A Book A Week

Faith by Jennifer Haigh

2012-01-26T13:42:00.000-08:00

This is the book I’ve been waiting for Mary Gordon or Alice McDermott to write. These women are leading writers of Irish-American fiction, but neither has taken on the subject of the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church. Jennifer Haigh has done it instead, and done it well. I was a little unsure at the beginning, in the way that I always am unsure when starting a book steeped in a current news issue: Would it be exploitative? Would it trivialize the issue? Or wallow in it? The answer is none of the above. This is a really really good book about a sensitive topic.

Faith tells the story of Arthur Breen, a Catholic priest accused of the sexual abuse of a young boy in Boston in the early 2000s. The book isn’t so much about whether or not Arthur is guilty, but is more the story of Arthur’s youth, education, and life in the Catholic community in Boston, and about his siblings Sheila and Mike, who careen wildly among the various emotions and beliefs that are engendered by the charge against their brother. I don’t want to give away too much detail here because the question of Arthur’s guilt or innocence is still salient to the plot, but I will say that Haigh allows us too to experience the varying emotions. Is Arthur creepy? Sad? Totally innocent? A monster? A victim? All of these at once?

How tempting would it be, if you were writing this book, to try to draw conclusions about the causes of the church’s scandal? To make generalizations, or sweeping statements. People do that all the time about this issue. Haigh masterfully avoids those urges and instead has written a story about one man, about his family, and about the bad things that can happen in life. I loved it.

(Book 3, 2012)

Powell's Partnership

2012-01-26T13:32:00.000-08:00

I've decided to join Powell's Partnership program. I am doing this mostly so that I can have a legal way to grab the book cover images that I use in my posts. Now when you click on the image of the cover you will go right to the Powell's website, where you can buy the book. Apparently I get a small commission from any sales that are generated this way, though I don't really expect that to happen all that often.

Regular readers of this blog know that I am mostly a library user and if I could figure out some way to link to the copy of the book at your local library so you could automatically request it I would do that instead. But I guess that won't work. Oh well. Powell's (located in Portland, Oregon) is a very cool store and I'm happy to support it.

Book Lust Rediscovery Series

2012-01-24T10:15:00.000-08:00

My favorite librarian-who-is-also-an-action-figure Nancy Pearl* has made a deal with Amazon to publish Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscovery series, which will release six Nancy-selected books a year of previously published but now out-of-print books. Apparently some readers have taken against this idea, accusing Pearl of collaborating with the enemy, that is, Amazon, because of their predatory policies. (You can read about that here.) I understand the pressure Amazon puts on the industry (for librarians, book sellers, and authors) but I also feel like anything that puts more books in the hands of readers can’t be all bad. I’m looking forward to checking out this series. I haven’t read either of the first two books slated for release later this year: A Gay and Melancholy Sound by Merle Miller, and After Life by Rhian Ellis.

I am still working my way (slowly) through Pearl's summer reading list. And now I see that she put a new list out in December called 7 Books with Personality. Must get going on that too!All this reminds me that I haven’t recently read anything published by Persephone, the UK-based publisher of out-of-print titles by 20th century women. I wonder if Nancy Pearl's books will look as pretty as the ones published by Persephone.

*because you know I have some favorite real-life librarians too (hey Sarah S.-C. and Lexy S.!)

The Oriental Wife by Evelyn Toynton

2012-01-20T10:15:00.000-08:00

I swore I wasn’t going to do this: pick up random books at the library. This was what got me into trouble last year; most of the books I found this way proved dull or annoying, and I wasted several days on each one. However, I can’t seem to resist the habit, and this time it paid off. I found The Oriental Wife on the new fiction shelf and gobbled it up in a few days. The story was haunting, the writing elegant and spare, the pace perfect. I have to remind myself that I have discovered many great authors through my random shelf pillaging. Just because I had a bad stretch doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes work out.

I can’t find much information on Evelyn Toynton on the Web, or any mainstream press reviews of The Oriental Wife. It seems to have slipped in under the radar. Toynton’s writing style reminds me a lot of Anita Brookner whose books are similarly graceful and traverse a similar landscape; the postwar years in London and Europe, and lonely people attempting (but usually failing) to make connections with others.

Louisa and Rolf are children together in Nuremberg, Germany in the 1930’s. As young adults both manage to flee to New York and are later joined by their parents—while the war is a backdrop to this story it’s not omnipresent. Louisa and Rolf marry, but shortly afterward Louisa suffers a traumatic brain injury which drastically changes their lives. Rolf proves not to be the man we had hoped he was and Louisa’s deterioration is saddest part of the story.

Okay, this description makes the whole book sound like a complete downer. While that’s one way to describe it, another way is that this is a serious book about the ups and downs of people’s lives. You can escape from the Nazis and still end up with a brain tumor. You can start out loving someone and then that person changes and you can’t love them anymore, even if the change isn’t their fault. And if the author delivers all this in a way that is measured and thoughtful and insightful, then even better.

(Book 2, 2012)

Bookless

2012-01-17T10:49:00.000-08:00

Madison, WI is building a new Central Library. On January 28they are holding a community celebration (called “Bookless”) in the old empty librarybuilding. The celebration goes on all day and includes an art gallery, familyactivities during the day and a “party in the stacks” in the evening, featuringlocal food and a cash bar. Tickets are $10 in advance and $12 at the door. All proceeds benefit the new library. Click on the picture below for more information. I’mgoing; how about you? Maybe I’ll see you there!

Weekly Check-in

2012-01-12T10:05:00.000-08:00

Currently Reading:

The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern. Funny and odd, a bit too long. I am reading this for my book club which doesn't meet until the end of January. I don't want to post about it until I hear (and think about) everyone else's reactions. I'm reading this on the Kindle.
The Oriental Wife by Evelyn Toynton. I discovered this on the new fiction shelf at the library. I never heard of it or the author, but it's good. It's about Jewish refugees in New York during World War II so it's from a different perspective than what I usually read.

Recently Sampled:

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan. I read the extract on the Kindle and liked it. I want to read it soon. Several people have recommended this to me.
11/22/63 by Stephen King. Another Kindle sample, this time not a success. I always want to like Stephen King because I like his plot ideas but I can never get beyond his overly casual writing style. I won't read this.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. My first impression was of amateurish writing and maudlin situations. This I checked out of the library but I plan to return it unread.

I'm Hearing About:

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. Everyone is talking about this and asking me if I've read it yet. Do I want to read a book about baseball? My friend Jane liked this a lot, but she likes baseball. It's the same with that TV show Friday Night Lights, which Jane also liked and about which I keep hearing. But it's about football.....
Swamplandia by Karen Russell. Another one people keep recommending. I downloaded a sample; maybe I'll read that next.

I'm writing this blog post in an effort to be more intentional with my reading as per my New Year's resolution. I'd like to continue doing these once a week, but we'll see...

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2012-01-04T10:11:00.000-08:00

This is just the kind of book I like, so my year is off to a good start. It’s clever and original, complicated, but not difficult to read. It’s funny and a bit sad at the same time. It’s also got some intricate plotting that I really enjoyed: characters who loop around one another, showing up unexpectedly in one another’s chapters for surprise visits.

Is this a novel or a series of linked short stories? I’m not sure, though I’d vote for the latter. Egan assembles a cast of about a dozen characters who have connections to one another and serves up stories about them at various points in their lives. The stories skip around in time from the near future back to the 1970’s. Characters evolve, or de-evolve, as the case may be. This kind of approach is tricky because it’s easy to leave dangling ends, but Egan ties everything up pretty well and makes it look simple.

I tried to figure out whether there was one character at the center of the tangle, someone with connections to everyone. Is it Bennie? It could be fun to draw some kind of graphic with lines indicating how everyone is connected to each other, but I don’t have the attention span for that kind of thing. I’m already on to my next book.

(Book 1, 2012)

Starting Out as I Mean to Continue

2012-01-02T11:47:00.000-08:00

My New Year's resolution for 2012 is not to read more books but to read better ones and to put in more time researching what to read. My reading in 2011 was characterized by laziness and ennui. I was too lazy to look very hard for new books and often just picked up the first thing that caught my eye at the library; these books were usually only fair and didn't hold my interest. I have a lot of good choices for ways to spend my entertainment hours these days (Netflix on demand, podcasts, social networking websites, etc.). Often it was more satisfying to choose one of those other options than to read the mediocre novel on my bedside table.

But I am, at my core, a reader, and if that means I need to spend a bit more time on the preparation end of things to get more out of the experience, I am willing to do it. Yesterday I took the first step: I took a long careful look at the books I have on hold at the library, excised several from the list that I know were just there on a whim, and ordered up a few that sound like good bets. And today, step two: I downloaded eight first chapter samples to my Kindle. I chose books that have been recently released and have gotten a lot of press--several are from the NY Times list of notable books of 2011. I've also given myself permission to just buy the damn book if I want to, rather than endure the interminable wait for a library copy. For example, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides has 514 people on the hold list. I downloaded a sample of this and if I like it, I'm just going to buy it.

Wish me luck!

So, What Happened this Year? or Three Pathetic Excuses

2012-01-01T10:47:00.000-08:00

Do I have to make excuses for my paltry showing (only 40 books, 12 short of my average and 18 short of last year)? Here are a few:

I started a lot of books that I didn’t like enough to finish or hate enough to write about here. I was especially disappointed with my choices of mysteries and hardly finished any of the half-dozen or so that I tried to read. Hence lots of actual reading hours are unaccounted for on the blog. I chalk that up to bad luck and poor book research on my part. My friend Henry says I should just list all my rejects anyway, but that doesn’t seem right. There are lots of reasons to give up on a book and my most common one is that I am just not in the mood for it right at the moment. That hardly constitutes a fair analysis so for the most part I avoid that approach.
I read a few really long books (Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin) so those should count double or even triple but it doesn’t work like that.
I wasted a lot of time on the Internet. What a time suck. I think to myself “I’m going to go read, but first I’m just going to check my e-mail” and the next thing I know I’ve spent half an hour watching videos from the Scottish Screen Archive about Shetland sheep shearing in the 1930's.

I make no promises for next year. I do have some interesting things in mind to read, but who knows? Meanwhile, Happy New Year to everyone!

A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin

2011-12-31T10:06:00.000-08:00

This is the fifth book in Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire. Long awaited, much anticipated, and released not long after HBO’s masterful dramatization of the first volume in the series, Game of Thrones, this book could hardly hope to measure up to everyone’s expectations, and alas, it does not. It’s too long, and has too many subplots. Our favorite characters from the earlier books are either dead or powerless, trapped or lost, and we spend far too much time on secondary plotlines that are disgusting or confusing, or both. Unfortunately, Martin’s flashes of brilliance continue to pop up at unpredictable intervals, rendering me unable to abandon the series entirely.

No, really, I won’t give up on them. These books are unique, with sympathetic original characters, inspiring plotlines, a refreshing lack of stereotypes, and huge emotional payoffs. If Martin has a fault, it’s that his imagination is too vast to be easily contained within the pages of a normal-length novel. That’s not so bad, really. My friend Max, who is 19 and a zealous fan of these books, gave me a pep talk the other night when I saw him at his parents’ house. His continued wide-eyed devotion to the books made me consider them with a fresh perspective. Talking with him reminded me of the sense of wonder and anticipation that a series like this can bring to a reader and made me want to recapture some of that for myself, even if I have to wade through nearly 1,000 pages find it.

ETA: The Onion weighs in.

(Book 40, 2011)

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

2011-12-30T11:12:00.000-08:00

This was one of those books I avoided because everyone else was reading it. I can be so narrow-minded sometimes, usually to my detriment, as in this case! If you’ve already read this, I’m sure you liked it. Who didn’t like it? It’s one of those sprawling old-fashioned novels that offer something for everyone: memorable characters, unique locations, plenty of action, and lots of emotion.

And if you haven’t read it you can look forward to it! It’s the story of Marion Stone and his brother Shiva, twins born to a nun who kept her pregnancy secret, and raised by a pair of Indian doctors in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in the 1950s. Most of the book is about their childhood at the mission hospital that employs their adoptive parents and I liked that part the best. I thought the book lost a lot of its charm when the action transferred to the U.S. where Marion goes for medical training. In fact, Marion was one of my least favorite characters. I much preferred reading about his natural parents (Thomas Stone and Sister Mary Joseph Praise) and later his adoptive parents, Hema and Ghosh, and the denizens of the mission hospital: nurses, gardeners, drivers, nannies, Hema and Ghosh’s colorful friends, the local prostitutes and politicians, and the hospital’s patients. Marion by himself is brooding and obsessive and the book doesn’t pick up steam again until the end when characters are reunited (though tragedy accompanies their reunion).

Erica Wagner, writing in the New York Times, says that Verghese’s writing owes a debt to Salman Rushdie and John Irving, and I agree. When describing this book to a friend the other day I said that it was like a lot of Indian novels in its scope and sprawl, and the book’s “capacious” feel (Wagner’s adjective) reminds me of Irving’s books, too. Though it’s something of a reach to compare Verghese’s writing to that of these two masters. His dialogue can be awkward, and he breaks some elementary rules of form when he uses Marion’s first person narration to describe events at which Marion was not present. But these are minor quibbles.

(Book 39, 2011)

All Other Nights by Dara Horn

2011-12-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

Last year I read Horn’s book The World to Come and I loved it. All Other Nights is nothing like that book and indeed if I didn’t know they were written by the same author I would never have guessed. All Other Nights is straight historical fiction with a linear plot. It completely lacks the whimsy and playfulness of The World to Come—All Other Nights is an easier read but not nearly as much fun.

This book tells the story of Jacob Rappaport and his experiences during the American Civil War. Rappaport is Jewish, from New York, the son of a wealthy businessman. At the beginning of the book he joins the Union army to escape from his overbearing father. Recruited as a spy, Jacob must constantly navigate the gray areas of conflict: his first assignment is to travel to New Orleans and assassinate his own uncle, who is plotting to kidnap Abraham Lincoln, and things get even trickier from there.

In my last post about The Cookbook Collector, I said that a book can have imperfections and still be a good read. That was true for TCC and it’s true for All Other Nights as well. Horn’s depictions of Jacob’s struggles (both physical and moral) are engrossing to read but Jacob himself is flat and unremarkable. He’s someone to whom things happen, but I don’t think that was Horn’s intention. It’s like she tried to make him interesting by putting him into interesting situations but that wasn’t enough to overcome his essential torpidity. Some of the secondary characters provide much needed punch, but often they just seem strangely out of place, like the girl who speaks only in palindromes; she could have wandered in from The World to Come, now that I think of it.

(Book 38, 2011)

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman

2011-12-13T10:51:00.000-08:00

The Cookbook Collector is the story of two sisters, Emily and Jess, who approach life very differently. It examines their varied experiences over a period of a few years in the early 2000s, when Emily is the CEO of a dotcom startup and Jess is a graduate student. The plot and the characters owe a lot to Sense and Sensibility and indeed Goodman makes it abundantly clear that this is a novel for novel-readers; references to, and plot devices from English literature abound. But Goodman doesn’t adhere as strictly to the plot of S&S as Cathleen Schine does in The Three Weissmanns of Westport. She isn’t retelling the story of S&S so much as paying homage to the “smart sister, sensitive sister” dynamic, and her approach is less distracting than Schine’s.

Like Austen, Goodman talks a lot about money in this book, and who has it and who doesn’t. Emily and her fiancé Jonathan (a CEO of a different startup) get very rich when their respective companies go public. Several other characters are quite wealthy, too. But I didn’t enjoy Goodman’s descriptions of high-end houses and cars and restaurants. I know the story is set 10 years ago (almost historical fiction!) but I was really put off by everyone’s air of entitlement, as if it was somehow inevitable that they were all going to end up rich. I will say that money doesn’t equal goodwill in Goodman’s world. Both Jonathan and George (ex-Microsoft) are unpleasant ubercompetitive jerks and one of them meets an untimely end. I’m sorry, do I sound like a total killjoy? I can’t help it. The book’s attitude toward money just seemed so retrograde and not in a good way.

On the other hand I wasn’t bored! Plenty of stuff happens (how’s THAT for a plot description?) and Jess is delightful, even if Emily can be a bit of a pill. The subplot about the mysterious collection of cookbooks is inventive and engrossing. Sometimes a book can have imperfections and still be a good read. The book I’m reading now, All Other Nights, by Dara Horn (plot inconsistencies! flat characters!) falls into that category too. I’ll say more about that idea when I post about that book.

(Book 37, 3011)

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch

2011-12-01T09:46:00.000-08:00

A salient feature of fantasy novels is world building. Doing it well is tricky and it’s often where a good idea turns into a not-so-good book. It’s also been the weak link in the fantasy novels I’ve read recently (Kraken by China Mieville and Shades of Grey by Jaspar Fforde). Here is the dilemma: if an author concentrates too hard on world building, he or she can end up with too much explication and not enough action. Not enough world building and readers are baffled by the mysterious rules of an unknown universe. I have found that authors usually err on the side of too much rather than not enough but in the case of Midnight Riot the opposite is true.

