Seven Sisters Book Nook

Paper Towns by John Green

2011-08-21T23:04:00.000-07:00

This book was sooo great! It started out as just another high school romance. A guy gets girl kind of book (this time from the boys perspective). And then from one page to the next it became a mystery; totally suspenseful, I couldn't put it down. Along with the suspense were moments with the quirky teen characters that literally made me laugh out loud. And then again, somewhere around half-way through the book, it develops into something else. The protagonist, Quentin, has these enlightening moments, that are insightful for both him and the reader. And the ending was just so fantastic.

Reviewers have said, "Printz Medalist John Green returns with the trademark brilliant wit and heart-stopping emotional honesty that have inspired a new generation of readers"..."[He] taps into the cadence of teenage life with sharp and funny writing, but transcends age with deeper insights."

So here's what it's about, Quentin, or Q, has a massive crush on his neighbor of 16 years, Margo Roth Spiegelman. When she drops by his window in the dead of night, asking to borrow his car for a revenge campaign, he takes her, and things finally start looking up for their relationship. But the next day, Margo doesn't come back. She doesn't come back the day after that. And the day after that. Everyone decides that she's gone forever, and that she'll never come back, but Q finds clues that seem to be specifically for him, and he becomes determined to get her back. As he follows the clues, Q realizes he has loved the idea of Margo Roth Speigelman, but doesn't really know who Margo actually is at all. As he is getting to know Margo more and coming closer to finding her, he also realizes just kind of simple things about how we all view other people. For example, do we look at them through windows or mirrors? I can't even remember all of the little Aha! moments I had, but like the reviewers I found it to be surprisingly thought-provoking and insightful.

Another blogger listed her favorite things about the book so I'm going to steal some of her ideas because I completely agree:

Q's narration is one of the funniest and wittiest I've read. Here's a ridiculous quote as example: "I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies. Example: Historically, Germany has had more enemies than Luxembourg. Margo Roth Spielgelman was Germany. And Great Britain. And the United States. And czarist Russia. Me, I'm Luxembourg. Just sitting around, tending sheep, and yodeling." Green's writing is full of goofiness like this :)

The characters were actually very believable. I can imagine them walking down the halls in my high school.

The writing was...lovely. It wasn't choppy, or anything. It flowed. And the dialogue was incredible. Maybe it's because he worked for radio stations, but John Green knows how to write dialogue that sort of seeps in naturally. It didn't seem fake or contrived. Like I said, it flowed.

The ending! The road trip, the climax, the last few pages-I absolutely adored everything. I admire how John Green ended the story, and I especially liked how he resolved the Q/Margo thing. It wasn't cheesy. It wasn't utterly romantic. It was...perfect and fit the novel nicely.

This quote from the last page is one of my favorites: "It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them."

So there you go. I think even you older ladies could enjoy this because it really is true to people and things that happen and feelings you have when you're a teenager. Next to Sherman Alexie, John Green is now one of my favorite young adult authors.

The Lonely Polygamist

2011-07-26T21:23:00.001-07:00

This is a dang good read, hilarious and heart wrenching (clichés , I know, but these two words do sum up the gripping charm of this book). It’s the best book I’ve read in recent years. Put away all your stereotypes about polygamy and jump in and start loving these unexpected characters.

The book is written from three alternating perspectives: Golden, the “sweet, bewildered, and thoroughly overwhelmed” patriarch and protagonist who wrestles with grief and temptation (thanks for those perfect adjectives, David J. Loftus, Amazon reviewer); Trish, his youngest and prettiest wife, smart, spunky, grieving, seeking refuge; and Rusty, almost twelve and utterly misunderstood as he vies for attention with outrageously boyish and ultimately tragic antics.

I don’t know how Udall so fully comprehends these three completely different individuals, but somehow he gets their voices just right. You can’t help loving them, no matter how crazy, ridiculous, pathetic, or damaging they are. They are each so good, trying so hard to make a good place for themselves in this world. These characters and their intertwining stories make you laugh and cringe and cry.

Udall also gifts you with a huge cast of other memorable characters, from the kind, wise sheriff to the happy, practical Mexicans to the other three sister wives: the unbending rock, the clown, and the delicate petal.

Most incredible of all, he makes all these people and their plights feel familiar.

That's the real gift of this story and this family-- it's us. No, we might not be fundamentalists sharing a husband with sister-wives. But we do grieve, shut down, try to escape, long to be included, stray from the straight and narrow, make cataclysmic mistakes, and fiercely love our kids. What a great author to plop us down in the craziness, and then make it human for us. (thanks again, this time to Rebecca on Goodreads)

Oh, and he does all this in pitch-perfect prose. So do yourself a favor and pick up this funny, tragic, hopeful, big-hearted book. Fall into the couch and plan on staying there til it’s over.

(Fair warning: There’s a generous dose of sex and swearing. But, in its fundamental morals, the book holds to a pretty conservative standard.)

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, by Flannery O'Conner, ed. by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald

2011-07-15T16:20:00.000-07:00

(This is longer than usual but really helped me clarify and remember what I got out of this remarkable little book.)

One of the most startling things about this posthumous collection of lectures and essays is to realize just how young Flannery O'Conner was when she died. Before age 39 she possessed more brazen confidence and piercing understanding of literary craft than I ever hope to achieve. Plus, her writing is so full of style and personality that (you'll see) I can't resist quoting her.

The editors open unexpectedly with O'Conner's personal account of raising peacocks that is both delightful and puzzling. Why this, in a book about writing? Maybe as an example of, an experience with, one of O'Conner's own mantras:

As a novelist, the major part of my task is to make everything, even an ultimate concern, as solid, as concrete, as specific as possible. The novelist begins his work where human knowledge begins--with the senses. (155)

The peacock writings illustrate not only O'Conner's preference for the concrete, but also her wry wit and no-nonsense attitude.

There follows four sections on writing: the connection between the fiction writer and his homeland, the nature and purpose of fiction in general, the teaching of literature, and writing as a believer (O'Conner holds an unusual place as a devoted Catholic living in the middle of the Bible Belt).

Besides insisting on writers sticking with the concrete, O'Conner speaks in section two on being a Southern writer. I’m not well-read enough to entirely follow how she places herself within that genre, but I did resonate to the notion that all writers should write from the culture and the language that they know:

Unless a novelist has gone utterly out of his mind, his aim is still communication, and communication suggests talking inside a community. . . . The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer insides his community seldom has such a problem. (53)

This is at least partly where “manners” comes into the title: soak yourself in the manners, the daily actions, customs, gestures, and conversation of your own people. Then write from there. Find the "mystery"--the deep, eternal meaning--in the manners, in the concrete.

In section three (on the nature and purpose of fiction), she urges writers to capture their own region’s language. In one lecture, critiquing submissions to a southern writers' conference, she notes:

I made another observation that startled me considerably. With the exception of one story, there was practically no use made of the local idiom. Now this is a Southern Writers’ Conference . . . [yet] the characters spoke as if they had never heard any kind of language except what came out of a television set. (103)

This is the kind of unapologetic, call-it-as-you-see-it language she uses throughout. She does it again when someone asks, “Why do you write?”: “Because I’m good at it.” She goes on to explain, “I had not been asked why I write the way I do, but why I write at all; and to that there’s only one legitimate answer.” (81)

Here’s another zinger, from section four, on teaching:

Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning. . . . No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail. . . .

The high school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he . . . will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed. (137, 140)

And another, back in section three:

You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don’t, probably nobody else will. (106)

A few pages previously, she shares a fun example of how one of her own stories surprised her with a wooden leg she didn’t know would be there and didn’t know it would get stolen. (100)

These insights into her own writing were my favorite gleanings from the book. I’d never before been assigned anything by Flannery O’Conner, and I’d never sought it out because I understood her work to be pretty grim and gruesome, “grotesque,” as O’Conner puts it. After reading the chapter titled “On Her Own Work,” I delved into and found profound and satisfying insight in her short stories “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Revelation.”

I’d recommend especially pages 111-114 to everyone before reading “A Good Man.” O’Conner says the key to the story is the Grandmother’s gesture near the end, when she recognizes that “she is responsible for the man before her” (111-112). To understand the heart of the story, we must pay close attention to the Grandmother’s gesture at that moment, to how it differs from all her other actions and how that gesture reveals the true mysteries behind her otherwise meaningless prattle.

Our age . . . does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace. . . . be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother’s soul, and not for their dead bodies. (112-113)

We must also understand the purpose of violence in her fiction:

I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. . . .

[T]he man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him; and since the characters in this story are all on the verge of eternity, it is appropriate to think of what they can take with them. (112, 114)

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil. (118)

This notion that evil is just as real as grace is central to section five, on writing as a believer. She discusses the struggle to find an audience, since fellow believers often expect happy writing, while non-believers are often unable to perceive and appreciate the moments of grace. O’Conner says she uses the “grotesque” to highlight those moments, to make them more noticeable to unbelieving, untrained eyes.

This juxtaposition of the grotesque and grace seems to be, in part, what is meant by "mystery" in the title. It remains the theme of the final section. An introduction to a memoir about an extraordinary child, it is another sample of O’Conner’s own non-fiction writing, forming, along with the peacocks’ opening chapter, bookends for this collection. We see in the child’s face—one half deformed by tumors and the other lively and gracious—a mirror of ourselves and of this entire mortal life, as well as a final distillation of O'Conner's literary aims.

Mockingjay

2011-06-22T18:09:00.000-07:00

I had hopes for this series. Hunger Games' premise was fascinating, the writing and characterizations superb, and the theme--Katniss learning to accept and offer love--compelling. Catching Fire stalled a bit for me, with almost no character development, but still I turned every page eagerly.

But with Mockingjay I had to keep forcing myself forward, just to see how it ends. When I got to the end, it wasn't really worth it. I’ve been trying to pin down why. My friend, Angela Hallstrom, nailed it in her Goodreads review. I think, ultimately, the novel’s failures all come down to Collins being more driven by her message than by her characters or story.

Angela writes that "Katniss is acted upon instead of acting of her own free will during much of the narrative." For me, Katniss in the first two books wasn't always likable, but she was always compelling and always a free agent. In fact, her independence was her defining trait. I wanted her to grow into her role as Mockingjay, to finally become the strong leader the previous stories seemed to be cultivating.

Instead, I think Collins' message forced her to make Katniss a helpless pawn. No doubt her message--that war is hell and no one wins and both sides can be equally evil--is important. But people read novels for character and story, and Collins, unfortunately, puts her agenda first, leaving her main character limping on the sidelines.

Allowing the agenda to drive the novel also probably explains the final problem Angela identifies: the sense that we’re slogging through irredeemable violence. Collins primarily wants to show that war isn’t worth it. So we slog. And then her attempt to wrap up, heal, and redeem feels hasty and tacked on.

Perhaps worst of all, Collins resolves the three-books-long love triangle so quickly and dismissively that it's an insult to both character and reader. It shows disregard for Katniss' deep, enduring friendships and disrespect for the complex individuals involved, reducing them all to allegory.

I give the book two stars because it offers some interesting things to think about--the parallels between the Capitol and District 13, the various manifestations of power-lust, the way both sides use Peeta and how he recovers.

Overall, though, I was sorry I'd bought the book and got rid of it as soon as possible. Still, the first book was great and might make it worth reading the series. From the library.

The Hunger Games

2011-06-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

If I could've I would've read this book all in one sitting. It's that engrossing. I loved the Gregor books, and again Suzanne Collins doesn't disappoint. As in The Underland Chronicles, she's the master of capturing a scene or a character with very few words.

There's nothing lyrical or poetic about Collins' language; rather the few words and images she picks area always dead on. It's the epitome of science-fiction/fantasy writing--clean, clear, and straightforward. That, of course, does make the violence a bit gruesome since you have no trouble picturing it exactly.

But, actually, for me it wasn't as bad as it had been built up to be (though I wouldn't recommend it for anyone younger than 14). And, really, for being a violent, action-packed dystopia novel, it's loaded with humanity. In fact, I sometimes found myself feeling the author was letting her characters off too easily. In a world designed to force even the most humane to act inhumanly, her characters never had to completely face the monster within.

I think that's because the story Collins really wanted to tell was the slow, even frustrating at times, transformation of her main character, Katniss. For me, this seemed primarily a story of Katniss learning how receive love, how to trust in it, and how to return it.

What an unexpected setting for such a story: an enclosed, highly controlled and manipulated world of futuristic reality television, where you win when all the other players are dead. Add to this an obsession with unreal physical beauty, and the Hunger Games look almost too much like what often passes for modern entertainment.

But it's not social commentary that makes this book, it's the characters. Katniss especially is intriguingly complex, a very real mix of selfish and selfless. Though she has the survivor's instinct, and she doesn't think of herself as someone who loves people, she naturally reaches out and takes care of others. In this book, she is just beginning the journey to understand herself and how she connects with the people around her. I look forward to watching the rest of the journey. I'm not very patient with series and often don't finish them. But this one, I'm sure I'll finish.

p.s. Since writing this review, I did finish the series and wasn't crazy about how Collins ended it. (hmmm . . . I didn't like how she wrapped up The Underland Chronicles either.) Still, I'm glad I read Hunger Games.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

2011-06-21T13:18:00.000-07:00

I read this book some years ago and it didn't exactly reel me in at the time. But I picked it up again on a recent trip to New Mexico and really loved it the second time around. Perhaps it was because I was seeing the harsh desert landscape Will Cather describes so beautifully and learning about the history that serves as a backdrop to this novel. We even visited the San Miguel Mission where the real bishop lived and the dramatic cathedral that was his legacy. I guess having those visuals so fresh in my mind helped me "get" this book a little better.

There's not much of a plot to Death Comes for the Archbishop, which may be what I was looking for the first time I read it. Cheri described it really well it in her Top 10 post as "a stack of paintings, showing the same subjects (person and landscape) in different moods, lighting, times." It's just a quiet portrait of a truly amazing place and a good man who does the best he can with the difficult task he's given – to reform the fractured and corrupt diocese and reinvigorate the faith among the Mexicans and Native Americans who occupy the New Mexican territory.

I appreciated the respect with which she wrote about the native cultures, her sympathetic characters, and her wonderful descriptions of the desert landscape. But what I loved most in this re-reading was the way Cather's simple, matter-of-fact style and the vast, epic setting gave me a feeling of serenity. That feeling is what made it such a pleasure to read.

The Graveyard Book

2011-04-09T17:07:00.000-07:00

This book was refreshingly fun after trying (unsuccessfully) to slog through Doctor Zhivago. I was captivated by the suspenseful story, the inventive setting, the kind, wise, funny, sinister cast of characters, and the clever language and humor.

The story opens with a scary scene: a family murdered by a man named Jack. (I briefly wondered how appropriate this was for kids, but Gaiman carefully avoids describing the violence, and the story quickly moves into friendlier territory.) A toddler escapes the house unnoticed and makes his way to a nearby graveyard, where he is adopted and raised by its ghostly residents. (The Graveyard Book is loosely based on The Jungle Book.)

The graveyard itself is a great setting. To an outsider it might seem creepy and isolated, but for Nobody Owens ("Bod" for short), it's a safe and cozy place to grow up. It's filled with places to explore and friends to meet, both living and dead. And Bod is granted Freedom of the Graveyard, so he can see in the dark, the cold doesn't bother him, and he learns useful skills like Fading and Sliding and Dreamwalking.

The book is both a novel and a collection of short stories, so in a series of episodes, we follow Bod's progress from toddler to teen as he navigates his unusual life amid ghosts, ghouls, witches, and the occasional living, breathing human. Along the way he braves new dangers, discovers his strengths and limitations, and learns what it will take to survive in the world beyond the graveyard. By the end, he's discovered why his family was killed, why the sinister convocation of Jacks is still after him, and what he must do about it.

The story is about being a child and growing up. But the bittersweet last chapter also makes it about parenting, about the tragic/comic fact that if, as a parent, you do your job properly and raise your children well, they stop needing you. They go away, and move on to their own lives and futures.

This is a terrific book. It's creepy and suspenseful, tender and funny. I haven't read anything else by Neil Gaiman, but lots of people seem to think this is his best work, and it did win the Newbery. I've also heard the audiobook (narrated by Mr. Gaiman) is really good, and there's a movie in the works. But whatever way you choose to experience this book, definitely check it out!

The Feast of Love

2011-01-25T22:06:00.001-08:00

I was probably half way through this novel before I was fully on board, but by the end I was quite smitten. It reminded me of the movie Love Actually with its cast of unforgettable characters whose lives intertwine in big or small ways, each representing some variety or stage of love. What Charles Baxter serves up is a rich, funny, sexy, heartbreaking, heartwarming "feast of love" -- really.

My one complaint is the first-person narration: sometimes the characters' voices didn't sound genuine to me -- too writerly or just not how real people talk (or think). That's a common criticism of mine, but it's something I find disruptive when I notice it. But it's a minor complaint, and not a hard one to get past. This is a terrific read.

A Gate at the Stairs

2010-09-15T18:58:00.000-07:00

Lorrie Moore is well known and widely respected as a short-story writer. This is her first novel in 15 years and her first book in 11, so it got a lot of attention and many rave reviews.

A Gate at the Stairs begins in the winter following 9/11, with smart, quirky Tassie Keltjin transitioning from her Midwest farming-community hometown to a liberal-minded college town where she's seeking employment between terms. She finds work as a nanny for a high-strung woman named Sarah Brink, who is adopting a "bi-racial" two-year-old. Grief and tragedy ensue as Tassie experiences the sometimes baffling, sometimes comical, sometimes brutal initiation into adult life.

Tassie is a terrific protagonist – smart, empathetic and at times hilariously awkward – and her responses to her experiences are funny, honest and moving. Her reflections on relationships, parenthood and racism are keen and insightful, and Moore is really good at finding just the right words to pinpoint her feelings.

But there are parts of this novel that really don't work. For example, the boyfriend who turns out to be a member of a terrorist cell – seems silly and implausible. (I gave away this plot twist because it's pretty lame and also pretty obvious as you read along).

Also many of Tassie's observations are just way too precocious. How many 20-year-olds can actually name every flower and tree they see, much less wax poetic about them? There are so many soliloquies and asides in this book that feel much more like Lorrie Moore than Tassie Keltjin – great writing, beautiful, clever words and phrases, but way too writerly and lyrical to fit the character. And sometimes just too tangential to hold my attention. More focus on plot and less on poetry would have made this a better novel, in my opinion.

But despite these complaints, when I closed the book I had a feeling that I'd just read a very good novel – an important one, even. There's more than enough humor, wisdom and insight in these pages to make me recommend it. And I'll definitely give her short stories a try.

Little Bee

2010-08-11T22:22:00.001-07:00

I found this book disappointing. I think my reaction, however, is largely due to the publisher’s mismanagement of my expectations.

As you can see, the book has a cute, girly cover. The synopsis on the back gives away nothing of the novel’s content. Instead it says something cutesy about how when you read this book, you’re going to want to tell your friends about it – but don’t tell them what happens, because “the magic is in how the story unfolds.”

Well it's not cute, and there's no magic. Tragedy, horror, MAYBE a dim ray of hope. No magic.

Little Bee is about how the West treats immigrants – especially the ones who need asylum – and the particular brand of evil that exists in parts of Africa. It’s about the vast chasm between developed and developing countries, the dark politics of oil development, globalization, the plight of refugees. It’s about marriage and parenting, civility and ethics, depression and grief.

These are important topics, and the author treats them with respect – the writing is fluid, the characters are compelling, the story is narrated in two impressively distinct women’s voices, and the plot is dispensed at a pace that allows suspense (and dread) to build slowly but surely. Like I said, this is an important book, and quite moving. As one reviewer put it, Little Bee “makes you think about the world and your place in it, and about what we owe to one another as human beings on this increasingly small, spinning globe.” My only real gripe with this novel is that there are certain plot points that really don’t make sense, choices the characters make that are inexplicably thoughtless. I can live with that.

But gimmicky jacket is a terrible marketing misjudgment. I just wasn’t prepared for the awfulness of what happened to the characters, nor for the unhappy ending. And because my expectations were set so far from the reality of the book – I guess that left me disgruntled.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

2010-08-01T20:32:00.000-07:00

This book was quite hard to get into. The characters were at first very unapproachable. The book is narrated by the concierge of a fancy apartment in France, and by a twelve year old girl who lives with her family there. Both are pretty depressed, and hiding their true personalities. At the beginning of the book they both are just too intelligent and there is too much intellectual musing for me to be that interested or attracted to them. They both are extremely intelligent but choose to hide this and are very introverted and the twelve year old is even planning to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday. I just didn't really understand or relate to them at all.

But once I got into the book, and the meeting of the two characters that the whole first half of the book was leading up to, the characters were changing and by the end I loved and cried for them.

So I still recommend it. Even though it was so hard to get into, the last half redeemed itself.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

2010-06-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. It's about a young Spokane Indian, Arnold (or Junior, as he's known on "the rez") who leaves his reservation and his people to go to high school in a place where people feel hope (i.e. an all-white school in a neighboring farm town). The people back on the rez, including his life-long best friend Rowdy, see his leaving as an unforgivable betrayal, and it takes a while for him to find his place at the new school. In the meantime life deals him a harsh series of tragedies, but Arnold never gives up. He navigates the vast gulf between his impoverished Indian community and the middle-class white school with humor and toughness and a sharp sense of irony.

As a "diary" the story is told (very authentically and with much self-deprecation) in Arnold's 14-year-old voice. He never shies away from who he is or what he's thinking or feeling, just puts everything out there. He also draws as a way to vent, so the book is littered with scraps of cartoons whose humor ranges from witty to ruminative to quite dark. And the cartoons don't just restate what's in the text, they add a lot and help define Arnold's mood and express his feelings.

Although this is ostensibly a young adult novel, I can't imagine anyone of any age it wouldn't appeal to. It's heartwarming and heartbreaking, hilarious and tragic, and I absolutely loved it from start to finish.

Pope Joan

2010-03-28T15:56:00.000-07:00

I didn't hate Pope Joan. I appreciated the rich world the author created—a product of years of research—and it seemed valuable to immerse myself and really imagine what the Middle Ages might have been like. Too, the legend of Pope Joan, several hundred years ago assumed true and as widely known as King Arthur, had faded from our view and deserved to be resurrected. The legend of a female pope is definitely great story material. Plus, this book kept me turning pages.

But I did sometimes feel manipulated. It had too much soap opera flavor for my taste, with romance drama and battle drama and intrigue drama. And way too much deaux ex machina. I couldn’t resist reporting my disgust to Eric every time another unbelievable coincidence came along, and I started keeping a log of them at the front of the book. I wasn’t a big fan of the ending either—again, things came together too perfectly.

