The Whisper of a Thousand Pages

What is it about 20-Somethings?

2010-08-24T12:34:00.002+04:00

In New York Times article What is it about 20-Somethings?, author Robin Marantz Henig spends over 8000 words discussing why people in their 20s are less likely than their ancestors to settle down, estabilish roots, and, generally, grow up. The author also devotes a great deal of time to the question of whether this is a natural biological bent, or if something in our culture is causing this trend.

Go ahead and read the article and form your own opinion before we get to mine. I'll wait. No really, go ahead. Com'on, you know I want you to... ;-)

Welcome back! Ready to hear my opinion? Of course you are, EVERYONE wants to know MY opinion. That's why I blog! Alright, without further ado (ok, just a little: drumroll, please!): I think it's culture. Partly because this "phenomenon" does not show up outside of the western world, and partly based on my own experiences as a Gen X 20-something.

In his moviementory, Waiting for 'Superman', Dave Guggenheim cites a study that says American children rank 21st and 25th in the world in science and math, yet #1 in confidence. We are told we can do anything we want, be anything we want, and we believe it. We're also told that we should try to find jobs that we love, to wait for a soulmate, and that kids are tricky and better saved till later.

So then we graduate from college, with our shiny pieces of paper and our dreams, and find that our ideal perfect fit job (if we've figured out what that is - it's not all that easy to decide ahead of time what will be personally fulfilling, especially since we are now good at all sorts of divergent things, thanks to lots of praise and zillions of extra curricular lessons and activities as kids) is not an entry-level position (or requires several years of committment: I once turned down an absolutely fantastic job because they wanted assurance I'd stick with them for 6 years), everyone wants us to have "experience," and the best living space we can afford is a mildewed studio apartment in a bad neighborhood. Unless the parents help out.

Since the parents love us, want us to keep loving them, and may just feel some guilt over missing a swim meet or two to work and therefore have long ago established patterns of buying our affection, they help us out. Besides, our success or failure reflects on them as human beings.

Presto! We 20-somethings now have the freedom and angst to try to pin down our dreams. Once we get life all figured out - the perfect job and house and life partner and hobbies - once we are entirely fulfilled, we'll start living. It makes more sense to create detailed architechtural plans before building the house, right?

Unfortunately, we still feel that the possibilities are limitless (or limited only by mean people not letting us get what we deserve), and so instead of sturdy cabins, we draw up magnificent castles in the clouds. (I don't mean that we shouldn't dream, but from what I've seen of 20-somethings - myself included - we are not always realistic about our hopes, nor inclined to be content with "settling" for something that is reasonable and puts food on the table. Sure, I love philosophy, but there are not many jobs in that line, and I like working with kids, so why not do that?) When we don't get exactly what we want - sometimes even when we do - we worry about being unfulfilled, not getting the most out of life (or making enough difference), wasting time. So we tend to not committ, not settle down, and avoid responsibility as long as possible. (Responsibility cements things and limits future options!)

I am being a bit cynical and tongue-in-cheek here, making fun of myself and my fellow wanderers. It is true that we don't settle down nearly as early. It is true that society and our parents pushed us to be all that we can be (remember that incredibly successful Army recruiting slogan?) and that that is a hard prospect to live up to. It's also true that there are a lot more opportunities now than there were just a generation ago. I live in Russia, keep in touch with family and friends by internet, and take transoceanic flights for just 1/4 of my monthly salary. It would not have been possible for my parents to do any of those things at my age. I deeply value the experiences I've had. But I still don't know what I'm going to do with my life.

There are just too many good options.

Chronicles of the Raven

2010-04-18T19:05:00.002+04:00

Nightchild
James Barclay

I picked this book up on three successive trips to Finland and each time put it back down. Last time I finally succumbed to its alluring green and black cover.

The story follows a band of warriors, The Raven, who saved the world sometime in the past and then disbanded. They reform to find the wife and daughter of one of their members. Unfortunately, everyone else in the world also wants to find them, and nearly all of them want to kill the little girl because her great, uncontrolled power is destroying the magic and the land. Lots of battles of all sorts ensue, quite a lot of people die, several narrow escapes happen. Meanwhile every temper tantrum of the girl manifests as a major natural disaster in the world - and she has lots of temper tantrums.

It is perhaps a problem that this is the third book in a series I have never heard of; there are a lot of references which are never explained and yet which are central to the plot, and I don't ever get a strong feel for who any of the characters are. Presumably this is all laid out in prior books, but I unfortunately do not know.

For instance, would one of the main characters really give away vital secret information in the hearing of a known enemy? I don't know him well enough to tell, but it reeked of plot device, and lost my suspension of disbelief. Too many times unexplained complications foundered them, too many times elaborately powerful and yet barely referenced characters swooped in and saved them. And I did not understand what happened in the end.

The world is overwhelmingly rich and has some really interesting ideas, such as The Protectors, an army of men whose souls reside together and bodies have input from everyone. They are awesome fighters and interesting characters. Unfortunately they have a lame name. So does The Unknown, the main fighter-dude of The Raven. Many of the sentences are ambiguous or downright confusing because of their grammar or word choices, and there were many typos in the text.

There is room here for a great tale, and, perhaps, shored up by the information in the first two books, it would be one. But alone it does not deliver what the lovely green cover seemed to indicate.

Forever

2010-04-18T18:45:00.002+04:00

Forever
Pete Hamill

What would you do with your time if you were granted the gift of immortality - so long as you didn't leave New York? Cormac Samuel O'Connor grows up outside Belfast in the 1500s, the son of a Gael and a Jewess. Both his father and mother's religions are intolerable in their society, so they wear Protestant masks and keep their heads down. Even Cormac doesn't know who they are - or that his name is not Robert Carson. He happily learns to read, absorbs stories of the Hebrew people, learns to help his father at the blacksmith's forge, and grows to love his dog and their new horse.

But when the cruel Earl runs his mother down with a carriage, Cormac's father tells him the truth of who they are. Then he makes a wondrous sword and begins to teach Cormac the way of the Old Irish people, including that murder must be avenged and all the killer's heirs destroyed. So when the Earl kills Cormac's father, the teen follows him across the Atlantic to the village of New York. There he befriends a powerful African who grants him immortality, with the condition that he never leave Manhattan. And there the journey through history begins.

Cormac is involved in all sorts of uprisings, revolutions, and restorations. He sees fire raze the city, helps General Washington fight the Brits, manages to make it through the terrible decades with no fresh water, and is standing only a few blocks away when the World Trade Center towers are attacked. And through it all he seeks and kills decendents of the Earl.