However, given the choice, I’d go with not enough. Reading always includes some element of suspension of disbelief; if the world building is a tad incomplete it’s just one more thing to not think too hard about. Aaronovitch’s enthusiastic foray into a magical London is just delightful, even if I didn’t always follow the action, exactly.

His protagonist Peter is a newly minted London constable who, to his great surprise, finds himself assigned to assist Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale in his investigations of crimes involving magic: ghostly witnesses, brawls among minor dieties, riots caused by long-dead provocateurs. It turns out Peter exhibits some aptitude for magic and throws himself eagerly into his new job. He’s a funny, warm-hearted, totally modern protagonist who cheerfully suspends his own initial disbelief, so is it too much to ask that we do likewise?

Aaronovitch’s sly references to contemporary vampire fiction and Harry Potter only enhanced my enjoyment of this book. I didn’t actually, in the end, understand the whole plotline concerning a lethal reenactment of Punch and Judy, but so what? It was still a really good read and I am thrilled to find another book featuring Peter and DIC Nightingale is already available (Moon Over Soho) and a third is coming in May 2012.

(Book 36, 2011)

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke

2011-11-21T09:26:00.000-08:00

This is a shorter, less daunting offering from Susanna Clarke, who gave us the weighty and (ultimately for me unreadable) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. A few of the stories are quite good; the first one, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, is clever and original and got me all excited to read more. But I should have been tipped off by the book’s (fictional) introduction by the (fictional) professor James Sutherland, Director of Sidhe Studies at the University of Aberdeen, about how Clarke’s collection seeks to illuminate the study of magic and faerie throughout British history. Instead of using a coherent storytelling voice, Clarke has created a mishmash of stories featuring wildly different narrative styles and devices, and sprinkled with faux scholarship and obscure literary and historical references. It didn’t matter than I liked the first story because its style and substance bore no resemblance to any story that followed.

I suppose for true devotees of fantasy (especially faerie-centered fantasy) this approach wouldn’t be a problem but I was just looking for something consistently entertaining and I felt a little bit cheated. The story The Ladies of Grace Adieu is set in the 19th century England of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell and made me think that maybe I should go back and try again to read that book. But I did try, and it was just Too Much. Remember the footnotes (all 185 of them)?

(Book 35, 2011)

I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron

2011-11-17T09:56:00.000-08:00

This was better than I Feel Bad About My Neck, about which I complained in this post back in 2007. The essays in Ephron's new book have more substance; more of them are about something, Ephron reminisces about her childhood and her early experiences as a journalist in New York in the 1960’s (shades of Mad Men, only funnier). It’s another fast read (like the Calvin Trillin book I posted about recently) and good for filling in an afternoon.

I keep trying Ephron’s essays because I like her movies (Julie & Julia, Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally). However, the Ephron work I’m most interested in right now is the play Love, Loss, and What I Wore, which is a collaboration with her sister Delia Ephron and which was based on the book of the same name by Ilene Beckerman. I loved that book and for a couple of years I gave it as a gift to a lot of my friends. I am hoping to see the show at the Broadway Playhouse in Chicago before it ends its run in January.

(Book 34, 2011)

About Alice by Calvin Trillin

2011-11-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

I know Trillin is famous for his witty essays in the New Yorker, but I'm only an occasional reader of that magazine and somehow his stuff has escaped me thus far. A few weeks ago, however, I saw Calvin Trillin on the Daily Show He was delightfully funny, and I realized that I was probably missing a lot by not seeking out his work. His new book Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (even that title is funny) has a long queue at the library, so I picked up About Alice instead. What a sweet book! It's an homage to his late wife and is touching and hilarious at the same time. It's a very short read and a perfect introduction to Trillin. If, like me, you have never quite gotten around to reading anything by him, About Alice is a good place to start.

I've pinned a link to the Daily Show broadcast to my Pinterest board.

(Book 33, 2011)

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

2011-10-25T10:07:00.000-07:00

In the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris, Ernest Hemingway talks in clichés as he tosses his lovely hair out of his eyes. In The Paris Wife Hemingway also speaks in clichés, but whereas in the movie you know it’s all a joke, in the book it’s supposed to be serious dialogue. The Paris Wife and Midnight in Paris have a lot in common; both describe Hemingway and his circle in Paris in the 1920’s through the eyes of outsiders. In the movie, the outsider is the time travelling writer Gil. In the book, it’s Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson.

Hadley Richardson was Hemingway’s starter wife and they divorced after seven years of marriage and one child. Hadley was frumpy and domestic and she married Hemingway when she almost 30 and he was only 21. They seem mismatched from the start though you do get the sense that Hemingway, fresh from WWI, needed nurturing and Hadley was a nurturer. The book covers Ernest and Hadley’s years together and ends when he leaves Hadley for wife #2 (with a short epilogue that tells us that Hadley later found happiness with a man who was far more reliable than Ernest). Even though this is a novel it apparently sticks closely to the facts and uses characters’ real names.

It’s the atmosphere that makes this book fun to read, in the same way that Midnight in Paris was fun to watch even though the premise was just dumb. I pictured all the characters in the book as they looked in the movie. Thus in my head Gertrude Stein looked like Kathy Bates, and the Fitzgeralds looked like those two lovely actors whose picture I’ve posted on my Pinterest board. Unfortunately there wasn’t complete overlap and the movie never shows Ernest with Hadley. Nevertheless I pictured her looking like Mariel Hemingway, whose real-life grandmother was Hadley Richardson.

(Book 32, 2011)

Nemesis by Philip Roth

2011-10-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

Leah Hager Cohen, writing in the New York Times, says that she always thought Philip Roth’s books were “for boys.” Then she goes on to say how much she liked Nemesis. Why? It’s just as boy-centric as all the others. I managed to get through it only because I was interested in two things: the topic (polio), and the setting (the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, NJ in 1944, where my mother-in-law [and Philip Roth] grew up).

Roth’s alter ego, Bucky Cantor, is a young gym teacher and playground director. At the beginning of the summer of 1944 he organizes pickup baseball games for his young charges, who are mostly 12-year-old boys. But as the summer progresses he watches in horror as several of the boys fall sick and die, turning what should have been an idyllic summer into a nightmare. At the urging of his panicked fiancée, Bucky leaves Newark for a job at the more bucolic (and ostensibly safer) environment of a summer camp in rural Pennsylvania. But polio emerges there, too, and Bucky must face the question of whether or not he brought it with him.

Of course because this is a Philip Roth book we must spend a lot of time considering Bucky’s masculinity. He is strong and fit and handsome but to his deep disappointment, his bad eyesight has kept him out of the army. His buddies are invading Normandy, but he is supervising children. Ah, the contradictions! I cannot tell you how many pages are filled as Roth explores this issue, over and over and over again. And if I was looking for any insights into what it was like to be a 12-year-old girl in Weequahic in 1944 (which is EXACTLY the age my mother-in-law was) I certainly didn’t find it in this book, where the only female characters are some nameless girls who jump rope in one corner of the playground (and apparently never contract polio; did only boys get it?), and the fiancée who does almost nothing but whine. To quote my mother-in-law, oy vey.

Apparently there was no polio epidemic in Newark in 1944, but there was one in 1952, and each mid-century summer brought polio scares around the U.S. until the polio vaccine was made widely available in the late 1950’s. I recently asked my father what he remembered about polio as a child in the 1940’s in West Philadelphia and he said he mostly remembered his mother’s anxiety. “We used to swim in Darby Creek and she was terrified that we would catch polio from the creek water. So we just lied to her and told her we weren’t swimming.” So clearly in his case the anxiety was confined to the adults. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my grandmother to be constantly worried that her children could catch a fatal disease just from playing outside. For me that’s a much more interesting topic than whether or not Bucky Cantor is real man or not.

(Book 31, 2011)

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

2011-10-14T14:27:00.000-07:00

As a girl I was obsessed with books about Anne Boleyn and her daughter Elizabeth I (and indeed about all the queens and princesses of England). My favorites were by authors like Margaret Campbell Barnes (whose 1944 classic Brief Gaudy Hour is still in print) and Jean Plaidy, whose Tudor Saga and Stuart Saga kept me occupied for one entire summer when I was about 12. More recent entries to the canon include books by Alison Weir and Phillipa Gregory. I am not sure why, but I haven’t liked these as much. Maybe I just got tired of them all after a while.

But now Hilary Mantel has given us Wolf Hall, which tells the story again from an entirely new and fresh angle, through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s most trusted advisor throughout the English Reformation, the man who oversaw Henry’s divorce from Katherine and facilitated Anne’s ascension to the throne. “Facilitated” is the operative word here, for, as Mantel depicts him, Cromwell is a master at the game of thrones: a skilled negotiator, a lawyer, a financier, and most interesting of all, a virtuoso at empathy, at figuring out exactly how to convince each player to go along with Henry’s plans. He is also, surprise surprise, extremely funny, with a dry wit that carries him through all kinds of challenges.

Cromwell was never a central character in the books I read as a girl. Along with Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey he was one of the boring old men who filled in the background. But Mantel has turned Cromwell into a fascinating character and dare I say it? I now have a crush on him. Mantel’s Cromwell is a warm, sensitive man who for years mourns the death of his wife and daughters, who fosters several young nephews with wisdom and affection, who works the system (such as it is) to arrive at the fairest settlement he can for Katherine and her daughter Mary, and who never forgets (or tries to hide) his humble origins as the son of a blacksmith.

Mantel writes the whole book as if we are observing from a camera mounted on Cromwell’s head. The narrative hews so closely to his perspective that she simply refers to Cromwell as “he” throughout the novel, sometimes causing confusion, until you understand what she’s doing. It’s very effective in making the reader identify so closely with Cromwell’s point of view. Know also that this book is very very long and slow going. It took me months to finish it, though I confess to occasionally cheating on Master Cromwell with various other (less demanding) books.

(Book 30, 2011)

My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young

2011-10-06T10:56:00.000-07:00

This book starts out so gently: it’s the story of Riley, a sensitive working class boy in pre-WWI London, taken in by an aristocratic (but non-conformist) family, educated beyond his station, treated with kindness and encouragement, until he embarks on a “thing” with the family’s daughter Nadine, at which point he is banished; turns out they are only so liberal after all. This part of the story fills the first third of the book, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the rest of the book would concern itself with the sweetness of the young couple’s triumph over class-based adversity.

Well guess again. Riley, in a fit of pique, joins the army and is quickly shunted off to the trenches of World War I--we all know what happened there. And Young doesn’t spare us any details. In the turn of a page the book transforms from a pleasing love story into one of the most brutal war stories I’ve ever read. We watch Riley change from a green boy to a ravaged bitter man who endures horrific battles and eventually winds up with a gruesome injury. Young doesn’t spare Nadine either. To spite her parents, Nadine joins the VAD and suffers her own form of hell as she is sent to the front as a battlefield nurse.

Both Nadine and Riley (and several other secondary characters) are suffering from serious cases of PTSD by the end of the book, and I thought I might be too. I haven’t cried this much while reading a book in a long time. It’s horribly sad and beautifully written and a really great read, if you have the stomach for it. I loved it.

(Book 29, 2011)

Eden by Yael Hedaya

2011-09-28T11:04:00.000-07:00

Eden was written originally in Hebrew by a contemporary Israeli writer and translated into English. I thought it sounded like something really different from my usual fare and my book club was reading it, so I dove right in. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

Eden is the name of a (fictional) moshav, a type of cooperative agricultural community in Israel similar to a kibbutz. Like many of these communities, Eden has had to struggle to find a new mission for itself in contemporary Israel, where the economic realities mean that most residents work outside the moshav. Fortuitously, Eden is located within easy driving distance of Tel Aviv, so it has reinvented itself as a suburb undergoing gentrification. The simple old moshav houses are being remodeled into McMansions and the community pays Thai immigrants to work in its fruit orchards. This leaves the children and grandchildren of the moshav’s founders free to engage in all manner of first world activities: we have disaffected teenagers, couples who are cheating on each other, and nasty neighbors with secret lives. Most of the book’s action could have been set in the San Fernando Valley, or the Long Island suburbs. Blech. I really don’t like books about suburban ennui, whether the suburbs are in the U.S. or, it turns out, in modern day Israel.

I never ended up going to the book club meeting because it was the same time as my last-ever back-to-school night, so I don't know what anyone else thought of this. Did people like it?

(Book 28, 2011)

Montana 1948 by Larry Watson

2011-09-20T16:35:00.000-07:00

I needed something short, after months of reading these doorstopper books. Montana 1948 fit the bill, lengthwise. It tells the story of one seminal event in the life of a young man, and the ways in which that event changed him and his worldview forever. It also evokes a vanished world of 60 years ago: small town life in the western U.S. At the center of the story is the affluent Hayden family: Julian (a rancher and retired sheriff), and his two sons, current sheriff Wesley and the war hero and town doctor Frank, and their wives and children.

The first person narrator, David Hayden (son of the sheriff), is 12 years old at the time of the events he describes, but the book is written from the point of view of an adult David, who looks back on the events from many years later. So the author gives us two vantage points simultaneously. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I liked this approach; the elder David provides a fair amount of post hoc interpretation that I found unnecessary, and which dilutes a little of the story’s power. I kept wanting to say “yes, I know that your father’s reaction here shocked you, I can tell, you don’t need to tell me it shocked you.” On the other hand, reading the words is kind of like being inside David’s head, and sometimes his interpretations are not what you expect.

What are the events that bring on such a seismic shift? A Sioux Indian woman who works for David’s family accuses Frank Hayden of sexually assaulting his female patients. Frank’s brother Wesley, as the sole law enforcement officer, must investigate this charge against his brother. The story rapidly unfolds into a firestorm of racism, sexism, violence, sibling rivalry, family bullying, and possibly murder. David listens at doors and from under porches, his innocence and childhood adoration of his uncle the war hero shattering before our eyes. It’s very powerful. And at 168 pages, the perfect length.

(Book 27, 2011)

Faithful Place by Tana French

2011-09-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

I'm finally admitting defeat. I cannot finish this. I so wanted to, having loved loved loved French's earlier novel The Likeness, which I blogged about here. I stuck with this one way longer than I would have otherwise, but still, I can't make it through.

French is notoriously long-winded. That was a big complaint about The Likeness, and I even referred to it in my own post: "French often uses three sentences when one would do." But while I enjoyed her style in that book, in Faithful Place her excess verbiage did me in. Usually it took the form of maudlin multipage conversations among a dysfunctional family of alcoholics and layabouts who pass their days accusing one another of historic betrayals and acts of violence, or convoluted theories about whodunit put forth by hostile law enforcement officers with competing agendas. Did I mention that this is a mystery? Who actually killed Rose is about 47th on the list of French's interests, it seems, well behind Dublin in the 1980's and the Irish economy, to name just two.

(Book 26, 2011)

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

2011-09-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

I liked this more than I implied in my last post. It’s true what I said, that it isn’t a very good book, but it’s an interesting read. It’s just badly organized, meandering, and ultimately unfulfilling. (What is it about? Methamphetamine abuse, the scourge of the rural Midwestern U.S. Why did I read it? Because my fellow blogger Citizen Reader wrote about it a while ago and her blog post stuck with me. She and I share an interest in reading about issues specific to the Midwest; see her recent post here about Detroit.)

Reding pinballs between the personal and the political as he searches for an overarching theme for this book. Some chapters feature interviews with meth addicts, law enforcement officers, and social workers. Other chapters try to link the rise of meth to the disintegration of the Midwest’s rural economy. The loss of union-wage jobs, the rise of factory farms, and the globalization of the food industry are all factors he cites. A third set of chapters detail the rise of the Mexican cartels that supply most of the meth that is now available in the Midwest. All these chapters are interesting, but the parts are greater than the sum. Reding tries to use meth’s effects on the small town of Oelwein , Iowa, as a unifying theme but he never quite makes it work. It’s like he gathered all these interesting stories, which he tells in a compelling way, but in the end he couldn’t seem to turn the material into a coherent book. Nevertheless, if you like this kind of thing, this is a good effort and worth your time.

(Book 25, 2011)

Really Really Bogged Down

2011-08-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

Note to self: Posts about why you are not blogging are really boring for readers.

Nevertheless I feel compelled to give an update. I am currently reading three books: Wolf Hall (by Hilary Mantel), which is 560 pages, Faithful Place by Tana French, merely 416 pages, and A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin, a whopping 1040 pages. I have already explained here why I can't read ADwD in bed so that is relegated to whatever time I can spare during the day (which isn't much). The other two are just dragging. Last night, instead of reading either of them, I played Boggle* on my smart phone. That is a bad sign.

I supposed I could blog about Methland, which I finished a few weeks ago. Look for that post in a few days. Don't get all excited, though, because it wasn't a very good book. I will probably just dismiss it in a few peremptory sentences.

*Technically, Bogged! a free Boggle-like game with a crappy dictionary that accepts almost any combination of letters as a "word." I've resorted to just randomly clicking on letters to see what it will take. For example, last night it took "ers," "kae," and "gink." What do these words even mean?