I thought Joan and Gerold (her life-long love) were both overly perfect too (as opposed to just the right amount of perfect . . . ). They needed flaws, and the flaws needed to cause some problems. Joan's only supposed flaw was her stubbornness in sticking to what she believes is right, and that doesn't count. We're supposed to admire her courage. If it causes problems, it's because other people are stupid, bigoted, whatever. And Gerold had no flaws whatsoever. Lame.

On the other hand, the book did inspire a good discussion about the power of education. The author says, “I wrote this book with my own daughter, and all the daughters of the world, very much in mind. If, as I hope, this story inspires young women to cultivate their minds and pursue their education, to follow their own dreams wherever they may lead, then Joan's legacy is secure.” In sharing this message, the book definitely succeeds.

Pope Joan also got our group talking about women. One person brought up how the book has no positive female characters other than Joan, and we talked about how Joan had to become a man to gain power. Someone else asked if Joan was really true to herself by giving up all her femaleness, comparing her to Martha Ballard in A Midwife’s Tale, who found real power in her community and family through her talents and her femininity. (Of course, things were a lot more open for women by then.) We also talked about how our modern culture still buys into the idea that real power is in being like men.

So . . . the book immersed me in the Middle Ages, sparked a very lively discussion, and kept me turning pages, but lots of stuff drove me crazy.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

2010-03-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

As a friend put it, this is a book you could recommend to anyone. At first glance it might seem like chic lit, but even my husband found this little book worthwhile. It offers a bit of everything—lively writing, stuff to learn, humor, charming characters, themes to ponder, a perfectly paced story arc crafted through a seemingly disjointed hodge-podge of personal letters. What begins as a light-hearted jaunt becomes a life-affirming account of “the immeasurable sustenance to be found in good books and good friends." (People)

Without losing its optimism and humor, the book gives an inside picture of a Nazi occupation, a perspective on WWII that was new for me. In each vignette, some heart-wrenching and some humorous, characters choose ingenuity and integrity, banding together to solve problems and stand up for what’s right.

In their letters, the characters feel like real people, people I wished I knew—quirky and endearing, each heroic in their own small ways. I still smile when I think of them, and I wonder how the authors mastered so many unique voices. All in all, a thoroughly satisfying and enjoyable read.

A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812

2010-03-28T15:31:00.000-07:00

A fascinating example of social history, this book finds its foundation in an early American midwife’s simple daily diary of activities and transactions. Using a wide range of other original sources, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich brilliantly expands the picture of Martha Ballard and her times. At first glance Ballard’s simple, unemotional daily entries don’t seem like interesting source material, but enriched by Ulrich’s extensive research, they form a valuable window into early American society.

Ulrich keeps her research process pretty transparent, always describing which documents shed light where. This makes for somewhat slow reading, but it’s worth the trade-off in being able to see and appreciate how she knows what she knows. Though I only had attention for about half the chapters, I was glad to have been invited into the research process.

All chapters begin with passages from the diary, “fleshing out this midwife's bare entries with interpretive essays” on a particular aspect of early American society (Publisher’s Weekly). Topics include medical knowledge and practice, the roles of men and women in the community economy, the evolving relationship between midwives and doctors, and marriage and family life. Throughout, I appreciated the new vision of empowered women Ulrich’s portrait gives. We often think of women from earlier times being downtrodden and without opportunity, but Martha and the women around her together formed a female economy as vital to the survival of their community as the men’s contributions.

In the middle of these big issues, I came to know an ordinary woman who intelligently, sensibly, compassionately improved her small world. As midwife and herbalist, Martha Ballard touched every household in her community, often at their most vulnerable times. As one Amazon reviewer writes,

[Ulrich reveals] the complex routine of a woman who kept a household for seven people, ran a cottage textile workshop, and served as midwife at the birth 816 infants during her 27 years of practice. . . . Ballard's ministrations, in fact, went far beyond birthing to the practice of general medicine. She could apply poultices, lance abscesses, expel worms, induce vomiting, stop hemorrhages, bring down a fever, and—all else failing—gently close the eyes of the dead. In this way, writes Ulrich, the midwife "mediated the mysteries of birth, procreation, illness, and death.”

I’m glad Ulrich helped me know her.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

2010-02-06T12:55:00.000-08:00

I loved The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. The author, David Wroblewski, has a rare gift for storytelling. It's captivating and profound, and he's such a fine writer, every sentence in this very long novel seemed really natural and right, to me.

The book is roughly based on Shakespeare's Hamlet, and you can track all the major characters and plot points between that play and this novel (which is fun for former students of English lit like me). It's definitely Shakespearean in its tragicness and epicness, but Edgard Sawtelle is completely different too. Someone who didn't know Hamlet at all would find this book no less remarkable for missing those connections.

I loved how the author tells the story from different characters' perspectives, including Edgar's companion dog, Almondine, who is as central a character in the book as any of his family. It's such a generous way of seeing things, and gives each character depth and complexity.

I was also completely smitten with all the stuff about dogs in Edgar Sawtelle -- and I am not a dog person at all. Edgar's family makes its way by raising an extraordinary (fictional) breed of dog. Much time is spent in this book on their care and training as well as dog biology and cognition. It's really fascinating, and the dogs themselves have amazing personalities. Almondine, the author tells us, is Edgar's "other" - she bears his soul. It literally says that. Their connection is a beautiful thing, and it's SO heartbreaking when that connection is inevitably -- it's based on a tragedy, after all -- broken.

Speaking of the end of this book, I put off finishing it because I wasn't ready to face it, nor was I ready to leave the wonderful world the author created. I wanted to focus and enjoy it and just sit with it in my head for a while. But the end is crushing. I read lots of reviews by people who were frustrated by that, but I think it would help to know going in. If you expect the Shakespearean tragedy rather than a justice-is-served happy ending, maybe you won't be disapointed. Anyway, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a GREAT read. I highly recommend it.

Unaccustomed Earth

2010-01-27T16:18:00.000-08:00

Jhumpa Lahiri's latest collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is, in my opinion, a real stand-out in recent years of impressive short fiction. I especially enjoyed the final three stories which trace the overlapping lives of Hema and Kaushik after their families emigrate from Bengal. One aspect of Lahiri's style is that the narrator is almost always looking at events in retrospect, the characters recalling the past and describing memories. I found this to be a really interesting way to explore the questions and topics the stories present - how and why we attach to places and people, how our attachments shape us, how brutally chance can affect our lives.

And also, each of the stories are set (at least in part) in my neighborhood! It was really fun to read scenes that could have taken place on my block in Cambridge and to see the buildings and landmarks I walk by everyday in her character's lives. Unaccustomed Earth is a fantastic collection of stories - I highly recommend.

Torch

2009-10-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

An impressively well-crafted novel by a fellow Portlander Cheryl Strayed. The topic (death and grief) is quite heavy, obviously, but the book never feels like "too much" -- it's never too sentimental or too melodramatic. The characters are complex and real, and while there is plenty of emotion, it always feels authentic. A very good read.

Summer Reading

2009-07-17T12:30:00.000-07:00

Remember summer reading lists? Ms. Tritten gave me one after my junior year of high school: 100 Books to Read Before College. I took it very seriously. And although they are now my to-read lists, not someone else's, I have one every summer. So I thought I'd take a cue from Danielle and write a wrap-up of a few books I've read so far this season.

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust. This is a great read. It’s a quick and relatively light history of the Civil War and Reconstruction years that doesn’t bombard readers with dates, battles and generals (although there are a lot of numbers). Her interpretation of recent research and findings feels original and makes for a rich cultural history of this time in America. And her writing is neither overly-academic nor too simple and watered-down. If you’re like me and haven’t read much about the Civil War, it’s a great place to start.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert is a lovely and entertaining novel. I had a lot of fun reading this because I didn’t know the details of the plot and had no idea how it would turn out (honestly!). So after the first few chapters I was hooked. Flaubert masterfully (I hear he agonized over every word) made an unlikeable woman and this wretched story easy to sympathize with and fun to read. And speaking of summer reading lists, it may not be on mine but Madame Bovary made someone's top ten.

Native Son by Richard Wright. This is one of those books that I’ve always had and always intended to read, but for one reason or another just never got to. I’d say if you’re in that same boat, read it now! Seriously. Stop reading my sloppy review and go get that dusty paperback off your shelf. And if you have read it, call me. We’ll talk. This book knocked my socks off.

The Time Traveler's Wife

2009-06-29T18:52:00.001-07:00

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Henry DeTamble is a librarian with "Chrono Displacement" disorder. At random times he suddenly disappears and finds himself in the past or future, usually at a time or place of importance in his life. From his point of view, he first met his wife Clare when he was 28 and she was 20. She had known him her whole life. The book alternates from Henry's point of view to Clare's. Publisher's Weekly described it as an "intriguing science fiction concept, a realistic character study, and a touching love story".

I thought it was fantastic! The characters had a lot of depth and the story was believable, even with the time travel. It was funny, touching, and even tragic. I recommend it!

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

2009-06-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is a truly amazing novella, a haunting and astonishing story. The characters range from odd to freakish, but the author makes them come alive and their motivations ring true. Loneliness is the main theme here, as it is in much of Carson McCullers' work. So it's sad tale, but well worth reading. Beautiful sentences, a sad and lovely voice.

This book also contains some very fine short stories, including her first, published at age 17, about a young girl in the moment of realizing she will not become a great pianist. I understand that story is somewhat autobiographical, and to that I say, Ms. McCullers, you may not have become a virtuouso pianist, but you are a virtuoso storyteller.

The Book Thief

2009-05-15T14:35:00.000-07:00

By far my favorite book this year. The narrator, Death, is among the most fascinating I've ever read. He is grimly witty, reluctantly compassionate, and, in his own words, "haunted by humans." He marvels that "the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant."

It's a book about words, their power to create and destroy, and humans, their stunning cruelty and kindness. But it weaves together so many other themes and motifs that I had to list them in the front pages so I wouldn't forget them all. Zusak writes with language so potent I found myself marking passages on nearly all of its 550 pages. Add to that endearingly human characters--sometimes cruel, but so often breath-takingly kind--and a page-turning plot, and you've got a book you really shouldn't miss.

The Shadow of the Wind

2009-03-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

The Shadow of the Wind is kind of a DaVinci Code for book lovers. It has all the mystery, suspense and intrigue, but instead of being about art and conspiracy theories, it's about a kid named Daniel who finds a book – The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax – which he loves. But when he tries to find the author's other works, he discovers that someone has been mysteriously tracking and destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. Daniel's investigation leads him to discover a tragic web of murder, revenge and doomed love.

Overall it's a pretty good book I guess. One of the aspects I found most interesting – and most cheesy – is that it's a very gothic novel. You don't see too many of those nowawadays what with the 19th century being well in the past, but this book has all the elements – melodrama, horror, danger, dark/decaying settings, terrible secrets, tragic figures, heroes and villains, etc. Sometimes the writing is a little clunky, and I don't know if the author or the translator is to blame for that, but I found I could mostly overlook the clunkiness because of the grippingness of the story. It was pretty engrossing. I'd recommend this if you feel like reading a kind of middle-brow thriller, because as thrillers go it's a fairly literate one – very readable, too.

Me Again

2009-02-27T16:51:00.000-08:00

I slacked off on my other books, so now I'll just have to do a three in one. Since I last posted, I've read The Power of One, A Room with a View, and the Bell Jar.

The Power of One was not what I expected at all. I expected it to actually be about apartheid or WWII and instead it was only about the kid. And I found it wasn't emotional at all. Mich said it was one of the only movies she's cried in, but I wasn't even close to tearing up. It was a pretty good story about, well, the power of one, but the end where he beats the crap out of his childhood bully kind of ruined it, I thought. So, not an A+ from me. Not that I didn't enjoy it, it was a pretty good read, but definitely not my fave.

A Room with a View was pretty great. At first it was boring, had long descriptive paragraphs that I didn't understand, and action that was vague so I felt like I was only getting the gist of the story. And now I feel like I'm hating on this book... But after the first bit of the book, I really enjoyed it and it was a lovely romance. Very cute!

I freaking loved the Bell Jar. When I got that at Christmas, I remember Went and Cris saying they loved it as well. It was intense and so well written! It was surprising how subtle it was at first, and then bam. But also, it didn't seem like she was insane, only really depressed. But I liked it mucho, I couldn't put it down!

So, there's a few little blips for ya! Love ya lots!

The Road

2009-02-02T11:39:00.000-08:00

The Road is a story of a father and son’s journey for survival through the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the American southeast. It’s set in an endless winter, in burned lifeless forests and on abandoned roads. The man and the boy travel only with a small stash of belongings and the food they have scavenged from the dead, ash-covered earth and abandoned homes. Many years before an unexplained catastrophe destroyed the earth. There is no sunshine, the air is thick with soot, rivers and the ocean are black, and most life has become extinct. Those left are refugees like the boy and the man, or marauders and cannibals.

Their journey is nothing short of terrifying. The desolation, the utter bleakness of their prospects is haunting. However, The Road is also a miraculous story of love and hope. Despite their misery, father and son continually remind themselves that they “carry the fire;” that they possess an inherent goodness, and a faith that civility and decency persist somewhere in the world. And the man and the boy’s devotion to one another remind us of the basic, undeniable authority of love. (And although my review may suggest otherwise, the novel isn't unnecessarily weighed down with generic themes or by apocalyptic dread. The Road is also an adventure novel.)

McCarthy's writing is epic and beautiful: "The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes."

And simple, bare and gripping: "He held him all night, dozing off and waking in terror, feeling for the boy's heart. In the morning he was no better. He tried to get him to drink some juice but he would not. He pressed his hand to his forehead, conjuring up a coolness that would not come. He wiped his white mouth while he slept. I will do what I promised, he whispered. No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone."

The Road is a brilliantly conceived allegory. And despite its darkness, it's also an extremely rewarding novel.

The Remains of the Day

2009-01-31T15:03:00.000-08:00

The Remains of the Day is about an aging English butler reflecting back on his long life of service, confronting uncomfortable truths about his employer and painful regrets regarding his friendship with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. It's about disillusionment and remorse and, finally, trying to make the best of what remains of one's day.

One of the first things that struck me about this book is how clear a picture one gets of the main character, Stevens. Stevens narrates in first person, and I felt immediately like he was a real person I could watch and listen to. He's very formal and reserved, proud yet humble. Every word of this book sounds like something this character would say - the voice and tone are flawless.

The sophisticated narrative structure also impressed. The plot centers on a short vacation during which Stevens pays a visit to Miss Kenton, whom he hasn't seen in years. It's written as a journal of this trip, but woven in with that we get decades of history at Darlington Hall, philosophical reflections on big ideas like the definition of dignity and the democratic responsibilities of the ordinary man, memories of fork-in-the-road moments in his relationship with Miss Kenton. The narrative is very intricate yet "flows" so naturally one hardly notices.

To sum up: I found this a beautiful novel - brilliantly written, quiet, heartbreaking. Highly recommended.

Cold Comfort Farm

2009-01-17T16:00:00.001-08:00

Dan already posted about this book (see her review here), but I liked it so well I thought I would re-enforce the accolades for anyone who hasn't read it. This was such a fun book to read, and Flora, the main character, is so "droll" and charming. As a parody of the rural novel, Cold Comfort Farm is often laugh-out-loud funny--it was published in 1932, but the comedy is completely unharmed by the passage of time. Consider this passage in which cousin Urk attempts to sweep his new-found love Meriam off her feet--a classic example of screwball physical comedy:

'Come, my beauty--my handful of dirt. I mun carry thee up to Ticklepenny's and show 'ee to the water-voles.' Urk's face was working with passion.

Urk put one arm around Meriam's waste and heaved away, but could not budge her from the floor. He cursed aloud, and, kneeling down, placed his arms around her middle, and heaved again. She did not stir. Next he wrapped his arms about her shoulders and below her knees. She declined upon him, and he, staggering beneath her, sank to the floor. Mrs Beetle made a sound resembling 't-t-t-t-t'.

Mark Dolour was heard to mutter that th' Fireman's Lift was as good a hold as any he knew.

Now Urk made Meriam stand in the middle of the floor, and with a low, passionful cry, ran at her.

'Come, my beauty.'

The sheer animal weight of the man bore her up into his clutching arms. Mark Dolour (who dearly loved a bit of sport) held open the door, and Urk and his burden rushed out into the dark and earthy scents of the young spring night.

Now am I the only one who finds that hilarious? Besides being a parody, Cold Comfort Farm also is itself a fine specimen of the rural genre--some of Ms. Gibbons' descriptions are just amazing, and it does end with a lot of happy marriages. Anyway I highly recommend this one. It's super fun.

I saw the movie adapted from this book a long time ago, but I can't recall whether it does justice to the book. Anyone?

The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness

2009-01-11T18:40:00.000-08:00

We just read this little gem for book group. I use "little gem" somewhat ironically, because that's exactly what it is, and sometimes it's just a bit much.

Overall, this really is a great little book. I enjoyed his weaving back and forth between classic folk tales, some familiar and some new to me, and his own experience. The tales were well chosen and unadorned, just the simple story offered for our pondering and followed by his parallel experience. Following this pattern, he takes us on his journey not only to accept but to find beauty in his personal tragedy: being a storyteller who loses his voice.

Oddly, the tragedy doesn't seem to touch at all on mundane temporal concerns like "how do I pay my bills now that I can no longer practice my livelihood?" His is a purely existential crisis, and he seems to have plenty of time to explore it.

He spends most of this time at his storytelling mentor's house, where he encounters frustrating riddles that eventually lead him to discover the truth: that losing his voice really has given him a gift that he could find in no other way, a gift that really does make a difference in his life.

This mentor framework is part of what I mean by "a bit much." It seems obvious to me that every insight was not actually spurred by a conversation with this one crazy, wise man. Of course, it would make for a very confusing and boring story to explain that one insight came while he was driving, another in the shower, another during a conversation with his wife. So I appreciate the necessity of the mentor frame, but it still distracted me.

Even so, this book does give you a lot to think about and provided our group a rich, big-ideas discussion. I marked many passages in spite of myself (and in spite of the fact that it was a library book--I used pencil and erased before returning). I don't want to spoil it by giving away the insights, so I'll just encourage you to sit down with it some rainy weekend when you're in the mood for a folksy, life-affirming, easy but thought-provoking read.

The Bean Trees & Chocolat

2009-01-10T19:14:00.000-08:00

Hey ya'll, we haven't really been doing this, because most of you just rate your books on Goodreads, but I don't really do that... Anywho, I borrowed a whole stack of books from Lisa, and then she gave me some for Christmas, so I'm gonna be reading all sorts of good books. I read The Bean Trees and Chocolat, and I'm now 100 something pages into The Power of One.

The Bean Trees I thought was excellent. It's the only book by Barbara Kingsolver that I have read, so I don't know how to compare it, but I liked it a lot. It's a really great story about independence and motherhood. One reviewer said, "[It's] as random and unexpected as real life... Whimsical, yet deeply insightful."

About Chocolat...it was wierd and a little confusing. Nothing gets resolved, either. I like the movie a lot better. At the end of the book, she gets pregnant again and leaves town again. It's just a circle, no happy ending or resolutions. It was still good, but pretty odd. :)

And The Power of One, I have a question. Apparently I need to know a bit more about South Africa and apartheid or something, but I don't really get why the kids at his school hated him, and such. He's English...were they German? It was more confusing because I assumed that a book about apartheid would be about a black kid, but then I realized he wasn't black... Anyway, anyone who knows anything, tell me stuff! :)

To Kill a Mockingbird

2008-10-19T15:22:00.000-07:00

I just read this again for the first time since high school and truly couldn't believe what a fine novel it is. It was among the first works of real literature I ever read, so in that sense it had a huge impact on my life. But now, with a few years and books behind me, I was floored by the greatness of this book. It's as deftly crafted as just about anything I've read, so that everything unfolds as naturally and inevitably as real life.

Lee carries the frame story (Boo Radley and the kids) so deep and so far that it becomes parallel, rather than simply bookends, to the story of Tom Robinson's trial. By the time we get back to Jem's broken arm, and the two stories finally, inevitably twine together, we've forgotten that was how Lee opened the novel.

The characters, too, even less central ones like Miss Maudie, are as tangible as our own next door neighbors. Lee doesn't give us a single flat character, not one that's purely good or evil, not one with only one obvious motivation. No matter how repulsive or heroic, no matter how minor - from Mayella Ewell to Aunt Alexandra and Walter Cunningham to Atticus - every character is complicatedly human. In fact, it's hard to label any of them really "minor," in the usual sense of being on the sidelines and not well known by the reader. We feel we know them all, as if we ourselves lived in Maycomb.

Lee gives the same care to her message. Her timeless, weighty themes weave subtly and without artifice through every page. Harper Lee wrote a book that would influence generations, with every event, character, and word carefully crafted over years of writing and managed to make it sound effortless.

My only (minor) quibble is that the narrator's insight into the character and history of her town is sometimes beyond the years of our admittedly smart and insightful first person narrator, Scout. But, really, I feel guilty even mentioning this small distraction. It's a great book (as in "the great works of fiction"), and if you haven't read it lately, pick it up.

Our Town

2008-10-10T22:52:00.000-07:00

Somehow I never read Our Town in high school or in six years as an English major, but just this week I enjoyed it very much. This is a bare-bones, stripped-down play with a pointed message: that we should wonder at and be grateful for the big and small details in life while we're still living it - "clocks ticking...and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up."

The back of the book calls it "the great American play," and though I've hardly ready enough drama to either agree or disagree with that assessment, I can see why he said it. The professor who wrote the Foreward also makes an impassioned case against those who complain that it's dated, simplistic, sentimental, or uneventful:

"Our Town is anything but dated, it is timeless; it is simple, but also
profound; it is full of genuine sentiment, which is not the same as its being sentimental; and, as far as its being uneventful, well, the event of the play is huge: it's life itself."

Read Our Town for yourself and see if you don't agree. Or if you rolled your eyes at it in high school and you've now got a few more years of experience under your belt, give it another shot.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

2008-09-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami is like a strange, dreamy-nightmary detective novel. It’s a book that grips you tightly and propels you forward, but ultimately, I think, lacks the meaning and cohesion to be a satisfying read.

