books in paradise

When we go on a relaxing tropical vacation, the first thing I put on the packing list is which books I want to bring - going to the pool doesn't mean swimming or tanning for us, it means reading... Here are the books we read on our Punta Cana trip (and the various nice places around the resort we found for doing the reading!)

#1: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson- a story about the relationship between two widowed people: a very properly British retired army major and the Pakistani shopkeeper in his quaint little English town. It was quite a charming love story but also a deeper story about culture, acceptance, and what really is "proper" behavior. A good vacation read.

#2: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach - Peter got me this one for Christmas. I was intrigued because it takes place at a (fictional) liberal arts college on the shores of Lake Michigan; it follows the college baseball team and the star shortstop who becomes filled with self doubt after a throw goes terribly awry. It wasn't all baseball - there were tidbits of English literature, liberal arts academic life, deep friendships, romances, dreams, redemption... And I was deeply into it enough that when I read #5 below - baseball nonfiction - I kept thinking of characters from this book and their baseball stats. Oops, not real people.

#3: The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean - about an elderly woman with Alzheimers' flashbacks to enduring the siege of Leningrad living in the Hermitage Museum. The art is all packed up to keep it safe during the war, but the book is still filled with beautiful descriptions of the art as Marina makes a "memory palace" of the museum's rooms. Lovely. I liked it a lot.

#4: Eden Close by Anita Shreve - someone at one of my book clubs handed this one to me; it was a good novel to just read - nothing too complicated, but an interesting mystery undercurrent to the plot in which the main character comes back to his childhood home, rediscovers his relationship (and love) with his neighbor, and learns what really happened in a tragic shooting next door 20 years earlier.

#5: I finished up with my fourth book on the second to last day of the trip... so I had to read one of Peter's, which he finished in the first few days - Moneyball by Michael Lewis, which describes how Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A's, takes a new approach to putting together a low-budget baseball team that competes with the much higher budgets of teams like the Yankees. I'll read a novel about baseball, but non-fiction...? But it was SO interesting. I loved the (real-life) characters, especially the undervalued baseball players who get their chance at baseball when evaluated in more rational ways (such as having high on base percentage vs looking good in a uniform). Beyond just baseball, it makes you consider what else we make assumptions about or do based on feelings, rather than real analytical, evidence-based practice.

#6: Peter also read Bill Bryson's latest (At Home: A Short History of Private Life). Between his two books, Peter became quite a font of knowledge and had lots of facts to report about baseball statistic keeping and the evolution of domesticity.