Forever is an interesting story, but loses some in the telling. Hamill uses phrases and idioms that are anachronistic and threw me off. He skips huge chunks of time - most notably the entire twentieth century. We get no sense of how difficult it is for Cormac to adapt to the great changes during that time, how he managed through WWI and WWII, what he thinks of techonology. Just the late 1800s and then the twin towers, bam. And his personal story does not really resolve at the end, either. It's too bad, because the premise and pace of the book are excellent and it is generally worth the read.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

2010-04-11T13:30:00.004+04:00

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
Peter Høeg

Denmark is a lovely country. And the police are particularly lovely. And surprising. They accompany the Royal Guard to Amalienborg Palace. They help lost ducklings cross the street. And when a little boy falls off a rooftop, first the uniformed police show up. And then the detectives. And finally the assistant district attorney for special economic crime sends his representative. How reassuring.

The little boy is Smilla's neighbor, her friend. She visits the rooftop, sees his tracks in the snow, and understands that his death was not an accident. So begins an investigation that requires all her courage, determination, and significant resources as she uncovers an old conspiracy and danger.

Smilla knows about snow. She knows about ice. She is, after all, the daughter of an Eskimo hunter from Northern Greenland, even if her wealthy anesthesiologist father forced her to come with him to Denmark for school. But her mother's blood runs true, and Smilla is a woman with the strength of skill, resourcefulness, and character built from creating survival in a harsh world. She knows more about life than she generally admits to nosy passers-by, and she's witty and resolute about it. As a rule I swim against the current. But on certain mornings, such as today, I have enough surplus energy to surrender. I love her.

I would read about Smilla sitting at home and drinking tea, she's just that fantastic. But Høeg lets the boy's death serve as the catalyst for a mysterious investigation. A lawyer turns up. A man who's been translating a tape for her is murdered. People start to follow her, threaten her, try to kill her. The downstairs neighbor befriends her, woos her, they fall in love. They break into old archives, track down people who might have connections, might know things, are chased by police and shadowy people who don't like what she knows. The plot grows in intrigue and danger until Smilla finds herself fighting for her life on the Artic seas. To which she says, oh dear, isn't this annoying. And keeps going. Even evil masterminds should know better than to mess with a determined Eskimo huntress on her own ice.

Throughout the tale, there is a lovely rich texture of being clearly aware of and yet not quite fitting into foreign culture. Both Smilla and the boy are natively Greenlanders, both brought against their will to Denmark for school as children. Displacement from home is not a theme of the book so much as it is the type of thread the story is woven from. There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lost the urge to explain it. To explain a phnomenon is to distance yourself from it. When I start talkig about Qaanaaq, to myself or to others, I again start to lose what has never been truly mine.

Høeg is not merely philosophical; the writing glints with snark and wit and cynicism. Take this description of a neighbor's apartment: There are rose bushes in large porcelain pots, and they have red blossoms, and it looks as if someone waters them and talks to them and promises them that they will never be sent on holiday to my place, where, for some strange reason, the climate is bad for green plants.

So. I adore the main character, who is strong and resourceful and complex and mysterious and still quite flawed. The writing is fabulous; fluid, philosophical, witty, provocative. The story is intriguing, the action gripping. This is one of the best books I've read in the last three years.

Truth and Beauty

2010-04-11T00:16:00.000+04:00

Truth and Beauty: a friendship
Ann Patchett

The moving story of Ann Patchett's friendship with fellow writer Lucy Grealy, told candidly and with great love. Lucy was always a star, finding limelight even in dusty midwestern towns and run-down old duplexes. Everyone knew her, and the story of her heroic battle against cancer that left her face mangled and forever dissolving, despite the continued efforts of surgeons in the UK and the US. Nevertheless, Lucy loved liveliness. She was the grasshopper, entertaining, delightful, and energetic.

Ann describes herself, on the other hand, as the ant: hard working, loyal, and dull. Lucy is deeply attached to her, and their lives march side by side for twenty years, taking them through college, Master's degrees, struggling to pay the rent while trying to write their first books, applying for fellowships and grants and competitions.

Their lives solidify: Ann settling in her hometown, dating a nice doctor, writing steadily; Lucy based in New York, surrounded by friends. Ann wins a fellowship and writes her first book. Lucy writes a bestseller about her struggle.

But Lucy's continued battle against depression and the endless rounds of grueling surgery take their toll. She is lonely, insecure, lost. She experiments and then becomes addicted to drugs. Ann flies up to New York, reassures, calms, praises, calls every day. She loves Lucy.

That love is what makes this book remarkable, heartwarming, real. Yes, it's about people who have problems, are inadequate, battle and sometimes give into anger, fear, and pain. And yet they choose to love each other. It's true, and it's beautiful.

In the Country of Men

2010-04-10T10:24:00.002+04:00

In the Country of Men
Hisham Matar

Suleiman is a nine-year-old boy in tumultuous Libya. He plays in the dust with the neighborhood boys, makes things from odds and ends in his workshop on the roof, eats mulberries until he is sick, and lives with his mother and father. But his father is often gone on business trips, and Suleiman's mother gets sick when she's alone. Still, Suleiman lives a normal sort of life - until the police show up and drag off the man who lives next door, a friend of father, father of Suleiman's best friend. The man's execution in a basketball stadium is aired on live TV. Will Suleiman's father be next?

What makes this story tumultuous is not the politics or the brutality, it's the chilling realization that everyone, even a young child, is subject to renouncing good in an effort to hide away from evil. We see values shift: Mama hated Baba, hides from him, yet only sings happily when he is around; Baba believes in truth but won't answer questions; Suleiman is considered too young to pay attention to and ends up trying to impress whatever adult he can find - even if the adult happens to be a police officer spying on Baba. All of them are forced to wonder what it means to be a man in Libya, a person in Libya.

The writing is clean and full of emotion, but the story leaves the world messy and untouched by the lives of the characters. Perhaps life is hopeless, perhaps there is nothing we can do but muddle along trying to find the lesser evils to invite into life so they can take up the space the greater horrors seek to fill. But if that's true, I don't really want to read about it.

Kitchen

2010-03-31T13:02:00.002+04:00

Kitchen
Banana Yoshimoto

Ok, I admit it - I bought this book simply because the author's name is Banana. Seriously, who could pass that up?