The main character is Toru Okada, a 30-year-old gofer at a Tokyo law firm who has recently quit his job and hasn't decided what to do next. Toru goes out one day to look for his missing cat and finds himself caught up in a series of bizarre adventures. Not long after the cat disappears, his wife Kumiko vanishes too, and passive, irresolute Toru is forced to assess the state of their marriage and take responsibility to bring Kumiko home.

Thus begins a bizarre journey in which Toru Okada meets a series of strangers: May Kasahara, a thoughtfully morbid teenager who’s responsible for her boyfriend's death; Malta Kano, a psychic who makes prophecies about Toru's missing cat; Malta's sister, Creta, who claims that she was violated and defiled by Kumiko's evil politician brother, Noboru Wataya; Lieutenant Mamiya, a soldier who witnessed unimaginable atrocities on the Asian continent during WWII; Nutmeg Akasaka, a mysterious healer whose husband was violently murdered; and Nutmeg's son, Cinnamon, a sharp young man who stopped talking when he was a boy.

Each of these characters has his or her own story/aside in the novel, and many of them are linked in some way, but not all of them seem to serve a purpose or have relevance in the end. Every storyline in this book is really interesting and the prose is always compelling, but there are many pieces of the puzzle that don’t fit into the whole picture—too many unanswered questions and unexplained events, too many details that turn out to be little more than a red herring. As Michiko Kakutani put it, “in trying to depict a fragmented, chaotic and ultimately unknowable world, Mr. Murakami has written a fragmentary and chaotic book.”

Wind-up Bird has been described as a detective story, a Bildungsroman, a fairy tale, a “Kafkaesque nightmare” and “science-fiction-meets-Lewis Carroll.” Those are all accurate descriptions of both the book and the book’s main problem: I think it’s trying to be too much, too many things.

I did enjoy reading this book. It’s really well written and pretty fascinating—really interesting the way Murakami blurs the line between real and not real, the way a character can experience something but at the same time not experience it—but the book is so long and so bizarre that having reached the end I’m not totally satisfied that it was worth the time it took to read it. I will say this: no matter how crazy the events in the book seem, Murakami's propulsive storytelling kept me engaged, thinking and guessing.

Out Stealing Horses

2008-07-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

This slender yet powerful novel by Norwegian author Per Petterson is one to read and reread.

Following the death of his second wife when he “lost interest in talking to people,” the narrator, Trond, has retired to a remote forest-village in eastern Norway. When his nearest neighbor turns out to be a figure from his past, from a life-altering summer spent in a similar setting with his father, Trond’s memories begin to churn, despite attempts to lose himself in the details of surviving in his new environment (wood-chopping, shopping, cooking, dog-walking). He is forced to sort through a series of traumatic war-time events, both personal and political, that led to his father abandoning the family – and find a way to prevent himself repeating that pattern. The book is a sort of conversation in Trond’s mind as he looks back on past losses and reflects on his coming old age.

One of the best things about Out Stealing Horses is the narrator’s unassuming voice, which belies the force and intensity of the memories conjured up. It’s the calm, deliberate voice of someone I’d like to know better.

Another notable aspect of this fairly amazing book is what one reviewer referred to as “the consolations of landscape.” The quiet setting (snowy forest, river, lake, remote village) is a profound presence in this novel, yielding the tranquility that allows Trond to remember and process what he had not been able to at age 15. You feel that tranquility yourself as you read the author’s lovely descriptions and quiet prose.

Also impressive is the author’s ability to pass back and forth in time with undisturbed continuity. Adding to that, he draws parallels both subtle and obvious between past and present, which helps keep the plot tightly bound.

Finally, this book is filled with wonderful sentences – the kind in which one does the work of many. There's a purity to his prose, and I found myself reading certain passages over and over as I came across them and flipping back to find them again later. Here’s a sample from the first chapter:

“Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or
slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill with physical
things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me
and does not vanish when I am not looking.”

I was sorry to turn the last page of Out Stealing Horses, and I know I will return to this lovely, impactful book. It's easy for me to recommend this one, especially to those who know what it means to seek solitude – the overwhelming beauty of being in a place “where there is only silence” and the associated risk of allowing time to “merely pass as you let others do the moving.”

It's Summer

2008-07-07T21:07:00.000-07:00

Which means plenty of reading time for Dan! I read Sense and Sensibility after watching the Jane Austen Book Club (I may also read the other Austen novels at some point this summer). :) It wasn't anything unexpected because the movie pretty much stuck to it, but turns out that even though I didn't like Oliver Twist, I do actually like to read Victorian literature. It was a fun read.

Next I went to the library and lo and behold, they finally had some books for me to read! Yay!

The first was classic chick lit. Just Listen by Sarah Dessen. "Annabel Greene is the girl who has everything. At least, that's what she portrays in her modeling shoots. But Annabel's life is far from perfect. her friendship with Sophie ended bitterly, and her older sister's eating disorder is weighing down the entire family. Isolated and ostracized at school and home, Annabel retreats into silent acceptance. Then she meets Owen -intense, music-obsessed, and determined to always tell the truth. And with his guidance, Annabel learns to just listen to herself and gains the courage to speak honestly. But will she be able to tell everyone what really happened the night she and Sophie stopped being friends?" It had more to it than just a goofy girl getting the guy. Pretty fantastic.

Next was Deadline by Chris Crutcher. About a guy who learns he has a terminal illness during a regular sports physical and only has a year left to live. He decides not to till anyone so that he can live out his year to the fullest, without anyone treating him differently. He finds love, helps some people, and goes out for football instead of cross country (he's only 123 pounds). I totally balled at the end. Another great one!

Next: How to Ruin a Summer Vacation by Simone Elkeles. This was about a girl who gets dragged to Israel for summer vacation by her dad who has never really been part of her life. She meets her Israeli family, finds a hot Israeli guy to annoy and eventually fall for, and discovers a lot about her heritage and her country, and herself. It has a really sweet ending. I loved it.

Last: Bad Kitty by Michele Jaffe. (No idea why its called that. There was one part at the beginning with a bad kitty, but definitely not enough to name the book after, but whatever.) It was a murder mystery, Nancy Drew modern style. Pretty great. Funny, crazy characters, a little romance, and a good twist at the end. I couldn't put it down!

So those were the fun books of the month. Next I'll either read A History of Love, or head back to the library. Love you guys!

Dan's New Top 10 List

2008-05-30T17:09:00.000-07:00

I suggested this a long time ago, and Cris did it, but not me, so I decided I should! So here goes.

Atonement. A for sure part of my ten. Atonement was amazing!

Harry Potter. I just reread the 7th book! Holy shnikes! Can you get better than that?! :)

Pride and Prejudice. Still on here. It's great. A classic.

Cold Comfort Farm. Fun story+hilarious characters = good book.

Flight. Sherman Alexie. That's basically enough said. :)

I Capture the Castle. love it.

Wuthering Heights. Oddly enough, I really enjoyed this book! The movie was WEIRD though. :)

Where the Heart Is. I laugh and cry every time.

Princess Nevermore. Cris read this to me when I was younger. So cute. Now I own it and every once in a while I pick it up again and I love it!

Cold Mountain. I'm a sucker for romance and tragedy.

Wuthering Heights

2008-05-25T20:50:00.000-07:00

Wuthering Heights was a super fun read. Surprisingly, it was way easier than the other Victorian (is that the right word?) books I've read. Classics are usually hard for me. Oliver Twist I couldn't even finish (I'll try it again), Huck Finn took forever, Pride and Prejudice took all of a month or two, but I read Wuthering Heights in a week or two. It was a nice book for bedtime. During AP test week, I relaxed with it rather than some crazy teen novel. It was good! I still don't really get Heathcliff. I guess he's just very passionate. I checked out the movie version with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, so hopefully that'll help.
Anyway, it was pretty and a nice romance. Plus, fun crazy people! :)

The God of Small Things

2008-05-16T23:52:00.000-07:00

From the perspective of literary achievement, I don’t hesitate to recommend The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, a book about a set of fraternal twins and how Things Can Change in a Day. Structurally, linguistically, stylistically this book is awesome. I especially enjoyed it on a words-and-sentences level—Ms. Roy uses fun tricks like capitalizing Significant Words and runningtogether other words, and throughout the book makes marvelous use of repetition with certain phrases and images. It’s like she invented her own language, and it’s truly truly beautiful—poetic and unprecedented.

But content-wise, this book is quite grim, quite depressing. Save for one small window of happiness, there’s a persistent sense of foreboding and sort of sickening horror from the first page to the last, and what we're left with in the end is this incredible sadness. Too, the author writes India as a place I would never want to set foot. A place of crushing poverty, a world smothering in its own steaming filth and grease-laden decay, a country of pervasive environmental catastrophe and awful people.

Honestly I don’t know whether I can recommend this book to my sisters. My reading experience was conflicted. I was delighted and horrified at the same time—which is itself disturbing. But if you’re interested, read more about it in this New York Times review, and decide for yourself.

Saturday

2008-04-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

I recently finished Saturday by Ian McEwan and just wanted to put a little blurb on here. I think Ian McEwan is an excellent writer! This book sounded so real even though the characters and events were not every day things at all. I couldn't put the book down, it was intense! A window into a man's life on a very crazy day. I liked it a lot!

The Speed of Dark

2008-04-08T17:29:00.000-07:00

At once near-future page-turner and philosophical treatise, The Speed of Dark had me in its grips from start to finish. From the first page, I was completely taken with the narrator, an autistic man who is first commanded and then offered a chance at an experimental cure. It's not surprising that his voice sounds so real, or that I liked him immediately—the author is the mother of an autistic teenager. Her love and understanding shine throughout.

Journeying with Lou as he grapples with this important decision brought me to consider huge questions like what is “normal?” what is self? will Lou still be Lou if he becomes “normal?” I hoped so. We think of autistics as lacking some basic human social or emotional connection. Not true. Sometimes Lou's way makes a lot more sense than mine. Walking through the world inside his brain for a little while, I see the whole place a little differently.

Ideas of Heaven

2008-04-04T20:54:00.000-07:00

I recently read a lovely collection of short stories by Joan Silber called Ideas of Heaven. The book is subtitled “A Ring of Stories” because the stories are connected one to the next, and they come full circle in the end – someone mentioned in passing in one story reappears as the protagonist/narrator in the next until the last story is tied back to the first.

The stories are also linked by a running theme: faith, love and sex. Silber explores the ways in which sex, love and religion are “always fighting over the same ground – with their sweeping claims, their promises of transport” and how each tends to fill in where the others fail. Her stories revolve around longing – religious and/or sexual. A “sacred thirst,” one character calls it. “Forms of devotion, forms of consolation.”

Silber successfully pulls off the “ring” device by making the connections subtle yet clear, without being obvious or seeming overwrought. What makes the ring even more impressive is that each story occurs in vastly different places and times – they take place in modern-day America and France, in Renaissance Italy, in China around 1900.

In fact, one of the things I most enjoyed about Silber is her dexterity – her ability to write convincingly about each of these disparate times and places and to assume, credibly, the voices of the dissimilar characters who inhabit those times and places. A gay man in New York, a turn-of-the-century Christian missionary in China, an Italian courtesan – she gives each of these a distinct, genuine voice.

Something else unusual about these stories is their epic sweep. Often short-story writers will focus on illuminating one small-yet-significant moment or one telling incident. Silber’s stories capture years, decades, lifetimes, without seeming fractured or incomplete. She distills complex characters and their equally complex lives into a few remarkable pages.

I very much enjoyed Silber’s clear, illuminating way with words, and the thoughtful, introspective tone with which she handles some fairly intense subject matter. Her stories are passionate and compassionate, elegant and wise, and they remind us that solace is sometimes found where and when we least expect it.

The Book of Other People

2008-03-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

This collection of captivating and amusing short stories is so great that I think you will all read it in one sitting. Or standing up in the bookstore like I did. However you read it, you really must! Editor Zadie Smith, author of On Beauty and White Teeth (which you can find a great review of right here, thanks to Lisa), asked 22 authors and artists to invent a character. Seems a simple and obvious task for authors of fiction, right? Well, the resulting collection is far from predictable and ordinary; it is remarkable! The stories, each named for the invented character, are both familiar and surprising, hilarious and heartbreaking.

Most stories are wonderful but there are a few that I think are outstanding: Jonathan Lethem’s "Perkus Tooth," a critique of critics; Aleksander Hemon’s "The Liar"; Miranda July’s quirky "Roy Spivey" is just one of her new short stories that should not be missed; Jonathan Safran Foer’s "Rhoda," a very short, stream-of-consciousness monologue from a Jewish grandmother – it’s an absolute gem; "Gideon," ZZ Packer’s gut-wrenching story of loneliness; Zadie Smith’s sympathetic story of family and loss, "Hanwell Snr"; and Dave Eggers’ "Theo," a fairy-tale of a giant who falls in love.

There are many more stories and even a few graphic-short stories (Chris Ware, Nick Hornby, Daniel Clowe). Each author’s voice is unique from the next and each of their characters are extraordinary and flawed and endearing in a much different way from the character that came before. Most impressively, each author approaches “character,” personhood, and character development differently, which makes this collection all the more thoughtful, wise and fascinating.

Plus all proceeds of this book benefit 826 New York, a literacy/creative writing project for youngsters in urban schools – I’m a tutor in the Boston center and I tell ya, it’s a good cause!

Atonement

2008-03-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

Atonement, by Ian McEwan, is about a crime and its consequences over the course of six decades. It's the mid-thirties, and a precocious young girl stands on the threshold of adolescence with all its inner drama and self-absorption. On a languid summer day, Briony glimpses strange incidents and misunderstood intimacies between her 20-something sister and her friend, Robbie. Late that night, someone is attacked, and Briony’s overactive imagination and overindulged self-importance send an innocent man to prison, destroying two lives as his wrongful conviction breaks up a love affair just as it’s begun.

Those events make up only a portion of Atonement: the rest is the aftermath. Five years farther down the path to adulthood, Briony realizes what she’s done and gives up college to become a nurse tending soldiers wounded in WWII to atone for the damage she caused as a child. There's also a long, intense section following Robbie's tour of duty in France—he joins the army because anything, including war, is better than the "daily stupidity" and claustrophobia of prison. Briony's real atonement, however, turns out to be not so much the stint with nursing—it comes decades later and I won’t say how because that would ruin McEwan’s surprising if somewhat contrived ending.

Atonement is a compelling story and fantastic book, complex and beautifully written, with a psychological acuity to which few living novelists can lay claim. In the first section, the author captures with such clarity the child's emotions and motives and her muddled understanding of adults' complex emotional lives. That first section pulses with heat and light; the descriptions are lush, unexpected, beautiful. Later the writing becomes more gritty (what with the war) but no less amazing. Throughout the novel, McEwan's writing is vibrant, precise, wrenching and intense.

To sum up: The movie was good, the book is great.

Bound on Earth

2008-03-05T22:04:00.000-08:00

I just finished a fantastic new LDS novel: Bound on Earth, by Angela Hallstrom. With honest, lucid prose, Hallstrom offers the best, most real, picture of contemporary Mormon life I've seen. It is a moving multi-generational story of one family drawing together through all their trials and foibles. Rather than centering her story on conversions, Hallstrom centers it on endurance. The complex, well-realized characters do not find simplistic answers to deeply troubling challenges; instead, there is often just simple, daily, difficult faith. They earn our compassion and teach us much about how to live well as flawed humans in a flawed world. Hallstrom gives us all this in just under 200 pages of tightly focused moments, deftly shifting from one time and perspective to another. This quietly affecting family portrait left me more compassionate toward myself and those I am bound to.

P.S. I'm so excited to get the word out on this book I even posted this review on amazon. :-)

Where the Heart Is

2008-02-20T17:13:00.000-08:00

Just a quicky note. This is the third time I've read this. Pretty sure it goes on my Top 10. I love it. So sweet and fun with great characters. Love it!

What is the What

2008-02-16T14:32:00.000-08:00

You know who should read What is the What? Um…everyone. Because it’s super good, not to mention important. It’s one of those rare books that are really easy to read, really gripping—it will grip you!—but also globally consequential.

What is the What, by Dave Eggers, is a docu-drama-type “novel” based on the real life of Valentino Achak Deng. At the age of seven (maybe eight) he watches his Sudanese village be attacked and destroyed by government-sponsored militia. Not knowing if his family is alive or dead, he's forced to run and ends up trekking (on foot with thousands of other boys) across the deserts of three countries. They walk for months, pursued by militiamen on horseback, government bombers and predatory animals, carrying with them almost nothing in terms of clothing, shoes, shelter, food or water. After this epic journey in which he faces down every imaginable hardship, Achak spends many years in desolate Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps before finally being resettled in the U.S. where he finds “a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges.” (So lazy, I quote the back of the book)

I don’t know if Valentino is the unluckiest person ever, or the luckiest for having survived a lifetime of horrors you and I could only conjure in our worst nightmares. But whatever he is, his story is extraordinary. This book is suspenseful, intense, horrifying, heartbreaking, at times surprisingly sweet and funny, but always incredibly moving—if you don’t at least have the urge to make large donations to Mercy Corps after reading this, you’re an absolute robot. I don’t know if there’s a word strong enough to sum up this guy’s life—the tragedy, trauma, loss, deprivation—but it was crazy to read his story and know it had all really happened while I sat around watching Seinfeld and picking the onions off my cheeseburger.

Things that are really great about this book:

Eggers lays out the decades-old conflict in Sudan in a way that people like me who knew little about it can wrap their brains around. He weaves the history into his story really naturally and without ever making it a political invective.

The author drops his self-consciously clever post-modernist “thang” and assumes the voice of Achak telling his story in first person. And outside of a few overly sophisticated turns of phrase, it works—sounds authentic and believable, as if it really were Achak telling his own story. Eggers does a terrific job of creating a “character” that is super lovable and pitiable but also respectable.

Despite the fairly devastating subject matter, What is the What is not depressing or the type of horrifying that makes you have to put it down. As a work of literature, it’s incredibly impressive and I found myself reading on because I was wowed. And too, Eggers makes this young Sudanese so very human and real that I felt a strong sense of commonality that made me not want to turn away from him. And the book ends on a rather hopeful note.

So. I recommend this book to you and everyone you know. It really is amazing, definitely top 10 material. If you want to learn more about it or read a (way) more articulate review, visit McSweeney’s—they seem to have republished everything ever written about What is the What.

Cold Comfort Farm and Twilight

2008-02-14T17:15:00.000-08:00

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons was excellent. Great, crazy characters, hilarious, 1930 (or 50s can't remember which) setting, romance. It was quite unexpectedly enjoyable. Not much else to say about it other than its greatness. :)

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer was also excellent in a completely different way. It sounds silly...definitely a teenage girl book...but it was fun. I couldn't put it down. I finished it in a couple days and it's around 500 pages! They're making a movie of it, and I'm way excited!

Eat, Pray, Love

2008-02-13T11:25:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned to a couple of my sisses, this definitely won't make it on to my top 10 list, but it I think the author (Elizabeth Gilbert) accomplished her goal of writing a spiritual journey memoir through a year of travels, and it did offer a lot of personal and spiritual insights that hit home for me.

Things I liked:
1) The personal, and accessible narrative offered through her diary-esque memoir. As the reader, I felt like I was looking intimately into someone's life that I have never met, knowing and understanding things that only her dearest friends should know. In that way, I felt a bit of a connection to her personal journey, and felt like her experiences are the same as everyone's experiences.

2) The section in India. Since Elizabeth Gilbert planned to spend 4 months in each of the three countries (Italy, India then Indonesia), she wrote the book in equal thirds, as well. The middle third was what I enjoyed most. For one, it had less personal drama and more personal reflections and insights, which may be what I'm craving more right now. And, this is when the author really comes to rely on her own strengths and depend on herself, balancing her mind (full of self-deprecating thoughts, as we've all experienced) and her heart (which she comes to understand is her biggest supporter and life-saver). I found that idea comforting; an understanding and state of being which I can aspire for.

Things I didn't like:
1) I felt like her writing style, as accessible as it was, wasn't worthy of the #1 New York Times Bestseller. Like I said, it was almost like reading someone's diary, or maybe just the way someone would tell you the story in person, complete with all the juicy details of personal drama. Though I did get a kick out of it at times, it just didn't seem well-polished overall.

2) The whole premise seemed a little too planned out for me. For being a spiritual journey memoir, it was a little extreme in the happily-ever-after ranking.

(I'm trying to go easy on it, because I think a lot of what I didn't like is actually personal and unfair judgements of the author, who's writing often rubbed me the wrong way, and who I couldn't help viewing as spoiled and arrogant. Though, like I said, they're unfair judgements, and I imagine a lot of what she wrote and revealed - if it's all true - is extremely hard to make public.)

That's all I'll say. I do want to say that if you were thinking about reading this, I recommend it, with about 3 out of 5 stars. :-)

Isabel Allende

2008-01-16T18:35:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd do a posting on a couple books by Isabel Allende, since she has become one of my favorite authors in the past year or so. I've only read three of her books (which is actually pretty good for me): Daughter of Fortune (on my top ten), The House of the Spirits, and Portrait in Sepia. I thought I'd write a few thoughts on the last two since I read them most recently.

Just like when I read Daughter of Fortune, I had a really hard time putting this down. I loved the flow of the book, never stopped enjoying the magical realism, and felt like I had a stake in the Trueba family. Allende beautifully combined the themes of love, family loyalties and secrets, political unrest and revolution, and class struggles; seamlessly woven (not to sound too cliche). This book will definitely be read for generations, as it was intended, with its timeless themes.

This books convinced me that I love Allende's books, and will most likely read all. :-) Because it links families, characters and plots from both The House of the Spirits, and Daughter of Fortune, I felt like Cris did with Paul Auster's book; like I was putting together a puzzle. So fun! Allende mostly left out magical realism, but somehow it seemed to work even better without it, and I didn't really miss it. As in all of Allende's books which I've read, the celebrations and tragedies of love (romantic and familial) were the most compelling themes for me, and one of the reasons I keep coming back to Isabel Allende.

She'll always be at the top of my recommended readings list!

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

2008-01-14T15:03:00.000-08:00

Garden Spells is about the Waverleys and their garden in Bascom, North Carolina. The apple tree's fruit shows you the biggest moment in your life (not always good, because it could be your death!), and the edible flowers have special powers such as: "Nasturtium promotes appetite in men. Makes women secretive. Secret sexual liaisons sometimes occur in mixed company. Do not let your guests out of your sight." and "Chive Blossom ensures you will win an argument. Conveniently also an antidote for hurt feelings." and "Violet, a wonderful finish to a meal. Insures calm, brings on happiness, and always assures a good night's sleep." Claire Waverley and her elderly cousin Evanelle are the last of the Waverleys, except for Claire's rebellious sister Sydney who left Bascom as soon as she could. "When Sydney suddenly returns home with a young daughter, Claire's quiet life is turned upside down-along with the protective boundary she has so carefully constructed around her heart." A lovely romance, along with total girl/sister power and so cute. The magical food sorta reminded me of Like Water For Chocolate. It's great! I loved it!

