting effect. In the last few weeks, I've managed to steal enough time (mostly on planes) to finish three books that do this.

The first is Five Thousand Days Like This One by Jane Brox. Her memoir is one part a collection of family stories passed down to her by her father and the other part a history of New England farm life. Both portions of the work use old records to reanimate scenes from the past in Brox's poetic style. I don't think it's a style I would follow -- sometimes the way the records are quoted into the larger narrative feels a bit choppy against the original language of the writer; the two just don't blend -- but it's striking how much those records help Brox situate her father's apple farm in the culture of American commerce when industry arrives. Context is everything.

The second book that makes great use of personal documents is Honor Moore's The Bishop's Daughter. In a way, the work relies almost too heavily on these -- primarily letters between Moore's parents in their dating years as well as letters between father and daughter and mother and daughter. The goal of incorporating all of this correspondence is to aid in creating a portrait of the family's private life while its members navigate a very public existence (Paul Moore was the 13th Episcopal Bishop of New York). I love how much access the narrator has to all of these rich primary sources -- I certainly don't have that volume to work with! On occasion, though, the specificity of each piece of evidence meant to illustrate some detail makes it difficult to see the big picture that the narrator is painting. It overwhelms, to a degree.

The most recent book I've finished is Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex. This one isn't actually a memoir, but it reads very much like one and situates its narrative over three generations of a Greek family adapting to life in America between the 1920s and 1970s (which includes Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement ...). It is extremely clear that the author has researched the influences of these six decades on Detroit -- the city where most of the narrative takes place -- and he weaves that information into the background of the story in a way that doesn't detract from the focus on the protagonist, a girl coming of age in that third generation of her family. Her coming of age is complicated by biological factors that have their own story, and this narrative thread's ability to hold its own as a driving force in the novel against such a tumultuous historical backdrop is what really amazes me. The two elements work in sync with each other to even greater effect.

All right, enough pseudo-book-reviewing from me. I know I've been behind on updating my reading list for the summer, so there you go (see the full list in the sidebar). Also, for those of you keeping track, I've got six more nominations left for the One Lovely Blog award, so if you like reading about what other people are reading, here are some blogs I've discovered recently:

• Books and Cooks, written by Tara
• Breaking the Fourth Wall, written by Lisa
• Tripping Toward Lucidity: Estella's Revenge, written by Andi
• Incurable Logophilia (author unnamed)
• Writing Under a Pseudonym, written by Jade Park.

And yes, the final nominee will be forthcoming soon.