The volume is a novella and a short story sharing similar themes of identity, loss, and coping with life. Kitchen, the novella, follows a young girl as she deals with bereavement and is taken in by a kind young man and his transgendered parent. Refreshingly, the story grinds no axes, focusing instead on each character as a person and their means of finding comfort and focus after family dies.

For our main character, that comfort is found in her surrogate family, and in kitchens. She loves the hum of refrigerators, the mundane ceremony of making and sharing tea, the preparation of food, the way it touches life.

The short story allows a grieving young widow final closure through a mystical once a century event.

Translated from Japanese by Megan Backus, Kitchen is a carefully written sojourn through dark times to life beyond. The style is oriental, yet accessible to the Western mind; the story flows like water over an unfamiliar landscape. Though the subject matter is heavy, the story is hopeful and manages to remain light without being shallow or sacriligious. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and will probably re-read it several times.

And I still love the author's name.

The Bourne Supremacy

2010-03-28T12:46:00.002+04:00

The Bourne Supremacy
Robert Ludlum

One of the things I really like about the Bourne movies is that Bourne is always in control, always wins, is explicitly and thoroughly trained and brilliant at what he does. One of the things I really like about the Bourne books is that Bourne loses control, has fits of incapacitation, sometimes falls for traps, and has multiple personality disorder. It is fitting in a tight, compact package like a film that Bourne also be a tight compact package, but it is much more interesting reading if he falls apart and the narrative includes some of his shattered thoughts. (Gosh, I sound cruel.)

The Bourne Supremacy has to do with a different Jason Bourne showing up and making some unnerving kills, trading under the name of the legacy. That's pretty much where the similarities between the book and the film end. For one, Marie is kidnapped, not shot, and the covert forces of the US and Britain know that it is not "their" Bourne who has shown up and assasinated a high-ranking diplomat. The main problem is not embezzlement, it's a strategy to incite full-scale war in Asia. Oh, and the book takes place in Hong Kong and China, not Europe and New York.

As in the first book, the fight scenes tend to be repetitive (his foot "lashes up" countless times) and overcomplicated - print is not the media for blow-by-blow. On the other hand, we get internal dialogue and emotion, and it's generally well-written and entertaining. Marie, being alive, gets to do things like make hell for the CIA agents who kidnapped her, and escape to wander around Kowloon. Bourne gets to shoot up Mao's mausoleum and speak Mandarin and Cantonese.

The characters are well-developed and flawed enough to be both believable and likeable. The storyline is twisted enough to warrant surprise at the end, and the pace is fast enough that I forgot where I was and nearly missed my public transit stop on more than one occasion. It's not the film; these are altogether different characters, with altogether different stories. But the book is gripping, decently written, and very much entertaining. I'll probably read it again several times, raised eyebrows on the metro notwithstanding.

Blue Willow

2010-03-28T12:18:00.003+04:00

Blue Willow
Deborah Smith

I bought this because I liked the design on the spine. It turns out to be a promotional copy, and has lots of funny typos, but it still manages to be five hundred and thirty-three pages of readable plot, which I finished in three days.

The story follows the lives of Lily MacKenzie, a muscular, independent red-headed farm girl from small-town Georgia, and Artemas Colebrook, heir to a broken family and a bankrupt china company. To him, Lily has always symbolized goodness, security, and his real home. To her, Artemas is the lost prince who will come back to a hard world and restore what was unthinkingly squandered and broken. Both dream of the time when they can be together, enjoying treasured home. But the hard, cold world has other plans.

When still a boy, Artemas realizes the destruction and cruelty of his parents and decides to protect and raise his five younger siblings. His grandmother trains him in the family business and leaves it to him when he is barely out of adolescence. He vows to do what is best for his family and restore their crushed legacy, no matter what the cost. It's an unrelenting vow, even when he realizes it means he must give up Lily.

She grows up with hard work and the pure love of her parents, writing encouraging letters to the older boy she met as a child. But when her parents are killed in a terrible accident and Artemas ignores her attempts at contact, her world is shattered. Bitter and grieving, she leaves her home to fight out a new life in Atlanta.

And so their worlds separate into difficult lives. Until Artemas moves the headquarters of the now fabulously successful family corporation to Atlanta, and hires Lily's husband to design the building. On opening day, the building crumbles, killing Lily's husband and son, maiming Artemas's brother, and killing his sister. Hatred and blame reawaken the old wounds between Lily and Artemas, resurrecting the pain of lost dreams as well.

But this is a romance novel (yeah, I was tricked by the cover copy), so everything is likely to turn out happily, even if it takes more than five hundred pages of angst, shouting, misunderstanding, and sex to do it.

The main characters are believable enough to root for, but many of the minor characters are not well developed. There are several scenes and veins of domestic abuse, but they do not make the kind of deep impact on the plot that such a situation does on a real life. Likewise, several other plot points end up being trite or shallow, or just don't really make sense. Multiple times I read a passage with the feeling that it was there just because the author needed it to be, rather than because the characters believably would have taken that course.

That being said, I did enjoy the book, overall. It was written as entertainment, and it entertained me. I'm not likely to read it again, but it was worth my metro time for a couple of days.

North of Ithaka

2010-03-20T11:26:00.002+03:00

North of Ithaka
Eleni Gage

By time she turned twenty-seven, Eleni Gage was tired of the not-so-subtle hints of her loud, superstitious aunts about marriage. But she wasn't tired of the stories they told of their childhood home, even though they broke off darkly with the invasion of the German army in WWII.

Eleni knows their home was turned into the headquarters of the army and used as a prison, torture chamber, and burial ground for those executed, including her grandmother. She knows the house has since fallen into ruin. And she knows the past is calling her.

Funded by her father and fueled by a desire to understand their family's tragic past and somehow redeem the future, she leaves a career as a New York journalist and moves to Lia, a a tiny village in northern Greece. There she navigates local custom (such as sacrificing a rooster on the foundations of a new house), stubborn tempers, and fights against squirrels to dig up and restore her family's past, revere the memory of her grandmother, and rebuild the family home. Along the way she learns to cook, how to balance superstition and orthodox religion, and what it means to be a Northern Greek.

Eleni's writing is frank and clear, recounting her mistakes, frustrations, revelations, and good times. Her descriptions of Greek village life are thoughtful and entertaining, and the neighbors never fail to be kind, loud, and overly concerned with everyone's business. As a bonus, Eleni includes recipes for many of the ritual foods mentioned throughout the book, such as rooster stew. It's not a page turner, but North of Ithaka is just the thing if you want a light, satisfying read.

