This Japanese novel from 1962 starts innocently enough. A man has disappeared after boarding a train to the seashore for a holiday. An amateur entomologist, he told the woman with whom he lives that he planned to collect specimens. Since no body is discovered in the area where he was headed, there is little to no investigation. Most people assume he's gone off with a woman or committed suicide.

After this brief introductory chapter, we enter the man's mind as he leaves the train and boards a bus. He takes the bus to the end of the line and then walks through a small village to the dunes by the sea. He wants to collect insects in the dunes, hoping to find a new variety, something no one has seen before. Perhaps it could be named after him.

He's been studying about sand and finds himself thinking about the size of the particles and the particular way it is somehow isolated from soil and clay and stones to create deserts and sandy beaches. As he wanders, eyes alert for beetles, thoughts circling around sand particles, he runs into several villagers who lure him into captivity, trapped in a deep cavity in the dunes where a woman lives in a shabby house. In return for digging the ever-encroaching sand and putting it in tins for the villagers to pull up and take away, they are provided with minimal food and water.

We now enter the realm of parable. Like something out of Kafka or Poe, the man at first rails against his imprisonment, refusing to work and trying to escape. The joy of this book is the slow, subtle, and thoroughly believable way that his spirit is broken. To build his strength and deceive his jailors, he pretends to accommodate himself to life in the hole. When not digging sand, he helps the woman string beads, extra work she has taken on to earn money for a radio. His “gentle contentment” grows until he remembers that “He had intended this accommodation to be a means, never a goal.”

At every turn I thought of my own long life working in offices. I thought of the salarymen in Japan, trying to hold onto jobs by putting in long hours of overtime and not taking vacation or sick days. When I went to Japan again a few years ago, the train from Tokyo was delayed because someone had committed suicide by jumping in front of it. I was told that this was a common occurrence.

It used to make me sad to think of the way we compromise our youthful dreams as we grow older. Then I decided that such a development was only realistic. Once we have responsibilities—spouses, children, mortgages—we must have a thought for these beloved and freely chosen encumbrances. We cannot think only of ourselves.

And office work gave me more than an income. It challenged me intellectually and forced me to become more disciplined. More importantly, it pulled me out of my shell and taught me to interact with and value people from circles I would not otherwise have breached. Working closely with strangers who became colleagues and, often, friends, rubbed off the rough edges of my eccentric solitary habits.

Yet this story reminds me how easily a temporary adjustment can become a prison.

What book have you read that changed the way you thought about your life?

Over the years, the staff at the Ivy Bookshop, my local indie bookstore, have introduced me to many of what have become my favorite books: Stoner, Old Filth, and The Sleeping Dictionary to name just a few. I always go there before my book club’s annual book selection night, and their recommendations are usually the ones we like the best. So when they put up a display of books by Chinese and Japanese authors with lovely covers from Vintage International and Random House, I immediately wanted one of each. Perhaps I will end up there, but for now I’m starting with four.

And what a way to start! Yiyun Li’s short stories bring to life a world of people far removed from the headlines and stereotypes. Some are set in China and some in the U.S., but most include or reference the tension of sons, daughters, or fiancés who have gone to the U.S. to study and may or may not return. All are told in the voice of a storyteller, one who gives us an entrée into the lives of ordinary people with astonishing stories to tell. Each person feels like someone we know quite well.

What I found most fascinating is the mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. In the first story, “Granny Lin”, the title character seems like many elderly women I've known who have been sidelined throughout their lives, following advice that turns out wrong, working hard. Yet she is uniquely herself. Her neighbor says of her, “. . . were there one honest person left on earth, it would be you.” She loves working as a maid at an exclusive private school where “Every meal is a banquet.” and takes on extra work in the laundry. There, she encounters a young boy who is “the son of a disfavored wife” and they become friends.

I love the way Li uses subtle turns of phrase, as well as proverbs, aphorisms, and references to mythology to convey the flavor of Chinese dialogue. For instance, a boy vowing vengeance on a gang who beat up his brother says, “Boys of the Song family are not soft persimmons for others to squeeze.” A woman says of a man who has been “married three times, and three times the wife died. They say he has the fate of a diamond.” She explains that “His life is as hard as a diamond and whoever he marries will be damaged.”

Also, alluding to a cultural factor that exists in China—and in the U.S. as well, though perhaps more covertly—the smallest happiness must be negotiated against totalitarian powers. These powers may be the state with their one-child policy, or pompous, pampered officials who make free with the lives of their peasant comrades. They may be school officials or parents whose expectations can feel like shackles.