Florida by Christine Schutt

2008-01-11T22:45:00.000-08:00

Florida by Christine Schutt is a fictional memoir about a girl named Alice. When Alice is 10-ish, her mother is committed to a psychiatric facility. With her father's earlier death (which may not have been an accident), Alice is essentially orphaned and from then on is shuttled around the homes of relatives in what she calls her "sleep-over life." They’re a wealthy family, but frugal with affection and attention. She comes of age mainly in her grandmother Nonna's home with its three floors, eleven baths, and countless bedrooms but little in the way of company – Nonna was rendered speechless by a stroke. The nearest thing she’s got to a friend or a parent is the family’s chauffeur, Arthur. She consoles herself with books and telling stories of her own as she struggles to define herself into adulthood. Schutt’s slim novel is a sort of “portrait of the artist as a young woman” told in fragmented prose-poetry meant to approximate the jumbled, chaotic non-structure of memory.

The best thing about this novel is its amazing sentences. The author has a marvelous facility with language, and it shines brightest in her uniquely rendered descriptions of things and places. Also dialogue. Her words sound beautiful, and they conduct an electrical charge. They feel like pinpricks, sometimes like a bruising jolt from a defibrillator. Truly, there's more poetry than prose in this book. In fact, there are entire reviews that focus solely on the poetry of her language, as in the following brief discussion of these two sentences: “I know about snakes. I take a late-night swim in the lap pool and astonish myself with the color of my skin.”

Here, “lap pool” turns back on itself sonically, and “snakes” resonates
recursively with “skin.” If one is going to adopt poetic techniques for writing
prose fiction, these are the kinds of effects, unlike rhyme, that a reader feels
well before knowing how it was done. (from Verse magazine's blog)

One of the book’s failings is its all-but-nonexistent plot – which is fine, really. Schutt is experimenting with language and with representing memory as its really experienced, in fragments, so a good plot really isn't germane. Another, more serious issue is indistinct characterization. I didn’t get a good sense of her mother and Arthur, despite the fact that most of the memory-fragments revolve around them. Even the narrator, Alice, is murky. And worse, unsympathetic. She’s thoughtless of others, self-absorbed. So although this book does have some insightful moments and a nice ending, the absence of compelling characters made it somewhat disappointing for me.

Like I said, Florida is best appreciated for its beautiful sentences. And there are many very good ones. But do I really want to read a whole book of beautiful sentences if they don’t, taken all together, have much impact? To me, Florida was more affected than affecting.

Anyway here’s an excerpt – a fine example of her poetic prose from a randomly selected page (really). This is a scene where Arthur is driving Alice around. She asks him to take her back to where she used to live, or take her to her mother in the “San.” Arthur is hesitant to be back late, but says finally, “All right then, I’ll show you something.”

All ways were dark, but this way deeply. We only knew what things were as we passed them, dark stands of trees, rows of mailboxes, wooden markers, the start of hills – up, over, over and down – down a narrow, brambled road, as in a story, abruptly turning and traveling upwards again to a gawky house with finials, deep porches, churchy windows. Here was a spinster closed for winter. I couldn’t see inside although I tried.

“This is where your father came from,” Arthur said, and I was amazed. My father, the mysteriously dead and only ever whispered about – Arthur knew where Father came from.

Thirteen Moons By Charles Frazier

2008-01-03T17:28:00.000-08:00

This is by the author of Cold Mountain and although not as marvelous a story, Thirteen Moons is a great historical novel. It's set before the Civil War in North Carolina, and the main character is Will Cooper. It starts when he is a young boy sent to work in a wilderness trading post where he sort of melts into the local indian tribe. He grows up with them and the book is just about his life. He lives to see the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War. He meets John C. Calhoun, President Andrew Jackson, and Davy Crockett. All the while he is in love with Claire but they somehow never stay together. They meet when they are both 12, then have a few year fling in their teen years, and occasional meetings throughout the rest of the book. It is a sad romance, one reviewer said the book is "melancholy". The book is also really pretty, the same as Cold Mountain, just the way the author writes is very pleasant and the descriptions of the country are really great. I recommend it, but if you haven't read Cold Mountain, read that instead :).

My Top 10 From 2007

2007-12-05T17:33:00.000-08:00

This is a list of the ten books that I liked best this year.

Plainsong by Kent Haruf. This books is a good winter-weather read. Haruf's language is as crude and spare as the rural Eastern Colorado landscape he describes.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. What a gem! For more details on this epic see Lisa's lovely post.

Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf. 'Nough said.

From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman. This history is fascinating because it is part political non-fiction, part history and also a bit of an autobiography of a true giant of Journalism. The scope of this history feels overwhelming but the personal narrative helped to keep me drawn in and it gave me a deeper sense of urgency on this important issue. Seymour Hersh is quoted on the cover saying something like "If you only read one book on the Middle East this should be it." Well, it couldn't be enough but it's as good start.

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. This book is so wonderful I'll devote an entire post to it later.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth who has got to be one of the most captivating authors ever. Lisa wrote a very excellent review of this book as well.

The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster. This is such a strange and fascinating memoir by an author I love. If you've read several of his novels, reading this memoir is like putting together a Paul Auster puzzle. For me, this book, which is a collection of journal entries and third-person memoir, was like peeping into a great mind's memory and finding the intimate details of novels that I love.

Shipping News by Annie Proulx. This is an incrediblely well told story in a stark, tragic setting. Proulx seems to be able to get right to the heart of a matter without sacrificing any affection for her characters.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. This is, of course, a classic. I haven't liked a lot of Ernest Hemingway but I did love this.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. I think this novel is magnificent. Nicole Krauss has written such interesting characters so candidly and with a genuine tenderness. When I read this I couldn't wait to get back to it if I had to put it down.

The Woman in White

2007-09-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is one of the first (and finest, if you believe the jacket cover) mystery thrillers ever written. It’s also one of the first in the genre of Victorian 'sensation novels' in which writers took the terrors of the gothic novel—madmen, vampires, dark castles—and moved them to familiar, domestic settings, building their plots around similarly thrilling or sensational themes like insanity, insane asylums, and wrongful committal, dark secrets like bigamy and identity theft, and all manner of crime and villainy, including muuurrderr. (To be read in the voice of Sideshow Bob in the Simpsons episode where he tries to exact revenge on archnemesis Bart by marrying aunt Selma and blowing up their honeymoon suite... you know the one).

This story begins with an eerie midnight encounter between art master Walter Hartright and a mysterious woman dressed all in white. She is in a state of confusion and distress, and Hartright helps her to find her way to London. In return, she warns him against a certain unnamed baronet. After they part, Hartright learns that she escaped from an asylum.

The next day, in his new position as art tutor to two young women (homely-yet-fascinating Marian Halcombe and her beautiful, wealthy half-sister, Laura Fairlie), he finds that the story of the woman in white is entangled with the lives of the two sisters. To further complicate matters, Walter and Laura fall in love, but he is poor and she is already engaged, by her dead father's wish, to a (gasp) baronet named Sir Percival Glyde.

Determined to learn all they can about the mysterious woman in white, Walter and the heroically capable Marian delve deeper. Engaging in a battle of wits with Glyde's enigmatic Italian friend Count Fosco, they “soon find themselves drawn into a “chilling vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping and international intrigue.”

As you can plainly see from that last line (again from the jacket cover) this was a fun book. It’s mostly fluff, but it kept me engaged and guessing. I found it compulsively readable, an excellent specimen of top-notch storytelling.

Being a Victorian novel, this is a long one, so by the end I was kind of glad to be done with it. But it was undeniably suspenseful, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it if you’re looking for good old fashioned entertainment. Too, it reminded my why I once found the Victorians and their literature so fascinating—their merciless social strictures, the beautiful courtesy and formality of the language, and above all the terrible plight of female protagonists who are, against the odds, brave and good and resourceful and always so composed.

three.

2007-08-28T18:40:00.000-07:00

one. Flight by Sherman Alexie. The first book written by him in ten years! It is so good! It's about an orphaned Indian teenager who travels back and forth through time "in a search for his true identity". His journey starts as he is about to commit a "massive act of violence." At that moment he finds himself shot back through time, in the body of an FBI agent. He continues his travels into several other lives, and when he is finally again in his own life he is a extremely changed. "This is Sherman Alexie at his most brilliant-making us laugh while he's breaking our hearts...In Flight he seeks nothing less than an understanding of why human beings hate. Flight is irrepressible, fearless, and groundbreaking Alexie."

two. St. Lucy's Home For Girl's Raised By Wolves by Karen Russell. Short stories. They were interesting. Weird. But good. Definitely original. St. Lucy's is probably the best one, which is probably why it's the title story. Other interesting titles are: Z.Z's Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers, The Star-Gazer's Log of Summer-Time Crime, and Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows. You should just read them and see if you like it, because I'm still not sure.

three. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. It's based in New York City in 1939. Sammy Clay lives there. His cousin Joe Kavalier has just escaped from Nazi occupied Prague and is looking to make quick money to bring his family over.
"Sammy is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the lastest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that unforgettable champion the Escapist. And inspired by the beautiful and elusive Rosa Saks, a woman who will be linked to both men by powerful ties of desire, love, and shame, they create the otherworldly mistress of the night, Luna Moth. As the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe and the world, the Golden Age of comic books has begun."
It has interesting history, a lot of it from the point of view of the characters, which makes it more real. Charles Frazier (author of Cold Mountain") says, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is an important, generous, beautifully written book, rich in wit and detail, overbrimming with marvels of narrative invention."

So Long, See You Tomorrow

2007-08-05T22:09:00.000-07:00

In So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell has built a thoughtful, heartbreaking novel around one awkward teenage moment and the guilt of a missed opportunity. On his first day at high school, shortly after his family moved from a small Illinois farming town to Chicago, he saw—and appeared to snub—a boy who had been a passing childhood companion. The boy, Cletus Smith, moved away after his father murdered the farmer next door, Lloyd Wilson, and then killed himself. Decades later, the narrator shares his story as a sort of apology, a belated attempt to offer Cletus the sympathy he failed to express in that moment.

In the quiet, unsentimental voice of an elderly man with something on his mind, Maxwell uses news clippings, memory and imagination to reconstruct the tangled story of the Smith and Wilson families and the events leading up to the murder. He also weaves in the sad tale of his own family's past. His mother died giving birth to his younger brother during the 1918 flu epidemic, plunging his father into a deep well of grief. Eventually, his father remarried, but young William continued to cling tightly to his sense of the way things were before his mother died. This response to loss informs Cletus’s story and serves as one of many demonstrations of the narrator's empathy.

Another—and one of the most unusual things about this book—is Maxwell’s use of the perspective of the Smith’s dog, whose life was shattered along with the family’s. It struck me as a wonderfully daring exercise in writing character, endowing a dog with thoughts, feelings and dreams. In another writer’s hands, it could easily come off like a bad Disney movie. What allows for this unusual point of view, what makes it succeed, is that a) it sounds pretty authentic, which I know seems silly to say about doggy point of view, but read it and see if you don't agree; b) the dog’s situation is essentially the same as Cletus’s, her losses no less heartbreaking; and c) one senses an incredible generosity behind this technique, in the author’s earnest wish to understand the whole story and to extend his sympathy—as he says, to "shake [his] head sadly and say, 'I know…. I know.'" That generous spirit is what makes this novel as affecting as it is.

So Long, See You Tomorrow is a short work, but it's crafted with a precision and emotional force uncommon in books of any length. It’s the sort of coming-of-age story that should be taught in high-school English classes. (Forget about The Lord of the Flies! Toss your ratty copies of that goddamn Catcher in the Rye!) Maxwell writes with wisdom and poignancy on the vulnerability and anxiety of adolescence. Though the action occurs in the early 1900s (So Long is marvelously evocative of the time and place), it manages not to feel dated. And though its pace is… I’ll call it “careful,” the book is never boring, and every word is relevant. It’s a wonderful novel—wise and generous and very nearly perfect.

Waiting, by Ha Jin

2007-07-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

Waiting is a book about—well, waiting. Every year, Lin Kong, a doctor in the Chinese army, returns to his village to end his arranged marriage with the "humble and touchingly loyal" Shuyu. But each time, Lin returns to the city to tell Manna Wu, his unofficial girlfriend and army nurse, that they'll have to postpone their engagement once again. For 18 years they have been waiting to begin their relationship. Following all the codes of conduct (written and unwritten) which rule their lives, they wait for the divorce to come through, and after the divorce they wait to get married so people won’t say they built a happy nest on the ex-wife’s misery. By the time they finally get together, the years of waiting have changed both of them. Lin daydreams about the peaceful life he had before and considers his new life tedious, chaotic and exhausting. Manna has become bitter, depressed, needy and resentful. They both wonder if what they feel for each other is really love, but neither has ever experienced an actual love affair. The end… well I won’t give any more away but will simply say there’s more waiting, and it’s tragic and deeply ironic.

I enjoyed many things about this book: its clear, simple language; its deceptive simplicity (it's got the rhythm of a folk tale or fable but is layered with meaning and feeling); its quiet, deliberate pace; the rich detail, particularly in descriptions of natural settings which shine with poetry.

I have some complaints as well. The dialogue is often stilted and strange (“bye-bye now”) or peppered with odd phrases that distract (“by hook or by crook,” “shilly shallying,” “tut tut”). Also, though the book is written in third person, the author focuses much more attention on Lin than on Manna, gives more insight into his character, emotions and motives. It feels as if the author doesn’t quite understand Manna and therefore limits his attempts to show us her head and heart, glossing over her inner life even in crucial moments, leaving her character sort of flat and underdeveloped.

Despite these points, I don’t hesitate to recommend Waiting. It’s a sad, graceful allegory about how we let outside forces influence us, diminish our chances of happiness; how we’re each isolated in our own suffering, lonely despite close companions. Lin and Manna’s story is complex and ironic—like life—and if the language isn’t always particularly eloquent, its meaning is.

I will also note (because this sort of thing always influences my opinion—I’m such a sucker!) that Ha Jin received the 1999 National Book Award for Waiting.

Things Fall Apart

2007-07-03T16:57:00.001-07:00

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
Marvelous. I had a hard time getting into it, but once I did, it was really interesting, kind of intense, and just marvelous. It's about Okonkwo an African man. Although his father was lazy, and a drunkard, Okonkwo knows he is better and is working his way up in tribal status. He has three wives, two titles, a wealthy farm, and was a great warrior in the intertribal wars. Just at the peak of his greatness, an accident happens and Okonkwo and his family are exiled for seven years. He is forced to start over. Then in comes the white man. Okonkwo's old village is taken over by Christianity. And everything falls apart. The end is just crushing. Seriously. CRUSHING! I didn't even have time to cry because it was just like WAM! But, the story is AMAZING. I don't even want to tell you more, because it would ruin it. Just read it. And besides taking my word for it, Draw and B recommended it. So go, read, STAT!
:D

P.S. Another great thing, I learned a lot about the culture. It is completely different, and of course this was ...however many years ago when white men first went to Africa, but still. It was really great.

Random observations on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

2007-06-24T21:18:00.000-07:00

This novel is set just before and after WWI at the Ramsay’s summer home on an island west of Scotland. Across the bay stands a lighthouse. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their family of eight children host a number of guests, the most significant (to the book) of whom is Lily Briscoe, an unmarried artist.

In her notes for the novel, Virginia Woolf expressed her narrative structure by drawing an "H" shape above which she wrote, “Two blocks joined by a corridor.” That’s basically what it is—two longish sections joined by a shorter, expositional, middle one. There’s no plot to speak of, but essential highlights include (from the first section) the tableau of Mrs. Ramsay sitting in a front window reading to her youngest son, James; his wish to go to the lighthouse; Mr. Ramsay’s need of Mrs. Ramsay's comfort and sympathy; Charles Tansley’s insistence that women cannot paint or write; and Lily Briscoe’s attempt to capture and re-present her artistic vision of the Ramsay’s home, of Mrs. Ramsay herself, there in the window. The first section ends with Mrs. Ramsay’s triumphant, unforgettable dinner party—a crafted moment in which she “resolved everything into simplicity.” (This ability to create beautiful moments is Mrs. Ramsey’s art, like painting or writing, and is, in her mind, the only hope of an enduring legacy.)

The middle section, the “corridor” entitled “Time Passes,” is a brief account of the ten years between two visits to the island. During that time, war breaks out across Europe, Mrs. Ramsay dies suddenly one night, Andrew Ramsay, her oldest son, is killed in battle, and his sister Prue dies from complications in childbirth. The family no longer vacations at its summerhouse, which languishes and crumbles in their absence: weeds take over the garden and spiders nest in the house. It’s some of the book’s most beautiful (elegiac) and devastating writing.

The third and final section of the book focuses on Mr. Ramsay’s return to the summer home, his trip to the lighthouse with James and daughter Cam, and Lily Briscoe’s completion of her painting.

This book is written very much in the tradition of modernists like James Joyce, “where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the prose can be winding and hard to follow” (thanks for saying it, Wikipedia). For this reason alone, I would say To the Lighthouse is not for everyone. If you need plot and drama to hold your interest, leave Virginia Woolf to those who appreciate beautiful sentences, poetic images, and abstract truth-seeking for its own sake. I’ll be the first to admit that reading this book sometimes felt like a homework assignment.

The novel is narrated in third person, but not through an omniscient voice. Instead it shifts constantly from the perspective of one character to another. Every word of it is subjective, every detail is seen through the eyes of one or another member of the Ramsay household. Toward the end of the novel, Lily reflects that in order to understand Mrs. Ramsay in a complete way, she would need fifty pairs of eyes—that the Truth rests in an accumulation of many different, even opposing, viewpoints. Woolf’s narrative technique mirrors Lily’s idea. The author’s representation of the Ramsays and their world depends upon the accumulated private perceptions of her characters.

Lily Briscoe is what one critic calls a “silhouette” of Virginia Woolf herself. As an artist, she represents the author’s struggle to express her vision—the difficulty of that task and the self-doubt that accompanies it. Whenever the art of painting is mentioned, it’s always alongside that of writing, as in Charles Tansley’s awful, obsessed-over mantra that women “can't paint, can't write” and in the idea of art as a permanent legacy: “Nothing stays, all changes; but not words, not paint.” In the end, Lily determines that completing the painting, regardless of what happens to it (it may be hung in an attic, stuffed under a couch), is the most important thing. She finishes it in the exact moment that Woolf ends the book, and her project mirrors Woolf’s in the way it synthesizes different perspectives to arrive at a more balanced and complete portrait of that world.

The beautiful Mrs. Ramsey—good, kind, intelligent, sensitive Mrs. Ramsay—is a portrait of the author’s own mother, and Mr. Ramsay, perhaps to a lesser extent, is her father. Woolf considered the book a success when she received this response to it from her sister Vanessa:

"Anyhow it seems to me in the first part of the book you have given a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived of as possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead. You have made one feel the extraordinary beauty of her character, which must be the most difficult thing in the world to do. It was like meeting her again with oneself grown up & on equal terms & it seems to me the most astonishing feat of creation to have been able to see her in such a way -- You have given father too I think as clearly, but perhaps, I may be wrong, that isnt quite so difficult. There is more to catch hold of. Still it seems to me to be the only thing about him which ever gave a true idea. So you see as far as portrait painting goes you seem to me to be a supreme artist & it is so shattering to find oneself face to face with those two again that I can hardly consider anything else. In fact for the last two days I have hardly been able to attend to daily life."
The publisher’s notes describe this book as “giving language to the silent space that separates people and the space they transgress to reach each other”—and it's an accurate description. To the Lighthouse is about how we so often only know the outline of a person, not the whole in all its complex detail. It’s about people in the act of observing other people, wondering what goes on inside their heads, trying to understand the discrepancy between what they are doing and saying and what they are actually thinking and feeling. There’s a wonderful scene in the first section—in fact the only scene where we see Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay alone together—in which he observes her in a moment of introspection. He sees a remoteness, a sadness in her, feels hurt “that she should look so distant, and he could not reach her.” Too, he seems to want to protect her from that sadness. She lets him draw her out of it, as a gift to him. Their conversation meanders over topics both trifling and significant. Each of them can sense what the other wants, yet both are fully aware of the chasm between them. They make small gestures to bridge it, saying what they know will please the other, knowing they are only making gestures, not building bridges, and the distance remains. It’s a sweet-sad moment between two people who love and are frustrated by each other, and I think it's an accurate portrayal of married life.

And that’s about all I’ve got in the way of random observations.

Two short story collections

2007-05-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

Having been recently reminded that my exposure to the contemporary short story is woefully deficient, I’ve been trying to fill in the blank of this gaping hole in my repertoire by reading stories by two virtuosos of the form, Deborah Eisenberg and Stuart Dybek.

Twilight of the Superheroes—don't let the silly comic-book cover fool you as it did the many people who chose to comment on my reading material. (“Wow, that looks like a fun book,” exclaimed the cafe server as she set my sandwich down. “Yes, well it’s actually…. You know what, it is fun,” I sighed.) Deborah Eisenberg is indeed fun, but also among the most important fiction writers working today, according to... well, people who know. Her stories are funny, sad, scary, and wise—amazingly insightful and masterfully crafted. I don’t have the energy to do these stories justice (seriously, the food poisoning has left me so lethargic I can barely hold my hands up to the keyboard), so just read the NY Times review and know that I heartily recommend this collection or any of Eisenberg’s stories to my lovely sisters.

I took Stuart Dybek’s 1990 collection, The Coast of Chicago, with me on a recent trip to the Windy Cty, and it was perfect—just the right mood, and it was so fun for me to read about places I was seeing. But this book is wonderful no matter where one reads it. These are beautiful, beautiful stories, by turns poetic, fantasmic (possibly not a word, but whatever), gritty, nostalgic, even sexy. Again I don’t have the brain or muscle power to do more than refer you to the NY Times, but I will say that these two collections contain stories I will want to come back to again and again. Also ought to put in a plug for the short story form itself, which seems to be regrettably undervalued by readers, publishers and booksellers. So check out these two, or do some discovering of your own.