2011-08-20T19:01:00.000-07:00

Often after I read a book I spend time on the Web reading about the book: reviews, articles about the setting, websites about the movie version, articles about the author. Occasionally I include these links in my blog post but usually not. I don't like to clutter up the post with too much extraneous stuff. But some of what I find is really interesting and I want to share it! So for the past few days I've been fooling around with the aggregator site Pinterest. Pinterest lets you create a virtual bulletin board and "pin" links to the board. You can keep your board private, or make it public so other people can see it. You can have multiple boards, collaborative boards, etc. Lots of people seem to use it for fanboards or for saving links to things they want to buy, but I have found some book-related boards, too.

Here is my board. I'll also put a link to it on my sidebar. Apparently you can also "follow me" though I'm not really sure what that entails. If you like it, check it again in a few weeks. I'll keep putting up new links as I find them.

A Book a Week on Pinterest

Evening is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan

2011-08-19T12:13:00.000-07:00

This book combines my love of domestic fiction with my love of reading about unfamiliar places. I heard about it from Nancy Pearl who included it in her list of 10 Terrific Summer Reads back in June. Several books on her list appealed to me but this was the only one the library had in, so it’s the only one I’ve read so far.

Set in Malaysia in the 1980’s this book is the story of an affluent Indian family: father, mother, grandmother, three children, and several servants. Uma, the oldest girl, is leaving for Columbia University in New York as the book opens. Samarasan uses a mostly backwards-running story line to tell the family’s history, focusing especially closely on Uma, her little sister Aasha, and a servant girl called Chellam (without neglecting the rest of the family, the neighbors, the distant relatives….it’s a long book).

Like all families, these people have agendas, secrets, and hidden loyalties. Are theirs any worse than anyone else’s? Samarasan focuses her camera so closely on each character that their foibles sometimes seem magnified into something larger than they really are. Uma spends the months before she leaves for New York in a period of what seems like melancholy, pushing her parents and siblings away, spending hours alone in her room. While the family and Samarasan make much of her gloominess, to me she just seemed like a typical teen girl dealing with her fears of impending adulthood.

But this is a minor complaint. Samarasan has a lovely original voice, and much of this book is quite funny. Aasha is especially delightful – her best friend is the ghost of a 19th century child who was the daughter of their house’s original owner. Can Aasha really see ghosts? Or does she just have a good imagination? Aasha’s grandmother Paati and mother Vasanthi relish their decades-long toxic feud, complete with vendettas, sabotage, and character assassination. The father Raju has a mistress, the neighbors have a soothsayer in their family: what more could a reader want?

(Book 24, 2011)

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

2011-08-12T10:58:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe I haven’t written about this yet. I read it over a month ago. I think I have been saving it up as a treat because I loved it so much. Ann Patchett (Run, blogged about here) is a great writer who can manage a complicated story with the right mixture of action and explication, create sympathetic, compelling characters, and explore unknown territory with vigor and excitement.

State of Wonder describes a Heart of Darkness type journey, with the Amazon standing in for the Congo and a renegade doctor, Annick Swenson, as Kurtz. Charles Marlow is transformed into Marina Singh, a pharmaceutical researcher sent by her employer in Minnesota to Swenson’s research station in Brazil. Marina is charged with discovering the answers to several mysteries, including what happened to Anders Eckman, the man originally sent to find Dr. Swenson, and what, exactly, is taking Dr. Swenson so long to finish her promised research. What is she up to out there in the jungle? And why is she so reluctant to communicate with her sponsors? The answers to some of these questions provide unanticipated plot developments that kept me reading late into the night.

Marina, unprepared and alone, must navigate a complex web of social and environmental obstacles to find Swenson and figure out what’s going on. Some of these obstacles include a complicated past history with Swenson, who was a former teacher of Marina’s; Swenson’s recalcitrant gatekeepers (a hippy dippy Australian couple); a journey up the Amazon river; and crushing heat, insects, snakes, native tribe members with poisoned arrows, and psychedelic mushrooms. I really enjoyed the tension and sense of adventure that this book offers. It’s a great combination of relationship story and action novel.

(Book 23, 2011)

When Books Make You Hungry

2011-08-06T10:31:00.000-07:00

Who knew George R. R. Martin was such a gourmand? I can't read Dance with Dragons without getting the urge to raid the refrigerator, except my refrigerator doesn't contain the bounty that his characters seem to enjoy, even the ones living on the edges of civilization.

In Pentos, Tyrion Lannister enjoys the hospitality of Magister Illyrio, where they dine on mushrooms sauted in garlic and butter, and "a heron stuffed with figs, veal cutlets blanched with almond milk, creamed herring, candied onions, foul-smelling cheeses, plates of snails and sweetbreads, and a black swan in her plumage" (which Tyrion refuses, claiming that it "reminded him of supper with his sister"). While all this sounds appealing, the dish that really pulled me in was one that Godric Borrell, Lord of Sweetsister, serves to Davos Seaworth when Davos arrives soaking wet and freezing cold at Borrell's island castle. One of Borrell's daughters serves Davos a stew that is "thick with leeks, carrots, barley, and turnips white and yellow, along with clams and chunks of cod and crabmeat, swimming in a stock of heavy cream and butter." Oh my. It sounds like a supercharged version of clam chowder, and I want some right now. Should I keep reading, or get cooking?

ETA: An anonymous commenter just left me this link to a blog called Inn at the Crossroads. These bloggers are creating recipes based on the foods GRRM talks about throughout the series. I am so impressed and can't wait to start cooking everything. And they've beaten me to the Sister's Stew, the chowder I describe above.

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

2011-08-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

Last time I looked at Kate Atkinson’s web site I got the impression she was done with Jackson Brodie, at least for a while. That was back when I read When Will There Be Good News, which I blogged about here. But apparently I was wrong! What a pleasure to discover a new mystery featuring this complicated man (ex-cop, ex-soldier, private investigator, denizen of Edinburgh and other northern cities).

As usual in Atkinson’s books, multiple plot strands (from both the past and the present) intertwine to create a twisted web of crime, corruption, moral ambiguity, and emotional wreckage. This story also features a new character, ex-detective Tracy Waterhouse, who seems to have a lot in common with Brodie: On the same day that Brodie kidnaps a dog from his abusive owner, Tracy kidnaps a little girl from her abusive mother. Meanwhile, Brodie wants to talk to Tracy about her memories of a case from 40 years ago, another kidnapping of a child. Tracy is as tightly wound as Brodie, and just as respectful of the rules (sarcasm). I liked her.

So can you follow it? Yes, because Atkinson is always up to the task: no loose ends, nothing left to coincidence. She is an expert at this form. If you haven’t read these books, you should start with the first one, Case Histories (blogged about here). They are really really good.

And here is another treat: when I visited Atkinson’s web site I discovered that the BBC has made a TV series of the first few Jackson Brodie titles, starring Jason Isaacs, who is skinnier than I imagine Brodie to be, but who otherwise looks perfect for the part. I don’t think Netflix is carrying this yet in the U.S. but I’m sure it will arrive soon enough.

(Book 22, 2011)

Big Heavy Books

2011-07-28T08:33:00.000-07:00

I just about gave myself a nosebleed last night with A Dance with Dragons. At 1,040 pages in hardback, I can barely lift the book with one hand, let alone hold it up to read it in bed. What's a girl to do? Start another book for bedtime reading: Wolf Hall. Wait, that one is 560 pages. Ouch. I need to start working out with weights to keep up with my reading.

Since I am about to leave for a trip to Tucson to see my sister and her new baby, I ordered Wolf Hall on the Kindle. I've been using the Kindle a lot recently to read first chapters of books I'm considering. So far I've tried and rejected several, including the new Eric Larson book In the Garden of Beasts which I didn't like any better than I liked Devil in the White City (which is to say, not at all).

I like the feeling of security that I get from the Kindle. If I have that with me, I am never without a book because if I finish (or don't like) one I can always get another! (That's assuming I have wi-fi and a functioning credit card.) Now I no longer have to travel with books and backup books, though I still obsess about what to take on each trip.

Here is a gratuitous shot of my lovely sister and beautiful nephew, just to break up the boredom. It's my blog; I'm allowed to do this.

Emily and Seth, July, 2011

The Orphan Sister by Gwendolen Gross

2011-07-24T19:28:00.000-07:00

This book is about three sisters in New Jersey and their parents. No, not really. This book is really about how you can be isolated and disconnected even while surrounded by people, how you can be the same as everyone else but be so different, how you can think you know everything but really know nothing, or, think you know nothing but really know everything.

The orphan sister is Clementine. Born as one of a set of triplets, her sisters are identical but she is fraternal. The three sisters share a strong bond, but the connection between the twins far outweighs anything they share with Clementine. Clementine’s parents’ relationship is also impenetrable to Clementine; it’s based mostly on lies and mutual avoidance of reality, and the dissolution of their marriage provides some of the only action in the book.

Clementine is the odd girl out, in so many ways, and Gross explores all of them. She writes beautifully of Clementine’s loneliness and confusion about where she fits and how she should live her life. Sometimes I wished that more things would happen in this book, but mostly I liked hanging around inside Clementine’s head as she explores her inner landscape and makes her own map of where she belongs.

(Book 21, 2011)

Kraken by China Mieville

2011-07-12T12:14:00.000-07:00

This book is an unreadable mess, a fascinating, memorable, unreadable mess. I really wanted to like it: it’s got much of what I look for in fiction: a clever, original plot, complex characters, challenging language. But it’s so overwritten, and Mieville is so enamored of his own ideas that it just grinds to a halt about half way through, brought down by the weight of all its excess baggage.

Mieville writes slipstream fiction--stories that straddle the boundary between realism and fantasy, and in Mieville's case that eschew traditional science fiction and fantasy tropes like robots and vampires.

Kraken is about a formaldehyde-preserved giant squid (architeuthis) that goes missing from the British Museum, and Billy, a museum curator who goes on a quest to find out what happened to it. But really, (as Sarah Lyall, writing in the New York Times says), that is like saying that King Lear is about property rights. Kraken is about a secret squid-worshipping religious cult; Kraken is about an urban army of sorcerers with their own reasons for wanting the squid (and the internecine warfare that erupts over who controls the squid); Kraken is about an obscure branch of the London police force dedicated to tracking the movements of the magical underworld.

But in his enthusiasm for introducing us to all these different actors and subplots, Mieville loses all forward momentum. The book ceases to be about where the squid went and just becomes about all this other extraneous flash. For pages and pages, Billy wanders around London with Dane, former member of the squid cult, and they encounter all these other weird folk and mysterious events, but they hardly find out anything at all about who might have the squid. And eventually, I just grew tired of all the smoke and mirrors and I couldn’t keep track of who was whom, and who might want the squid or not, and it just didn’t matter anymore. Mieville lost me, and I couldn’t finish the book.

Okay but here is the really really strange part. One way to track the activities of the underground sorcerers’ mafia is to read the graffiti in sketchy neighborhoods. This morning I saw this new tag on a wall across the street from my office. I swear I am not making this up. What does it mean? Why is it there? What is going on?

Corner W. Johnson & Brooks St., Madison, WI 7-11-11

ETA: Here is another one, spotted a few blocks from the first one, a few weeks later.

Corner E. Johnson St. and Frances St., Madison, WI 8-1-11

(Book 20, 2011)

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

2011-07-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

Egad I am picky. A lot of people liked this book, and there is much that is great about it, but I have a big problem with it that I can’t ignore. It’s like two books, written by two different people. Chapters alternate between the voice of Little Bee, a young female survivor of horrific violence in Nigeria, and Sarah, the English woman who is her rescuer. Little Bee’s voice is unique, thoughtful, moving, evocative, heart-wrenching. Sarah’s voice is phony, clichéd, and shallow. I am really in the dark about how Cleave can write so well as Little Bee and so badly as Sarah.

Of course we are supposed to think that Sarah is phony and shallow, because we need a contrast with Little Bee. But I could barely read Sarah’s chapters. Instead of the hyperrealism that we see in Little Bee’s chapters, Sarah’s are sketchy and unbelievable. Her husband dies and there is a funeral, but where are his parents? Her parents? Their siblings? It was the most unrealistic funeral chapter I’ve ever read. Other chapters have similar gaps and weaknesses, and read as if they were dashed off as drafts of chapters, instead of final versions. Cleave could have made Sarah phony and shallow and still provided some polish and verisimilitude.

Unfortunately you can’t just read Little Bee’s chapters and get the whole picture. Because Little Bee’s story is so compelling I still recommend this book, but be prepared to skim Sarah’s chapters.

(Book 19, 2011)

Vacation Reading

2011-07-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

Family trips to visit my dad are great opportunities for reading. A long plane ride, lots of down time on the beach and the screen porch, a house full of books--I love it. Even my teenage reluctant reader could be found with his nose in a Dave Barry book.

I read 2.5 books in a week! Here's the list: Started Early, Took my Dog, by Kate Atkinson, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, and half of The Orphan Sister by Gwendolen Gross. I also still have to blog about Little Bee by Chris Cleave and Kraken, by China Mieville. I'm sorry I've gotten so far behind but I promise to catch up soon.

Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman

2011-06-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

Alexandra Jacobs, who reviewed Red Hook Road in the New York Times, described it as “Victorian in tone” and I agree. In fact, the book that I was most reminded of when reading this was Morningside Heights, by Cheryl Mendelsohn, which I described as a Victorian novel when I wrote about it in this post. The two books have other similarities as well: both are about a certain kind of educated Jewish New Yorker, rich in culture if not in dollars, sure that their way is the best way.

Becca (from Manhattan) spends every summer at her family’s vacation home in Maine. There she meets and falls in love with John, native Mainer, ship builder, whose mother cleans Becca’s family’s house. But alas, on the way to their wedding reception, Becca and John are killed in a freak car accident. We are left with Iris and Jane, the respective mothers, who circle each other warily across the vast lake of their class differences. The car accident happens right at the beginning of the book; most of the novel concerns the efforts of Iris and Jane (and their other children and spouses) to heal, to connect, to move on from this tragedy.

I didn’t like either Iris or Jane. Iris is smugly superior, manipulative, and a really bad listener. Jane is cold, repressed, and closed-minded. The rest of the characters run the gamut from unique to predictable – the same goes for the action that shores up the remainder of the story.

A lot of people don’t like Ayelet Waldman, though she must sell a lot of books to get a nice hardcover treatment and a review in the Times. I would try another book by her; this was sufficiently entertaining and well-written to keep me occupied, despite my complaints.

(Book 18, 2011)

Ape House by Sara Gruen

2011-06-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

A lot of people liked Sara Gruen’s last book, Water for Elephants, but I didn’t have much success with it. I did better with Ape House and enjoyed it for the most part, though I do have a few quibbles.

Gruen knows how to move a story along at a nice pace but she’s not a great writer. This story, of a family of bonobos and their researcher/caretaker Isabel, held my interest and kept me entertained, but only because I like bonobos. I didn’t like Isabel nearly as much, or really any of the human characters. They were predictable types from central casting – give me one serious female scientist who doesn’t know how beautiful she is, give me an intrepid male journalist in pursuit of a story, give me an evil corporate villain who will stop at nothing to make a buck, etc. etc. I also didn’t think much of the plot which was part bonobo documentary, part animal rights terrorist thriller, part romance, and part sitcom. Gruen just tries to do way too much with only mixed success.

But the bonobos! Gruen does seem to get this part right, at least as far as I can tell. She has clearly done a lot of research and her portrayal of the individual bonobos is measured and nuanced. I loved reading about their language development and their relationships with Isabel and among each other.

I would call this a good beach read, not a category I usually give much credence to. (Any good book is a good beach read, no?) But if you want something to keep you entertained and you aren’t feeling very picky, this might be just the thing.

(Book 17, 2011)

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

2011-06-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

How do you make a familiar story fresh? How do you shine a new light on a familiar landscape? Do what Dave Eggers has done – tell a story that most of us know, but tell it from a totally unexpected point of view.

Most U.S. residents know the stories of Hurricane Katrina. If we didn’t live through it ourselves, we watched in horror on TV. We felt awful. We sent money to the Red Cross. We try to remember that even now people are still suffering the after-effects.

But I didn’t know anything at all about the life of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a New Orleans housepainter, a Syrian immigrant, a man with a wife and four children and strong connections to his New Orleans neighborhood. Eggers embeds Zeitoun’s story within the larger story of Katrina, giving us a more personal and unique way to experience it.

Zeitoun’s family flees New Orleans ahead of the storm, but Zeitoun stays behind to watch over his house, his rental properties, and his warehouse, sure that he is safe in his neighborhood far from the ocean and the levees. Of course we all know what happens – Zeitoun’s house rapidly fills with water and he spends a week paddling around New Orleans in his canoe feeding abandoned dogs with the contents of his freezer and rescuing old people. But here is where the twist comes. As a Muslim man Zeitoun becomes the target of a ragtag band of unsupervised law enforcement agents who decide (without any apparent cause) that he must be an Al Qaeda operative sent to stir up trouble. Zeitoun is arrested and imprisoned without charge for a month before his wife and a lawyer manage to secure his release.

Eggers presents Zeitoun so well, and so sympathetically, that rooting for him is like rooting for the city of New Orleans itself. He’s a good metaphor for a diverse complicated city. Profits from the book go to the Zeitoun Foundation which has contributed over $200,000 toward the rebuilding of New Orleans and towards promoting interfaith dialog.