Part of this negotiation is what can be said and what cannot be said, whether out of modesty or loneliness or fear of retribution. There are many silences in these stories. The title story brilliantly explores this theme: the elderly Mr. Shi comes to visit his daughter in the Midwest town where she works in a college library. He befriends a woman from Iran, even though neither speaks much English, and tries to talk with his daughter. The communication between them, in words but also in the food he cooks for her, shifts in the course of the story. His daughter says that a new language “makes you a new person.”

Sometimes the reference to the U.S. may be simply the name of a film. In “Love in the Marketplace”, Sansan is called Miss Casablanca by her students because she shows the film five or six times a semester. I remember my son watching that film over and over. For Sansan, a 32-year-old spinster, a promise is a promise. We go with her to see her mother who sells seasoned eggs in the marketplace. The lives of these two women may seem small, but their choices and the integrity with which they make them loom large. They linger in my memory long after I have finished the story, as I ponder the details of their stories and the larger human context.

What short story collection have you read that lingers in your mind?

I did a reading with Margo Christie a little while ago, and we had an interesting discussion about using life experiences in memoir and fiction. I read from my memoir, Innocent, and she read from this novel, which is based on some of her own experiences.

Fourteen-year-old Becky Shelling idolizes her father, jazz trumpeter Ernie Shelling, a romantic figure whose gigs take him traveling or staying out till the wee hours. He in turn favors her over his step-daughter, treating Becky to dance lessons and taking her along to sing with one of his woman friends, Teri the Canary. To Becky, his glamorous work far outshines their shabby rowhouse in Highlandtown, a blue-collar neighborhood in Baltimore of formstone rowhouses with at least one bar, if not four, at every intersection.

Then he gets a gig in Miami and leaves, promising to send Becky a bus ticket. Although her stepmother continues to let Becky live there, life becomes more and more intolerable as her stepsister’s boyfriend and his rowdy friends take over the place whenever Arlene is at work. It’s 1974, but Becky has assembled a wardrobe out of the 1940s, thanks to Goodwill shops. Hoping for a stage career, she finds a job at a run-down dinner theater in Middle River, working as an usher, coat-check girl, costume repairer, or whatever else needed doing while snagging some small parts.

It’s there that she meets Lenny Moss, an older man who sells insurance and looks like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. She becomes not just his mistress but also his employee when he fulfills his long-time dream of opening a bar on the Block, Baltimore’s famous red-light district. The Block used to stretch to several blocks of burlesque clubs but by the 1970s had begun its long slide down into an ever-shrinking area of peep shows and strip joints. Moss hopes to reverse this trend by imbuing his club with some of the opulence of the old days, when women wore fabulously beaded and embellished gowns and danced and teased with their fans and feathered boas.

Stories of older men and young teenaged girls make my skin crawl, but there’s something sweet about this one. Becky is so invested in becoming a 1940s glamour queen; she and Lenny meet on level ground when it comes to their dreams. However, morning always comes, and hanging out with her new friends on the Block, Becky begins to learn the truth about her father.

This award-winning book is thoroughly addictive. Long past my usual lights-out, Christie’s prose kept me reading, oh just one more page, one more chapter. Her dialogue is a delight, catching the nuances of the varied cast of characters, from clumsy teenaged boys to sultry torch singers. And bars and kitchens and gowns all come to life in her descriptions. It was also fun to hear all the stories about the Block in the old days. When I was growing up, it was still world-famous. I remember a doctor visiting us from India. “All I know about Baltimore,” he said, “is Fort McHenry and the Block.”

Holding onto the past, wanting to recreate a more dazzling time, seems relatively harmless. Becky’s story, though, makes me think again about the sometimes dangerous allure of nostalgia.

Have you read a novel where someone clings to the past, perhaps in a subtle way rather than insanely à la Miss Havisham?

Although I’ve been meaning for years to read this novel by one of my favorite poets, I only just got around to it, prompted by last week’s The Blind Owl I heard that Hedayat had been influenced by the Rilke novel, and I could see that. Both plunge the reader deep into the mind of a troubled young man, seducing us with poetic prose that draws us in ever deeper. Rilke’s novel, however, is not a plunge into madness, but an existential journey.