The Wheel on the School

2010-03-14T13:06:00.002+03:00

The Wheel on the School
Meindert DeJong

I loved this book as a child (as well as several other books by this author), so when I saw it in a used book store I picked it up right away. Then I brought it home and read it all in one day. It's one of those books for children that is so delightful that one never outgrows it. Besides, three of the main characters are elderly.

Lina is the only girl in her tiny six pupil school. One day she writes an essay about storks. They nest on her Aunt's house in a neighboring town, but none of the lucky birds grace their Dutch fishing village. Lina, the teacher, and the five boys set out to investigate why. It is decided that they need to put a wagon wheel up on the steep roof so the storks have something to nest on. But can they find one?

Their search takes them all over the countryside, where they meet unexpected allies, nearly drown several times, and finally succeed in finding a wheel. But a major storm is killing the storks, migrating over the sea from Africa. Will any survive? Will any choose the little town of Shora for their new lives? They will if the townsfolk and the children have anything to say about it.

Warm, fresh, and lively, The Wheel on the School is a delightful tale of community, overcoming fear and prejudice, and the power of beliving in the impossible.

Besides, it's illustrated by Maurice Sendak. How could it get any better than that?

Alentejo Blue

2010-03-13T12:10:00.002+03:00

Alentejo Blue
Monica Ali

Set in a hot summer of rural Portugal, Alentejo Blue follows the colored threads of different lives as they cross and recross in the tangle of small town life. There are those who have lived in Mamarrosa their entire lives, those who left and came back full of wisdom about the greater world, and those who fled their lives in other places for the exotic quiet of a foreign village. A drunk English writer, an engaged couple, a destitute family, a fat chef. Each character wrestles through quirks and needs to make decisions, sometimes whether to go abroad, sometimes whether to light a match. Their decisions form patterns in the village tapestry.

Unfortunately, none of the characters were compelling: small town folk making difficult mistakes and not resolving anything. The only person I found myself rooting for was the girl who was going abroad to work; disappointing in a book about a village. And, characteristically, even she makes terrible decisions and is ignored by the consequences. Lack of resolution gave an otherwise promising book a flabby, unfinished feel. It's a pity; the title was so intriguing.

The Dispossessed

2010-02-16T10:17:00.002+03:00

The Dispossessed
Ursula K. LeGuin

Shevek is brilliant young physicist working on a theory that will allow instantaneous space travel (teleportation!). He's also an Odonian, part of a socialist anarchist society living on the harsh moon of his peoples' home planet. But moneyless settlers fighting dust and famine for survival are not overly interested in teleportation. For the sake of his research and to bridge the gulf between the society they left and the one they created, Shev takes an unprescedented journey to earth, hoping to tear down walls and trade his theory for mutual cooperation and freedom.

Woven into Shev's experiences with earth technology, style, customs, and depravity are chapters about his youth, family, culture, and the events which led to leaving his home. LeGuin's descriptions are creative and compelling, and the characters are memorable, but the best part of this book is seeing the world through the eyes of an outsider.

The childlike simplicity and trust that Shevek has, his expectation that people will do right by each other and his surprise at being cheated and manipulated harkens to the stories fondly told of Soviet times. "See, Soviet people were very kind to each other, and did not expect to be cheated. It was easy to scam them, because they didn't even think of such a thing." "In Soviet times, people helped each other, shared what they had with their neighbors. It was a community." Even so, this is not a romantic anarchist utopia; LeGuin does not sugar coat the harshness and flaws of the Odonian society. We are left with a startling picture of what happens when people focus on one aspect of human nature and stretch it into encompassing morality.

I am afraid that if I keep writing, I'll degenerate into rambling. But first, I have one last thing to say: I really want Shev's teleportation technology.

Anil's Ghost

2010-02-15T13:11:00.002+03:00

Anil's Ghost
Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje's stories have the feeling of a sepia photograph; they're rich, real, and yet hallowed by lack of color. His prose lives in sparse details. A water drop falls from a leaf, a woman sighs, a headlight blinks a man into consciousness for a second. The world turns. Evil in chaos, scientists and artists struggling to create. Risking their next moment in a sepia photograph to show up in truth.

He haunts me, flashes of a ghost barely not seen. And yet the story is very solid, gritty, terrible and beautiful and full of soil as well as soul. Anil's Ghost is a mystery, a mystery about government killings in Sri Lanka, a mystery about an unsual skeleton, a mystery of choices, conscience, and survival. It's about Anil, who left. Sarath, who retreated into cynicism and the archeology of ancient temple ruins. Gamini, who hides in drugs and twenty-hour shifts in the ER. And whether it is possible to do anything but survive in the face of constant murder and betrayal.

Oh, Dear

2010-02-09T11:01:00.002+03:00

A two week long roaming vacation with one's brother all over the UK is fantastic for the soul, but not for reading. Particularly since we each had only a small backpack as luggage. And then work ate me. So.

I will do my best to review these books in the next couple of weeks...

January booklist:

To Swim Across the World, Francis and Ginger Park
*The Firstborn Advantage: Making your birth order work for you, Dr. Kevin Leman
*Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller
The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt
Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
*The Kingdom by the Sea, Paul Theroux
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin

*denotes a book I read for the first time

Degenerating into lists

2009-12-24T11:56:00.002+03:00

Well, I decided to handmake all my Christmas gifts this year. Since I decided it at the end of October, and NaNoWriMo ate my November, Christmas gift making took up all my free time in December. (Plus I needed something of a break from writing after NaNo.) I have been reading, though (I still commute on the metro/tram/bus at least 2 hours a day).

You'll probably have to wait until I re-read (or re-re-re-re-re-re-re-read, as the case may be) these books, but here's a list of most of what I read in November and December (in the order they are piled on my shelf, not the order in which they were read):

Another Fine Myth Robert Aspirin
*The Wanderer Alain-Fournier
*A Doll's House and Other Plays Ibsen
Myst: the Book of Atrus Rand and Robyn Miller
*Sinning with Annie and other stories Paul Theroux
Captains Courageous Rudyard Kipling
The English Patient Michael Ondaatje
Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome
Memoirs of a Geisha Arthur Golden
The Railway Children E. Nesbit
The Hobbit J.R.R. Tolkein
Gifts Urusula K. LeGuin
*Dubliners James Joyce
Swallows and Amazons Arthur Ransome
*In Cold Blood Truman Capote

Right now I am re-reading To Swim Across the World by Frances and Ginger Park. I have not decided what will get to come on my UK trip. (On the one hand, I want to just buy books THERE! but I will need something to read in the airports on the way there. We'll see.) So there will probably be at least two more books to add to this list.