American Pastoral

2007-04-21T23:07:00.000-07:00

American Pastoral, Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Philip Roth (I’ll call him “Phil”) is about an all-American guy who seems to have a super-charmed life (handsome legendary athlete marries Miss New Jersey, has sweet, precocious daughter, inherits and builds upon his father’s successful business, moves into beautiful stone house in idyllic setting) until the day his beloved daughter commits an outrageous act of political terrorism—blows up the local post office, killing a man, to “bring home” the war in Vietnam—an act that transports Swede Levov from his “American pastoral” into the fury and violence of its antithesis, the “American berserk.” It’s a story about the destruction of a seemingly indestructible man, the tragedy of a man who is not set up for tragedy. (See how I kind of said the same thing twice there? Phil does that a lot. I mean a LOT, and usually more than twice. That seemed like it might be a bad thing at first, but after a while I was actually quite impressed. He uses words very well. When it seems like he might be saying the same thing over and over, really he’s not, he’s building on what came before, adding meaning. He uses a lot of words to say what could, by another, lesser writer, be said in far fewer words, but Phil’s words are good words.)

Anyway. After Merry blows up the P.O., she disappears, leaving her father to figure out why it happened, where he went wrong. And that’s the rest of the book—circling around and around his life, looking at it from the outside, from every which way, talking and talking and talking it out with himself. He does his best to carry on like normal on the outside—he is the house of stone that holds everyone else together (wife, parents)—but now he’s got this wretched inner life, and it’s only his almost pathological sense of duty that prevents him falling apart. In his head he’s searching for the moment that shaped his destiny, made his daughter a murderer, believing that this tragedy must have been caused by some transgression against his own responsibility.

Basically this book is an etiology. “Etiology” is a word I learned from Phil, who likes to use big words. It's the study of the causes of disease. Swede Levov expends his life trying to determine the cause of the disease that claimed his daughter, and this becomes an allegory for whatever it is that undermines the American promises of prosperity, civic order and domestic bliss.

Maybe that sounds kind of boring or depressing, but no—this is an excellent book. It’s a compelling read that builds with surprising momentum, even though we know what happens from the start. It’s a long book, and Phil’s sentences and paragraphs sometimes go on and on, but the ones that do are often the most affecting—the guy can turn a very sharp phrase. In the end, it’s not his impressive ability to put words together that stays with the reader—it’s their emotional impact, the intense sense of loss and futility, anguish and rage, the desperation of this character’s attempt to hold himself together—Phil makes you feel that, and powerfully, right through the drawn-out-for-40-pages ending.

So many words make up this book, but they are good words.

Cold Mountain, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

2007-04-08T13:35:00.000-07:00

Lisa's been bugging me, but I figured I'd finish Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close first, then do a 3 in 1 :D.

So Who Will Run the Frog Hospital was first. It's a short novel about a woman's teenage years. Her best friend gets pregnant and has an abortion and it's just about their hardships I guess. To be truthful it was a little bit confusing, so somebody read it and then they can do an amazing blog on it!

Next, Cold Mountain! It was sooo good! And I really cried, like HARD, the last like 5 pages. I loved it soo much! Definately Top 5 material. And I'm pretty sure there's another blog already on it, so I don't need to talk about it!

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was amazing! It's about a boy named Oskar who finds a mysterious key after his father's death on September 11th. So he's searching for the lock. He has "heavy boots" a lot but the people he meets searching for the key help him through it. It's really great...I think it's on Cris's top ten??
Anyway, Love ya'll! :D

White Teeth

2007-03-10T13:45:00.000-08:00

Now here is a delightful book. Fresh, smart, funny, intuitive and expansive, White Teeth by Zadie Smith is the story of three generations of three families from three cultures and three corners of the world—all somehow tangled up together and all converging at the same time and place in the book’s Grand Finale. It begins with Archie Jones, an English lower-class nobody, Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim, and Clara Bowden, a Jamaican Jehovah’s Witness. The story expands out to include their parents, grandparents and offspring, later adding in another family of white, middle-class liberal-academic types. Smith braids all these strands together with a wit and assurance that can’t be a fluke, even for such a young writer (she was still an undergrad at Cambridge when she started writing this book, and was 24, I think, when it was published.)

One thing she’s very good at is finding a unique voice for each of her characters, capturing with authenticity (like I know) the sounds, the cadence, the colloquialisms for each of them, no matter the generation or ethnic background. It’s a crowded tangle of voices and viewpoints, and Smith seems a fairly brilliant mimic of an incredibly broad range of vernacular.

As well, this book is pretty light reading—in a good way, a fun and interesting way—despite the fact that it addresses big, big themes: race, class, gender politics, cultural identity, religious antagonism. The reader never feels mired down by the weight of the subject matter, and the narrator never becomes polemical or moralizing. In fact, there's a certain humility in it that one can’t help but notice and appreciate. Add to that her genuine affection for each character—how she observes their shortcomings with a gentle, knowing smile and judges their actions with generosity—and what it amounts to is a consummately likable book.

Though perhaps MAYBE a little overly ambitious (the end doesn’t hold up as well as it might, the writing becomes somehow less confident), this book is a real treat, easy for me to recommend to any of my sisters. Thanks so much for sharing it with me, Cris!

The Handmaid's Tale

2007-02-19T16:29:00.000-08:00

In the world of the near future, who will control women's bodies?

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable.

Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now....

Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.

That's what the book jacket says because I didn't know how else to put it. Im not genius like you guys! I read this a while ago, so it's not really in my head very much any more, but I remember it was REALLY GOOD!

The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy

2007-01-30T21:47:00.000-08:00

We just finished this, our next read-aloud, a couple days ago. What fun! Birdsall's voice and wit engaged us all from the first page. We were also immediately endeared to the four wacky sisters (OK, the oldest is mostly level-headed), their gentle professor father, and their comfortable, protective dog. Lighthearted and in the tradition of an old-fashioned family novel like The Moffats, this little book tumbles along at the speed of girltalk, with one true-to-childhood adventure after another. It succeeds in two unusual and impressive ways: real-life humor—we laughed out loud with every chapter; and freshness—the kids' scrapes are at once believable and unpredictable. Best of all, in this midst of this rollicking story, everyone finds comfort in family.

The Neverending Story

2007-01-30T20:54:00.000-08:00

I read The Neverending Story aloud to the kids this winter. Debbi gave it to us years ago, but we just hadn't gotten around to reading it until now. It was so much better than I expected that I almost regret waiting, except I think it was the perfect time for our family. All the kids were actually old enough to appreciate a fairy tale that's much more than just an adventure story.

It's really two hero myths, one after the other. The first half of the book is Atreyu's adventure, which we read along with Bastien, a geeky boy who “borrows” the book from a bookstore and reads it all day and night in the attic of his school. We and Bastien enter the magical world of Fantasia on the brink of destruction. Brave young Atreyu is the hero they need to discover how to save the world. His adventure follows pretty much the same paths as the movie, but with more richness of course.

About half way through the book we, Atreyu, and Bastien learn that the Childlike Empress, upon whose life the life of Fantasia depends, can be saved simply by receiving a new name. The catch is she can't receive that name from any Fantastican. Only a human can give her a new name.

Now, the story would be pretty complex and satisfying if it ended here, with Bastien finally finding the courage to call out her new name and enter and save Fantastica. Author Michael Ende has already given us plenty to think about—the nature of time, space, and existence; the inexorable bond between imagination and reality; courage; the power of despair and of faith and sacrifice. And along the way we've met a bunch of fascinating characters.

But this is only half the book. Where else can we go? Many places. With Bastien on his own hero quest. Bastien does what probably any kid, and lots of adults, would do with the magical wish-granting amulet given him by the Childlike Empress: he makes himself into all the wonderful things he's always dreamed of being: handsome, powerful, incredibly strong, known for his generosity, beloved by all. Fantastica is rebuilt by Bastien's wishes. But the more he wishes for himself, the worse things get. It's only his friends' amazing determination that saves him, and the rest of the story is Bastien's journey toward his true, best self and his one real wish.

It's this part of the quest that I think offers the richest rewards for readers who persevere through Bastien's frustrating, whimsical, destructive selfishness. “Up until then he had always wanted to be someone other than he was, but he didn't want to change.” With Bastien, we discover this paradox: it's better to be who we really are, and to be that we have to change. As Bastien journeys from selfishness to compassion, each stop is an unforgettably powerful allegory. I'd love to tell you about each of the places he visits, but you should really just make the journey with Bastien yourself.

Gregory Maguire

2007-01-24T15:59:00.000-08:00

Wicked (the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West), Son of a Witch, and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister:

They are super duper good! I just can't stop, when I read them! Wicked and Son of a Witch both have the good against evil theme, and also, the same sort of love theme. Wicked is GREAT, yet not as G-rated as the musical. It tells all about Elphaba (the witch) from her birth, to college, to trying to bring down the Wizard of Oz, who is the dictator of the Land of Oz, to her death, which we all know was Dorothy's fault. She has a love life, and a family, and all that stuff, and then stupid, ditzy Dorothy comes along and dumps water on her! The book really makes you hate all the characters of the Wizard of Oz, who in those books were the good ones. I mean, they're good, they're just stupid, and do stupid stuff, and most people in Oz don't like them.

Son of a Witch, of course is about the son of the witch, Liir. No one is quite sure he even is the son of the witch, but he flies on her broom, so that's what people think. In this one, the Wizard is gone, but the new Emperor is a bit insane. So Son of a Witch is about Liir growing up and falling in love, and killing some dragons on the way.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister shows Cinderella in a whole new light. This Cinderella doesn't go anywhere, because she doesn't want to. She cleans the chimney because she likes to. She is slightly spoiled though, because she's the rich one, not the stepsisters, and pretty stupid, too. Basically the only good thing about her is she is beautiful. So the book tells about how Iris and Ruth (the ugly stepsisters) come to be Clara's (Cinderella) stepsisters, and how Clara gets the Prince. It's the same story of Cinderella, but it's got a twist.

Read away! They are GOOD!

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

2007-01-20T01:09:00.000-08:00

“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” So begins the story of a very old man, “ugly, shy, and anachronistic,” who has resolved to tell, finally, just what he’s “really like.”

“I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay,” he continues, “and the few who weren't in the profession I persuaded, by argument or by force, to take money even if they threw it in the trash. When I was 20 I began to keep a record listing name, age, place, and a brief notation on the circumstances and style of lovemaking. By the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once. I stopped making the list when my body no longer allowed me to have so many and I could keep track of them without paper.”

All this presumably changes when he meets “Delgadina,” the 14-year-old girl procured for his 90th birthday. He does not touch her that first night, nor the next night, nor the one after. Instead, he simply watches her sleep, exhausted as she is from caring for her siblings and crippled mother and from her day job sewing buttons. He’s smitten from the start, and so at the unlikely age of ninety, his life is overhauled by love.

I feel unqualified to dislike anything by Gabriel García Márquez, but with this slim novella I come very close. His other novels I’ve read (100 Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera) left me absolutely floored. His talent is prodigious and undeniable, and I fully expected this to be yet another amazing story masterfully told. But to be honest Memories falls a little flat. It’s García Márquez’ first work of fiction in ten years, and at a mere 115 pages long, I wonder if maybe its brevity is the problem. The qualities that usually amaze—his inventive “magic realism,” the color and innovation of his language, the swooping narratives that move seamlessly back and forth in time, the panoramic scope he manages with unwavering authority—feel squeezed out of this short work. Also, the book comes off, frankly, a little careless. Jumps in time are not as smooth as they could be, memories are inexplicably dropped before they're fleshed out or given meaning, and dialog can be downright confusing. Too, we're expected to overlook the grim realities of third-world brothels and the barbarism of sex for hire with barely-pubescent virgins and focus instead on the raptures and pains of love and old age. It’s a lot to ask.

Memories isn’t all bad, though. I enjoyed its humor and earthy sensuality, and there is some wisdom to be found in these pages—I will say it's not without merit as a meditation on aging, desire and regret. Oh and kudos to GGM for somehow avoiding salaciousness and making this narrator more than just a dirty old man. But to my sisters who want to try something short by García Márquez, I say better to go with Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

And Then There Were None

2007-01-09T16:09:00.000-08:00

I read this for a book report for English. It was on the reading list, and since the book report is a movie, I thought I'd read something actually cool, so that my movie would be even cooler! So, I chose this one and discovered Agatha Christie is way better then whoever wrote Nancy Drew. :)

It was crazy! I read it in 2 days because I could not put it down. And Debbi read it also, she read it after work, because by that time I was asleep. She finished it also, so maybe she'll say something about it on here, too.

Anyway, it's about 10 people that get invited to an island, but when they arrive their host is not there. The people have nothing in common except that they all have commited murder that the law couldn't prosecute them for. In each of their rooms there is the nursery rhyme "10 Little Indians" (another name for the book) about how each of the ten indians die. People out of the ten start dieing in just the way it says in the poem and the ones left have to figure out who the murderer is before it's too late!! It's really great, a fast read, and quite spooky! READ IT!

The Great Fire

2006-12-31T20:11:00.000-08:00

23 years after her last novel, The Great Fire earned Australian-American author Shirley Hazzard the 2003 National Book Award. The honor is well-deserved.

The book begins in the aftermath of the second world war as decorated British officer Aldred Leith arrives in occupied Japan to write about the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima. There he meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the delightful son and daughter of a boorish medical bureaucrat and his horrid wife. Antithetic to their parents, Ben (dying, at 20, of a rare degenerative disease) and Helen (younger, and utterly devoted to her brother) are precocious and sensitive, having been, in Leith’s words, “delivered by literature.” (wonderful thought.) Leith develops an intense friendship with the two, and finds himself falling in love with young Helen (beautiful, brainy, elfin—a "changling," he calls her). At which point the book becomes an unabashedly romantic Romeo and Juliet-like love story (a lot more than that too, though), with parents conspiring to keep them apart, and good friends favoring their cause.

The Great Fire takes us back and forth across the globe—Japan, China, Hong Kong, Britain, France, Italy, New Zealand—and is wonderfully atmospheric in each location. Everywhere there is destruction and weariness, squalor (physical and psychological) interspersed with moments of beauty and consolation. Hazzard's style is complex and lucid, with a lovely formality that lends pleasure but requires slow, careful reading. She is at her best when describing the landscapes, scents and colors of her various backdrops. (A sample: “Outdoors, in the squelching world, rain had drawn off into purpled sky; green smells were sharp, chilly wet, delicious.”)

Really, her style isn't particularly contemporary. The book’s sensibilities, reflecting the times and places it evokes, could in fact be called old-fashioned. She is skittish with physicality, illness, violence; horrors of war are only hinted at; private moments between lovers are left just that. While I can imagine some readers seeing her book as an antique, I think Hazzard's reserve is commendable, especially given the novel’s far-flung set pieces and grand themes (impossible loves, striving for human connection in a world shattered by war)—it’s ripe for melodrama and sensationalism, but is entirely without it because her observations are so finely nuanced and so deeply insightful.

If pressed to state a criticism, I wouldn't have to think too hard: dialog in the book tends to read like something written rather than spoken; it's often stilted and unnatural. But that aside, the quality of her writing is extraordinary—careful, lyrical, solemn, beautiful. A line that I enjoyed, to illustrate: Helen calls her brother's attention to a full moon as they contemplate their new friendship with Leith. "Her life, and even his, in the little prison of their rooms, had also rounded and ripened, grown luminous." (Dear Shirley, that’s so lovely.)

What I liked best about this book (besides that Helen is such a remarkable reader!) was the sense that this was a rather personal work stemming from a time and a place which the author herself experienced (which is true); that she finally shared it, in an act of compassion, with a world “entirely charged with human wishes, existing for the most part silently and in vain.” Everyone has a cruel story, one character concludes, and “the entire world needs comforting.” Shirley Hazzard’s extraordinary novel is a gift of hope, as comforting today as it would have been 50-some years ago: a shared wish that love may rescue us all.

Perma Red

2006-12-27T16:25:00.000-08:00

Perma Red, by Debra Magpie Earling.

I don't really have much to say about this, it's not the kind of book you can really tell anyone what it's about. It's one of the many loaned to me by Draw and Britty...Anywho it's about Louise White Elk who is a young woman on a Flathead Indian reservation. It changes stories kind of. Like each chapter is the same story but centered around another character. I guess I'll just put some chapter beginnings so you can kinda get a feel for the book... and say it was MAGNIFICO!

A Louise White Elk Chapter

"After Florence died the weather changed. The sun turned cold, and dark owl days perched over Louise's life. The approaching winter light blinked through the windows of her grandmother's house to find her still slumped in bed. Louise would wake to a sun so bright she would cover her face with her hands. She would sit on the porch until late afternoon waiting until she could return to bed."

A Charlie Kicking Woman Chapter

"I burned the roads getting home, early enough to change my uniform and meet the day looking decent, but I arrived too late to save my marriage. Aida had left me. I guess I knew even as I sat in that hotel room she was already gone from me. A man knows these things."

A Baptiste Yellow Knife Chapter

"Even the smallest bones in his hands and feet were lit with pain. He had to brace himslef against his mother to make it to bed. Stars rushed his head, burning stars glittered his backbone. The ground seemed to drop from him and rise up again suddenly. He couldn't get his bearings. He wobbled in his walk."

The Catcher in the Rye

2006-12-26T21:22:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye, and enjoyed it quite a lot. I read it aloud to Nick, which is a great way to read this book if you don’t mind a lot of cussing, because it's all about voice—voice and attitude, because of course Holden Caulfield is an icon of teenage anxiety, cynicism and depression.

Now that I've read it, I do think it's too bad that Catcher in the Rye is so widely read in high school English classes. Not because of Holden's potty mouth or the book's depictions of adolescent sexuality and alcohol abuse (all official excuses for banning this book), but just because there are better books out there. I will say, at no point did I find this book uninteresting, and it does have moments of real poignancy, but I think kids these days might find it dated and tedious.

Here are a few bits of trivia from wikipedia:

The word "goddamn" appears in the book 252 times.
Salinger has refused to license the film rights to any producer or director. The reason for his refusal to allow a film version of the novel: "I would like to see it done, but Holden wouldn't approve"—a reference to Holden's distaste for movies and Hollywood "phonies."
Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon, was carrying the book when he was arrested immediately after the murder and referred to it in his statement to police shortly thereafter. John Hinckley, Jr., who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, was also reported to have been obsessed with Catcher in the Rye, and Kurt Cobain is said to have been carrying a copy of the book and wearing a red hunting cap in the weeks prior to his death.
The Catcher in the Rye continues to be both one of the most banned books in America and one of the most taught books in public schools.
The poem’s name (and a central theme) comes from the poem “Coming Through the Rye” by Robert Burns. If anyone can restate this poem in modern American English, I'd love to know what it means.

And some memorable lines:

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddamn stupid useless conversations with anybody."
(now why didn't I think of that?!)
"What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff— I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
"Sleep tight, ya morons!"
"All morons hate it when you call them a moron."
"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."

(Hello, is this the Austen residence? May I speak with Jane, please?)

Haunting of Hill House

2006-12-23T18:05:00.000-08:00

This fall semester I took a senior seminar for my major on "Literature of the Fantastic." We read chronologically starting with E.T.A. Hoffman's "The Sandman" from the mid-18th Century and ended with a collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber (1979) by Angela Carter. My understanding, for those of you who aren't familiar -- I sure wasn't before the semester began -- is that Fantastic's beginnings are aligned with the advent of the world in which we live now: a modern, industrialized, increasingly complex society. It follows the strangeness of population growth and urbanization, the proliferation of bodies and culture.

The Haunting of Hill House was a really fun book to begin wrapping up our discussion of this genre because it is packed with literary and cultural allusions and available to a compelling variety of theoretical interpretations and literary analyses. My class' approach to Fantastic literature was that the genre represents the darker side of modernity; an era in which everything is in motion, categories are no longer fixed and social codes are reformulated. With this reading in mind, Jackson is really quite masterful. Plus, guys, it's totally creepy. The surprising thing is that Hill House isn't gory or even scary, really. It definitely doesn't feel like a horror novel. But the language and the story are just downright unnerving yet totally dynamic and fascinating, a style that Shirley Jackson is famous for. I was extremely drawn in by the low-grade anxiety that I felt from page one...if you think you might be as well I definitely recommend it.

I Capture the Castle

2006-12-03T13:50:00.000-08:00

I've read 2 things I haven't posted on, I Capture the Castle, and Wicked. So Lisa said I had to report on them.

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
It is soo good! I'm in love with it. The narration is so good, and it is just so fun, and a great story and I can't think of anything bad about it! It's narrated by Cassandra Mortmain who wants to be a writer. Her family is very poor, living in a broken down castle. She starts a journal where she wishes to "capture" her family, and the castle, in her writing. Her sister Rose longs for romance and money, while Cassandra says, "I know all about the facts of life, and I don't think much of them." But their isolation from romance ends when the rich American boys, Simon and Neil Cotton, move into the house down the lane. The back of the book says, "[Cassandra] strives, over 6 turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls, and her own first descent into love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has 'captured the castle'--and the heart of the reader--in one of literature's most enchanting entertainments."

I think it was marvelous, and I want to see the movie that Debbi says is also marvelous. Here's a excerpt just for fun:

"I decided to think a little before i began writing, and lay back enjoying the heat of the sun and staring up at the great blue bowl of the sky. It was lovely feeling the warm earth under me and the springing grass against the palms of my hands while my mind was drawn upwards. Unfortunately my thoughts will never stay exalted for very long, and soon I was gloating over my new green dress and wondering if it would suit me to curl my hair. I closed my eyes, as I usually do when I am thinking very hard. Gradually I slid into imagining Rose married to Simon--it doesn't seem to matter when you imagine about other people, it only stops things happening when you do it about yorself. I gave Rose a lovely wedding and got to where she was alone with Simon at a Paris hotel--she was a little frightened of him, but I made her enjoy that. He was looking at her the way he did at dinner when he raised his glass to her........
I opened my eyes. He was there, the real Simon Cotton, looking at me. I hadn't heard a sound."

So there you are. I feel like stopping, so maybe sometime this week I will put Wicked on here.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

2006-11-13T18:42:00.000-08:00

The 13th and last book in the series, "The End" came out on Friday the 13th. I reread a couple of the last few books that I didn't remember, and also "The Beatrice Letters" (Lisa sent me the 13th book and the Letters). And despite what some *coughCheri* might think, the story is quite lovely. :)

If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery
layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and
another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen
table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling
in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away
on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant
never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and
bitter vegetable. In this way, the story of the Baudelaire orphans is like an
onion, and if you insist on reading each and every thin, papery layer in A
Series of Unfortunate Events, your only reward will be 170 chapters of misery in
your library and countless tears in your eyes. Even if you have read the first
twelve volumes of the Baudelaires' story, it is not too late to stop peeling
away the layers, and to put this book back on the shelf to wither away while you
read something less complicated and overwhelming. The end of this unhappy
chronicle is like its bad beginning, as each misfortune only reveals another,
and another, and another, and only those with the stomach for this strange and
bitter tale should venture any farther into the Baudelaire onion. I'm sorry to
tell you this, but that is how the story goes.