Twenty-eight-year-old Malte leads a solitary life in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. He walks the streets, dismayed by the poverty and despair of the people he sees. Death is all around him: a man dying near him in a cafe, a young girl dying in front of his eyes on a trolley. He says, “I have no roof over me, and it is raining into my eyes.”

He takes refuge in libraries, museums, and his own bare room. He reconstructs his childhood, when only his mother was powerful enough to dispel the night fears. Daytime fears abound: a mysterious hand he encounters under a table as he searches for a dropped crayon, costumes and masks he dresses up in that suck his soul away. Two encounters with dead women, one a visible manifestation and one, a story of his mother’s, only felt—but there was the dog’s behavior. And death: he says that we each carry our death inside us “as a fruit has its core.” He movingly recounts the terrible deaths of his grandfather, father and mother.

Masks become a motif throughout the novel, as Malte determines how to live and how to love. They recur in various ways, as decorations on the wall, a death mask of Beethoven, the false front certain other historical figures have put on, the world itself. He asks, “Is it possible that despite our discoveries and advances, despite our culture, religion, and science, we have remained on the surface of this life?”

He explores the lives of various poets, saints, kings, and others, always in beautifully evocative language. Here he is, after pondering a number of women whose stories have come down to us, famous for their grief at having lost their great loves, thinking suddenly of a childhood memory.

I found a jewel-case; it was two handsbreadths large, fan-shaped, with a border of flowers stamped into the dark-green morocco. I opened it: it was empty. I can say this now after so many years. But at that time, when I had opened it, I saw only what its emptiness consisted of: velvet, a small mound of light-colored, no longer fresh velvet; and the jewel-groove which, empty and brighter by just a trace of melancholy, vanished into it. For a moment this was bearable. But to those who, as women who are loved, remain behind, it is perhaps always like this.

He turns to love, requited and not. I remember a long time ago a friend of mine pointing out how much easier it is to be the one who loves rather than the one who is loved. Malte takes this insight even further, declaring that the Prodigal Son left home because he could not bear to be so loved by his family. He imagines the freedom of running away through fields escaping even the dogs, and preferring the harshness of life on his own. “What were all the darknesses of that time, compared to the thick sorrow of those embraces in which everything was lost? Didn’t you wake up feeling that you had no future? Didn’t you walk around drained of all meaning, without the right to even the slightest danger?”

I thought of the two novels I read recently which featured a child mysteriously resistant to family ties who runs away. In The Stone Carvers it was a son who ran away and ran away until finally he didn’t come back. In The Orchardist it was an adopted daughter who goes off with the horse wranglers every season until she too does not return. This beautiful novel by Rilke helps me understand these other two novels better and also myself.

In the Introduction, William H. Gass ties Malte’s story closely to Rilke’s own biography. Yet he also clarifies how much editing and revision went into the final version. We who write fiction may use elements from our lives but using imagination and passion we craft them into something whole and shining, or try to. Rilke succeeds brilliantly.

What novel have you read whose poetic prose you particularly noticed?

Rummaging around in my TBR mountain (books waiting To Be Read), I came across this slender novel. I don’t remember where it came from; I’ve never heard of it, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t buy it. However, once it jumped into my hand, I was intrigued. The cover unsettled me; an interesting collage of Persian rugs, rather jumbled, with the title text pushing out of its box and just a corner of an owl’s head, it hinted at secrets and mysteries and dark things just outside your field of vision.

The story is indeed dark. The narrator is a Persian man living—if you can call it that—just outside the city of Rey. With the first line we are plunged into his maelstrom: “There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker.” He goes on to talk of the agony of his disease, which I at first assumed to be depression or youthful alienation, but turns out to be much worse.

He tells us he is writing this story to capture what he remembers of a series of strange events. “My one fear is that tomorrow I may die without having come to know myself . . . I am writing only for my shadow,” he says, reminding me of Jung’s archetype.

The story is divided into two parts. The first part, chapters one to three, tells how he, a man who makes pen-cases, always painting the same scene, sees a woman, sees in fact that very scene. After this coup de foudre, he goes out walking, looking for her, although he has already told us that he has not been the same since losing her. The second part, chapters four and five, go back over and over the story, adding more information, changing details, swapping personas, building in intensity.

The story is an unsettling journey in the mind of a man going mad, as dark as something out of Poe or Kafka. That he treats his “disease” with copious amounts of wine and opium only makes what he observes even more obscure. The ever-shifting reality, the surreal happenings leave the reader reeling with vertigo, unsure of what is true and what is not.