* = first time I read this book

Note to the Faithful*

2009-11-22T11:41:00.003+03:00

This is a bit late, but you knew this anyway: I am doing NaNoWriMo. Which means all my words are being sucked into the endless black hole of my novel this month. I am still reading, and the stack of books to review is piling high on my end table, but I haven't time at the moment. So watch out for a tumbling avalanche of reviews in December.

*Faithful, here, means the three of you who read this...

The Angelic Darkness

2009-10-31T21:49:00.002+03:00

The Angelic Darkness
Richard Zimler

When Bill Ticino's wife moves out, he is beset by insomnia and childhood fear of spirits. Hoping to reassure himself, he rents part of the house to a mysterious Portuguese diplomat. Called Peter, the new tenant brings his pet hoopoe, piles of bizarre relics, pointedly important stories, and new experiences with spirits and mystics.

As an emotional Bill starts to piece life back together, he finds that things are far from what they seem. From the feminine transvestite prostitute he interviews for an article just before his murder to the pixie-like Indian singer who seems to know far too much about the world, Bill's normal way of framing things are bent. But are any of these things really happening?

Although I was initially intrigued by the characters and their stories, the point of the book was disappointing. I expected the mysticism to reveal the deep overlap between myth and reality, perhaps breaking the boundary altogether in a step into urban fantasy. But it was about figuring out how to be gay in a straight world. Oh, well. Ok, then. This was a letdown not because I deem it an inappropriate struggle to portray, but rather because the beginning, the stories, the tone, were not well tied in to the conclusion. I was left feeling like I had started one book and finished another.

The Shack

2009-10-31T21:04:00.002+03:00

The Shack
William Paul Young

This tale of how God responds when bad things happen to people who want good lives has been discussed all over the place. Copies of it have even made it to Russia, which is saying something. So, now it's time for my three cents.

The scene is set with Mac losing his baby girl to a brutal serial killer. His depression grows gnarlier, his relationships falter, and he doesn't trust God anymore. After all, if the ruler of the universe were actually good, He wouldn't let people kill adorable small children. And then, God invites him out to the shack where the last bloodstained traces of Mac's little girl were found. Desperate, he goes.

When he's given up all hope, the shack is transformed into a beautiful house, and God the Father walks out of it to give Mac a big hug. The idea of God manifesting as a big black woman whippin' up great meals is delightful to me, and I am thrilled that someone finally portrayed Jesus as being Middle Eastern. The Holy Spirit as a mystical iridescent Asian woman is a bit more cliche, but still entertaining. The three of them work together to show Mac that his view of life, God, and tragedy are skewed.

Hang'in out with members of the Trinity for one-on-one chats about free will, omnipotence, forgiveness, and justice, Mac finds his depression lifting and worldview radically changing. He leaves so impressed by the truths he's learned that his friends and family eventually believe his incredible story.

Thanks to this book, I now believe in the importance of an editor and understand why self-publishing is such a bad idea. It took long, conscious effort to turn off my internal writer/English teacher/editor and actually pay attention to the story. Young uses far too much passive voice and makes sentences and ideas overly complicated, bogging them down with multiple extraneous metaphors. It's a great story, but the writing - oh dear.

Contemporary Chinese Fiction

2009-10-31T20:45:00.003+03:00

The Picador Book of Contemporary Chinese Fiction
Ed. Carolyn Choa & David Su Li-Qun

Sadly, the only contemporary Chinese fiction I've read in the past three years is the marvelous little Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie. So when I found a collection of contemporary short stories, all translated into English for the first time, I was delighted.

The book did not disappoint. The nineteen authors cover broad territory in the twenty-eight pieces: death, marriage, love, disappointment, the change of traditions, respect, ghosts, and how to share a crowded courtyard with too many other people. Each character is carefully sculpted with a minimum of movements, fully three-dimensional and elegantly portrayed. Reflecting on bits of life in communist times, the authors manage to present a rich, deeply colored glimpse of life using deceptively simple strokes. Reading is like listening to bells and watching the wind tickle a pine: mystical and yet very connected with the dirt of life.

I am babbling because it is hard to adequately sum up how different these stories feel from what I normally read. I suggest you do what you can to find them yourself.

The Red and the Green

2009-10-31T20:24:00.003+03:00

The Red and the Green
Iris Murdoch

I admit to not knowing much about Ireland or its history, other than that it really didn't like the English shoving it around and it has leprechauns. I also admit to planning a trek there this winter. So. Enter Iris Murdoch, whose book The Sea, the Sea was my traveling companion on my last foray to the British Isles, and who proved a fantastic wordsmith and traveling companion, particularly as I was on her home soil. Who better to introduce me to the Irish mind in the week leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916?

Her story follows various members of an extended Irish-English family as they move about Dublin in the days prior to the uprising, painting a picture of diverse households, motives, and ideals. Murdoch presents the tale in pairs of opposites: Andrew, the London-raised English cavalry officer just about to be sent to France to fight the Germans, in contrast with his admired cousin Pat, one of the junior leaders of the revolution; Christopher, a well-endowed gentleman pushing life around with the end of a walking stick until it's just as he likes it, as opposed to Barney, who muddled up his early religious devotion and can't quite seem to sort out his consequent life; Millie, the eccentric, defiantly unfeminine, incredibly alluring widow who plays her many partners against each other and is vastly different from innocent, prim Frances, who watches the restless sea with calm eyes and has been raised in the most ladylike fashion.

And then, after all the build-up, all the political arguments and riding around on bicycles and surprising each other in secrets and proposals and refusals and generally wandering around in the heads of all these men (the women are supplemental characters, really), the uprising comes in and drags them all off, and the book is finished off in eight and a half pages. We find out what happens to the bodies of all the people, but I was left frowning after how the battle affected the minds I'd been inside. Suddenly my intimately known characters became ghosts. Perhaps that's as Murdoch meant it to be.

Empires of the Plain

2009-10-26T10:49:00.004+03:00

Empires of the Plain
Lesley Adkins

This summer I visited the British Museum, where I was overwhelmed by the huge rooms full of ancient treasures. Besides the Rosetta Stone, what impressed me the most were huge relief carvings from Assyrian palaces, beautiful pictures covered in intricate cuneiform writing.