(Book 16, 2011)

Room by Emma Donoghue

2011-06-02T09:59:00.000-07:00

Inspired by real-life events, Room is the story of a mother and son who are imprisoned in a garden shed by the mother’s rapist. It’s also the story of their rescue and reintegration into society. The narrator is the son Jack, who was born in the shed, and is 5 years old when the story begins.

Sounds disturbing, no? Everyone I know thinks so, and is avoiding this book. I was too. But a friend pushed it on me, and assured me that it was safe to read, and she was right! Don’t be put off by the alarming subject matter and the nontraditional narrator. It’s really really good.

I loved how Donoghue captures mothering at its most elemental level. The relationship between mother and son sustains them both, and the small daily pleasures (bath time, cuddle time, even TV time) are intense and life-affirming. Jack is a delightful child and his mother instinctively responds to him in the best possible way. Jack’s humor, and after their rescue, his wonder at the wider world, are the best parts of the book. The author has said that she thought it would be too disturbing to have the mother narrate the story and I think she is right. By placing Jack (happy, loving, and curious) at the center, she keeps the mother’s terror at arm’s length, letting us view it from a safe distance.

A few people have commented that they were shocked that Jack’s mother still nursed him at age 5. That reaction really disturbed me. This is a book about kidnapping and repeated rape. That’s not shocking, but the breastfeeding is? How very sad. I guess, if you are the kind of person who is scared to read about breastfeeding, maybe this isn’t a book for you.

(Book 15, 2011)

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

2011-05-26T18:18:00.000-07:00

I know a lot of people who read Young Adult (YA) fiction. Most are mothers of middle and high school girls who started reading it because they wanted to share the reading experience with their daughters, or their daughters recommended specific titles to them, or they were just curious about what was out there. But I know this isn’t the full story; YA is too popular among adults to be only the province of a certain group of women. I have tried to read a few popular YA books without much success (including The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins and Un Lun Dun, by China Mieville). In most cases I just found it too difficult to identify with an adolescent narrator. Yet I have no trouble with J. K. Rowling’s books, so obviously it’s not always a problem for me.

I’m thinking about this recently because I just finished The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, which features an adolescent narrator, but which deals with sophisticated issues of identity, race, substance abuse, and depression. Now I am wondering what makes a book a YA novel? Is it the age of the narrator? The subject matter? Or just the marketing plan? I don’t know the answer.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is the story of Rachel, daughter of a Danish mother and an African American father. Raised in Europe, where her father was a career U.S. serviceman, Rachel must go live with her African American grandmother in Portland, Oregon after the death of her mother and siblings. It is there that she learns about being biracial as she navigates middle school, then high school, with her black hair and blue eyes. She must also deal with the loss of her mother--the circumstances of her death and the deaths of Rachel’s siblings add some mystery and drama to the story.

This is a quick read. Rachel is not a terribly complex girl. The more interesting characters are her grandmother and aunt, and the version of Rachel’s mother that we see filtered through the lens of Rachel’s memories. I got a little mixed up at the end of the book – were there some loose ends? Or did I just not read carefully enough? No matter -- I still enjoyed it a lot. I don’t believe this book is marketed as YA, but it would be an excellent choice for a high school reader, and even a mature middle schooler, and a good book for a mother and daughter to read together.

(Book 14, 2011)

My Korean Deli by Ben Ryder Howe

2011-05-17T17:00:00.000-07:00

Ben Ryder Howe is the sweetest man on earth. Or at least he comes across that way in his memoir My Korean Deli: Risking it all for a Convenience Store, the story of his family’s attempt to purchase and operate a deli/convenience store in Brooklyn. He must be sweet – he goes along with this plan to please his mother-in-law! What a nice boy.

Ben, son of New England gentry, is married to Gab, daughter of Korean immigrants. Gab is a corporate lawyer in Manhattan; Ben is an editor at the exalted literary magazine The Paris Review. Gab’s mother, Kay, has worked for years in other people’s convenience stores, but longs for one of her own. Despite having what seems like enviable careers, Ben and Gab agree to purchase and work in said deli for as long as it takes Kay to get up and running, while still (most of the time) working at their original jobs to keep income flowing in. To save even more money, Ben and Gab move into Kay’s basement in Staten Island. Does this sound like a recipe for peace and family harmony? No, but it’s abundant fodder for a book like this.

Ben is terrible as a deli owner. He makes dozens of mistakes at the cash register, and doesn’t have a clue how to handle the suppliers or the staff. To say that the store’s success is erratic is an understatement; pretty much whatever can go wrong, does. The store gets robbed, is fined for code violations by the city of New York, and becomes a nighttime hangout for neighborhood drunks and drug addicts. Kay nearly drops dead from the stress of overwork. Nevertheless Ben maintains a sense of equanimity and soldiers on. I won’t give away the ending, but be assured that management skills and profits eventually come their way.

Ben also writes affectionately of working at The Paris Review under its founder and editor George Plimpton. Observant readers will remember that Plimpton was famous for taking jobs for which he was supremely unqualified (Detroit Lions backup quarterback) and then writing books about the experience. Is this book a kind of sideways homage to Plimpton? You decide. Ben Ryder Howe is much too modest to make any such claims.

(Book 13, 2011)

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett, Do Over

2011-05-05T16:10:00.000-07:00

Here is a more nuanced discussion than the one I posted yesterday.

In recent years, many mystery novels have become platforms for social analysis. There is something about the form that lends itself to the task, whether it's the requirement that all mysteries contain some form of good vs. evil, or the close character studies afforded by the tradition. While some mystery writers have always done this on a micro level (think Patricia Highsmith’s ongoing fascination with the role of the outsider in her work), only recently have we seen such a spate of books that use the mystery novel framework to reflect on a society as a whole. I’ve talked about this before here and here. But Bangkok 8 is like a supercharged example of the phenomenon.

In yesterday’s post I complained that this book was too long. Part of that length involves Burdett’s continual examination of the differences between Asian and Western culture. He illustrates some of these differences with his two protagonists, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a Thai detective, and Kimberley Jones, an American FBI agent, who are assigned to work together to discover the killer of a U.S. Marine in Bangkok. But Burdett goes much further than just showing us their different approaches (Jones’s reliance on hard facts; Sonchai’s reliance on his intuition). In Sonchai, Burdett has given us a character who thinks really hard about these differences. As a man of mixed race (he has a Thai mother and an unknown U.S. Vietnam-era serviceman father), Sonchai is uniquely situated to provide ongoing analysis and commentary. And Burdett doesn’t hesitate to pull the puppeteer’s strings; towards the end of the book he even has Sonchai reading a book about how the West doesn’t understand Thailand. He even treats us to quotes from that book, in case we haven’t gotten his point.

Another theme of the book is the sex trade in Thailand (which Sonchai, as the son of a former prostitute, has a unique perspective on) and more specifically, the booming Thai industry in gender reassignment surgery, which is much cheaper and less regulated than what is available in Western nations. Burdett again provides an east vs. west analysis of people’s attitudes toward sex and gender that (of course) ends up relating back to the original murder.

This book is a lot of work – it’s not a mindless escapist sort of mystery, but one you can sink your teeth into, if you like this kind of thing. I do, sometimes, and felt (despite my complaints about its length) that it was a really good read.

(Book 12, 2011)

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett

2011-05-04T13:19:00.000-07:00

A conversation among Me, Myself, and I.

Me: Ugh, I thought this book would never end.

Myself: You say that like it’s a bad thing.

Me: I mean it that way. It was just endless. I kept on reading and reading, but I never seemed to finish.

Myself: But it was really interesting! And it had so much cool information about Bangkok! And the detective, Sonchai, was so likable, wise, and funny. Didn’t you love him?

Me: Well yes, he was great, and so was Jones, the American FBI agent. She was smart and intrepid, yes. But what about the snakes? Yuck. And that sleazy guy Warren? Eeeeeeeeeewwwww. What he did was awful!

Myself, Yes but Sonchai and Jones were on him! They figured him out!

Me: I know, but still….and what about all the stuff about the sex trade? Wasn’t it a little bit Too Much Information?

Myself: Well maybe, but didn’t you love the ex-prostitute Nong, who was busy taking finance and management courses over the web in anticipation of opening her own sex club? And she was Sonchai’s mother! What a smart cookie!

Me: I guess. But it sure didn’t make me want to visit Bangkok. I’d be afraid I’d get caught in one of their traffic jams.

Myself: So what I hear you saying is that you loved this book’s characters, but maybe didn’t enjoy the action or the setting so much.

Me: That’s kind of an over-simplification. I liked a lot of that, especially the Bangkok setting. There was just a bit too much; Burdett could have left some of it out, saved it for his next book. Then he would have gotten to the finish more quickly and efficiently. And I could have started to read all these other books that are piling up next to my bed.

I: Shhhhhhh. Would you girls stop talking? I’m trying to read.

(Book 12, 2011)

In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss

2011-04-26T10:16:00.000-07:00

Until recently I believed that literary genres were fairly static. We had literary fiction, popular fiction, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, mysteries. Now I feel like I discover new genres all the time. Maybe these new genres are really sub-genres of these larger groups, but who cares? It’s fun. A few weeks ago I wrote about tartan noir. Today I’m writing about slipstream, fiction with a fantastical edge to it, not really fantasy, but not realistic fiction either. I love it.

The stories in this book are uneven in how closely they walk the boundary between fantasy and reality. They are also uneven in quality. The title story In the Forest of Forgetting is just brilliant. It’s a vivid mixture of traditional fairy tale (an innocent maiden wanders alone into a forest and encounters a witch) and reality (the forest is illness; the witch is a surgeon; the walk through the forest is a journey towards death from breast cancer). I also loved Sleeping with Bears, which is available on this website. You can read a few other stories on Goss’s own website, here. Some of them appear in the volume I just read, and others stand alone.

I want to read more books like this one but have trouble finding them. Suggestions?

(Book 11, 2011)

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

2011-04-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

What a refreshing change this book is from the contemporary fiction I’ve been reading recently. Instead of a book about self-absorbed whiny people where hardly anything happens (Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris; Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger), this book is a sprawling saga of World War II in Hungary, with a cast of thousands, a huge variety of locations, war, deprivation, joy, anxiety, relief, love, hate, birth, death, and not a shred of self-pity. I loved it!

I didn’t know much about Hungary in the war and a lot of the information was new to me, and I suspect it will be new to most readers. It’s the story of Andras Levi, a Hungarian architecture student, and it begins in the late 1930’s as he moves to Paris to take up a scholarship place at architecture school. It follows Andras, his brothers, his parents, his eventual wife, her family, and their children throughout the war, from Paris, back to Budapest, through stints in the Hungarian Labor Service, throughout the siege of Budapest, to the aftermath of the war.

This book is in the tradition of the great war novels that are also great family sagas: I’m thinking now of Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, and also of Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance. Like Wouk and Mitchell, Orringer skillfully integrates fact and fiction, including both real and fictional characters. Meticulously researched, it’s as much about epic battles as it is about how people hang on to their humanity during the most trying situations imaginable. Also like those three books I mention, The Invisible Bridge is not high literary art; it’s got its share of purple prose and overwrought descriptions. Yet I think it too will endure as a classic.

My sincere apologies to loyal blog readers for such infrequent posts: The Invisible Bridge is long (over 700 pages), and I read it during an especially busy time at work and at home. In this post I complained that the Kindle version provided no maps, but I was mistaken. I discovered the map after I was done reading; had I better understood the workings of the Kindle I would have found it earlier. It even shows the location of Carpathian Ruthenia (which, it turns out, is in Ukraine).

(Book 10, 2011)

Please Turn Off All Electronic Devices

2011-04-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

The Amazon Kindle is an electronic device. Thus, the familiar airline directive to "turn off and stow" left me with NOTHING TO READ during takeoff and landing, and worst of all, nothing to read during the entire flight from Madison to Milwaukee, which is of too short duration to allow for the use of any devices at all (let alone handouts of free soda and peanuts).

Well that was on the way to Philadelphia last week. This week, for the return trip, I had the foresight to buy a magazine (Vanity Fair) and got to read all about Stuxnet. The book I am (intermittently) reading on the Kindle is The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, which started off slowly but is picking up steam. I remain ambivalent about reading on the Kindle. While it was convenient not to lug around a 600-page hardback, I still miss holding the book, turning the pages, and looking at the cover. And long time blog readers may remember that I really like it when a book has maps. I don't know whether the print version of The Invisible Bridge has maps, but the Kindle version sure doesn't, so I was left wondering where, exactly, was Carpathian Ruthenia.

A Darker Domain by Val McDermid

2011-03-31T10:36:00.000-07:00

Here’s a useful new term: Tartan Noir. It describes a form of Scottish crime fiction characterized by troubled protagonists and plots that deal with questions of redemption. It turns out there’s also Scandinavian Noir (troubled protagonists and changing society; authors include Henning Mankell, Karin Fossum and Arnaldur Indridison), and Mediterranean Noir (troubled protagonists and governmental corruption; authors include Andrea Camilleri and Michael Dibdin). Most of the crime novels I’ve read in the last few years fall into one of these genres, it turns out, including A Darker Domain.

I liked this one a lot. It’s a standard police procedural with POVs from several different characters. I liked the two female protagonists (a cop and a journalist, both investigating the same crime). So many of these “noir-ish” books have a dearth of female characters. McDermid’s two female leads are not as tortured as some of their male counterparts (Kurt Wallander's depression, and Erlendur’s troubled family come to mind) but they still have their demons. McDermid’s writing is excellent and her plotting is complicated but accessible. I also liked the relative lack of blood and gore, though I hear some of her other titles feature more violence.

Hey, what about Stalin’s Ghost, by Martin Cruz Smith? Arkady Renko is certainly a detective with issues, and all those books dwell on corruption and moral ambiguity in both the old and the new Russia. But a quick Google search for “Russian Noir” yields only links to articles about Russian photographers, film makers, and Pinot Noir from California’s Russian River Valley; no one has yet used the term to refer to this type of fiction. Folks, you heard it here first!

(Book 9, 2011)

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

2011-03-25T13:07:00.000-07:00

I hate it when a character does something that is …out of character. Not just unpredictable, but something that you just feel like that character wouldn’t do. In this post from last week I talked about how “confabulated characters walk about in our heads with the authority of our own friends and relatives (Lionel Shriver, The Financial Times, Feb 26/27, 2011).” And when you know a character as well as you know your own sister (for example) and then she does something that you just know she would not do, it’s like a blast of cold air that interrupts and ultimately diminishes the whole reading experience. This was the experience I had with Her Fearful Symmetry.

Her Fearful Symmetry is the story of 20-something twins, Julia and Valentina, who inherit a flat in London from their late aunt Elspeth (who is the twin sister of their mother Edwina). Lots of baggage (literal and emotional) comes with the flat, including Elspeth’s lover Robert (who inhabits the flat downstairs) and Martin, the OCD-suffering neighbor from upstairs. Also Elspeth’s ghost, who is at first just a puff of air but eventually transforms herself into something quite a bit more powerful and possibly malevolent.

Julia and Valentina are shallow and self-absorbed. They spend a lot of time playing dress-up in Elspeth’s quirky outfits and wandering pointlessly around London. Robert is devastated by Elspeth’s death and Martin is crippled by his mental illness. No one is happy or even very functional. Despite my lukewarm feelings toward the characters, I found that the book contained enough intrigue and atmosphere to propel me along nicely, until I was yanked out of the story by a decision Valentina makes about ¾ of the way through. It ruined the whole rest of the book for me, and made everything that came afterwards seem forced and manipulative. I wish the author had chosen a different method for accomplishing her goals. Still, this is an interesting book about death and separation and all the ways in which people can be both together and apart, and maybe that plot twist won’t bother you as much as it bothered me.

The flat that Julia and Valentina inherit is in the London neighborhood of Highgate and backs up to Highgate cemetery. Many scenes take place in the cemetery: Elspeth is buried there, Robert works as a guide there, and is writing a history of it, and the twins walk there frequently. Highgate cemetery is a stunning example of the Victorians’ overblown sentimentality toward death and is filled with elaborate monuments to dead poets, and twisty paths through dense underbrush. It figures strongly in another book I liked a lot, Falling Angels, by Tracy Chevalier, and provides a satisfyingly creepy backdrop for a lot of the action in this book. A few years ago on a trip to London I dragged my friend Catherine with me to see Highgate cemetery, and I thought she might never forgive me – she found the Victorian excess deeply disturbing, but I loved it.

(Book 8, 2011)

They're Alive!

2011-03-16T10:51:00.000-07:00

I came across this paragraph about fiction recently, thought it was just brilliant and had to share it. It was from a review in the Financial Times by Lionel Shriver of Siri Husvedt’s new novel The Summer Without Men. Here you go:

Fiction relies on a baffling alchemy. At some point in the narrative, and with the best of books from the very beginning, a story the author cheerfully, even formally, concedes is invented seems actually to have happened. Through the aegis of our eagerness to be fooled, confabulated characters walk about in our heads with the authority of our own friends and relatives. It’s a wonderful and mysterious process, one I don’t pretend to understand.