Don't pay any attention to Lemony Snicket's repeated warnings. Read the books, they don't make you cry like onions! :)
Anywho, the good things about this series are:

The writing is original and fun: As you can tell from the excerpt, he likes to talk about random things like onions, the water cycle, reasons not to read the book, and various other topics. I think this spices it up a bit, makes it amusing.

The story is good: Although it is the series of UNFORTUNATE events, it has it's happy moments, and in the end, they do, as far as you can tell, live happily ever after.

Emotion: It really brings emotions out. You laugh at the funny parts, I've cried a few times, and at the intense parts when theres action, you sit on the edge of your seat wondering what might happen.

The movie was cute and funny, but didn't really do much justice to the books. They are really great! On the top ten series list, their pretty far up there. :D

Truman Capote is Amazing

2006-11-11T14:27:00.000-08:00

Breakfast at Tiffany's and A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote

I decided to read Breakfast at Tiffany's because I really love the author (I read In Cold Blood in high school and, though it's about the murder of a family in Kansas, the investigation, and the life of the two men resposonsible, I really liked it. It sounds as if it'd be some creepy thriller or detective story or something, but it wasn't. It was really intelligent the way Capote wrote it and I can't help but add it to my recommendations.) and I love the movie that was inspired by the book. But, if you've seen the movie you've basically read the book. It really was exactly the same. Which is okay because I love it. I just didn't feel like I gained anything by reading it, any new information or insights I mean. Don't get me wrong, it's a great story about the free spirit of Holly Golightly told from the perspective of the man who falls in love with her. It's very enchanting and Capote's style is unique and fun. So, if you haven't seen the movie, though I doubt anyone hasn't, read the book instead or first. The end is a little different, and it does make you think about why Capote would have chosen to end it like that. He is a really great author. All in all, the movie did the book justice, which can't be said of too many these days.

Anyway, following Breakfast at Tiffany's (at least in this publication) are some of Capote's short stories including his most famous, "A Christmas Memory." Oh, I absolutely loved it! It was so charming and fun to read! I read it once a long time ago, maybe as a freshman in high school, but I had completely forgotten about it, until now. If you haven't read it I highly recommend it. It's absolutely beautiful. The language he uses guides you through his memory and brings it to life. The story is really touching and definitely worth a read. Just one more reason to love Truman Capote!

Here's To You, Jesusa!

2006-11-11T13:17:00.000-08:00

This is a phenomenal story of a woman's search for identity in the volatile years of the Mexican Revolution. The story follows Jesusa from her earliest memories in a countryside with her family, to the life of a working-class elderly woman in the maze of Mexico City. The reader sees it all, from the peace of childhood to the discovery of her spirituality to industrialization. It seems as though Poniatowska creates Jesusa's narrative to serve as a metaphor for Mexico and what it is experiencing politically, socially, and psychologically at this time. Jesusa is the heroine of the story and, although she is at times so outrageous and difficult to understand, her strength, humor and sense of self give the first-person narrative such an overwhelming authority. For instance:

"Me, imprisoned in my pots and pans, but I'm not much of a fighter anymore or as mean on the streets now, because I got old and now my blood doesn't boil and I've lost my strength and my hair fell out and I just have pegs for teeth, I'd scratch myself, but I don't have any fingernails left after so many came out in the laundry sink. And here I am now, just waiting for it to strike five in the morning because I can't sleep and it all comes back to me, everything I've been through since I was little and I walked around barefoot, fighting in the Revolution like playing blindman's bluff, being beaten, more unwrapped each time in this fucked up life."

Poniatowska is most famous for a collection of memories from surivors of the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, "Massacre in Mexico." Because of her career as both a novelist and journalist her works combine fiction and documentary forms such as archival pictures, oral histories, and interviews. The introduction of Here's To You Jesusa! has a detailed account of interviews between Poniatowska and a woman that Jesusa's character is based on. This is an extremely compelling and heart-wrenching novel and I highly recommend it.

The Start of More to Come

2006-11-07T22:40:00.000-08:00

Cold Mountain
This book, by author Charles Frazier centers around three characters and their attempts to overcome the trials brought on by the civil war. Inman is the wounded soldier who has left the war. He has realized he is fighting for a cause in which he doesn't believe and he simply wants nothing more than to return to his home and the girl he loves. Ada is left alone as the men are gone to fight and her father has redently died, leaving her to fend for herself. Ruby arrives in time to help Ada learn the skills it takes to survive as they work together to create a home and refuge.

I really liked reading this book because I love reading about events and people in a way that could be true. It helps me to experience the way life was or might have been in a time that I otherwise only know about from history books. So, instead of just giving facts and numbers like history classes do, this story brings the event to life and gives it perspective and turns the past into something real that changed and effected lives. The story was alive with the passion of the characters and the description the author provides of life in the south for both soldiers and those left behind.

The Birth House

2006-10-25T23:26:00.000-07:00

WOW! I love this book! I say that in the present tense because I plan on reading it again and again. I really really love it!

The story is set in a small town - Scots Bay, Nova Scotia - in the midst of World War I. Dora, the main character of the novel, is a seventeen year-old girl on the brink of womanhood and a pre-destined midwife. The next character (if it were a movie she would be the supporting actress) is Marie Babineau, the long-time midwife of the town and a firey cajun woman, from the Louisiana bayou. She made the trek to Nova Scotia by foot after a visit from her (dead) great-grandfather who gave her the gift and knowledge of the traiteurs (healers). She uses all the traditional herbal remedies along with the mystical/religious remedies and takes Dora under her wing because she sees her as the next traiteur for the town.

Being set in the early 20th century, this is also the time of the beginnings of modern medicine. So this small seaside town is torn between the two: midwives or obstetritions, herbs and prayers or chlorophorm and forecepts.

I don't want to say anymore, I just want all of you to read it! It's definitely going to knock one of my books off the my top 10 list. I really could not put it down. It's written in the first person, in Dora's voice, which makes it a really fun read and draws you in from the first page. Plus, there are newspaper articles, ads and journal entries that make it even more fun. I shouldn't give you the wrong idea, though; I almost never cry in books, and this one drew the tears, and made me feel like I had a chicken bone stuck in my throat (remember 'My Girl'?). There are about a hundred child birth scenes, so it won't give anything away to put in an exerpt form one of them, to give you an idea of this book:

Miss B. called out to her, "God knows you're tired, dear, as do all the angels in heaven, so on this next push they're gonna help you get that baby out." Miss B.'s voice was firm. "You ain't got no choice... now here we go. Mother Mary, help this mama, help this baby, Mother Mary, Blessed Virgin, Our Lady of the Moon and the Star of the Sea, Ave Maria Stellas... un, deux, trois..." Mabel closed her eyes and let out a long, anguished wail. Bertine and Sadie cried out loud beside her, moaning right along with her, all three women letting out heavy groans. As the baby slipped out, all milky-looking and wet, I pulled the cord free from its neck. Miss B. scooped the baby up, opening its tiny mouth with her fingers. She held her mouth to the infant's, her cheeks puffing with gentle breaths, then made the sign of the cross over and over as the baby gave its first cry.

I LOVE THIS BOOK!!! At best, it makes me want to be a mid-wife and at worst it makes me want to be a better person...and read more by Ami McKay. I hope all my sisters get a chance to read it. Oh, and there's even a website for this book: http://www.thebirthhouse.com/.

The Lord of the Rings

2006-10-10T13:17:00.000-07:00

Well, it only took me about 8 months, but I finished it! I got through the first two books (The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Tours) pretty quickly, but then I guess I got too busy and The Return of the King took me about 4 months, at least, to finish. But, I'm happy to say I did!

This is one book that I really wish I had read when I was younger, and especially before the movies were made. It was nearly impossible for me to separate the movies from the books, which both added to and took away from my reading experience. For example, the characters already had faces, even before Tolkien described them. I'll always think of Frodo with the face of Elijah Wood and Legolas with the face of Orlando Bloom. On the other hand, I could really appreciate the depth of the book when discovering everything the movie had to leave out. (Admittedly, I couldn't help but feel like Tolkien left out a very important sub-plot between Aragorn and Aowyn.) :-)

I have definitely joined everyone else in the world who is completely floored with Tolkien's ability to create an entirely different world, leaving out nothing, down to most (seemingly)insignificant details. I love how every group of people (if you can call them all people - elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, dunedain, wizards, humans, ents...) had their own detailed history which created who they were throughout the story and gave insight as to why they chose to live however the lived, why they said what they said and why they did what they did. That continued to surprise me throughout the whole trilogy; it all came across so naturally.

My favorite times in the book were always with the hobbits. I was always waiting for the next chapter that would go back to Sam and Frodo or to Merry and Pippin. The rest was, of course, wonderful too, but I really love the hobbits. Samwise Gamgee will always be #1 in my heart. :-) The moments at the end of the Two Towers, while Frodo is being attacked by Shilob and Sam fights and kills her and takes the ring to try and finish the task alone, and then saves Frodo after he finds out that he's still alive - those were my proudest moments.

I'm sure I'm the last sister to read this book, so I want to know who/what you're favorites were! I love you all!

Goose Girl

2006-09-26T21:49:00.000-07:00

Goose Girl is a fun, rich, real-feeling development of a classic fairy tale.

Housekeeping

2006-09-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her novel Gilead. Housekeeping, written in 1980, is her first and only other work of fiction. It’s the story of Ruthie and her sister Lucille, who grow up under the care of their grandmother, and when she died, of their great aunts Lily and Nona, and when they fled, of their aunt Sylvie. They live in the tiny Idaho town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake where their grandfather died when his train went off the bridge and where their mother died when she drove off a cliff. It is a story about loss and longing, about how family bonds outlast absence and even death.

Housekeeping is a dark and dreamy novel, abstract, ponderous, murky. It's a slow-paced book of very little plot and very beautiful language which is often challenging—steeped in metaphor and foggy with abstraction. It is a book about becoming, about the devastating losses that lead to Ruthie becoming a transient, a ghost. “When did I become so unlike other people?” she asks herself at the end. “Either it was when I followed Sylvie across the bridge, and the lake claimed us, or it was when my mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain.” It's that sense of absence, of what her life does not contain, that so haunts Ruthie.

What is good about this book:

Details, when they are provided, are wonderful—concrete and specific, very closely observed. Check this out:

I have often wondered what it seemed like to Sylvie to come back to that house, which would have changed since she left it, shifted and settled. I imagine her with her grips in her bare hands, walking down the middle of the road, which was narrowed by the banks of plowed snow on either side, and narrowed more by the slushy pools that were forming at the foot of each bank. Sylvie always walked with her head down, to one side, with an abstracted and considering expression, as if someone were speaking to her in a soft voice. But she would have glanced up sometimes at the snow, which was the color of heavy clouds, and the sky, which was the color of melting snow, and all the slick black planks and sticks and stumps that erupted as the snow sank away.

I like how carefully she describes the road, the colors of the sky and snow, the tilt of Sylvie’s head, the expression on her face. Too, Ruthie is really only imagining this scene, and this is something else I enjoyed about the book—the narrator imagining how things must have been for others, what a given situation might have been like for them, what might have happened if…. There is something really generous about the way she thinks, and the book ends very satisfyingly with one such imagining.

Location plays an amazing role in this book. It casts a pall of gloom that is never really interrupted. The setting is stark and cheerless, a sort of gray watery vastness that is not exactly pleasant, but I have to admire Robinson’s skillful use of place to create a mood and set a tone. Water images pervade the book, the lake is a constant, haunting presence, and the landscape—the ring of mountains that surrounds the lake—eclipses the small town, engulfing it in a “spacious silence that seemed to ring like glass.” It's eerie and beautiful.

Also I was impressed by the use of imagery. In fact a person of greater ambition than I could write a very decent paper tracing Ruthie’s journey from fairly normal child to ghostly transient through the image of a lit house at night, of looking at a lit house from the outside. The first use of this image is very early in the book, when the two sisters are coming home late from ice skating on the lake:

“We walked the blocks from the lake to our grandmother’s house, jealous to the point of rage of those who were already accustomed to the light and the
somnolent warmth of the houses we passed…When we finally came to our house, which was low and set back and apart by its orchard, we were not much surprised to see it still standing, the porch and kitchen lights shining as warmly as any we had passed.”

At this point, when they are so young, the lit house simply represents physical comfort and shelter, the security of knowing their aunts are waiting inside, though too in that scene there is an ominous mention of the darkness hovering just outside the lights. Moving through the book the lit house image appears repeatedly, becoming a more overt symbol of the sort of shelter provided by familial bonds, human relations. Finally at the end, there is a strange, shocking scene where the entire house—every last window—is lit up, and Ruthie, outside in the dark orchard, can’t imagine going inside. Entering would somehow mean the further loss or forgetting of “her kind”—which I took to mean her mother, her grandfather, grandmother, all the people she’s lost—and so the physical comfort would not, in fact, comfort.

Finally, it is a story about sisters, about the close bond of sisterhood and the devastating effects of that bond being broken. I like reading about sisters.

What I did not so much enjoy:

I had difficulty wading through this book. As I said before, it’s slow and murky, and that made it not a book that I couldn’t wait to pick up again—I had to force myself to read it sometimes. Too, the language is occasionally bogged down by strange word choices and muddled abstractions. Here’s an example:

I remember Sylvie walking through the house with a scarf tied around her hair, carrying a broom. Yet this was the time that leaves began to gather in the corners. They were leaves that had been through the winter, some of them worn to a net of veins. There were scraps of paper among them, crisp and strained from their mingling in the cold brown liquors of decay and regeneration, and on these scraps there were sometimes words. One read Powers Meet, and another, which had been the flap of an envelope, had a penciled message in anonymous hand: I think of you. Perhaps Sylvie when she swept took care not to molest them. Perhaps she sensed a Delphic niceness in the scattering of these leaves and paper, here and not elsewhere, thus and not otherwise.

You see how the paragraph starts out with lovely, concrete details and then devolves into something very like nonsense? Delphic niceness? Does anyone know what that means? and what the heck are those last two phrases?

Anyway, my final verdict: Housekeeping is a novel I respect, and a reading experience I value, even if I did not entirely enjoy it. If you do read it, give yourself time to read very slowly. Savor the beauty of its language and the chill of its disturbing, quiet drama.

Palate Cleansers

2006-09-14T21:12:00.000-07:00

In between amazing books I needed a breather—a palate cleanser, if you will. So this is what I read: Ghost World, a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes (“now a major motion picture”). It’s a subtle, complex portrayal of two recent high school graduates, Enid and Rebecca, as they try to figure out what to do next. It’s kind of just about growing pains—two longtime friends attempting to discover who they are, navigating the changes they each see occuring the other. It’s an insightful, funny, sad, engaging book. One of the things I most enjoyed about it was actually not the girls but the book's depiction of the poor souls trying to parent them. Mainly I was interested in Enid’s dad who hovers anxiously, trying to let his daughter be who she will be, make her own choices even when they’re clearly bad ones. My favorite part was a scene with a big fight between the two friends and then the dad digging up his daughter’s old record player and a record she listened to as a child. It’s a heartbreakingly sweet moment which I do not explain well at all—you'll have to see for yourself. I do recommend this book unless you are squeamish about four-letter words and some “adult” material. It captures so well the fragile adolescent ego, the vulnerability, angst, cruelty, and self-doubt. And the graphics are pretty amazing: done in ghostly pale colors, they speak volumes in facial expression and body language.

Palate cleanser #2: Letters to a Young Poet. This slender volume is comprised of 10 short letters written by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to the student of one of his own former teachers. The letters are what one Amazon reviewer calls “a sublime, one-on-one equivalent of the modern writing workshop” in which the poet warmly encourages and instructs the student. But you don’t have to be a writer to appreciate these letters. What I loved about them (learned most from) is their generosity—they’re incredibly compassionate, empathetic and wise, written with the warmest regard and concern for the recipient while sharing beautiful truths that apply to all. Rilke is at once humble and authoritative, and his sentences are so graceful, so elegant—these letters are wonderful to read for the language alone. He does write about writing a lot, about the aloneness of the creative spirit, but also writes about reading, about how to judge literature, about the dangers of a too-ironic worldview, about how to love, how to find beauty in the smallest things, how to win oneself back from “the demands of the multiplicities that speak and chatter”—I loved that part of the 5th letter. This was a perfect palate cleanser for me—a small book, simple, beautiful and wise.

the curious incident of the dog in the night-time

2006-09-01T23:35:00.001-07:00

Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7, 057. He can also square 2 up to over 30 million. He cannot stand to be touched.He hates the yellow and brown. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. Christopher is autistic. The novel is Christopher's very own book he has decided to write. He loves mystery novels. He loves Sherlock Holmes but hates Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

One night he discovers Mrs. Shear's dog Wellington with a pitch fork in his belly. Laying in the yard. He decides to find out who killed Wellington and write a detective book documenting his investigation.

So this is the book. It is amazing (I stole Lisa's word ha). It was so interesting reading from the view point of an autistic boy. The back of the book says its like The Catcher in the Rye. But I've read that too. And it isn't. Holden Caulfield is just wierd. It never says what the heck is wrong with him. He just is a freak. I'm pretty sure. Christopher Boone is a genius with some emotional issues :). Here is a paragraph to show how cool this book is:

Eight years ago, when I first met Siobhan, she showed me this picture : ( and I knew that it meant "sad," which is what I felt when I found the dead dog. Then she showed me this picture : ) and I knew that it meant "happy," like when I'm reading about the Apollo space missions, or when I am still awake at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. in the morning and I can walk up and down the street and pretend that I am the only person in the whole world. The she drew me some other pictures ; ) (angry face) (confused face) : o [sorry i couldn't make those faces] but I was unable to say what these meant. I got Siobhan to draw lots of these faces and then write down next to them exactly what they meant. I kept the piece of paper in my pocket and took it out when I didn't understand what someone was saying. But it was very difficult to decide which of the diagrams was most like the face they were making because some people's faces move very quickly.

So anyway, theres a peek of the book. It gets cooler than that paragraph but it's really late in the night-time and I just want to sleep. So just read the book. It is good and a really easy read, and a quick read, and it is just swell.

"A Mind Full of Fabulations"

2006-08-30T20:25:00.000-07:00

Flapper truly is a madcap chronicle of just about everything Jazz Age! Not simply a story of sex and the “new woman,” though the sub-title might suggest otherwise, Joshua Zeitz’s latest work of non-fiction takes a thorough and comprehensive look into history. Popular culture from the turn of the 20th century to pre-WWII; from Muncie, Indiana to Hollywood to Harlem: Zeitz has covered it.

Zeitz begins by introducing us to the quintessential flapper herself, Zelda Fitzgerald. He crowns her and her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald as the royal couple of the Jazz Age. Though the story is dedicated to the emergence of a “new woman:” one who throws off the tenets of her traditional upbringing in order to support herself in America’s cities; who rejects the corset and opts instead for the loose, modern garb of the suffragettes; a daring, attractive, open-minded, self-aware, and adventurous (albeit, sometimes dangerous) young woman, Zeitz continually brings the story back to the era’s most melodramatic couple. By pairing the trajectory of the Fitzgeralds' rise and fall with the changes taking place nationwide, the reader gets a big-pictures story of the 20’s, mirrored by the personal lives of two of its greatest characters.

Literature, music and the personalities of the Roaring 20’s have always fascinated me so I really enjoyed that this book offers so many interesting and hilarious details. This is an entertaining study of how cultural, social and economic shifts reshaped the nation and made room for this new generation of girls.

A few interesting points:

The evolution of urban societies in the 20’s:
"The mass entry of women into the workforce was part of a longer trend toward industrialization and urbanization, a process that reached its crescendo in 1920, when the Census Bureau announced that the United States was no longer a nation of small farmers. For the first time ever, more Americans (51 percent) lived in cities than in the countryside. Though the Census Bureau counted any municipality with more than 2,500 residents as “urban,” most of the country’s new urban majority lived in cities with more than 100,000 residents. In real numbers, the change is staggering. Between 1880 and 1920, the number of people living in cities with a population of at least 8,000 jumped from 6.2 million to 54.3 million"!

New social trends:
Flapper describes the dramatic increase of patents each year (“It took more than 100 years for the U.S. patent office to issue its millionth patent in 1911; within 15 years, it had issued its two-millionth.”), the decline in the national birth rate (from 7.04 in 1800 to 3.17 in 1920), and the money for “non-essentials” that flooded the market throughout a period of steady economic prosperity.

Consumerism and a new, modern self-image:
Through this prosperity and the beginnings of what would become an enthusiastic culture of consumerism, came department stores. These stores distributed catalogues to every rural family so that they, too, could enjoy the novelty of modern appliances, canned produce, European fashion trends, and participate in the nation-wide whole-life make-over. Advertising companies began to sprout up, eager for the opportunity to “appeal to the anxieties of urban Americans who lived in proximity to one another and experienced the daily angst of anonymity and public scrutiny.” As an example, after a company came up with the idea of halitosis as the technical term for bad breath (it didn’t originally come from the AMA) and invented mouth wash, they saw sales of Listerine – formerly only used on cuts and scrapes – “skyrocket by 33 percent after just one month of the add campaign.” Here is the campaign:

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride….Edna’s case was a really pathetic one. Like every woman her primary ambition was to marry….Most of the other girls of her set were….And as her birthdays crept gradually toward the tragic thirty-mark, marriage seemed further and further away….Listerine.
And so it went with all sorts of new disorders: “dandruff, athlete’s foot, body odor, face wrinkles, dry or oily hair, acne, rough skin. Beneath every imperfection lurked a disastrous end – a lost job, a lost love, a missed opportunity. And for every danger there was a cure….”

I loved reading about the details of the emergence of not just a new generation of rowdy and sexually-charged young women, but a new identity as a nation. The elements that shaped young people’s lives were not simply about a new generation but about fundamental shifts toward modern life and a new century. It’s all very exciting and the flapper, sexy and loud all night drink and dance-machine that she is, was only a part of the excitement.