While this is not usually the sort of story I like to read, the power of the prose held me rapt until I turned the last page. It is a bit flowery for our modern reading tastes—the book was first published in 1941—but it is irresistible.

The night was departing on tip-toe. One felt that it had shed sufficient of its weariness to enable it to go its way. The ear detected faint, far-off sounds such as the sprouting grass might have made, or some migratory bird as it dreamed upon the wing. The pale stars were disappearing behind banks of cloud. I felt the gentle breath of the morning on my face and at the same moment a cock crowed somewhere in the distance.

Also, the puzzle addict in me was kept busy trying to untangle all of the motifs and themes that the story kept spiraling back to, finding them changed each time, such as the two months and four days turning into two years and four months or the origin and composition of the mysterious bottle of wine metamorphosing.

I have seen so many contradictory things and have heard so many words of different sorts, my eyes have seen so much of the worn-out surface of various objects—the thin, tough rind behind which the spirit is hidden—that now I believe nothing. At this very moment I doubt the existence of tangible, solid things, I doubt clear, manifest truths.

Once I finished it, I set out to learn more about the book and discovered that The Blind Owl is considered the foremost work of twentieth-century Iranian fiction. Hedayat wrote it between 1925 and 1941, the last years of Reza Shah’s reign, and so is assumed by some to be about Iran’s tug of war between tradition and modernity. Yet the story is so deep and passionate that one can read it many ways. I suspect, too, that on each rereading, it will appear to be a different story.

What Iranian fiction have you read?

Edna Pontellier, a 28-year-old wife and mother, is on vacation with her two small sons. They are at a pension on Grand Isle where other families have taken refuge from New Orleans’ August heat, husbands joining them at the weekend. We see her first through the eyes of her 40-year-old husband, a prosperous businessman, as she returns from bathing accompanied by Robert Lebrun, the son of the pension owner. Mr. Pontellier criticises her for getting sunburnt, “looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage.”

Yet there is clearly an understanding between them as she, laughing, holds out her hand and he knows she is asking for her rings which she asked him to hold for her. Edna has a certain reserve that sets her apart. “Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself.” Although she does have friends among the other women on Grand Isle, she does not feel at home among them because she alone is not a Creole, with their freedom of expression and absence of prudery. Also, she is not a “mother-woman . . .They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.”

Almost imperceptibly, through one small scene and then another, Edna begins to recognise herself and “her position in the universe as a human being”. She begins to do the things that she wants to do rather than the things she is supposed to do, spending her days painting in an atelier she has created at the top of their town mansion, not attending her own “at homes”. I love that rather than defining herself by those around her, she tries to define herself from within, to become her authentic self, although at first she does not know what that is.

First published in 1899, The Awakening is as relevant to women today as it was then, when women—and men—were struggling to free themselves from Victorian tradition and authority. In her introduction, Sandra M. Gilbert places the novel in the context of fin de siêcle writers and their predecessors, such as Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, Walt Whitman, Emile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant. As Gilbert points out, though, Edna differs from George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke and Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw Linton in that their struggle ends with them "accepting their own comparative powerlessness." Edna never does.

Gilbert also points out the sensual images of the sea that permeate the book and suggests that Edna’s story may be a retelling of the story of Aphrodite. I had not considered these ideas when I first read this book in the 1970s. Reading it now, it seems deeper and richer than ever, and I appreciate more the structure and the subtle changes Edna undergoes.

Chopin achieves these almost imperceptible transitions by leaving some mystery around Edna’s feelings: she cries after being awakened and reproached by her husband, but "She could not have told why she was crying." This is appropriate since Edna herself does not understand for a long time what is happening to her. Her statements and the close third-person narration gradually become stronger as her feelings and goals become clearer. Also, much of our understanding of her feelings comes from what others say about her and from the descriptions of her surroundings. These seem only loosely linked to her journey at first, more obviously reflect her feelings as we go on.

The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight.

What book from the past have you reread and found better than you remembered?

This compulsively readable novel is about a handful of people at a small college in Michigan whose plans, dreams and ambitions are thrown off course. Mike Schwartz is more than the captain of the baseball team; he is its heart. Acting as the assistant coach the school can’t afford, he pushes his teammates to do more and better than they ever thought they could. He discovers shortstop Henry Skrimshander at a summer Legion game and, impressed by the boy’s astounding fielding ability, engineers a place for him at Westish College.