Shriver goes on to say that “sometimes it doesn’t work” but that isn’t what interests me. I just loved how she expressed the role that fictional characters can take on in our lives: “confabulated characters walk about in our heads with the authority of our own friends and relatives.” That is how I feel all the time about my favorite characters. It’s my favorite part of reading fiction.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

2011-03-11T09:53:00.000-08:00

The Finkler Question won the 2010 Man Booker Prize for fiction. Many people a lot smarter than I am have analyzed this book in depth, so I’m not going to do that. Any book about self-hating Jews and antisemitism is bound to generate a lot of discussion and I am certain that I have nothing new to add. A quick Google search will yield a zillion articles, both in the popular and the scholarly press, so if you want high level discussion, go there instead of here.

As I’ve said before, I am just interested in the reading experience, and for me, this reading experience was less than satisfying. Here are some good things about this book: The narrator is funny and has a strong original voice. He manages his characters with an ironic detachment, and provides amusing commentary on them, which I enjoyed. Here are some bad things: These unpleasant characters just go on and on and on and they never shut up. Hardly anything ever happens except for a few nasty incidents that get blown out of proportion by the self-absorbed people who experience them. I couldn’t stand those parts.

Apparently this book is a roman a clef, with several characters who are obvious parodies of well-known British academics and pundits. Since I am almost totally unfamiliar with the 21st century British intelligentsia, all those references passed me by completely. If you want, you could try to explore that angle, too, but I can’t be bothered. I’ve had enough of these folks.

(Book 7, 2010)

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum

2011-03-01T15:06:00.000-08:00

Having recently read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks I was looking for more “science for laypeople” books. Deborah Blum won a Pulitzer Prize for science journalism and is a professor at the University of Wisconsin. One of her former students recommended this to me, and I’d also heard from several mystery readers that this was a really fun book, if you don’t mind a little chemistry with your drama.

Deborah Blum tells the true story of New York’s first chief medical examiner Charles Norris, and his right-hand man Alexander Gettler and their efforts to reform the way New York city officials investigated suspicious deaths and prosecuted suspected poisoners. Did you know that in the early part of the 20th century it was extremely easy to get your hands on a variety of nasty substances (my favorite is something called Rough on Rats which was 90% arsenic) and also really easy to get away with using said substances to murder someone? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration was in its infancy. Autopsies were primitive. Gettler and Norris saw the need for greater regulation and better analysis and they became crusaders for both.

This book is like a smorgasbord of information about poison and poisoners, and how Gettler and Norris went after both. It’s got detailed descriptions of how Gettler minced up flesh from human cadavers and subjected the resulting mush to a battery of tests as he tried to figure out the best way to extract the toxins. Norris focused more on policy – he hated Prohibition, for example, and assiduously tracked the sharp rise in deaths caused by the methyl alcohol in bootleg liquor. I also liked Blum’s vignettes about notorious poisoners such as Fanny Creighton, who managed to knock off several annoying family members with arsenic before she was finally caught and prosecuted. Blum’s prose is lively and she provides just the right mix of science and suspense to make this a great read.

(Book 6, 2011)

Capitulation

2011-02-23T16:34:00.000-08:00

I just bought a Kindle. I was persuaded to do so by the drop in price and the rediscovery of a long-forgotten Amazon gift card (thanks Dad!). I like it more than I thought I would. It's simple to use and the page is easy to read. I bought my first book (The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson) for $5.00, a bargain.

I still haven't completely adjusted to the reading experience. I feel a little removed from the book. I miss the front and back covers, the blurb, the author's photo. On the other hand I like how light the device is. I am looking forward to downloading first chapters of books for free to see if I want to read them. This feature could save me lugging a lot of books home from the library only to abandon them 15 pages in. I anticipate that my spending on books will go up a bit, but I don't see myself quitting the library any time soon.

Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding Myself by Frances Kuffel

2011-02-19T11:55:00.000-08:00

This is a memoir by a formerly obese woman who lost 180 lbs in her early 40’s. It’s not a how-to-diet book (there are no recipes) or an inspirational tract (like the popular Women, Food, and God; click to see the Citizen Reader’s take on that book). Rather, it’s about the experiences of (a) completely changing your appearance to the point where you become unrecognizable to friends and family, and (b) carving out new a life in what was formerly uncharted territory – the Planet of Thin, Kuffel calls it. On the Planet of Thin you can buy your underwear in Rite Aid rather than ordering it out of a catalog, you fit in an airplane seat, and most profoundly for Kuffel, you can run through the streets of lower Manhattan to escape the collapsing towers on September 11, 2001. “My weight loss had saved my life,” she says, bluntly and without fuss.

In addition to the Planet of Thin, Kuffel explores the Planet of Girls, another formerly forbidden zone where you can shop for interesting clothes and meet men who flirt with you. This might sound trite but it’s not. Kuffel has her first date and her first sexual experience. Her reactions are decidedly complicated, her descriptions moving. She is shockingly honest and this makes for an interesting read, though sometimes you want to say “It’s okay, Frances, we don’t have to keep talking about this.” This book offers good writing about a transformative life experience. I liked it.

(Book 5, 2011)

Stalin's Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith

2011-02-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

This book’s mystery was not as satisfying as some of Smith’s earlier work, but the writing was just excellent. In Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, Michael Chabon argues for blurring the lines between genre fiction and mainstream literary fiction when we talk about writing. Stalin’s Ghost is a perfect book to further Chabon’s argument that some of the best modern writing is happening in genre fiction (mystery, science fiction, fantasy) rather than in traditional literary fiction. When I think about how Smith’s writing in Stalin’s Ghost compares to some of the sloppy slapdash crap that passes for literary fiction these days I get all worked up (can you tell?). Smith’s prose is just gorgeous, both poetic and precise at the same time; it’s always exactly right.

The mystery is a little muddier – what, exactly, is Renko investigating? The reported appearance of the ghost of Joseph Stalin at a Moscow subway station? Potential corruption in the OMON (the Russian Special Police)? The origins and victims of a World War II-era mass grave in the Russian city of Tver? Pretty much all of it, it seems; Renko is not one to shy away from a challenge. Smith also presents us with an extremely unflattering portrait of modern Russia, complete with its enormous income gap, and peopled by gamblers, alcoholics, motorcycle gangs, runaways and knife-wielding thugs. It’s endlessly fascinating, though occasionally a little over the top for me.

I have been following Arkady Renko’s career since his earliest days as a homicide investigator in Soviet-era Moscow, in Smith’s first book Gorky Park. He’s one of my all time favorite detectives. He’s getting older now, and smokes too many cigarettes and drinks too much vodka, which seems to be the fate of everyone else in Russia, too, if you believe Smith’s portrayal.

(Book 4, 2011)

Index of Books Read 2010

2011-02-03T11:00:00.000-08:00

Books read in 2010, alphabetical by title. Use your browser search feature (usually Ctrl F) to find a specific author or title. Or you can search the whole blog from the Blogger search box on the right sidebar.

Angelology by Danielle Trussoni
Baker Towers by Jennifer Haigh
The Believers by Zoe Heller
Black Seconds by Karin Fossum
Brave Girl Eating by Harriet Brown
The Blood Doctor by Barbara Vine
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
A Candle in her Room by Ruth M. Arthur
The Condition by Jennifer Haigh
A Dead Hand by Paul Theroux
Do Not Deny Me by Jean Thompson
Finding Iris Chang by Paula Kamen
Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido
The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
The Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Haunted Ground by Erin Hart
Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indidason
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Lima Nights by Marie Arana
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Man from Saigon by Marti Leimbach
The Map Thief by Heather Terrell
The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander
Naming Nature by Carol Kaesuk Yoon
Not Becoming My Mother by Ruth Reichl
The Other Mother by Gwendolyn Gross
The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee
Privileges by Jonathan Dee
A Proper Education for Girls by Elaine DiRollo
Property by Valerie Martin
Read My Pins by Madeline Albright
Red Bones by Ann Cleeves
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
Restless by William Boyd
Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant
The Saffron Kitchen by Yasmin Crowther
Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
Sima’s Undergarments for Women by Ilana Stanger
The Good People of New York by Thisbe Nissen
The Tapestry of Love by Rosy Thornton
This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper
This One is Mine by Maria Semple
The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
Voice of America by E. C. Osondu
The World to Come by Dara Horn
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine

2011-02-02T17:18:00.000-08:00

This was the January selection at my book club. I enjoyed it, though not everyone else did. Elana thought there was too much “tell” and not enough “show” and I think Phyllis thought it was a bit lightweight, though she was too polite to say so. I, however, was happily entertained by it, though I don’t think either Elana or Phyllis are incorrect in their analyses.

The book is a retelling of Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen, transferred to Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Westport, Connecticut, in the present day. Schine has transformed nearly every plot point and character into a modern version, some more successfully than others. For example, Marianne, from S&S, is a delightfully free spirit, romantic and impetuous. Her 21st century analog, Miranda, is a spoiled drama queen and not nearly as appealing as Marianne. Fanny, from S&S, who schemes to cheat Marianne and her mother and sister out of their rightful portions, is recreated as Felicity, a more fully developed character in Schine’s version, and more sympathetic too (though I confess, it’s been a long time since I read S&S). It’s fun to play the match-up game, though the book certainly works even if you don’t know the origin of the plot and the characters (as a few book club members sheepishly confessed).

I find Schine to be an erratic writer. Years ago I read Alice in Bed, her first book, and really liked it, but I’ve had more trouble with her later offerings. Sometimes she is sloppy and takes the easy way out (telling and not showing, for example). But sometimes she is really ironic and sharp-witted and I like that. I can’t decide if updating a classic like S&S is brave (oh, the challenge of writing as well as Ms. Austen!) or lazy (don’t have to waste time coming up with a plot!). Maybe it’s both.

(Book 3, 2011)

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

2011-01-27T16:16:00.000-08:00

This novel got a lot of good press and won some awards, including the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award. It’s the story of a group of people who work together in a Chicago advertising agency. The agency is in decline; one by one the copywriters and graphic designers are being laid off as the clients disappear and the work dries up. Meanwhile, the remaining staff gather in one another’s offices to commiserate, gossip, drink coffee, and in some cases plan their escapes. A great deal of the book consists of these glib conversations that take place in one cubicle or another. Like at a real job, sometimes these conversations are clever but a lot of the time they are trite, and Ferris doesn’t really favor one sort over the other. Hence we endure endless discussions about Marcia’s new hair style, and whether or not Larry is going to leave his wife for Amber.

Reviewers rave about how Ferris captures the ennui and the cynicism that characterize modern office life, and he does. But if you already work in an office where ennui and cynicism are the norm, do you really want to read about it for fun, too? It’s not like their ennui and cynicism are any different from anyone else’s, which is what the critics seemed to like, but which I thought made for dull reading. Occasionally Ferris introduces some level of pathos or action that moves the story to another level, like when Janine feels compelled to mourn her murdered daughter by spending her lunch hour in the plastic ball pit at McDonalds, or when Tom decides to take his tragicomic revenge for being laid off. But these moments are too infrequent to counteract the endless boring debates about who should get the chair of the most recently departed employee. Yes, I realize that the pointlessness is the point. But does all this really add up to one of the best books of 2007?

(Book 2, 2011)

Game of Thrones on HBO

2011-01-24T08:06:00.000-08:00

HBO is producing a dramatization of the first book in George R. R. Martin's four-volume (and as yet unfinished) fantasy series known as A Song of Ice and Fire. I read the first three volumes of this series before I had my blog. The fourth book, A Feast for Crows, was one of the first books I wrote about when I started blogging. So it's been a long time since I read A Game of Thrones: almost ten years. The question is, do I reread it before I watch the series, or not? The books feature a cast of thousands and they have about a million different plot strands. Is HBO going to try to stick closely to the original story or will it simplify things? Will I like the series more or less if it doesn't match the book? I am encouraged by the fact that one of the the producers and writers for the series is David Benioff, whose novel City of Thieves was one of my favorites of 2008.

If you haven't read this series I highly recommend it, even for readers who don't normally do fantasy. Martin is very sparing in his use of traditional fantasy elements. Mostly it's just an alternate reality story of medieval knights and kings and political machinations, and the magical elements are kept to a very bare minimum. Benioff has famously described the series as "The Sopranos in Middle Earth," and that's pretty accurate. It features strong memorable characters (both male and female), action, romance, and a surprising amount of humor, though it also contains some gruesome violence.

I am not generally a rereader. My TBR stack is too high to spend time on things I've already read. Should I make an exception in this case?

Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar

2011-01-18T17:33:00.000-08:00

Sometimes people ask me how I choose books. I usually answer something like “Oh, I have a lot of writers whose work I like, so just keeping up with their new books can fill my time.” Or, I’ll tell them that I regularly read the newspaper book review pages and make my choices based on that advice. But the sad truth is, sometimes I read a book because it’s been left on the breakfast table by someone else and I pick it up to read while I eat my oatmeal.* That’s how I began Students for a Democratic Society by Harvey Pekar, my first (and probably my only) foray into the graphic format. My son checked this out of the library when he was home from college on winter break and he left it there one morning.**

Did I like it? To my surprise, I liked a lot of it, though after a while I couldn’t stick with it. I discovered something that maybe graphic format readers already know: that when you read these kinds of books, the story’s facts come from the prose, but the emotions come from the illustrations. Because I am so oriented toward print instead of illustration I found myself just reading the prose and skipping the pictures and feeling like the stories were too flat. When I realized what I was doing I went back and looked at the pictures more closely and picked up more of the nuance. Still, it seemed like a lot of work and eventually I gave up.

Students for a Democratic Society is a graphic history of this group from its origins in the labor movement of the late 1950’s up through its disintegration in the early 1970’s. The book mostly consists of a series of reminiscences by and about members of the SDS. It’s certainly not a complete history of the SDS, nor does it claim to be. But it held my interest long enough to provide me with a good introduction to the format, and it inspired me to learn more about Harvey Pekar, who died a few months ago.

*Are you allowed to read during meals at your house? We are. Our kitchen table is usually heaped with books, magazines, and newspapers, and anyone may read during any meal except one that is officially designated as “family dinner,” for which we actually clear the junk off the table. Sometimes during breakfast there is no noise at all except for the crunching of cereal and the flipping of pages.

**College-age boys home on break leave their stuff everywhere. Everywhere.

(Book 1, 2011)

2010 Report

2011-01-13T16:58:00.000-08:00

Regular readers of this blog know that I find “Best of the Year” type posts boring, so I’m going to be quick. Also, almost all the books I read this year were really good, but that’s because I don’t usually stick with a book that I don’t like. The reject pile next to my bed would really shock some of you. But that said, a few titles that I read this year are worth mentioning as real standouts. In no particular order, they are:

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
The World to Come by Dara Horn
White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Property by Valerie Martin
The Glass Room by Simon Mawrer
When the Emperor was Divine
Hellhound on his Trail by Hampton Sides

As soon as I can I’ll put together a list of all the books I read in 2010 so I can link to it from my sidebar.

Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indriðason

2011-01-12T13:53:00.000-08:00

I’ve noticed that when it comes to mysteries, I am all about location, the more exotic the better. In the past year or so I’ve read mysteries that take place in India, Norway, the Shetland Islands, China, Ireland, Italy, and Saudi Arabia. And now with this most recent book, Iceland. Though I’ve been to Iceland before (in real life, too!), as this is the fifth book I’ve read about Reykjavik detective Erlandur. Like Arnaldur's earlier books, this is one dark and laconic. He doesn’t waste words or emotions and neither does Erlandur as he slowly and doggedly tries to get to the bottom of an apparent suicide that just doesn’t seem right to him.

Several scenes in this book are set at the Thingvellir National Park, one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been in my life, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates come together to form a rift valley. You can walk on the valley floor between the two plates, North America on your left side, Europe on your right. It’s also a Unesco World Heritage site, the original site of the Althing, the world’s oldest parliament, established in 930 CE. Of course none of this matters to Erlandur, who just spends a lot of time wondering how long it would take for someone to freeze to death in the icy waters of Lake Thingvallavatn (answer: not very long).

Above is a picture I took of the trail through the rift valley at Thingvellir. You can see more (and better) photos of this place on Flickr or by doing an image search in Google.

(Book 58, 2010)

The Tapestry of Love by Rosy Thornton

2011-01-06T13:36:00.000-08:00

Oh Rosy, where is your sharp edge? What happened to your astute observations, your subtle wit, your understated skewering of all things pompous? I loved your last book, Hearts and Minds but this one kind of left me cold.

The Tapestry of Love is about a middle-aged divorced British woman who buys an old house in southern France, fixes it up, starts her own successful decorating business, meets the handsome (and single) neighbor, etc. etc. A predictable plot, yes, but I had hoped that Thornton’s ever-so-slightly cynical voice could render it fresh and different. But alas, no, it’s a conventional plot rendered conventionally; Thornton’s humor and zing are gone and she just offers up the requisite scenes: the one with the sheep, the one with the priest, the one at the town market. It’s like someone took all the spice out of her writing. I’m so disappointed.

If you want a comfort read, something to take your mind off your bratty kids and your boring job, this might do the trick. It’s certainly not badly written or offensive. It’s just that I was expecting a bowl of chili and I felt like I got Campbell’s cream of tomato soup instead.