Finally, Zeitz’s depiction of the stock market crash, like the Fitgeralds’ celebrity coming to its terribly un-glamorous end, is thoughtful without being onerous or patronizing. Although one can certainly find the short-sightedness and excess of the era, there has also been so much enduring beauty, sophistication and fun from the 20’s: Jazz, 52nd Street and the Charleston; The New Yorker, Lois Long and Harold Ross; the Rose Room and its literary critics at the famous Algonquin “Round Table;” the automobile; Madison Avenue, the reinvention of women’s fashion (with the help of Coco Chanel), Conde Nast; Hollywood, movies and celebrity; Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn and innovations in dance; hundreds of patents for amusement parks alone! Zeitz brings all of these historical details together easily and exuberantly.

Interestingly, Flapper opens with a quote from Willa Cather: “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts….” Although it isn’t exactly clear if Ms Cather thinks that the dramatic reinventions of the early 20th century are for better or worse, it is, at least, remarkable! One thing that is made clear is Zeitz's feelings on the matter: “The flapper was, in effect, the first thoroughly modern American.”

The Known World

2006-08-27T22:20:00.000-07:00

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, is a book about slavery in the antebellum south, which is, admittedly, not a new topic—it’s been done before, and done well. But I can tell you, this is not like anything you have read before. It’s not a conventional depiction and indictment of slavery, although it is both a depiction and an indictment—it’s just not conventional. Not in any way. It’s mind-blowing. So amazing I don’t even know where to begin talking about it. You know what, don’t even bother reading this post, just go get the book. Go now, in fact. Go to wherever you get books and head straight for the J’s. You have to read this book. Everyone has to read it. Seriously.

Well then, sisters, if you’re still here, you must be asking what is so amazing. I guess a place to start is the place itself: a plantation in Manchester County, Va., owned by Henry Townsend, who was bought out of slavery by his father Augustus only to become a slave-owner himself, to his parents’ horror. The book begins as Henry lies on his deathbed at the age of 31. Jones then takes us back to the boy's youth as a groom and slave to William Robbins, a white slave owner who runs his plantation (and the county, really) with a hardnosed business sense and also is deeply in love with his black mistress. From there the story moves on to what happens after Henry dies, and I won’t give away any more plot.

The crux of the book, the point that is driven home again and again, is that slavery poisons and contaminates everyone who participates in it, and it perverts the notions of justice, humanity, morality, law, love, family, God—basically everything. Even those who don’t participate directly are tainted by it, still often complicit in it. Most are compromised, one way or another; I say most because there are a couple of beautiful beautiful characters who transcend the inevitable horrors and humiliations, whose goodness, in the end, outshines the terrible injustice. Anyway this is a book that, to quote one reviewer, takes the measure of slavery's punishments.

So what is so amazing?

Wonderful details. Jones is said to have done little or no research, just worked off what was in his head (apparently a voracious reader), but you get a very clear sense of what day-to-day life was like for slaves and their masters alike. The details he includes are extremely affecting. As well there are these almost mythical, supernatural scenes that will blow your mind (the opening scene with Moses in the forest, a transformative scene with Stamford and the crows), and what makes these scenes so phenomenal is the amazing details. (Yes, I will continue to use the word "amazing" until you are so sick of it you beg me to find a thesaurus. Because this book is a.ma.zing.)

Incredible emotional impact. The author’s voice is modest and unassuming, his sentences usually economical and restrained, yet smoldering under the surface of his understated words is a quiet indignation. What’s amazing (you see? I can't help myself) is how even though his style is so unobtrusive, he packs a huge emotional punch, page after page. I cried like a baby at the end, no kidding—like a baby who is heartbroken and amazed and moved beyond words by the profound beauty of this book.

Staggering technical skill. The narrative form is highly tangential and the point of view is sort of a kaleidoscopic omniscience—focusing closely on one character or scene, exploring the myriad effects and implications, and then moving on to another in the same way. It reminded me of a tree, actually, each character with his own set of branches. And each character does get a set of branches, not just one branch, because their stories include not just their presents, but also their histories and their lives to come, their deaths, and their legacies that extend to today. This provides an extraordinarily complete context in which to view the characters and judge their actions during the moments of the book's plot, and somehow, impressively, the digressions and asides never confuse or detract from the story.

Marvelously complex characters. There is very little absolute good or evil in this book; instead each character is drawn in one of the many shades in between black and white (I mean this, of course, in terms of morality and ethics.) And unlike some of the other great antebellum lit (think of the long-suffering saint/martyr Uncle Tom and vicious slave-owner Simon Legree), Jones gives the same complexity to black and white alike. Take, for example, the sheriff, John Skiffington. Here is a man who doesn’t believe in owning slaves, but is sworn to protect the investments of those who do. So even though he is someone who wants to do the right thing, someone who believes it wrong to own another human being, someone who wants to believe he can protect everyone equally, he’s still caught in this terrible thing. His livelihood depends on his ability to keep the plantation owners happy, and in the end, despite his commendable aspirations, he does something really really horrible. It’s so sad; but the amazing thing is watching him struggle between the impulses, many good, that compel him in different directions.

Another example: Henry Townsend. The irony of his position is so obvious to the reader, and to his parents and to his slaves (“It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn’t fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made.”), but if Henry is aware of it, he manages to mask it well. He too has what he supposes are good intentions. (“Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known,” Jones writes. “He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master.”) Even though he wants to be a good master, there are inevitable moments of brutality in that role, as when one of his slaves, Elias, escapes. So in Henry you see this remarkable mélange of genuine affection and sickening cruelty. And every character has similar internal conflicts and complexity; every last one is a fully realized person, never a stereotype or cliché. The author has such compassion for all the people he’s created, even the most brutal of the sheriff’s patrollers have life-altering moments where they just can’t take any more or know they’ve gone too far. The book is, as another reviewer put it, a “stunning portrait of moral confusion.”

Last amazing quality I will list: beautiful sentences. Simple yet intricate in what they imply. Deeply felt sentences, resonant with detail and rhythm. Listen, friends:

Someone down in the fields, a woman, was singing. She soon realized that the woman was Celeste. It was not a sad song Celeste was singing and it was not a happy song, just melodious words to fill the silence that would otherwise be claimed by the songs of the birds. The room had been dark when she first opened her eyes, but as the sun rose and rose, it took Celeste’s song and carried it with the light to every corner of the room, and little by little the stiffness of sleep went out of Caldonia and she stretched and yawned and wondered what in the end she would do about Moses.

So beautiful, that part about the song being carried on the light into her room. You see, without him having to say, the life of ease Caldonia (Henry’s widow) enjoys on the backs of her slaves, and there is so much conveyed in that last phrase about Moses, a slave she’s just slept with—her consciousness of her role and his, her detachment as she thinks about him not as a lover but as a problem.

Here is another passage, which I share because it’s heart-stopping. (Note that in this scene Augustus is dead—the after-death scenes in this book are SO extraordinary as the author continues to follow the character that has just died):

Augustus went upstairs and found Mildred sleeping in their bed. He looked at her for a long time, certainly as long as it would have taken him, walking up above it all, to walk to Canada and beyond. Then he went to the bed, leaned over and kissed her left breast.

The kiss went through the breast, through skin and bone and came to the cage that protected the heart. Now the kiss, like so many kisses, had all manner of keys, but it, like so many kisses, was forgetful, and it could not find the right key to the cage. So in the end, frustrated, desperate, the kiss squeezed through the bars and kissed Mildred’s heart. She woke immediately and she knew her husband was gone forever. All breath went and she was seized with such a pain that she had to come to her feet. But the room and the house were not big enough to contain her pain and she stumbled out of the room, out and down the stairs, out through the door that Augustus, as usual, had left open. The dog watched her from the hearth. Only in the yard could she begin to breathe again. And breath brought tears. She fell to her knees, out in the open yard, in her nightclothes, something Augustus would not have approved of.

Augustus died on Wednesday.

I love the poetry in that passage, a rare moment in this book, but so beautiful. And how the poetry is offset by simple, concrete details like the dog at the hearth. The rhythm and the repetition, too, in the sentence that begins “But the room and the house...” So wonderful.

Okay I will stop now. Only want to say, again: seriously, this book is amazing. Immensely moving, painfully wise. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius—really. Please read it. If not now, then one day. You really must read it.

Pendragon

2006-08-07T19:40:00.000-07:00

The Pendragon Series: Journal of an Adventure Through Time and Space: By D.J. MacHale!!

Dang these books are soo cool!! A reader comment on the book says she thinks they're better than Harry Potter...but even these sweet books couldn't be better than Harry Potter! Man! They are FANTASTIC though. Cheri, I think your kids would love them! So the premise is (i don't know if premise is the right word..) the main character Bobby Pendragon is on his way out the door of his house to play in the big basketball game of the season. He's the star of the team but he never makes it there. Right before he leaves his Uncle Press comes to his house and tells him he's a Traveler. A Traveler is someone who goes through the flumes (tunnels that magically and kind of unexplainably take the travelers to other "territories" or planets) to all the territories (there are 10 which include 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Earth. 2nd earth is right now, 1st is in the 1920's or so, and 3rd is in the distant future). Each territory will have a "turning point". A time when the future of the territory will change drastically either for the better or the worse. But there is a bad guy. His name is Saint Dane and he is trying to make the turning points turn the wrong way so he can rule "Halla" (everything, everyone, and every time that ever was and will be). It also makes it worse that Saint Dane can change his appearance to anyone so that the travelers never know who he is. So off they go to the territories. In the first (The Merchant of Death) they go to Denduron which is in medievil times with knights and everything. There Bobby meets Osa and Loor the travelers from Zadaa (which is like Africa). In the second (The Lost City of Faar) they go to Cloral which is a world entirely of water. The people there live on huge-mongous boat/islands that have whole cities and farms and everything on them. The traveler from Cloral is Spader (he's my fave : D). In the third (the Never War) Bobby goes to the first and third earths (but the turning point is on first) and meets the traveler Gunny. In the fourth (the Reality Bug) he goes to Veelox which is normal in appearance and the people are humans and all, but there's this thing called Lifelite that you go into and live in your fantasies. So everyone, except the people that run the machines, is asleep and in Lifelite. The traveler from Veelox is Aja Killian. In the fifth (Black Water) they go to Eelong, where the "civilized" beings are large talking jungle cats. The humans are basically their slaves so that makes things a bit difficult for Bobby to be there. The traveler there is named Kasha. In the 6th (the Rivers of Zadaa) he obviously goes to Zadaa where the black people live above land which is desert but they have rivers until the white people who live underground take all the water underground with them, starting a nice big war. In the newest book, the seventh (the Quillan Games) Bobby goes to Quillan where the people are basically zombies and they have to gamble on games in order to get food and clothes and such. If they lose bad stuff happens. So it's pretty wacked out. Anyway that was a short but not so short summary of it all. That was like the very minimum I could've told you. Just take my word for it these books are Sweet with a capital S! I can't wait for the 8th one (Pendragon the Great) which should come out next summer. So there'll probably be Harry Potter 7 and Pendragon 8!! WOOHOO!!! Check them out at this website: http://www.thependragonadventure.com/.

Shopgirl

2006-08-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

Shopgirl is Steve Martin’s novella about the complex relationships of bored / depressed / profoundly vulnerable sales girl and aspiring artist, Mirabelle. She works the glove counter at Neiman’s (“When you work in the glove department you are selling things that nobody buys any more.”) so most of her days are spent wishing for someone to talk to. She is just lonely enough to get involved with aimless slacker Jeremy, whom she meets at a laundromat. They have a brief thing, and then about the time Jeremy sets off on a months-long road trip as a rock band's roady, Mirabelle meets Ray Porter: 50-something, rich, charming, equal parts well-intentioned and self-deluding. She hands herself over to him, piece by piece, and in return he gives her money (pays off her credit card, student loan): “These gifts, though he doesn’t know it, are given so that she will be all right after he leaves her.” Ray is with her because he needs to be near someone while he waits for the right person to come along; Mirabelle believes he will return her love.

So together they exist, for a while, in a “temporary but poorly constructed heaven.” Ray showers her with kindness, and even helps her through a paralyzing bout of depression (usually kept at bay with pharmaceuticals), but still wants only “a square inch of her and not all of her.” Then one day he decides to tell her he has slept with someone else:

He had debated with himself for two hours while flying to Los Angeles. Tell
her, or not? But she had asked him to tell her. She must have meant it. Plus it
wasn’t love; it was a f--k. Plus, she had asked him to tell her. He thought this
was a new feminism thing that he is honor bound to oblige; that if he doesn’t,
he’s a pig. That he will actually come off well by telling her.... But whatever his thought process was, whatever he told himself was the right thing to do, was false. Because his logic was not based in any understanding of her heart, and he continues to misread her.

This brings the relationship to an messy end, though they stay in touch and actually remain friends: “He sees, finally, that as much as he believed he was imposing his will on her, she was also imposing her need on him, and their two dispositions interlocked. And the consequence was a mutual education.”

Meanwhile, on the road, Jeremy listens to self-help tapes on relating to women and finally starts to cross the threshold into adulthood. When he comes back, he and Mirabelle hook up again:

Mirabelle takes months to accept Jeremy, and Jeremy patiently waits…. Where his insight comes from as he courts her, even he doesn’t know…. But unlike Ray Porter, his love is fearless and without reservation. As Jeremy offers her more of his heart, she offers equal parts of herself in return. One night, sooner than she would have liked, which made it irresistible, they make love for the second time in two years. But this time, Jeremy holds her for a long while, and they connect in a deep and profound way. At this point, Jeremy surpasses Mr. Ray Porter as a lover of Mirabelle, because as clumsy as he is, what he offers her is tender and true.

The gist of this little book is that “it’s pain that changes our lives,” and that whatever happens, and whatever is felt along the way—the despair and neediness and vulnerability, the hope and warmth and tenderness—it’s all part of the school of life.

Martin’s wisdom and insight, his perceptive observations, are so pleasing—and surprising, especially if you’re just looking for comedy. What’s good about this book is its mood—quiet and melancholy with a twist of disarming. Also its pace—careful and deliberate. As well, he uses an uncommonly omniscient narrator to get into everyone’s heads, detailing out the mutual incomprehension that defines Mirabelle’s early encounter with Jeremy and then with Ray Porter.

The movie (good, by the way) was wrongly billed as a romantic comedy—it’s too sad and sweet and true to be very funny, though there are moments of wry, ironic humor—but both book and movie are sweet little gems which I recommend (though perhaps not highly).

I Am Still Alive and Reading

2006-07-24T23:40:00.000-07:00

Sorry about never writing. The only time I ever have to read is after midnight sometime, depending on when I get off work. Oh the joys of life!

Okay, so it seems to be well understood that Jane Austen is amazing and the author of the classics that most people have read and love b/c of the characters she creates and their timeless tales of love and friendship. Having already experienced the joys of her genius while reading Emma and Pride and Prejudice, I can honestly say that I agree with that understanding whole heartedly. And Sense and Sensibilty is no exception. At first, I admit, it was hard for me to set my mind back a couple centuries and focus on what I was reading b/c of the Elizabethan language and Austen's seemingly long-winded descriptions of events. Despite this setback, it wasn't long for my modern brain to adjust to the style and get sucked right into the life of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. They are characters who, similar to both Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennett, the reader cannot help but admire b/c of their individual minds and strengths.

Elinor is a thoughful and devoted sister and daughter who is considerate of all yet is reserved in her attitude and communication (thus comes the sense). Marianne is quite the opposite. She is full of emotion and romance (here is the sensibility) yet has few reservations about revealing her thoughts and feelings to the world. Throughout the novel, the reader knows that all will be well with the Dashwoods but it is the path to the happy ending that is clouded with questions of how and when. For Marianne, the imaginative and lively girl who has dreams of perfection in love, the ending seemed to have been exactly as she has hoped. But her ideals came crashing to the floor when a scandal was revealed and her love vanished leaving her hurt and confused. Elinor, on the other hand, suffered from a secret ache as the man she loved was confidetially revealed to her to be engaged to a woman who she could never possibly admire due to the woman's lack of sense and propriety. The sisters both learned from their trials and became stronger coming to rely on one another for the sense that they needed in their mixed up and painful worlds. Sense and Sensibility is a beautiful tale of love of family and finding happiness when all seems lost. The end is touching as one reads of Marianne's turn from a zealous romantic and outspoken child to a mature woman who has experienced the joys of love, lost herself in the pain of heartache, and found herself a new and wiser being through the example of her patient and good sister who is her anchor through all things. It is b/c of this turn about that she is able to finally find lasting love and happiness. Elinor's ending is equally pleasing as she is ultimately blessed with her secret wish of marrying the one man she thought she could never have. As always, Jane Austen has delivered a romantic and witty tale that has been able to overcome the barriers of time and will continue to endure in the hearts of readers for years to come.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

2006-07-24T21:46:00.000-07:00

I’m so used to breezing by the non-fiction tables at the bookstore that though I have many times seen books by David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked), I never stopped to take a second look. Until now. And I couldn’t be more thrilled to have found this entertaining, witty, insightful essayist. But I also discovered that Sedaris is not in fact new to me—I’ve heard him on NPR, and just now realized that he wrote "The Santaland Diaries," a very funny piece about his experience as a Christmas elf at Macy’s which I saw performed four years ago at Portland Center Stage. (It was a total crack-up, followed by another one-man performance of the heartwarming/heartbreaking story “A Christmas Memory” by Truman Capote, one of my favorite things to read during the holidays).

Anyway. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is a collection of personal essays that parades before readers wise enough to stop at non-fiction tables Sedaris’s self-depracating, sardonic wit. Topics stem largely from his personal relationships, and he spares no one—least of all his nearest and dearest—but is seldom (if ever) actually mean-spirited. On the contrary, pretty well every essay, however cynical and biting it may start out, ends with a moment of raw, exposed human emotion, or some insightful Truth that lends a warm glow of tenderness to the absurdity he’s just trotted out. Take, for example, “Let it Snow.” Young David is in 5th grade, and he and his sisters are snowed out of school. “On the fifth day of our vacation my mother had a little breakdown,” he writes. “Our presence had disrupted the secret life she led while we were in school, and when she could no longer take it she threw us out. It wasn’t a gentle request, but something closer to an eviction. ‘Get the hell out of my house,’ she said.”

After several hours in the outdoors, the kids devise the rather desperate attention-getting plan of getting hit by a car; when they’re ratted out by a well-meaning neighbor, their mother comes to fetch them:

Another car passed and then we saw our mother, this puffy figure awkwardly negotiating the crest of the hill. She did not own a pair of pants, and her legs were buried to the calves in snow. We wanted to send her home, to kick her out of nature as she had kicked us out of the house, but it was hard to stay angry at someone that pitiful-looking.

“Are you wearing your loafers?” Lisa asked, and in response our mother raised her bare foot. “I was wearing loafers,” she said. “I mean, really, it was there a second ago.”

This was how things went. One moment she was locking us out of our own house and the next we were rooting around in the snow, looking for her left shoe. “Oh forget about it,” she said. “It’ll turn up in a few days.” Gretchen fitted her cap over my mother’s foot. Lisa secured it with her scarf, and surrounding her tightly on all sides, we made our way back home.

In “Put a Lid on It” Sedaris describes his nutty sister who trolls garbage bins for anything she can sell (or eat—shudder) and basically lives like an animal, but at the end of the chapter there is a lovely, distilled moment in which he steps back and takes a look at himself, acknowledging that the real problem is not his sister’s unusual lifestyle but his own need to make her into something he can understand, to fix her. There are lots more examples, but this is getting long. So I will just say, do yourself a favor and read something by David Sedaris. His extraordinary, sharp wit made me laugh out loud, but each chapter seems to boil down to some really poignant insight, such as: when it comes to family, forgiveness is automatic (got that from the jacket). Or this, from a chapter called “Who’s the Chef” in which he's frustrated by an argument with his boyfriend Hugh: “Dead or alive, I'd have no peace, and so I let it go, the way you have to when you’re totally dependent on somebody.” Loved that line.

Another three for Dan

2006-07-17T21:14:00.000-07:00

I am the Messenger by Markus Zusak: Underaged cab driver Ed Kennedy has little to do except share a run-down apartment with his faithful yet smelly dog, drive his taxi, and play cards and drink with his similarly washed-up friends. Then, after he stops a bank robbery, Ed begins receiving anonymous messages marked in code on playing cards in the mail. Usually the messages instruct him to be at a certain address at a certain time. So with nothing to lose, Ed embarks on a series of missions as random as a toss of dice: sometimes daredevil, sometimes heartwarmingly safe. He rescues a woman from nightly rape by her husband. He buys a poor family new christmas light to light up their house, and their lives. But after all the things he does, the last question is who is sending the messages, and why? The person sends gangsters to beat him up. So apparently they don't care much about his well-being, but do care about these random people living on Glory Road (no that has nothing to do with the movie : ) , it was just the only address from the book I could remember) etc. Anyway, it was great! Very action packed. I'm in to action books lately, as you will see, since 2 out of the 3 are action books. Also, it kind of reminded me of the M. Night Shyalaman movie Unbreakable because of how he just had this instinct of what to do. Only on the first card out of four did they tell him exactly where to go, on the remaining three he had to figure it out on his own, and then every time he just knew what he needed to do to help the people he was sent to. It was great!

The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum: This is A LOT different from the movie. It had this assassin named Carlos that was going after Jason Bourne because Jason wasn't really Jason his name is Daniel Webb and he was hired by Treadstone to pretend to be an assassin so they could arrest Carlos. And (I'm just going to assume you've all seen the movie) the thing with Marie is WAY different. Instead of paying her for a ride he kidnaps her, and then the assassins going after him "rescue" her and then get him and then they're going to go kill her but Jason saves her after he kills the guys that were going to kill him. So that's why they fall in love. Anyway, it's action packed and all that jazz :) Pretty darn sweet!