Unfortunately, I only remember Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Israel from school, and had no idea what cuneiform was or who the Assyrians were. So when I saw a book on Henry Rawlinson, the East India Company soldier responsible for much of the work done on cracking cuneiform, I picked it up.

Rawlinson was a soldier, diplomat, and self-taught linguist in the employ of the East India Company for the first several decades of the 1800s. His greatest single feat was climbing a formidable rock face to make copies of a huge trilingual inscription recounting the victory of Darius the Great over rebels. He spent much of the rest of his life deciphering the symbols and three languages, while colleagues began to unearth colossal palaces and wall carvings bearing more cuneiform.

Following Rawlinson's career from homesick initiate to trustee of the British Museum, Empires of the Plain gives an astonishing look into the politics, trade, archeology, and linguistics of the knowledge-hungry British Empire in the Middle East. It also showcases the worth of tenacity and determination in the face of seemingly impossible tasks. If you have any interest in the Middle East, British Imperialism, ancient races, archeology, or linguistics, this book is well worth the read.

The Lord of the Rings

2009-10-11T10:45:00.002+04:00

The Lord of the Rings
consisting of The Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers
and The Return of the King
J.R.R. Tolkien

The quite good film adaptations of this epic classic has rendered it famous even to those who don't tackle thousand page tomes. But even good films are not the same as books - "The media makes the message," as dear old Marshal McLuhan would say - and The Lord of the Rings is more than worth the read.

It's the story of nine people who step into a journey that tests, refines, and transforms them, ultimately deciding on their place in the new world and what that world will be. It's about doing hard things, what happens when you succeed, and the terror of failure. And it's about faith in friends.

Along the way, we adventure with hobbits (those remarkably sturdy small earth-dwellers), elves (fair folk of the forest), rangers (grim protectors of the borders), dwarves (rugged stone-shapers and metalworkers), men (some good, some bad, all tall), ents (ancient tree-herders and by far my favorite), old creatures of unclassifiable sort (Tom Bombadil!), and wizards (keepers of lore, wisdom, and power at need - and some make spectacular fireworks). They are set against troubles (orks! trolls! demons! snow! wolves! axes! love!) that threaten to overrun them at every turn and defeat their mission to thwart the conquest of the world by the evil Sauran.

The plan is simple: destroy the ring that Suaran made to control all other rings of power. The execution of the plan... well, therein lies the tale.

One of my favorite things about Lord of the Rings is that it is largely told from the point of view of the "least" characters. The hobbits are unknown to most of the world and viewed as simple farmers by the rest. They do not set out reknowned or heroes. But the parts they play impact the world more significantly than any, even the wizards and elf-lords, could have predicted.

But even the heroes struggle with self-sacrifice, feelings of inadequacy, and the temptation to just step back and say they've done enough, which makes them intimately accessible and real. And the friendships in this book are magnificent. It is riveting and epic, and yet close to heart and calming. Not because it is Happy, but because it is Right.

The back of my volume quotes The Sunday Times: "The English-speaking world is divided into those who have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and those who are going to read them." I hope they are right.

Popular Music

2009-10-10T21:05:00.003+04:00

Popular Music
Mikael Neimi
translated by Laurie Thomson

Featuring Finnish speaking characters, but written in Swedish and set in a small Northern Swedish town just across the border from Finland, Popular Music is the growing up story of a boy and his home.

Matti and his best friend Niila are born into a tiny rural town where most people speak Finnish and don't understand the soft Southern Swedes, who don't even know they exist. When they are boys, they watch automobiles arrive and sneak into an older sibling's room to play records of Elvis and The Beatles. But they still ride kick-sledges to school and chop wood for their mothers.

As they get into scrapes, work their first jobs, learn to play guitar, and are initiated into the rites of family feuds, their town also changes. Slowly but as surely as the spring thaw, modern living creeps in, leading the grandparents to scoff that they're all getting soft.

The story is told in first person, taking us inside Matti's head and adventures. He doesn't skimp on boy-humor and teenage capers, so if you don't like fart jokes or air gun wars, stay away. Somewhat crusty and crude at times, it nevertheless is an intimate look into an intriguing culture and a touching story of coming of age in a forgotten rural village.

Half a Life

2009-10-03T13:01:00.005+04:00

Half a Life
V.S. Naipaul

A couple of years ago, I read a rich and provoking memoir by Paul Theroux about his relationship with V.S. Naipaul. Until that point I had heard of neither of them; since then I have wanted to read their works. So, even though Half a Life cost three Euro, I bought it. It also won a Nobel prize, which also helped justify the cost.

It's hard to say precisely what this book is about. Will has a lot of angst about Purpose and Race and Ethnicity and his place in the world, but he never really resolves any of them. Born of a mixed-caste marriage in provincial India, he dabbles in converting to Canadian missionary whiteness, moving in Notting Hill bohemian society, hobnobbing with those in vanity publishing, and living with half-Portuguese half-African ruling colonials in Africa. None of them fit him, though he adapts to each for a time.

Driving his ethnic angst is a cloudy sense of purpose. He gets out of India, writes a book, almost completes a degree, and still has no direction. Not all who wander are lost, says Tolkein, but many are. Will marries, slides into his role as the man of the manor in Africa, but is not content. Nothing drives him, and he drives nothing. Each time he realizes he is unhappy driftwood, he moves on to a different mix of folks, waiting for them to validate him and teach him to paddle. Ultimately, none do.

He tries exploring sexuality as a means to fulfillment, beginning with whores and his friends' girls, and moving on to marriage and then falling back to whores before finishing in adultery. But sex gives unsatisfactory, temporary answers, and he dismisses it eventually.

Along the way, we are treated to Naipaul's terse, telling descriptions of persons, events, neighborhoods, and classes. The subtle brilliance of the work is in the way he uses words. Whatever one thinks of the themes, Naipaul is a master of his craft.

An almost raw look at race, identity, and globalization, Half a Life carefully reveals the emptiness of a purposeless life. Unfortunately, it ends as hopeless as Ecclesiastes: vanity, vanity, all is vanity...

The Last Samurai

2009-10-01T10:10:00.003+04:00

The Last Samurai
Helen DeWitt

Once I had to spend 16 days in Finland with very little money, waiting for a visa to Russia. I whiled away much of the time in the English book section of the public library. As I had no library card, I could not take books out, so I sat in hard wooden chairs and read books cover to cover, averaging two a day. This was one of them.