(Book 57, 2010)

Voice of America by E. C. Osondu

2011-01-04T11:00:00.000-08:00

An editor at Harper sent me a review copy of this book. I’d never heard of Osondu, though the first story in this book, Waiting, won the 2009 Caine Prize, which is a literary prize for the best original short story by an African writer who is writing in English.

Waiting is a very moving story of young people living in a refugee camp, waiting for what? They wait for food, for clothing, for things to change, for a chance to go to America. Most stories in this book are set in Nigeria but a few are set in the U.S. I liked the Nigerian stories better, especially a story called Jimmy Carter’s Eyes, which is available online here.

What I found really interesting was the way Osondu explored the relationship between Africans and African Americans. Several stories (some set in the U.S., others in Nigeria) deal with the expectations that Africans have regarding African Americans, and vice versa. The cultural divide between these groups is huge, and Osondu exploits it for purposes both comic and tragic.

Osondu’s writing style is spare but not macho. He makes his observations with a minimum of fuss, so even a drama-filled story about a beachfront firing squad is an exercise in control. And while it is clearly not Osondu’s intention to remind his U.S. readers how good they have it, he achieves this nevertheless. I read Waiting from the comfort of my warm house, surrounded by my loving family, and was grateful for everything I had.

(Book 56, 2010)

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

2010-12-30T09:40:00.000-08:00

This was mindbending. It didn’t help that in the same weekend that I read this, I also watched the movie Inception and several episodes of Season 5 of Lost. I was lucky I could find my own kitchen, given all the time travel/dream-within-a-dream/bright flashes of light that were going on in my own personal entertainment universe.

How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is the story of a travelling time machine repairman. Did you try to use your time machine to change the past? Uh oh. You broke it. Charles Yu to the rescue. But Charles (yes, the protagonist’s name is the same as the author’s) also uses his own time machine to avoid living in any particular year or place and instead (against the rules) hovers in a kind of no-time space where his only friends are his virtual dog Ed, and TAMMY, his management software with an inferiority complex. Only when he is forced to return to real time when his own time machine breaks down do actual things start to happen.

I wanted to like this, and I did, in some ways. It has a sweet father-son relationship story buried inside the layers of overly clever science fictional technojargon. Even some aspects of the science fictional world-building were funny and original, but mostly it was over the top. Yu can be an interesting writer and reminds me a little of Nicholson Baker, but Yu (like some other alternate reality writers) can get so caught up in his own details that he forgets that he is telling a story, that someone else is trying to follow what he is saying, that he has to work to maintain the reader’s interest. About half way through I started skimming, resulting in no loss of comprehension (because I was only getting about 60% of it anyway).

(Book 55, 2010)

The Other Mother by Gwendolyn Gross

2010-12-27T18:17:00.000-08:00

I loved how honest this book was. It reminded me a lot of Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk, though those mothers are less sympathetic. The two mothers in this book (each narrates alternating chapters, thus each is the “other mother”) are more likable than Cusk’s women. They live on either side of a high fence, both literally and figuratively. They are neighbors in New Jersey and sometimes they are friends. One stays home full time with her three children (ages 13 and under) and the other goes to work as an editor at a New York publishing firm, leaving her infant daughter with a series of caregivers. Each envies the other’s life but believes her own choice is the best one (usually).

Gross is a lovely writer and, like Cusk, captures the minutiae of suburban life with young children in all its sticky wonder. But it's a dangerous topic for a writer who wants to be taken seriously. Just yesterday in the New York Times Book Review I read this review of My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses by Claire Dederer, which is a memoir of motherhood and family life. The reviewer, Dani Shapiro, feels compelled to remark that “it is heartening to see a serious female writer take such a risky step into territory where writers of literary ambition fear to tread, lest they be dismissed as trivial.” Shapiro goes to great lengths in her review to justify why she actually liked a book about motherhood and child rearing. Must I make similar excuses for myself? Well I’m not going to. This was an interesting book: well written, observant, and moving.

(Book 54, 2010)

The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander

2010-12-20T19:35:00.000-08:00

I abandoned this book after page 7 because I didn’t like the narrator. In some books a narrator’s voice is imperceptible, but other times the voice is more present, inserting itself into the reader’s consciousness, shading the reader’s interpretations, leading the reader astray, even, or in the case of this book, just irritating the reader.

On the top of page 7 this book’s narrator describes a woman named Lila Finkel as having "a cunt of pure gold." Wow, that’s pretty extreme. We are only on page 7. I barely know this narrator; this is our first conversation, and the first I’ve heard of Lila. If I met a guy at a party who described his friend Lila that way, I’d get away from him as fast as I could, and think “what a creep.”

Now if that description of Lila had emerged from a character’s mouth instead of from the narrator my reaction would have been entirely different. I would have sailed right over it, and internalized the intended message “the person speaking is crude and uninterested in whether or not he offends.” But it came from the narrator’s voice and it said to me that this narrator doesn’t care if he offends me, and in fact, he probably isn’t even talking to me. He is probably picturing his reader as a man, his frat brother, his drinking buddy, someone with whom he can casually toss around a word like that with no thought of giving offense. Or maybe I am being too nice, maybe he pictures his reader as a woman too, and he wants to offend her, he wants her to be shocked. What’s going on with that?

Either way, I’m not going to listen. Yes, I am offended (what of Lila’s lips, her voice, her attention to detail, her excellent golf swing?). And really I just want to get away from this weirdo who describes women using crude names for their sexual parts. I’m not going to keep talking to him just to be polite, and I’m not going to keep reading this book just because someone else thinks it’s good. Maybe this narrator is an okay guy, and can tell an interesting story, but his utter disregard for my sensibilities (or his deliberate attempt to shock me) just put me off completely.

This was my book club’s December selection, and I complained about it in this post. I skipped the meeting for reasons unrelated to my dislike of the book. But what did the book club think, you might wonder. When I asked Elana how the meeting went, she replied that she thought it went well, though they “spent a lot of time talking about whether there was any redemption or if the book was just utter darkness. “ Whoa, utter darkness AND creepy weirdos. Get me out of there.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, Revisited

2010-12-17T10:21:00.000-08:00

As I was writing my post about The Making of a Marchioness I found myself wondering if young girls still read books by Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden, A Little Princess). My friend Nora answered that question when she told me that her girls (approx. ages 14 and 16) love both of these books, so that was reassuring. My boys were not terribly keen on vintage books. One loved the Little Eddie stories by Carolyn Haywood, which first appeared in the 1940’s, and the other was briefly a fan of the Narnia books, but otherwise, not so much.

Just the other day, on the radio, I heard this story about what publishers are calling multi-platform books for adolescent readers. These are books that appear in print but which also have some kind of interactive online component to draw readers in. It made me think, how can books like those by Hodgson Burnett possibly compete? Filled with arcane references to life in India, they assume an understanding of British empire class distinctions, and are sprinkled with obscure dialect (does anyone remember trying to decipher Dickon’s language?). I remember being baffled by some aspects of the stories when I first read them in the 1970’s (what was an ayah?); it must be even harder now. It seems like these books would be hard going for a girl who could instead choose to read The 39 Clues.

I am not bemoaning the popularity of multi-platform books; they sound like a lot of fun. I’m just wondering, and am encouraged that there are girls who do still want to read the older stories.

The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett

2010-12-14T19:29:00.000-08:00

Is there a lifelong (female) reader who doesn’t love The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett? It’s one of my favorites and I’ve read it several times. Hodgson Burnett wrote for adults as well as children, and Persephone Books has published two of her titles. I just finished The Making of a Marchioness, originally published in 1901, and republished by Persephone in 2001.

Persephone’s version of this book is actually two novels in one: the first book, The Making of a Marchioness, followed by its sequel, The Methods of Lady Walderhurst. The first volume is a Cinderella-type story of Emily Fox-Seton, impoverished gentlewoman, who ekes out a living running errands for her wealthy acquaintances. While Hodgson Burnett occasionally provides glimpses of the dark side of Emily’s tenuous existence, mostly she dwells on her unflagging good spirits and continued optimism in the face of impending spinsterhood. And like any good Cinderella story, Emily’s prince eventually emerges in the form of the Marquis of Walderhurst, a dull self-centered man who chooses to marry Emily because her practical nature appeals to him. Thus Emily lives happily ever after as the Marchioness of Walderhurst.

Or does she? The Methods of Lady Walderhurst could hardly be a more different book than its predecessor. Lord Walderhurst must travel to India to oversee his business interests. On her own at home, Emily is beset by the evil Alec Osborn, Walderhurst’s dissolute heir presumptive, who views Emily’s existence (and that of her potential offspring) as a direct threat to him. We move rapidly from a story so sweet that it hurts your teeth, to one so dark that it keeps you up at night. Is Osborn going to murder Emily? How involved in any potential plot is Osborn’s wife Hester, whom Emily befriends? And what exactly is going on with the Indian servant Ameerah?

Like most Persephone books, issues pertaining to feminism and class are just under the surface of these stories. Why must Emily be so accommodating all the time? Because it is her nature, or her only guarantee of survival? How does Hester’s Anglo-Indian heritage make her an ambiguous figure? Is Walderhurst's remoteness a feature of his personality or his culture? Persephone titles like this one make me think a lot. Maybe that's why they take me so long to read.

(Book 53, 2010)

The Dreaded Curse of the Book Club

2010-12-08T11:55:00.000-08:00

It’s happening already. I am procrastinating reading my book club selection because I hate it. Hate it hate it hate hate hate hate it, as I wrote in a message to Elana, our fearless leader. What should I do? Elana says I should come to the meeting anyway and talk about why I hate it. That would certainly be what a grown-up member of a book club would do. But right now I just want to blow raspberries and drum my heels into the floor chanting HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT, like my kids did when I tried to make them eat something yucky.

What Have I Been Doing All Year? (and other lists)

2010-12-07T11:04:00.000-08:00

Here is a link to the 100 Notable Books of 2010, from the New York Times? How does it happen that I have only read three of these titles (Angelology, The Privileges, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)? A few of them have been on my list for a while (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu, and Room, by Emma Donaghue) but others have completely escaped my notice, especially the non-fiction choices.

And here's a list of comfort reads, compiled by India Knight on her blog. I normally avoid lists like this, but this one spoke to me with its interesting combination of long-time personal favorites (Frenchman's Creek, Ballet Shoes, The Cazalet Chronicles, The Secret Garden) and books I've never heard of (The Towers of Trebizond, Riders and Rivals, Hens Dancing). Cool. I might try to get to some of these.

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

2010-12-03T13:09:00.000-08:00

I have been struggling to capture the subtleties of this book. Leah Hager Cohen, writing in the New York Times, does a better job than I can. These are typical Munro short stories; they appear simple at first reading, but then hit you like a rocket attack once you get going.

Sometimes these stories aren’t really about what they seem to be about, if you know what I mean. Even when they seem to be about “big” issues (such as domestic violence, for example), their power comes from something else, from something small that happens in the last few seconds, something that you can almost overlook, like the tiny murder that is going on in the corner of the painting.

Alice Munro won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, which honors “one writer's overall contribution to fiction on the world stage” (Man Booker Prize archive website: http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/mbi-archive/43). She has written a lot of books, but I’ve only read a handful. It takes me a long time to get through one of her volumes because I have to read a story, and then rest for a while. Then I can do another one. That’s how powerful they are.

(Book 52, 2010)

This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

2010-11-23T08:45:00.000-08:00

I joined a book club and this was our first selection. I don’t have a good track record with book clubs. I am too picky to make the necessary compromises about book selection. Sometimes my bluntly worded criticisms put other members off. And I am certainly not interested in going to meetings where people haven’t really read the book and just want to drink chardonnay and talk about their children. I have, in fact, said previously that the only way I would be in a book club was if I could pick every book and run every meeting. Well that works, if the only club member is me. Hence, this blog, perfect for my egocentric tendencies.

But this book group came together with serendipitous solutions to most of my objections. It has a leader, Elana, who keeps us on track and whose MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop gives her all the cred I need. It has a theme (contemporary Jewish fiction) so the book choices are limited in a manageable yet interesting way. Its members are a diverse group of men and women (a librarian, a rabbi, a lawyer, a retired professor, some graduate students, some stay-at-home moms, a couple of writer/editors) who don’t know one another well enough get sidetracked into personal conversations. Let’s just say that I am cautiously optimistic.

And I liked this book (though Elana and several others did not)! Tropper uses the construct of shiva, the week-long traditional Jewish mourning period to bring together a highly dysfunctional family, their neighbors, friends, lovers, ex-spouses, and offspring for a week of fireworks and breakdowns. It’s a very funny, sad story of a modern family who are just off-beat enough to make good copy but who aren’t so out there that you don’t believe in them.

Some club members commented that Tropper is too hard on his characters. His physical descriptions can be merciless, bordering on cruel (the overweight matron who breaks her chair, for example, and the creepy neighbor with the wandering hands). But he’s an equal opportunity misanthrope and it all just seemed so real. I thought it was a really good read – intelligent and entertaining, with original characters who stick around in your head for a while.

(Book 51, 2010)

Real Justice for Fictional Characters

2010-11-22T15:51:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I complained in this blog post about one of the protagonists of The Privileges, and about how he was never called to account for his Wall Street shenanigans. It soured me on the story. The plot of The Privileges, by Jonathan Dee, includes a complicated insider trading scheme that sounds a lot like the one currently being investigated by the United States federal authorities. So when I read more details about that investigation today, I reflexively thought "Whoa, finally, they are going to get that guy!"

Well except not. Because he's not real. He's just a guy in a book I read. Okay, whatever.

Hellhound on his Trail by Hampton Sides

2010-11-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

My blogging friend Linda, of Each Little World, recommended this book. She reads a lot more nonfiction than I do, and she makes it all sound so interesting! And this was! It’s about James Earl Ray and the assassination of Martin Luther King, and it reads like a thriller. The book follows Ray from his escape from prison in 1967, through the assassination and its aftermath, to Ray’s capture in London in 1968.

I was shocked, as I read this, to discover how little I knew about this event. I think it’s because I am caught in an age-related limbo state. I was in elementary school when King was shot; too young to have been reading newspapers and following the unfolding drama on television. In contrast, my children have studied all this school. I think they know more about it than I did.

As you would expect, Ray is not a sympathetic character. Neither are supporting characters such as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who hated King, but was obliged to investigate his death. The author’s portrait of King is nuanced and engrossing, and is well balanced. Sides doesn’t give much credence to the various conspiracy theories surrounding King’s assassination. Likewise, he doesn’t spend a lot of time contemplating Ray’s motives, though he makes clear that Ray was a racist and an admirer of George Wallace and Rhodesian leader Ian Smith. This is a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of storytelling and it works very well.

(Book 50, 2010)

A Dead Hand by Paul Theroux

2010-11-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

Doesn’t this sound like it’s a mystery novel? Look at the cover: scary! But no, bait and switch. It’s really about a washed up travel writer who becomes obsessed with a mysterious American woman living in Calcutta. On and on he goes about how beautiful she is, how fascinating, how unique. He can’t get enough of her. When she asks him to look into a teeny problem she is having, of course he agrees; how could he not? Sucker.

He does eventually catch on to her nefarious business, but not until long after we have figured it out. Meanwhile, he’s developed a bad case of writer’s block (he has a “dead hand”) and we have to listen to him go on and on about that, too.

The weird thing is that Paul Theroux is himself kind of a crabby old travel writer (though I wouldn’t describe him as “washed up”). What was Theroux trying to accomplish with this book? The mystery is dull and the characters are sketchy. The descriptions of India are good, though. Was Theroux really just writing another travel book with a half-baked mystery plastered on top for marketing purposes?

(Book 49, 2010)

The Privileges by Jonathan Dee

2010-10-31T08:05:00.000-07:00

I picked this randomly off the new book shelf at the library. The cover looked like a Vanity Fair magazine photo and for some reason I thought the story might be like the articles in that magazine: stylish but not shallow. Ah, the effect of a good cover!

The Privileges is about a power couple, Adam and Cynthia, and it follows them from their wedding day through Adam’s rise in the financial world, to their days as New York City philanthropists. The story wasn’t boring and Dee is a good writer. Even though it’s about rich people in New York, it’s not overloaded with superfluous descriptions of shopping and restaurants. There’s also a lot of relationship analysis, which I like.

What I didn’t like was the book’s amorality. Cynthia is cold and harsh, and she treats her family appallingly. Adam justifies his insider trading as some kind of gift from on high, like, because he’s smart enough to figure out a way to do it without being caught, that makes it okay. Dee refuses to judge his characters or provide any kind of divine retribution, and I found that unsatisfying. I really wished the whole thing WAS a Vanity Fair article. It could have used some of that magazine’s “take them down a notch” approach to the rich and famous.

(Book 48, 2010)

Good Things in the Royal Mail

2010-10-25T17:43:00.000-07:00

Today I got a treat in the mail...

This is what was inside:

Rosy Thornton's new book, not yet available in the U.S. (but coming in December).