The best part of the book for me is the description of Henry’s first days at this place that seems to him like something out of a movie. “If he’d been able to imagine the students of Westish College in any specific way, he imagined twelve hundred Mike Schwartzes, huge and mythic and grave, and twelve hundred women of the sort Mike Schwartz might date: leggy, stunning, well versed in ancient history. The whole thing, really, was too intimidating to think about.”

He hesitates outside the door of his dorm room, wondering how many roommates he will have and what kind of music was trickling out of the room. Henry’s roommate turns out to be Owen Dunne, sophisticated, gay, totally cool, and compulsive about cleanliness: Henry first meets Owen as the boy is scrubbing the en suite bathroom grout with a toothbrush. The unlikely duo become friends. Owen too has a well-thumbed copy of Henry’s Bible: The Art of Fielding by a fictitious Aparicio Rodriguez, supposedly the greatest defensive shortstop ever. Rodriguez’s book is filled with snippets of advice and epigrams that border on the enigmatic.

The other two characters we follow are Guert Affenlight, the president of the college, and his daughter, Pella, who shows up at his home fleeing from an intolerable marriage and ready for a new start, though she has forgotten to bring any socks. All of these characters are afflicted by sometimes crippling self-doubt as they pursue their dreams. All but Owen, rather, who seems untouched by such mundane concerns.

I have to say that, although I enjoyed the camaraderie and mutual support of the baseball team and appreciated the various baseball metaphors, I found the main characters uninteresting, if not repellent. Although we spend a lot of time in Mike and Guert’s heads, I cannot muster enough sympathy for them to overcome my dislike of their actions. The two sad sacks, Henry and Pella, seem pretty impenetrable to me, and Owen is just too perfect to be real.

Still, I could not stop reading. I’m not even sure why. I certainly wasn’t interested in the fate of the baseball team or the characters. Certainly, the prose is addictive, easy to read, and often funny. The voices of the five are well-differentiated. One thing I particularly like is that Harbach is able to write about deep emotions in his male characters without either gruffness or sentimentality.

I had to laugh at the climax; it was not at all what I expected from a baseball novel. The ending, though, seemed contrived to me, as though the author had dug himself into a hole and didn’t know how to get out.

Yet I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out why I couldn’t stop until I had read every single word.

What book have you read recently that you couldn't put down?

The Sleeping Dictionary is the best sort of historical fiction: an absorbing story with plenty of detail to immerse you in the time, all supported by an historically accurate framework. Set during the turbulent last days of the British Raj, this is the story of a child who is orphaned when a tsunami sweeps away her village and her family. We follow her struggles to make a place for herself in a world that is not kind to women or to Bengali peasants.

Our narrator's name changes with her circumstances, but her voice is strong enough that we never lose sight of who she is. She starts out as Pom, beloved Didi (older sister) to her siblings. Massey weaves in the foreign words so naturally that I had no need of the glossary provided. There are lovely descriptions of her Hindu family's life on the land that they farmed but did not own.

We had potatoes and eggplants and tomatoes and greens from our own vegetable garden. Fruits beckoned from old abandoned orchards and from neighbors who did not mind sharing. To buy foodstuffs we could not grow, my mother raised a small amount from selling the brooms [she made] in summer and catching fish during rainy season.

As the monsoon approaches, she says, “Stillness precedes the rains: a kind of energy that holds you and everything else motionless. It was holding us then.”

When the flood comes, she happens to be in the woods and survives by climbing a tree. Afterwards, several boats of survivors pass her but are not willing to pick her up, saying they had no room for another. Finally one family grudgingly lets her climb into their boat, but refuses to share their food and water with her and abandons her as soon as they reach land. This is a portent of things to come as she finds sometimes reluctant help, a few generous people, and many more who want to make use of her.

I enjoyed the section where, renamed Sarah and ordered to be a Christian, she works as a servant in an Anglo-Indian school. There, through the kindness of a teacher and a student, she discovers a love of reading and languages. The school's name of Lockwood of course reminded me of Lowood, not the only reference to Jane Eyre. But our heroine finds herself more adrift in the world than prim and passionate Jane. She makes more mistakes, poignantly believing in the kindness of strangers and the lure of appearances.

