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Required Reading - 2020

6/15/2020

 
By Carol Van Why

If in the wake of the George Floyd tragedy you’re looking to broaden your understanding of the issues surrounding race in the United States, turning to important books is always a solution. 
 
One of the best choices would be Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.  Author Toni Morrison told us that this book should be on everyone’s “required reading” list.  Even if you’ve already read this gripping memoir, it’s one of those titles that you can revisit again and again.  Find Coates’ book, written in the form of a letter to his son, in the 1666 library’s BIOGRAPHY SECTION, shelved under Coates. ​ 
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​Ta-Nehisi Coates himself has said that James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” is the best essay he ever read.  Originally published in 1963, find this essay in a collection of Baldwin’s work in the ESSAYS AND COLUMNS section on the library’s upper level. 
 
Watch for more important book suggestions coming to this space in July and August.

Review: “Where'd You Go, Bernadette”

6/2/2020

 
By Mary Abbe, Library Committee
Originally published in the June 2020 issue of the 1666 Coffman Newsletter

If you-know-what has cancelled the beach idyll on your summer schedule, consider subbing in the fab beach-worthy book Where’d You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple. A recent donation to the Coffman Library, this entertaining 2012 paperback is a totally engaging romp.

The cover photo of a soigné brunette in sunglasses caught my eye. Could it be a novel about Anna Wintour, the tyrannically aloof British-born editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, I 
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wondered? ​Nope. Just her west coast double, Bernadette, a sulky Seattle housewife with a mysterious past who goes AWOL on the eve of a family jaunt to Antarctica. That leaves her over-achieving teenage daughter, Bee, and her mostly-clueless Microsoft exec hubby, Elgie, to puzzle out where she’d gone.

Bee assembles the bread crumb trail of her Mom’s long-buried life and lays it out in a series of hilarious vignettes and documentary ephemera. The vignettes involve busybody moms from Bee’s second-tier prep school—unfortunately located next to an odiferous seafood warehouse—whose efforts to bust into the top tier of Seattle schools are frustrated by gardening disasters, rampant neuroses, automotive envy, and gossip. Ah, and did I mention a mudslide? Well, it is Seattle in the rainy season. Imagine.

Meanwhile, Bee is being set up for a transfer to Choate, the back-east prep school at which Mom flourished before matriculating at Princeton. Despite the family’s bottomless bank accounts and offshore personal assistant (India) who handles the money, mom Bernadette ignores the leaky roof of their hilltop manse and retreats to the Petit Trianon, her backyard camper.

After Bernadette vanishes, it’s Bee who pieces together the shattered fragments of these chaotic lives from a metaphorical dustbin of emails, school memos, emergency room bills, Artforum magazine, interviews, maps, hotel tabs, psychiatric evaluations, police and FBI reports. Laid out more or less chronologically, this deadpan detritus is hilarious. Kinda like life. Only more so.

Besides its engaging characters and unusual format, Bernadette delivers a devastating satire of Seattle and Microsoft, some laugh-out-loud passages about tech lingo and psychotherapy, and smart jabs at real architects, notably postmodernist Michael Graves and Getty Center designer Richard Meier.

Don’t just take my word for it, even the experts offer these cryptic raves:
  • “Divinely funny.” The New York Times
  • “Uproarious.” People
  • “Whip-smart.” Entertainment Weekly
  • “An enchanting ride.” Los Angeles Times
  • “Like Jane Austen—who set the gold standard for social satire—Semple’s most ridiculous characters are convinced that they’re the normal ones, and it’s wonderful fun to watch as they behave abominably, believing themselves blameless.” San Francisco Chronicle

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  • Home
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