Brave Girl Eating by Harriet Brown

2010-10-18T09:59:00.000-07:00

This is a memoir of Brown’s experience helping her daughter Kitty recover from anorexia, using an approach called family-based treatment (FBT). It’s also an indictment of traditional attitudes towards anorexia (blame the victim, blame the family) and a call to action to make FBT more widely available to doctors, therapists, and struggling families. A recent randomized controlled trial of FBT shows that FBT offers a success rate greater than 50%, vs. 23% for traditional treatment methods.

Anorexia is a nightmare for children and their parents. Brown chronicles her family’s dawning horror as they realize how sick Kitty has gotten, and the medical maelstrom they encounter as they try to learn about the disease, find the best treatment, and fight for coverage from their insurer. In family-based treatment, parents take responsibility for their child’s weight restoration; this is a huge difference from traditional approaches that isolate the child from her parents and place the responsibility for weight restoration directly on the patient. But FBT is a hard path to take. Brown and her husband had to sit with Kitty during every meal and every snack for the many months it took her to gain weight. It was an emotional rollercoaster as meals would take hours, and be accompanied by rivers of tears as Kitty fought the demons that were preventing her from eating.

Brown takes deeply entrenched theories (both scientific and popular) about anorexia and turns them on their heads. Here is the fundamental question: Is extreme weight loss caused by deviant thinking, or is the deviant thinking caused by the weight loss? According to Brown, (and FBT advocates) it’s the nutritional deficits that result from too much weight loss that lead to the deviant thinking among anorexics, not the other way around. On this issue Brown has become a crusader, and she backs up her conclusions with results of studies performed on starvation victims. Without exactly saying it, she clearly blames the medical establishment for long-held “blame the victim” attitudes and she seeks to rebut that approach in this book.

Okay, but why did I read this book, you are wondering? It’s not my usual fare. It’s because I know Harriet Brown, and I know Kitty (not her real name). For several years their family lived in our neighborhood, and my oldest son was friends with Kitty in the sibling-ish manner of boys and girls who have gone to school together their whole lives. I saw Harriet fairly frequently at school events and other neighborhood activities. Lots of my friends have been skeptical about Harriet’s decision to write this book: is she taking advantage of Kitty’s illness for her own personal gain as a writer? Let me answer a resounding NO to this question; I think she is doing adolescent girls a huge favor by telling their family’s story and by calling attention to FBT. If you know both of these women (Kitty is 19 now), you know they are no shrinking violets. Kitty was always fearless on the playground, and for as long as I’ve known her, Harriet has been pissed off about something or other. It’s like she’s finally found her cause and she brings to it a wealth of wisdom, the energy of a true zealot, and the communication skills of an experienced journalist; quite a formidable combination.

(Book 47, 2010)

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

2010-10-12T10:37:00.000-07:00

I imagine if you are fan of Jasper Fforde, creator of oddball alternate-universe mysteries like the Thursday Next series, you might like this book. Several years ago I tried to read The Eyre Affair and abandoned it in exhaustion. In the intervening years Fforde has cranked out five more Thursday Next books and a couple of Nursery Crime novels, and now he’s begun a third series, the first of which is this one, Shades of Grey.

Shades of Grey is part dystopian tale, part social satire, and total fantasy. The world has undergone some unspecified disaster, destroying civilization as we know it, and damaging people’s ability to perceive color. The society that has evolved organizes people into castes by what colors they can see, and (as you can imagine), some colors confer more status than others. The Purples are at the top of the heap; the Greys are at the bottom. The world is controlled by the Colortocracy, complete with rigid rules and arcane traditions that combine the worst of North Korea with English public schools. (Prefects are in charge, everyone must play a sport, there is much singing in praise of someone called Munsell.)

This book is very funny (a la Douglas Adam), but it’s also very complicated and difficult to follow. Fforde’s world is so enormously complex that huge portions of the book are just explication. The story (about Eddie, a naïve Red, and Jane, a subversive Grey) is constantly interrupted in its forward progress by whimsical asides about the black market value of lingonberry jam and the abuse of the color green, for example. Fforde’s total infatuation with his own cleverness is his undoing. In the end I was overwhelmed by detail and lost track of who was who and why it mattered.

(Book 46, 2010)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

2010-10-05T08:33:00.000-07:00

I had planned to read this at some point, but bumped it up in my queue when I heard about Go Big Read, the University of Wisconsin Common Reading Program. I like it when a book gets a lot of attention around here; it makes for a change from all the fuss about the football team. Rebecca Skloot is speaking on campus in late October. For information about that event, and others related to Go Big Read, click on the button on my sidebar.

This book is the true story of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman from Baltimore who had cancerous cells taken from her body without her consent by researchers at Johns Hopkins hospital. Because these cells (codenamed HeLa) were among the first to grew easily in a lab, they became the basis for much of the medical research that goes on today around the world. Biologists work on HeLa cells all the time, for cancer research, but also for research on genetics, organ transplantation, and pharmaceutical development. The book is a fascinating combination of family saga and medical documentary. Skloot explains the science well and doesn’t overdo (or underdo) it. Her portrait of Henrietta and her family is sensitive and honest. Henrietta’s early death from cancer left her young family motherless and adrift. Her cells proliferated while her family barely got by.

I’ve heard criticism that this book portrays the Lacks family unflatteringly. Skloot has transcribed their voices from her recordings of her interviews with them, and she included their regionalisms and reproduced their accents. She also doesn’t omit unpleasant details like Henrietta’s son’s prison record and tendency toward continued violence. The Lacks family suffers from entrenched poverty, poor education, and little access to reliable health care. Their situation is far from unique and Skloot is never judgmental. I thought it was a good look at one family’s situation, and an important part of the narrative.

The book brings up so many issues: Why could the researchers take Henrietta’s cells without her permission? (In many situations it’s still possible for this to happen today.) Why is it okay for someone to profit from the sale of Henrietta’s cells when she and her family received nothing for them? (Tissue culture vendors sell HeLa cells by the test-tube-full.) What part does this story play in the long history of exploitative research on African Americans by white scientists? Why is the health care system in the U.S. so uneven and unfair? Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah Lacks, points out the irony of her family’s situation:

Truth be told, I can’t get mad at science, because it help people live, and I’d be a mess without it. I’m a walking drugstore! I can’t say nuthin bad about science, but I won’t lie, I would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother cells probably helped make.

(Book 45, 2010)

Sima’s Undergarments for Women by Ilana Stanger-Ross

2010-09-28T11:37:00.000-07:00

This book (as you would expect) is the story of Sima, a 60-ish woman who owns a lingerie shop in Brooklyn in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Her shop is a gathering place for neighborhood women who are making transitions, because, if you think about it, female transitions are often accompanied by the need for new underwear: adolescence, a wedding, pregnancy, divorce, weight gain or loss. Sima is herself in transition to retirement and she is knocked off her stride by the entrance of another transitional figure, a young Israeli woman Timna, who takes a job in the shop. The relationship between Sima and Timna is really complex and painful. Sima has never come to terms with her failure to have children, and the confusingly maternal urges that Timna stirs up in Sima bring on a personal crisis for Sima. Timna, meanwhile, has no desire to be mothered by Sima, yet she clearly forms an attachment to Sima, despite her efforts not to.

Ilana Stanger-Ross is a good, careful writer and everything in the story (neighborhood, relationships, character development) is well done, but I still had a hard time enjoying it. Both Sima and Timna are difficult to like, for different reasons, and I often grew impatient with Sima, especially. The claustrophobic atmosphere of Sima’s basement shop (where everyone knows everyone else’s business and feels free to comment on it) gave me the heebie jeebies. I prefer to buy my underwear in the anonymity of a department store and now I know why.

(Book 44, 2010)

National Book Award Fail

2010-09-22T09:48:00.000-07:00

Add Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann to my ever-growing list of award-winning books that I hated (and in most cases Did Not Finish). This dreary novel joins recent winners of other coveted awards such as Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009 Pulitzer Prize) and The Great Man by Kate Christenson (PEN/Faulkner 2008, a DNF, so unblogged) in my collection of “they weren’t talking to me when they picked these” books.

In the same vein, I took great delight in reading B. R. Myers' trashing of the latest Jonathan Franzen book Freedom in October's Atlantic Monthly. Hooray, finally someone agrees with me that Franzen is a lazy writer who tries to pass off bad prose and boring characters under a wrapper of "social relevance." The Corrections (National Book Award 2001) was one of the worst books I have ever read and is at the very top of my aforementioned list of dreadful prize-winners. Myers is the author of A Reader's Manifesto, a book I've been meaning to read for a really long time, ever since I read the excerpt from it that was published in the Atlantic back in 2001. That essay caused a huge kerfuffle among fans of literary fiction, but I loved it.

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

2010-09-21T09:18:00.000-07:00

This was a good, sprawling read, something for a rainy weekend or a cottage vacation. It’s long and has lots of characters; also fairy tales, abandoned children, long sea voyages, literary puzzles, locked gardens, evil stepmothers, and mysterious inheritances. I really liked it, except for a few small complaints which I will get to in a minute.

Nell and her sisters have a happy childhood in early 20th century Australia. Only as an adult does she discover that her parents are not really her parents: she was discovered by the harbormaster at age 4, abandoned on a ship full of immigrants from England, and adopted by the harbormaster and his wife. Nell’s quest to discover her real identity (and the reason why she arrived in Australia alone) form the central theme of the book.

The author could have told Nell’s story, and the story of her quest linearly, but instead she opted for a much more complicated approach, and brings in two other central characters: the woman who may or may not be Nell’s mother (named Eliza), and Nell’s granddaughter Cassandra, who continues Nell’s quest after Nell’s death. Thus we really have three stories going on at three different points in time: early 20th century, the 1970’s and the 2000’s. On her web site, Kate Morton says that she “was plaiting the strands of Eliza, Nell and Cassandra's stories, so that each woman's journey could play its part in the solution of the book's mystery.” While I like her image of the three strands of a braid, what Morton sometimes ends up with is a big tangle where it’s hard to remember which woman is uncovering which secret. In the end I wasn’t sure whether Cassandra figured out the whole story or not, and this was a bit disappointing. On the other hand, I certainly had the whole story, which I guess is all that matters.

(Book 43, 2010)

The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer

2010-09-12T17:18:00.000-07:00

This was such a disappointing book. It sounded really good when I read about it. I was envisioning some kind of travel guide like the Lonely Planet series, with photos and little blurbs about food (roasted swan), lodging (in a monastery), and attractions (London Bridge). Doesn't that sounds like a fun idea? Kind of like the fake travel guides published by JetLag, about made-up places like Molvania (A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry), only about the past instead of about an imaginary place. But no, alas, this was just a weird mix of dry scholarly facts and figures presented in the dullest of formats, prose chapters studded with occasional headings. Mortimer does try to sprinkle in some first-hand accounts to liven things up a bit, but he relies so heavily on Chaucer that it starts to feel like a Cliff Notes version of The Canterbury Tales.

The thing that annoyed me most of all about this book, though, was its assumption that the time traveller who was using this book was male. Written mostly in the second person, the book directed all its information to a "you" who was obviously a man. For example, "you" would wear a certain kind of cloak, but a woman would wear a different kind, the book explained. If "you" were traveling by horse, you might expect certain things to happen at an inn, but a woman wouldn't really be traveling by horse, the book points out. What's with that? Yes, I do understand that women's lives were lived more in the background during medieval times, but since the whole book is a fake construct anyway, why adopt this odd voice? No one, male or female, is really going to use the book because you can't time travel (duh!) so why not just talk to everyone the same way and handle gender-related exceptions as they crop up? Real travel guides have no trouble discussing options that are available to only one gender (such as segregated bath houses, for example), without resorting to treating half the possible readers as afterthoughts.

(Book 42, 2010)

The Good People of New York by Thisbe Nissen

2010-09-06T13:06:00.000-07:00

I usually avoid coming-of-age stories. I had my own coming-of-age and as a mother I’ve been intimately involved in the comings-of-age of other people too. Enough is enough, thank you very much. The only reason I read this book was because I thought it was a story of married life in New York city – the familiar domestic fiction landscape that I like to inhabit. The blurb on the back certainly makes you think that! But it’s a bait and switch. After a few chapters of the courtship and early married life of Roz (Jewish, from Brooklyn) and Edwin (upstanding Nebraskan) we quickly abandon them and focus on their daughter Miranda. I missed Roz and Edwin! Edwin, especially, gets the short shrift, after he and Roz divorce and he’s banished back to the wilds of Omaha.

But by then I was invested enough in Miranda to stay with her, from her days at summer camp all the way through her first year of college. She’s a good little proto-feminist and I enjoyed her story. It was set in the 1980’s which was after my own adolescence but before that of my children, so it offered a different view. Dare we ask if Miranda’s story has anything in common with that of her creator, Thisbe Nissen, born in 1972? Oh who cares. It’s still entertaining and well written, so it makes for a good read.

This book came from a stack that I grabbed from the free book exchange located in the pool house of my mother-in-law’s condominium complex in West Orange, New Jersey. It’s amazing what you can find there! Future blog posts will feature some of my other discoveries.

(Book 41, 2010)

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

2010-08-31T13:07:00.000-07:00

I haven’t read a book this bad in a long time. I’m surprised I even finished it, except that I wanted to be able to write a coherent post. This book features unpleasant characters, improbable plot devices, unexplained personality changes, off-putting sex, a bit of gruesome violence, and a complete lack of subtlety or nuance – it’s a total mess. There is one clever plot twist, I’ll grant that, though maybe more astute readers would have seen it coming. I probably was too irritated by that time to recognize the signs.

And can I mention the prose style? The overwrought, melodramatic and repetitive prose, the one-sentence paragraphs (“And so he wept.”), the declarative subject-verb-object construction over and over and over again until I thought I would scream? There, I mentioned it.

Here is a paragraph I that flagged because it was so impossibly bad. I leave you with it.

…There was not a speck of dust in the room. It was a fine room, not the best, but fine. It was the sort of room in which she might have served coffee or tea, dressed for dinner or the theater, might have kept a canary, if she had lived there, but she didn’t live there and no bird sang.

(Book 40, 2010)

Black Seconds by Karin Fossum

2010-08-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve said this before about mysteries by Karin Fossum: they are good to read, but hard to write about. So much of the story is inside the heads of the characters, in how they think about their actions and the consequences of those actions (in the case of the perpetrators) or in how they reason out the solution of the crime (in the case of the detectives).

This book is about a child disappearance, but it isn’t typical. There are no evil serial killers, only a few troubled young men and some bad decisions. Like an earlier Fossum book I read, Don’t Look Back, it’s set in rural/suburban Norway, among typical Norwegian characters, such as oil workers, housewives, and students. This is worth mentioning, I think, because so many Scandinavian writers are focusing these days on issues of immigration and urban crime. While I enjoy those books, too, if you are looking for that angle, Fossum won’t provide it. Instead you will get a restrained and measured analysis of a series of events and their aftermath.

Trust me, this is good, even though it sounds like not so much. Fans of Scandinavian crime novels will immediately get what I’m driving at (I hope).

(Book 39, 2010)

Lima Nights by Marie Arana

2010-08-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

Years ago I read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa. I don’t remember much of the story but I do remember the setting: Lima, Peru in the 1950’s. I remember the atmosphere of elegance and faded glory in the grand European style apartment buildings and along the boulevards, the mix of haves and have-nots, and also my total unfamiliarity with the topography. We have all read enough books set in London and Paris to recognize landmarks like the Thames or the Louvre, but here was a city that sounded equally remarkable, but which was so unknown to me. I felt like I was truly visiting someplace exotic. I tried reading other books by Vargas Llosa but none of the ones I tried captured the essence of life in Lima the way that one did.

Now finally I’m back in Lima! Marie Arana’s short novel about an affair between a married, aristocratic Peruvian man and a young indigenous girl from the slums offers all the atmosphere I was seeking, along with a great story of passion and manipulation. Everything happens pretty much as you would expect: the man Carlos is older and married when he meets the girl Maria, who is a dancer in a bar. The affair progresses rapidly and soon Carlos is so besotted he risks his marriage and his livelihood to be with her. Arana handles the age difference between the characters well. Yes, it’s creepy and you want Carlos to leave the 15-year-old Maria alone; on the other hand you want Maria to find a way out of her squalid life however she can and Carlos provides a safer exit than most of her other choices. Both have things to gain and things to lose from the relationship, no matter how it turns out in the end.

Unlike Vargas Llosa, who writes in Spanish, Arana writes in English, and indeed works as a writer for the Washington Post. The Post’s excellent review of the book (with a more complete plot description than I offer) is here. I hope Arana writes more stories set in Lima.

(Book 38, 2010)

Red Bones by Ann Cleeves

2010-08-18T12:16:00.000-07:00

I love this mystery series, set in the Shetland Isles. I love the cold wet climate, the isolation, the sheep. Weird, I know. But even if this setting sounds awful to you, if you are mystery fan, you will enjoy this. Some archeologists find some old bones. But wait, are they really old? Then one archaeologist turns up dead. What’s going on? Turns out, even in a place as peaceful and remote as this, there are people who are hungry for money and power, and who don’t want their secrets revealed.

Cleeves is the author of two previous Shetland mysteries, Raven Black and White Nights, both of which (like this one) feature detective Jimmy Perez. A fourth book, Blue Lightning, is due out in September. Her books are a kind of cross between standard British police procedurals and the darker, more detached style favored by the Scandinavian mystery writers. I’ll be really disappointed if she ends the series with Blue Lightning (which I think is likely, given the fact that Amazon bills them as the “Shetland Quartet”). Darn it.