Unfortunately I have not the time nor necessity to read books cover-to-cover in a single sitting now, but still I re-read The Last Samurai in only three days. I couldn't help it; I love this book.

Are you ready to be surprised? This book is not about Samurai. It did not inspire any films. Not the Tom Cruise one, not any other one. Sorry. It's about a single mother from a family of thwarted genius, raising her son as well as she can to explore his interests and proclivities. Since she does not want him to grow up with no male role models, she makes him watch the Japanese film The Seven Samurai (on which the classic American film The Magnificent Seven was based) repeatedly. And in between he teaches himself Greek at age 4, Japanese at 5, starts in on Algebra and aerodynamics before kindergarten, and generally makes it difficult for his mother to continue computerizing back issues of obscure magazines such as Carpworld. The boy, called Ludo, turns a precocious eleven and starts thinking of applying to Oxford and trying to find his father.

Such is the storyline. The style, well! DeWitt dispenses with traditional punctuation like quotation marks, which gives the book a stream of consciousness quality, but it is not so annoying that I cannot read it. The story of Ludo and Sybilla (his mother) is interspersed with their summations of interesting people they admire ("He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men."), comments on syntax and language structure (Japanese, Icelandic, Inuit...), passages from aerodynamics texts, and Sybilla's dry, sarcastic humor ("Tall Men in Tight Jeans! I haven't seen this in years! ...Not ONE but SEVEN tall men in tight jeans! It's simply MAGNIFICENT!").

It is possible that I like this book because everyone it in is as obsessive and strange as I am. It is also witty, original, and makes me laugh. Hard enough that people stare at me on the metro. Care to give it a whirl?

The Kite Runner

2009-09-26T13:31:00.002+04:00

The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini

Amir's childhood is a tumble of playing with his friend Hassan, reading stories under the pomegranate tree, vying for his father's approval, and taking part in the annual kite flying competitions. But as childhood wanes, three events break Amir's comfortable upper-class life: he discovers that he is a writer, he fails to step in and help Hassan in crisis, and Soviet troops begin bombing Kabul.

Amir and his father smuggle themselves to Pakistan, and from there move to California to begin a new life. But the the repercussions of his cowardice haunt Amir. Resolutely, he stifles guilt and ignores the memory of the friend who was a brother to him. Until a phone call from Pakistan requires him to make the same choice again.

Powerful, devastating, heartbreaking, and convicting, The Kite Runner is not only a look at the world of Afghanistan in the last century, but also a deep exploration of the sin of omission. The characters are rich and pungeant, the setting exotic yet homey, the narrator an uncomfortably real man. Prepare to journal and cry over this one. And be careful: it just might change you, too.

The Prisoner of Zenda

2009-09-20T15:20:00.002+04:00

The Prisoner of Zenda
Anthony Hope

This is a re-read, but I've decided to review all books as I read them, provided they haven't yet made it onto the site. Which means you will not get a review of Lord of the Rings every three months, but you do get to hear about The Prisoner of Zenda today.

For a long* time I listed this book when asked my "favorite**." It's a clever and moving tale of high adventure, full of sword fights, intrigue, daring, and frantic gallops across small European countries. It reminds me very much of the film description of The Princess Bride: "Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...."

Set in mythical Ruritania, The Prisoner of Zenda concerns a young English aristocrat, left enough money by his father to allow a life of whim and leisure. When he goes to see the coronation of the new King of Ruritania, he discovers a plot against the sovereign, to whom he bears a striking resemblance. To save the throne, he agrees to sit in for the kidnapped king, buying time for a desperate rescue attempt. Unfortunately, he inadvertantly wins the heart of the princess, and must choose whether to live the honorable man or continue the masquerade to fulfill the desire of his heart.

Though interlaced with questions of honor, loyalty, and valour, The Prisoner of Zenda never forgets that it is a tale of heart-pounding adventure. It has well earned its place as one of the top three swashbuckling adventures I've ever read.

*when it comes to the life of my obsessions, "long time" can be reasonably defined as 6-18 months.
**While I am firmly of the opinion that an avid reader can have a favorite book just as realistically as one can have a favorite skin cell, people persist in asking this question, so I generally try to remember a standard answer.

Question for the People

2009-09-16T19:59:00.004+04:00

Hey, multitude of readers - yes, all two of you - have you ever read a book that was so good it became the Standard of Goodness against which other novels you read were judged? What is it? Why do you consider it so excellent? Do you re-read it, or just cherish it in memory?

The House on the Strand

2009-09-16T19:33:00.003+04:00

The House on the Strand
Daphne du Maurier

A long time ago, in a country far far away, there were library booksales. At one of these heavens I saw a book called The Scapegoat, intriguing because I had just finished a thesis which dealt with the idea of scapegoating. As it was fifty cents, I bought it. And so was caught by the brilliance of Daphne du Maurier.

The Scapegoat will probably always be my favorite, but The House on the Strand throws open a vaguely uncanny realm of possibility, thrusts you into it, and closes the door behind. Specifically, the psychological relationship between the past and present. Do we carry latent common memories with ancestors? If aroused, what would those memories tell us? Would active knowledge of them change our present behavior? Professor Lane, a brilliant biologist, has concocted a drug which opens the old world to his long-time friend Richard Young, who is eager for new experience with which to replace the pasty dissatisfaction of a midlife crisis.

There is never any question as to whether these characters are real; they walk in my memory as vividly as my college roommates, merging fiction and reality much in the same way the drug merges past and present for Richard. He begins to encounter difficult side effects, but now is addicted to the drama of watching another world unfold (this was before TV and therefore surprises him).

Though the setting is rich (Cornwall countryside!), the characters superb, and the plot intriguing, the resolution is dodgy. Most of the pressing questions remain unanswered after a long build-up of hints and near-reveals. I was left feeling a bit cheated out of important information, as if the author decided it was time for the book to be finished already and just closed things off. I understand the dramatic need for the twist which occasioned most of my disappointment, but somehow the tension did not build in such as way as to leave me breathless, but, rather, huffy. Perhaps it is my own fault.

The Devil Wears Prada

2009-09-12T19:01:00.002+04:00

The Devil Wears Prada
Lauren Weisberger

Contrary to what is said on the popular blog Stuff White People Like, it is not socially unacceptable to read a book after it has become a movie. Well, maybe it is, but I don't live in white suburban America anymore, so I don't have to abide by those rules.