The Simple Gift by Steven Herrick: A free-verse novel told in three voices. Billy, 16, says good riddance to his abusive father and hops a freight train. Settling in a small town in Australia that has a friendly librarian and a train yard with abandoned cars to call home. He adjusts quickly to life as a bum, figuring out how to eat and keep clean. Intelligent and mature, the teen thinks about cruelty, compassion, and what his life has become–"I'm poor, homeless, but I'm not stupid." He meets and falls in love with Caitlin, a rich and dissatisfied girl who quickly sees there is more to Billy than a starving bum grabbing leftovers off the tables in McDonald's. He also befriends Old Bill, a homeless drunk who teaches him a few things, including how to earn money. Billy has little to offer but compassion, and that's what these two people so desperately need. All three of them are able to give the simplest gifts to one another in this beautiful, subtle, and sensitive story. (If you couldn't tell I totally stole that thing from amazon haha). So, it's fantastic! It was a really quick read, since it was all written poem style. Free-verse though, so it was like reading a book but shorter. It turned out that Old Bill isn't really a bum, he only wants to be. He has a house, but his daughter fell out of a tree and died, and a year later his wife died in a drunk driving accident. So he doesn't want to live in his house anymore. So when the welfare guys come around asking where Billy lives, they tell them Old Bill's address. Billy moves in, and Caitlin comes often to make dinner..and there is also some love scenes indirectly portrayed. Anywho it was pretty darn good :)

Anna Karenina

2006-07-11T20:25:00.000-07:00

First, a brief and woefully inadequate plot summary: Anna Karenina is the story of a fashionable married woman who seems to have it all – beauty, wealth, a sensible (read insipid) husband, an adored son – until she meets Count Vronsky. Her reaction to Vronsky is immediate, passionate, visceral. So Anna leaves her husband to go and shack up with Vronsky, losing her son and her social position. The story follows her life with Vronsky to its inevitable conclusion: Anna throws herself under the wheels of a train. (Sorry for the spoiler, but this is one of the most famous suicides in literary history, so I really think the cat's out of the etc.) It is to Tolstoy's credit that Anna is not an entirely selfish person, nor motivated by entirely evil (or obvious) impulses. In fact she is a fairly enigmatic character – her motives and her history go largely unexplained, leaving readers to judge for themselves.

There is another storyline, about Levin. (The book may as well be called Anna and Levin – he gets just as much air time as she does.) Levin is a passionate, restless, shy aristocratic landowner who lives on a rural estate which he manages in a very hands-on fashion. He is in love with Anna's brother's sister-in-law, and after a lot of awkwardness they get married, settle down and have a family. Levin is considered to be almost a self-portrait of Tolstoy, representing his views particularly regarding familial happiness as the highest human ideal. Levin also goes through a religious crisis that mirrors Tolstoy's own spiritual struggle: even though he is happy in his family life, he comes very close to suicide because he feels he'll never know the meaning and purpose of his life. He does not, however, end up under a train.

If I had to state one theme or message of the book – though there are many – I would say it is that "we err in imagining that happiness is the realization of our desires." To wit: Anna throws her life away to follow her passion, and ends in ruin. Also, Levin gets the life and love he has so long wished for, but still only finds inner peace and purpose in the Higher Good which is in his power to bring to his corner of the world.

So as not to kowtow too deeply to Tolstoy and this book, I will state a grievance or... three:
1. In order to demonstrate the joy and peace found in honest hard work and decent family relations, Tolstoy paints the peasant class as a cheerful, healthy, rosy-cheeked lot who chatter merrily and sing rollicking songs as they work. Any resentment of the wealthy, land-owning class is "drowned in a sea of common cheerful labor," as if the labor is its own reward and the fact that they don't enjoy its fruits is irrelevant. This struck me as unrealistic and improbable.

2. I felt Tolstoy treated some women's issues too lightly (e.g. the question of women's education is literally laughed off). I did, however, appreciate the both implied and explicit acknowledgement that infidelity is punished unequally for men and women by both society and the law. The double standard is shown as grossly unfair, as Anna is ruined while her philandering brother is promoted at work as well as in society.

3. There are some very long and seemingly extraneous sections (e.g. Levin's hunting trip, the provincial elections, philosophical debates on education, farming, and the development of Russian society and economy). These may be interesting from a historical perspective, but they do little to advance themes or propel the plot forward.

But geesh, let's face it, who am I to judge Leo Tolstoy? This is one of the great novels of all time. It's a beautiful, tragic, timeless story and a rich, expansive evocation of 19th-century Russia. I was surprised to find Anna Karenina so approachable, and though it did take me a long time to wade through its 800+ pages, I did not for a moment regret the time spent. It's the kind of book that reminds me why I was an English major.

Empire Falls

2006-07-02T19:18:00.000-07:00

I recently watched the HBO movie of Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, and it reminded me how great the book was. I read it a while ago, so for a summary I will just refer you to this reading group guide. (This is a good resource, by the way, for those who have a book group or just want food for thought. It’s got reading group guides for tons of books. Click “Find a Guide” to browse all the titles.)

Anyway, Empire Falls is a pretty amazing book, and I’m not just saying that because Russo won a Pulitzer Prize for it (although that is usually a good sign). The characters and place are vivid and memorable, and the book is funny, scary, heartwrenching, wise and true. I can’t imagine anyone not being totally hooked.

P.S. The HBO movie version (available on DVD) actually does pretty well by the book, and it’s got a great cast that includes (but is not limited to) Paul Newman, Ed Harris, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Helen Hunt and Robin Wright Penn.

Leaves of Grass

2006-06-26T16:19:00.000-07:00

OK, “Song of Myself” drove me crazy. I guess the title should have been warning enough. First, and obviously, it was self obsession squared. Beyond that, I didn't find that much poetry in it. I checked my English and American anthologies and didn't find anyone else doing free verse anywhere near that time, so I guess Whitman invented it? (Wikipedia confirms this.) Whether or not I like him, I guess Whitman deserves much credit for revolutionizing poetry, and maybe literature in general.

I'll grant him some alliteration. But where is the imagery? Personification? Symbolism or metaphor? Poetry has become a pretty open-ended affair since Whitman, and much of my favorite poetry is free verse, but, in more ways than using lines and stanzas instead of sentences and paragraphs, poetry ought somehow to be distinct from prose.

In later versions, Whitman did eliminate most of the distracting ellipses and exclamation marks from “Song of Myself,” but other than that it remains virtually unchanged. It's consistent with his own declared worldview that he wouldn't see any changes needed in the “barbaric yawp” he first belted out. Indeed, he is proudly “less the reminder of property or qualities, and more the reminder of life.” “What blurt is it about virtue and about vice?” “I exist as I am, that is enough.”

D.H. Lawrence . . . characterized Whitman’s poetry as “long sums in addition and multiplication, of which the answer is invariably MYSELF. He reaches the state of ALLNESS. And what then? It’s all empty. Just an empty Allness” (Eugene England Beyond Romanticism, 210).

The exaltation of all things to a single level of pantheistic ALLNESS paradoxically reduces their worth. ...Whitman’s exaltation tends to reduce the writings of poetry to an endless cataloguing of indistinguishable and undistinguished particulars, with even their particularity slighted, because the discriminating power inherent in the nature of language is not respected (England, 211).

With Whitman, it's all ecstatically wonderful, and it's all contained within himself. He is the prostitute, the loving mother, the suicide victim bloody on the floor. He is the flatboatman, the seamstress, the president. He even wants to be me, or at least have a relationship with me. I can't remember which poem it was, I just remember the intense repulsion that he could presume to know me, in any sense of the word.

Of every kind of suffering and experience, he says “All this I swallow and it tastes good, I like it well, and it becomes mine,/ I am the man, I suffered, I was there.” And yet he merely catalogs these theoretical individuals in the loosest, most stereotypical and impersonal way. He doesn't see them clearly enough to give me any unique vision. Here is one the most descriptive passages in “Song of Myself”:

The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by
the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck,
the murderous buckshot and the bullets,
All these I feel or am.
I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself
become the wounded person.

Yes, there's some almost-shocking description, but is there any individuality, or does even this relatively detailed (by this poem's standards) description really just represent all slaves who ever tried to escape? I got the feeling from this poem that Whitman really is just about Whitman. He wants to be bigger, to encompass man and nature, but he never steps outside himself long enough to really see anyone or anything else.

But I did like a few of his other poems, mostly “A Noiseless, Patient Spider”—now there's sound and imagery, metaphor and symbolism—and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” a genuine tribute to someone else, with effective images and symbols like the lilacs and the songbird carefully woven through a coherent whole. Even the title has sound and rhythm.

Unlike “Song of Myself,” everything about “A Noiseless, Patient Spider” resonates well with me, especially the sounds. I want to hear it aloud every time I read it, just enough repetition to tickle my tongue and my ear, but changing too, keeping my attention. And all the sounds so perfect for a web, and a soul's longing—v, f, l, s, p—they whisper, vibrating like a gently plucked string. I suppose it's not entirely unlike “Song of Myself,” (it is still Whitman!) but with quieter longing and with real appreciation for the spider and a sense that maybe there is a particular anchorplace for the soul.

I read a lot

2006-06-25T19:53:00.000-07:00

All I ever do is read. I don't have anything else to do. So these are some of the books I have recently read: Hip-hop High School, An Island Like You, Jude, and My Girl.
So...Hip-hop high school by Alan Lawrence Sitomer is about a girl somewhere around L.A. She's black and at her school there's no white people. There's african-american, latino, and some asian. Anyway, so everyone loves hip hop, thats why its called that. :) So the story goes that she has this great older brother thats like the town hero so she has to live up to the expectations of the teachers, and then her best friend becomes a cheer leader and gets pregnant and drops out. So she starts hanging out with this dude Devon who's cool, nice, and the smartest kid in school. Quoting the back of the book, "Together, Devon and Theresa set off on a quest to beat the SAT, prove they are not merely another "urban statistic" and earn their way into top colleges". But then Devon gets shot in the neck in a drive by shooting the day before college applications are due. They aren't sure he's going to live, and Theresa decides to finish his essays for him, and send in his applications to harvard, yale, usc, and a couple other i can't remember. So it's got a nice twist ending, and it's great!
Next: An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio by Judith Ortiz Cofer is a bunch of short stories all kind of connected about Puerto Rican teenagers growing up in a barrio in new jersey. It's great, and has a lot of things about the culture that was fun to read about. Actually...mom stole it, she just picked it up and started to read it. So obviously it's good :).
Jude by Kate Morgenroth: So, he's fifteen and lives with his dad, the drug dealer. one day his dad gets shot, and the killer says that if jude tells who did it, that he'll kill him. Then he finds out the DA is his long lost mother. So he lives with her for a while, but then a kid at his fancy new school, asks him to take him to his old neighborhood to buy drugs. So he does, and when the guy dies, he gets sent to jail. The twist is that his mom's boyfriend, who said he was going to get him out after his mom's politcal election, ends up being a backstabber that did a whole lot of bad things to jude and jude's dad. Anyway, it's a really good one. Action packed!
And of course My Girl. I finished it today. I cried. It was great. :D

Saving the World

2006-06-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

Saving the World is Julia Alvarez’s attempt to answer (or at least ask) the question “is it possible to do good in the world without anyone getting hurt.”

The book has two parallel stories. The first is about Alma, a Dominican author who's in a funk, her next novel years overdue. Her husband works for an NGO and wants her help starting a green center in the Dominican Republic, a world-saving project that turns out to be not as straightforward as advertised. Alma begs off joining him, using her writing and her dying neighbor Helen as an excuse, then spends the next weeks second-guessing her decision and wallowing in loneliness. Richard winds up a hostage, held prisoner with the local AIDS clinic’s staff and patients by a group of young men who want nothing more than “the chance to be a human being.”

This half of the book is overwrought and unconvincing. I never felt as sorry for the hostage-takers as the author hopes, and Helen’s crazy son and his even crazier wife who call themselves "ethical terrorists" (and again, we’re supposed to sympathize) made no sense whatsoever. Also, Alma has a devoted husband, good friends and a successful career, so her depression, self-doubt and petty jealousy seem inexplicable. However, she does gather some redeeming strength and courage from the much more interesting story she’s been researching: the real-life story of Isabel, a Spanish rectoress who, in 1803, took 23 orphan boys on a ship bound for the American colonies to save the world from smallpox. The boys are human vaccine carriers; two at a time are vaccinated with cowpox and then, when the vesicles fill with fluid, it’s harvested to vaccinate others. The mission is fraught with hardship and often stumbles over its director’s ego, but Isabel proves herself a genuine hero.

The story is pretty amazing. Unfortunately Alvarez makes the mistake of telling it in first person, and the voice does not sound even remotely authentic. She peppers Isabel’s journal with archaic terms (“I’ll be there presently” and “it would not be a short journey hither and yon” and “we assembled our equipages”) which don’t sound at all like something Isabel Sendales y Gómez from 19th-century Spain would have said. I mean...barf. Great story, awful narrative voice.

And that’s the problem with this author: she picks great stories to tell, but her success in telling them is never a sure thing. (In the Name of Salome is another example of a good story that falls short in the telling.) This novel has its moments—I will say that she writes grief well, and the book is sprinkled with really poetic turns of phrase and even some thought-provoking ideas. But overall, I can't recommend it. The stories would have been better off in more capable hands.

I do recommend In the Time of the Butterflies. Also, Before We Were Free is a good youth-fiction novel (see Danielle's Top 10).

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

2006-06-16T20:54:00.000-07:00

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is Lynne Truss's attempt to correct the abysmal state of punctuation in the world today—and you don't have to be an English major to know what I'm talking about. The very day I read the chapter on "The Tractable Apostrophe" I saw a sign indicating a local tanning salon was "now accepting resume's."

Boring topic, you say? Okay, maybe for some. But you really don’t have to be a grammar geek to enjoy this book. It’s instructive and entertaining, making liberal use of that droll British humor we Americans find so charming yet can't for the life of us imitate. Here's a sample from the introduction:

Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. "Come inside," it says, "for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's."
If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don't bother to go any further.

See? Now you want to go further, don't you? And you wouldn't be sorry—this book is fun, and chock full of hilarious specimens of incorrect punctuation usage. It even comes with a Punctuation Repair Kit to get wannabe vigilantes started—stickers (commas, semi-colons, even a few exclamation marks) for correcting punctuation faux pas everywhere. I'm on my way to Jungle Tan now, "The Panda Says NO!" sticker in hand.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

2006-06-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the story of the murder of Santiago Nasar. Bayardo San Roman, a man on a mission to marry, arrives in a small Columbian town and immediately sweeps the townsfolk off their feet. He tells tales of bravery and adventure and has the extraordinary and bizarre talents of one who has traveled the mysterious world. As the wealthiest and most influential man in town, Bayardo can name any one of the local women as his bride, and he chooses Angela Vicario. Following an enormously elaborate ceremony and party, Bayardo discovers that Angela is not a virgin. She is promptly returned to her family's humble home where they are so disgraced that she is brutally beaten until she finally surrenders the secret lover's identity. After admitting that her lover was Santiago Nasar, her twin brothers, Pedro and Pablo Vicario, despite their life-long friendship with Nasar, vow to avenge their family's spoiled honor.

Despite the non-linear narrative and the constant and tangential anecdotes, it becomes clear that Santiago Nasar is not connected to Angela in the least and is, in fact, unsuspecting and confused by the rumor of his murderous friends. It appears as though Angela merely states a name in an effort to protect the man she really loves. (Though the narrator speculates that this is possible, the reader never uncovers the truth of Angela's disastrous claim.) Most interestingly, upon Bayardo San Roman's departure Angela discovers her love for him. Angela does not mourn the loss of Nasar or a secret lover; she lives alone until Bayardo returns to her many years later.

Though Gabriel Garcia Marquez is always a genius of magical realism, this book is stylistically and thematically much simpler than other Garcia Marquez's works. Not to mention much shorter at a whopping 130 pages. However, it is just as pure-Gabriel Garcia Marquez as his best: full of wisdom, humor and skillful prose. It is a deeply disturbing and harrowingly symbolic love story that reads as absurd and, at times, hilarious. For instance, the book opens with a description of the Nasar household on the morning of his murder, and goes on to relate Santiago Nasar's last dream before his death: "He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completly spattered with bird shit." One review said Chronicle of a Death Foretold was "very strange and brilliantly concieved....a sort of metaphysical murder mystery."

So, although it doesn't feel quite as epic or relevant as One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, it reads as a Garcia Marquez mini-epic and a mystery definitely worth reading and rediscovering again.

Zorro

2006-05-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

Whenever I go on vacation I try to bring a book that somehow relates to my destination. So when we went to Mexico a couple weeks ago (look for pictures on the fam website soon!) I was in the market for anything set in Mexico, written by a Mexican author, or at least had loose ties to something hispanic, and I settled on Isabel Allende's latest novel, Zorro. Even though Allende is a peruvian raised in Chile, and the book is set in California and Spain, there were actually some direct ties to our vacation. For example, the characters spend some time in the Caribbean--we were on the Yucatan peninsula--and I saw a restaurant named after the famed pirate Jean LaFitte, who makes quite an impression late in the novel. So that was enough to satisfy the geeky compulsion to read books that coincide with my surroundings.

Zorro is about young Diego de la Vega, his formative years and how he became the legendary masked crusader. It's a pretty fun story with lots of colorful characters, exciting adventures and ties to real history. It's an impressive re-imagining of the legend, and it's pretty fast-paced so it didn't get boring. I really liked that the author worked some strong female characters into Zorro's backstory, and she provided some insightful glimpses into social customs of the day and cultural conflicts between the old and new worlds. The best thing about the book is probably the richness of detail--it's very easy to picture everything as it happens.

But... I was still pretty glad to be done reading this book. I enjoyed it quite a lot at first, but after a while it started to seem really dorky. I don't know why, exactly. Sometimes the writing is kind of clumsy--maybe that's all it was. (At one point I began to wonder if I just thought that House of Spirits was a well-written book, because this one really didn't seem up to the standard that I remembered. But no, I really think this one comes off more amateurish). Anyway I still recommend it if you just want something light and fun. It's good, but not great.

three in one

2006-05-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

I like books! So I checked out the hugest pile ever from the library!! The first was Uglies. It was way sweet, and its the first in a trilogy so i got the library to order the 2nd one. It's Earth in the future. Normal humans have slightly died out, and now are dying out more, because when they reach they age of 16 they get a surgery to make them not Ugly (normal looking)anymore. The surgery makes their eyes big and doe-like, their lips big, etc. And pretty much they look like Angelina Jolie. The main character is Tally. She's mischievious and gets in to trouble. Which threatens her chances at surgery. But then she meets a hot guy living in the Smoke (where uglies run away to, when they don't want the surgery) and he tells her the ugly secret about the surgeries. It is grand and action packed. I just kept wanting to read it forever. Like Harry Potter or something!! Crazy! Anywho, so the next one, is Girl, 15, Charming but Insane. It's a British novel about Jess Jordan. She's 15 obviously, and hilarious. It's freaking funny! There's one part where she stuffs her bra with bags of minestrone and then a guy grabs her boobs, since they're so big, and they pop and squirt soup everywhere! It's completely silly, but cute. Next is Double Helix. It was kind of hard to understand sometimes, because it's very science-y, but very good!! The kid, Eli Samuels' mother has Huntingtons disease (they slowly go insane) and he then he gets this job at Wyatt Transgenics. But his Dad has quite a bit of hatred for Dr. Wyatt, but won't tell Eli why. Then Eli meets Kayla Matherson, who is staying with Dr. Wyatt. And slowly, Eli uncovers one layer after another of the truth about Dr. Wyatt's genetic-engineering experiments and their connection to his parents, Kayla, and himself. Plus it has a sweet hang-on-the-edge-of-your-seat ending. So there you go. Some sweet books. YUP! Alrighty! Love ya, DANLEE

It's hard-boiled, but it ain't no egg, dollface.

2006-04-19T18:19:00.000-07:00

I used the term “hard-boiled” in a previous post to describe The Grapes of Wrath as tough and unflinching, but I recently learned it's not just a cool adjective, it’s also a fictional genre, pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and improved upon, some say, by Raymond Chandler. According to wikipedia (god love ‘em), “hardboiled fiction is most commonly associated with detective short stories and novels. It is distinguished by an unsentimental portrayal of crime, violence and sex.”

Nick actually introduced me to this genre—he requested The Thin Man as a book to read together, but we gave up after a couple chapters. Too much dialog and short, choppy sentences make it not “flow” well for reading-aloud purposes. But it was fun to read to myself.

The book is about Nick and Nora Charles, a hard-drinking, high-living married couple who banter wittily over martinis as they solve homicides (seemingly for the fun of it, as they are independently wealthy). A girl has been murdered, and her employer, Clyde Wynant, the titular thin man and nutty inventor, is missing in action. The other key suspects, Wynant’s ex-wife and seriously-dysfunctional children, are at the center of a web of clues and diversions which finally unravels in a nice-and-tidy-yet-surprising wrap-up.

You know those old black and white movies where a detective narrates in first person using words like “dollface” and names like “Studsy”? That’s Dashiell Hammett. Seriously, this is how the book starts out: "I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street..." The style is lean and spare, the plot is satisfyingly complex and the characters are fascinating—Nick and Nora are glamorous and cynical, the Wynant clan is screwed-up-bigtime and definitely not to be trusted, the police detective is a two-fisted, hard-talking tough guy, and Wynant’s lawyer is a little too slick. It’s all good stuff, though it can sound cliché if you forget the fact that it was 1933 and Hammett was inventing a genre. Raymond Chandler is quoted on the cover: “Hammett…wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” I could totally see that. Here's a sample:

An immensely fat blonde man—so blond he was nearly albino—who had been
sitting at Miriam's table came over and said to me in a thin, tremulous,
effeminate voice: "So you're the party who put it to little Art Nunhei—"
Morelli hit the fat man in his fat belly, as hard as he could without getting
up. Studsy, suddenly on his feet, leaned over Morelli and smashed a
big fist into the fat man's face. I noticed, foolishly, that he still led with
his right. Hunchbacked Pete came up behind the fat man and banged an empty
tray down with full force on the fat man's head. The fat man fell back,
upsetting three people and a table. Both bartenders were with us by then. One of
them hit the fat man with a blackjack as he tried to get up, knocking him
forward on his hands and knees, the other put a hand down inside the fat man's
collar in back, twisting the collar to choke him. With Morelli's help they got
the fat man to his feet and hustled him out.
Pete looked after them and sucked a tooth. "That god-damned Sparrow," he
explained to me, "you can't take no chances on him when he's drinking."
Studsy was at the next table, the one that had been upset, helping people
pick up themselves and their possessions. "That's bad," he was saying, "bad for
business, but where you going to draw the line? I ain't running a dive, but I
ain't trying to run a young ladies' seminary neither."
Dorothy was pale, frightened; Nora wide-eyed and amazed. "It's a madhouse,"
she said. "What'd they do that for?"
"You know as much about it as I do," I told her.

See what I mean? No one (that I know of) wrote like that before Dashiell Hammett came along. Anyway, some final notes:

Among the enduring characters Hammett created is Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.
In 1934 The Thin Man was made into a movie which developed into a popular series.
If you ever get a crossword clue about Nick and Nora Charles’ dog (I've seen it more than once in the NYT), the name is Asta.