Red Bones is set on the Shetland island of Whalsay. Here’s a link to a lovely batch of photos of Whalsay.

(Book 37, 2010)

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See

2010-08-13T18:13:00.000-07:00

I am conflicted about Lisa See. I think she excels in writing about places and time periods, but isn’t so good at creating original characters. The sisters in Shanghai Girls have a relationship that is clichéd and predictable. The dialogue is almost painfully banal. Yet the settings (1930’s Shanghai, 1940’s and ‘50’s Los Angeles) are great, very evocative and filled with detail. This book follows the fortunes of sisters Pearl and May, who make their living working in Shanghai as advertising models, or so-called “beautiful girls.” When their father suffers business reversals he marries them off to the sons of one of his creditors and the girls must leave Shanghai and join their Chinese-American husbands in California where they will work as low-wage labor for their father-in-law. But before they can leave, the Japanese invade Shanghai, forcing Pearl and May to flee with their mother to Hong Kong and make their way by a long circuitous route to the U.S. Their lives in the U.S. are quite a come-down from their affluent pre-war lives. Their husbands are poor and the sisters work long grinding hours in Chinatown. Is this why See must insert maudlin platitudes about how the bond between sisters is unbreakable, despite all adversity, blah blah blah?

Despite my complaints about the characterizations and relationships, I found this book really interesting and entertaining. I loved reading about the 1940’s incarnation of Chinatown in Los Angeles, a neighborhood built not for immigrants but as a tourist attraction and designed by Hollywood set designers. Pearl and May work in this pretend city and therefore are forbidden to wear western-style clothes, lest they disappoint the white visitors who come for the food and the rickshaw rides.

Lisa See has compiled a great set of photographs on Flickr, of Chinatown, Shanghai, and Chinese advertising posters featuring beautiful girls like Pearl and May. Here is the link.

(Book 36, 2010)

Blog Redesign Coming!

2010-08-11T10:47:00.001-07:00

I am not much on redecorating. Or really decorating at all; I think there is nothing wrong with teeteringly tall stacks of books on bedside tables and baskets of half-worked knitting projects in every corner. Family members agree; their favorite accessories run to USB cords and piles of magazines, and we've recently installed a phone museum in our kitchen that consists of broken cell phones, artfully arranged. It's on the side counter, if you are interested in visiting it.

Nevertheless, one must stay current. And in the blog world, at least, you can hire someone to do the freshening up for you. So stay tuned for a new look. I hope you like it!

ETA: It's here! Is the text too small? Let me know if you think it is.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

2010-08-10T09:15:00.000-07:00

This is as good as everyone says it is. Helen Simonson has written an old-fashioned story and interjected some surprisingly contemporary elements, with great success. In many ways this is a standard story of English village life, complete with a vicar, eccentric neighbors, the golf club, social climbing relatives, and featuring a retired major who wants nothing more than to be left alone to putter around in his garden. All the elements are in place for a 21st century Mapp and Lucia type of romp. But here is what stirs everything up: the major’s infatuation with the lovely Pakistani widow who runs the local convenience store. Suddenly, race relations in the new Britain are front and center.

Major Pettigrew is not always a sympathetic lead. His obsession with his late father’s antique shotguns forms a subplot that reveals a weaker side of his character. On the other hand, his growing love for Mrs. Ali, and his continued commitment to her, despite the horrified reactions of the village, and the objections of his and her own families, makes you cheer for him despite his occasional weaknesses.

Simonson raises issues about race and class with a deft hand. For example, here’s a knotty one: Major Pettigrew was born in Pakistan, son of a much-decorated British hero of the partition. Mrs. Ali was born and raised in England, daughter of a Pakistani professor at a British university. Who is the foreigner here? I love it when books ask questions like these.

(Book 35, 2010)

Thrilling Thrillers

2010-07-28T19:02:00.000-07:00

National Public Radio is compiling a list of 100 best thrillers. They've put together a list of almost 200 choices, from which you can vote for your ten favorites. Voting ends today, July 28, so if you read this post and still have time to go vote, here is the link. I'm sorry I didn't publicize this sooner. Here are my choices, in order of publication date (but not the order in which I read them -- that I cannot really remember).

Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurer: 1938
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith: 1955
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote: 1966
The Salzburg Connection by Helen MacInnes: 1968
Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth: 1971
Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett: 1978
Shibumi by Trevanian: 1979
Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith: 1981
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton: 1990
The Likeness by Tana French: 2008

Half the books on my list were written in the 1960's and 1970s, which reveals to me that my peak thriller-reading years were the 1970's. I would lump Gorky Park in with the 60's/70's titles as well, since it's a very cold war era book. Only two of my choices were published after 1981. I really do think this reflects my declining interest in the genre rather than the fact that no good thrillers were published during the last 30 years. In fact, I can think of a few more recent titles that I'm surprised didn't make the list. For example, I would have included (and would have voted for) Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I was also surprised not to find any books by Barbara Vine, queen of the psychological thriller.

I have very specific memories of some of these books. Here is one: I know that I read In Cold Blood in 1976 while on a summer vacation with my family. I found the book so gripping that I insisted on reading it straight through until I finished it, and refused to leave our rented cabin until I was done. I remember my frustrated mother arguing with me that I could "read any time" and that I should be off swimming in the lake instead of holed up inside, which in retrospect is ironic, since my mother probably wanted me out in the lake so that she herself could get back to her reading.

And one more memory: In Shibumi, the hero is a master of an obscure* ~~(and certainly fictional)~~ martial art called Naked Kill. For some reason I thought this was hilarious and for years made bad jokes about it which no one else got. I remember I told someone not that long ago that I was sure Dick Cheney was also a skilled practitioner of this art but received only a blank look in return. Oh well.

*See Jonathan's excellent description of this art in the comments.

The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee

2010-07-21T11:47:00.000-07:00

As people who read this blog know, I like to read books about colonialism, especially the British in India and in Ireland. I can’t really explain why these books appeal to me, except as a part of my larger interest in books that deal with class issues. Colonial settings provide a double whammy when it comes to thinking about class, as they often feature class conflict within a group (higher and lower caste Indians, for example) and across groups (Indians vs. British).

The Piano Teacher is different territory for me, literally, as it’s set in colonial Hong Kong. It actually covers two different eras: the 1940’s, when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong, and the 1950’s when the British were in control. The protagonist, an English expatriate named Will, is a mysterious man who navigates both eras with different coping strategies. The book also features Will’s two lovers: a Portuguese-Chinese woman called Trudy in the 1940’s and Claire (the piano teacher) in the 1950’s. All are outsiders in Hong Kong society, but really, who isn’t? In a society this complex, everyone is an outsider to some group or other. That’s what makes it so interesting.

This book will not make you a fan of Japanese soldiers. I am also just finishing up Shanghai Girls, by Lisa See, which if you can believe it, makes the Japanese sound even more brutal than they are in The Piano Teacher. But I am enjoying this expedition into colonial Asia. What’s next? The French in Viet Nam?

(Book 34, 2010)

Some Books and a Recipe

2010-07-18T10:57:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is ridiculous. That list on the right sidebar of unblogged books just gets longer and longer and I’m getting more and more stressed about it. So I’ve decided to sit here in my kitchen and write short little pieces about all of those books while I make potato salad. As a bonus for sticking with me I will also give you my potato salad recipe which I adapted from one at epicurious.com (to omit the bacon and make it vegetarian-friendly).

1. Boil 3 lbs. small new potatoes for about 15 minutes, until tender.

Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett

Good. Old fashioned writing, stories about explorers and scientists from the 19th century through the present. Develops themes of science and exploration, and how the two overlap. Also raises questions about the conflict between science and religion. Sounds dull but isn’t. Grade: A

2. Drain, cool, and peel potatoes. Slice and place in a bowl, preferably an old yellow bowl that belonged to your grandmother.

The Map Thief by Heather Terrell

A mystery about an ancient map which has been stolen from a Chinese archaeological dig. The main mystery features a modern-day woman who specializes in recovering stolen art, but we also get chapters from the POV of the map’s 17th century creator, and various characters throughout history who have stolen or made use of the map for their own purposes. I was kind of in the mood for this after reading Servants of the Map but this wasn’t as good. The writing was a little pedestrian and I’ve forgotten a lot of the story already. Grade B.

3. Finely dice one small onion and two cloves garlic and sauté in ¼ cup vegetable oil. Allow to cool.

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

Really really good. This is a fictionalized story of Mary Anning, a 19th century working class woman who was a skilled fossil hunter in Lyme Regis, in England. Anning found the first ichthyosaurus skeleton, among many other important fossils, in the chalk cliffs on the beach in Lyme Regis. Chevalier writes beautifully from the POV of Anning’s friend Elizabeth Philpot (also a real person and a fossil hunter). Anning’s struggles for recognition by the male scientific establishment are infuriating; frequently her discoveries were appropriated by others (men) and only in the last few decades has she gotten the notice she deserves. Like Servants of the Map, this book also raises questions about the relationship between science and religious faith. Chevalier has a nice web site about the book and about Anning. Grade A.

4. To the saucepan containing the onions, garlic, and oil, add: 2 ½ cups vegetable stock, ¼ cup cider vinegar, 2 tablespoons brown mustard, and 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce. Bring to boil, boil 1 minute, then cool.

A Proper Education for Girls by Elaine DiRollo

Very funny, very original. Two sisters in Victorian England are raised by their father (who is a collector of scientific and natural miscellany), their eccentric aunts, and an odd assortment of hangers on, including a mysterious man who is building a flying machine on the roof. One sister, after a youthful indiscretion, has been forced to marry a missionary and is banished to India; the other sister works as her father’s curator, spending her days documenting the depth and breadth of his collection. The bulk of the story is the sisters’ efforts to reunite while their father conspires to keep them apart. This book has a high level of whimsy. It reminded me a lot of Daniel Handler’s Series of Unfortunate Events, but for grownups. Grade A.

5. Pour liquid from saucepan over the cooled, sliced potatoes. Toss. Add freshly ground pepper. Serve at room temperature.

Haunted Ground by Erin Hart

Wow, what was this about? I can’t remember even one thing. Oh, wait, now I remember. This was pretty good. It’s another archeological mystery (clearly I am on some kind of roll with these), about some Irish farmers who discover a preserved body in the peat bog. Is this a modern murder or is it an ancient body that has been mummified, like the other bog people found around northern Europe. My one complaint is that the author wasn’t satisfied just pursuing the identity and story of the red-haired bog woman, but had to throw in another complicated mystery as well, which I thought was just a big distraction. Grade B.

That's all for now. I still have a few more to write about but I think I can get to them in the normal course of events.

(Books 29-33, 2010)

Naming Nature by Carol Kaesuk Yoon

2010-06-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science is a nonfiction book about the history of taxonomy. It falls into a category that I call “science lite,” written for a nontechnical audience. I really like these kinds of books but good ones are hard to find. I think they must be hard to write. It’s tricky to achieve just the right tone – accessible but not condescending. I will say that this book could have been shorter. Yoon is so enamored of her topic that she repeats herself sometimes, and she tries a bit too hard to make us appreciate the cosmic interconnectedness of it all.

On the other hand, it is kind of cosmically cool. Did you know that civilizations all over the world and throughout history classify animals and plants in similar ways? For example, native tribes people in remote parts of Asia put the same plants into the same categories that the Oxford botany department does, without either group being familiar with the others’ methods or choices. Yoon hypothesizes that humans evolved the ability (and the desire) to classify things very early on in history as a survival skill. After all, it’s important to know what kinds of things you can eat, vs. what might eat you.

Yoon provides delightful sketches of the fathers of taxonomy, including Carl Linnaeus (a big ego) and Charles Darwin (obsessed with barnacles). She follows up with good explanations of the current state of the field, which focuses on analyzing DNA to decide for certain which things are related to which others. I also enjoyed her digressions about folk taxonomy, which describes categories like pets, and her ideas about why children are obsessed with dinosaurs (again, an innate desire to sort and classify).

(Book 28, 2010)

Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido

2010-06-25T08:31:00.000-07:00

Within the space of a few weeks several people recommended that I read Barbara Trapido. Because I always do as I’m told (!) I picked her 2003 novel Frankie and Stankie, in part because it was set in 1950’s South Africa, a time period/location combination that was completely new to me. Despite the fact that it’s fiction, it’s impossible not to read this book as a memoir of growing up white under apartheid, and it’s really fascinating.

Frankie and Stankie are childhood nicknames of Dinah and Lisa de Bondt, the daughters of a left-leaning Jewish Durban mathematics professor and his German Christian wife. The book is narrated by Dinah and is in many ways a typical coming-of-age novel. We follow Dinah through childhood, adolescence, and her years at university in Durban. While Dinah’s day-to-day experiences are what you might expect (girlfriends, boys, school, parents, teachers), life under apartheid provides a constant dissonant background noise that continually intrudes into the narrative. Thus as some girls in Dinah’s class develop crushes on rugby players, another girl is “racially reclassified” and disappears overnight from their whites-only school. Dinah’s father refuses to build a fence around their property and he allows black workers from a nearly settlement to cut through their yard as a shortcut to their jobs in the white neighborhood. His actions are viewed by the neighbors as subversive and the family is treated with suspicion; Dinah’s mother fears a visit from the police.

This book offers no great climax or cathartic event. It’s clear that Dinah will eventually leave South Africa (as Barbara Trapido did also), but that’s not really the point. Trapido manages to illustrate the tyranny of South Africa’s oppressive regime not through one large event but through a continuous series of small observations and reflections--death by a thousand cuts rather than through one blow, if you will.

(Book 27, 2010)

Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant

2010-06-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

More nuns! I wasn’t trying to read two books in a row about nuns, but I did. (See Angelology by Danielle Trussoni.) In Sacred Hearts the sisters can’t summon angels, but they do have power, in their own limited (but more realistic) way.

In Renaissance Italy dowry inflation caused trouble for aristocratic women. Grooms’ families demanded dowries that were so large, most families could only afford to finance one daughter’s marriage. While one girl (usually the oldest, but not always) could marry, her sisters were out of luck, and most of these girls ended up in convents, as there was no place for them within their own families once their parents died. I read one statistic that said that nearly 50% of women in Renaissance Italy were nuns.

Sacred Hearts is set within this milieu. As you can imagine, many of the women who ended up in convents were there under duress, or even against their will. Their interest in God and service was minimal. Lucky ones lived in convents where the rules were lax, and books, music, and frequent visits from friends and family made their days bearable. Others found some solace in meaningful work in the community of sisters. In Sacred Hearts this is the case of Suora Zuana, who acts as her convent’s apothecary, mixing medicines from plants and healing the sick. Her friend, the convent’s Mother Superior has also found her niche. Running a convent is a complex task requiring diplomacy, financial acumen, and political sophistication. Together these two women must deal with the case of the rebellious novice Seraphina, a 16-year-old whose father has banished her to the convent after her indiscretions with her handsome music teacher. Zuana and the Mother Superior (whose name escapes me, is it Benedicta?) must use creativity, common sense, and compassion to resolve this issue.

I liked this peek into a community of women who must make the best of their lot in life. Sarah Dunant writes good historical fiction that is neither weighed down with too much detail nor too anachronistic. It would have been easy to make this story a crusade against the oppression and patriarchy of the church and all that; Dunant avoids this while still telling a tale of injustice and survival.

(Book 26, 2010)

Angelology by Danielle Trussoni

2010-06-18T12:51:00.000-07:00

I like books where fantasy and reality intermingle. Where you can pretend that maybe there really is a race of angels (called Nephilim) who live secretly among us, descended from the biblical union of heavenly angels and human women (the “sons of God and the daughters of men”) as described in Genesis. Except wait, maybe not, because these guys are seriously scary and not very nice. For thousands of years the power of the Nephilim has been held in check by the Angelologists, a band of priests, nuns, and scholars who must stay one step ahead of the Nephilim in order to maintain the celestial balance. Now the Nephilim are close to acquiring an artifact that will tip the balance back in their favor. It's up to the Angelologists to thwart the Nephilim, much to our entertainment.

I think any thriller that deals with the Catholic Church can’t help but be compared to The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. While Angelology shares some of that book’s obsession with secret societies and historical mysteries, Angelology is a better book, or at least a better-written book. Some of Trussoni’s plot strands (like Brown’s) can really exercise your disbelief-suspension muscles to the point of exhaustion. But never mind. I loved it. It’s got tons of action and a cast of powerful women: The current leader of the Angelologists is a 70-something designer-clad Frenchwoman who lives in a chic Manhattan apartment and drives a Porsche. Her granddaughter Evangeline, a novice nun, joins her grandmother’s quest to defeat the evil Nephilim, and together they match wits and firepower against them, aided by a formidable group of elderly nuns (srsly!). Yes, you will never look at a wheelchair-bound Sister the same way again, I swear.

This is a fun read, long but not slow moving; as close to a good beach-read as I ever get. I hear it’s been optioned by Hollywood. Look out!

(Book 25, 2010)