When she finally makes it to Calcutta and renames herself Kamala, she finds a job but also becomes caught up in the movement to free India from the British Empire. Tempting as it must have been for the author to tell us all about those tumultuous and thrilling times, Massey never loses the story. She limits herself to only what Kamala might know and encounter in the course of her daily life. Thus the historical detail remains organic and never intrudes on the story.

I highly recommend this novel. I've enjoyed Massey's earlier books, award-winning mysteries featuring Rei Shimuri. This big novel reads just as fast and fluently as her mysteries. I loved watching Pom/Kamala remake herself over and over, adapting to new worlds, but never losing sight of what's most important. It's a complex story, giving the flavor of many of the smaller worlds within India during the last days of the Raj, always from a woman's point of view.

What historical novels have you enjoyed?

Zucchino is a journalist who in this extremely well-written book sets out to explode the stereotype of the welfare queen that Ronald Reagan promulgated to persuade the public that all welfare recipients were cheating the system and driving around in gold Cadillacs collecting checks to which they were not entitled.

This was also the motive that drove me to write a memoir of my time on welfare, Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother. I closed it with an epigraph from George Herbert: “Poverty is no sin.” I wrote not just about myself, but also about many of the other people I knew. The Writer's Almanac recently had a quote from Frank Capra: “I wanted to glorify the average man, not the guy at the top, not the politician, not the banker, just the ordinary guy whose strength I admire, whose survivability I admire.” I, too, admired the strength and survivability of the people around me who were bravely trying to get out of poverty despite overwhelming odds.

I also wanted to show that we were just parents and, like any other parent, only trying to do the best for our children. Zucchino does this as well by focusing his story on two Philadelphia women: Odessa Williams and Cheri Honkala. Despite ill health Odessa is the bulwark of her large extended family, the person everyone turns to for help. After taking in some of her grandchildren, she was forced to go back on welfare after many years of supporting herself and her family. Cheri is a activist for the homeless. She herself is able to rent a place for her son and herself out of her welfare check, but is dedicated to finding new ways to shame the city into providing help for the city's most vulnerable citizens.

Although the story takes place 15 years after I went off of welfare, there is much that I recognise. Odessa's daughter Elaine has tried repeatedly to get the training that would give her the credentials necessary to securing a job. When her latest training program is cancelled due to budget cuts the day before it is due to start, she says: “‘Seems like just when I start to rise up, . . . something comes along and—bam!—it knocks me back down.'”

When Odessa tells her grandson's therapist that she sometimes feels like giving up, the woman reminds her of what a good job she is doing of caring for her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She says, “‘There's something good inside you—a big heart.'”

Rebecca's kind words had warmed her. It occurred to her that what she needed was acknowledgment, from someone in the world beyond Allegheny Avenue, of her deprivations and sacrifices. She did not expect it from her family; she took care of them because she loved them and because it was her duty. But to receive such reassurance from an outsider afforded her a sort of absolution for all her dark thoughts about abandoning her responsibilities.

This incident reminded me of how important my contacts with the world outside of other welfare moms were to me in my struggle to get out of poverty.

Cheri starts a tent city on the city of a former lace factory that has been burned and bulldozed. As winter falls she moves them into an abandoned church. We get to know several of the homeless folks, particularly two women with young children. Cheri's outrage reminds me of my own, especially when she is given some posters about corporate welfare, with photos of men from Disney, McDonald's and Lockheed Martin and the taxpayer money, ranging from $300,000 to $850 million, they received. “Below each man's photo were two paragraphs pointing out that AFDC accounted for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. The $14.4 billion spent on all social welfare programs in 1994, the message said, was dwarfed by the $104.3 billion spent on corporate welfare.” I especially liked the other message on the poster, which expresses a point I've often tried to make:

Everyone who drives on a toll-free highway, attends a public school or university, deducts mortgage interest payments from their income tax, or enjoys a national park is getting the equivalent of welfare from the federal government. In one way or another, we are all welfare recipients.

The truly sad part of the book is that Zucchino's portrait of the two women is just before Clinton signed the welfare reform act in 1996 that effectively removed the safety net; it “revoked the federal guarantee of welfare cash to low-income families with dependent children.” So as hard as the lives are of those portrayed in this book, we know they are about to get a lot harder.

It is almost impossible, unless you are a highly paid professional or a trust fund baby, for a single parent to make enough money to pay for even the barest living expenses plus child care. The way this country has turned its back on its children continues to shock me. Investing in our children is investing in the country's future.

What book have you read that helped you understand another way of life?