I will admit that, if I had not been dragged to see the movie and then accidentally adored it, I would never have picked up this book. One has only to glance at me to see that, clearly, fashion is not My Thing. Somehow all the fashion genes in my family (along with the fashionable jeans) got distributed to my brothers.

But I adored this movie for its fantastic wittiness, fascinating characters, stellar cast, and moral morasses. The book is not quite so witty, the characters are not quite as endearing or lifelike, and of course there's no cast. But the moral challenges and decisions about priorities are even more strongly a theme of the book.

The choices made in the book are not as neat or as fixable as in the film. Andy loses people she loves and is not able to get them back. She lets her friends down and almost costs the life of one of them. She learns little about fashion. But she is real, she struggles with priorities, and the story is told well. I actually took it out of my bag to finish reading it at home one evening after work.

I probably won't re-read this books as many times as I have re-watched the film, but it was enjoyable and not overly fluffy. Definitely worth the time.

In America

2009-09-08T11:01:00.002+04:00

In America
Susan Sontag

The story of a celebrated Polish actress who persuades her friends to follow her to California to establish a simple farm commune and take pleasure in wholesome activity, In America is a tale of dreams, journeys, hope, and how to find one's self when one is without a proper country.

The novel is quite philosophical, spending a lot of time poking around in European perceptions of American culture, particularly theater. It also addresses the disconnect between European ideals of America and the actuality of the young country, the naiveté of aristocrats turned homesteaders, the choice of fidelity in marriage, and the nature of friendships.

The cast of characters are flawed, struggling, vaguely triumphant but not heroic, perhaps meant to mimic protagonist Maryna's famous tragic roles. All of them feel a bit grey, a bit forced, like type-actors on a stage. Unlike the popular Shakespearian roles, there is not a solid, definite end to this story. It fades to grey with Maryna growing old on stage, no mention of whether her husband has reconciled his cravings, no word of whether our heroine has found life or tied of it.

The whole book was slightly grey and flat, with stream-of-conciousness monologue that lasted pages unbroken even by paragraphs. These were interspersed with journal entries, letters, and more typical descriptive prose.

I was interested by the storyline and musings of the chief character, but never captivated. Too bad; I was prepared to enjoy it immensely.

Saving Fish from Drowning

2009-08-31T11:16:00.003+04:00

Saving Fish from Drowning
Amy Tan

I fell in love with Amy Tan last summer when I happened across The Joy Luck Club in a small library in Southern Russia. I read the book in a single sitting, and was so engrossed in it that I didn't notice the sun until I had finished the book and had second-degree burns. I was left with the wackiest tan lines ever and a strong appreciation for Tan's whimsical and witty way of portraying serious truths. So when I came across another of her books in a used book store in Finland, I bought it right away.

With such a wry, contorted zen title, it is no surprise that the book is quirky, glancingly philosophical (although there is more to chew on if you choose to look), and set in Asia. China and Burma, to be precise, with some before-and-after in California. It follows the misadventure of twelve rich, cultured Americans as they tour Buddhist temples, view artwork, sample local cuisine, and encounter indiginous tribes. They are meant to be guided by their friend, Bibi, a spunky Chinese woman who emigrated to America and became the foremost scholar on Buddhist art. Unfortunately, just before the trip is to depart, she is found dead of mysterious causes.

That does not leave her out of the story, however: her spirit follows the group, narrating to us with her wise humor. If only she had lived to keep her friends from making so many cultural blunders and unwise mistakes! But she can only watch, listen, and sigh helplessly as the group gets itself into predicament after foible, leading finally to their mysterious disappearance.

I enjoyed the commentary on tourism, Western ideals forcing themselves on a local setting, and the changing interactions of a group required to live, eat, and sleep together for weeks under stress and change. The characters are quirky and privledged, yet very human. Insightful, exotic, suspenseful, and full of wry humor, Saving Fish from Drowning was an absorbing and fulfilling read. Just make sure you have a good layer of sunscreen on before you start.

What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

2009-08-30T11:31:00.003+04:00

What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day
Pearl Cleage

To be perfectly honest, I bought this book for its cover, which is graced by a chic silhouette of a purple tai chi woman. The typefaces are clean and the cover's understated design intrigued me. Certainly an editor who had chosen such a designer would also have chosen a book to match.

I shouldn't have ignored the "Oprah's Book Club" logo in the top right corner.

Nothing against Oprah (well, nothing that has a part in this discussoin); I buy books for myself, and for my students to practice their English. Oprah tends to recommend books that are a bit more syrupy than I like. Other Oprah book club books I've read have also been big on realistic cultural lingo, which confuses English as a Foreign Language students faster than a page from the book of Job. So I usually avoid the books Oprah has sent her clubbers off to read.

This time, lured by the oh so intriguing cover, I bought the book anyway. It's the story of a 30s-something African-American woman who ran away from her tiny Michigan town to find a life. Now she's back for a short visit between big exciting cities, facing a life with HIV and disillusioned with the prospect of Mecca.

Visiting her sister, she finds that their hometown has changed for the worse, filled with cocaine addicts, abusive boyfriends, single teenage mothers, and ignorance. But her older sister, a widowed social worker, is trying to give the kids enough life training to be able to make something of themselves. The neighbor, a dreadlocked Vietnam vet who practices Tai Chi between carpentry jobs, is helping, too. And as main character Ava starts to help out, she accidentally begins to like the place.

The themes of grassroots-driven social change, small-town community, and looking out for each other are strong, but they work out too quickly for this story to read as anything but a fairy tale. Crack babies are quiet, teenage girls immediately adopt safe sex, the abusive boyfriend is stupid enough to land himself safely out of the way in jail, the cocaine addicts are shuffled off to rehab, and the interfering pastor and his wife are banished to Chicago. It's a story that should be gritty, but somehow we manage to keep our hands clean all the way through.

A little too quickly told, too neatly packaged, but I did like the themes and the characters are quirky and entertaining (if a tad flat). I didn't hate it, but I probably won't be reading this one again. Maybe I'll just prop it up so I can look at the cover.

Snow Falling on Cedars

2009-08-22T15:17:00.003+04:00

Snow Falling on Cedars
David Guterson

Though it may be difficult to immediately appreciate the aptness of titling the story of a murder trial after trees and snow, I have never read a book with a more fitting title. The narrative is grey, quiet, thick, inescapable, brutal, beautiful.

The story itself explores the lives of a small island fishing community off the coast of Seattle as the inhabitants interact with each other, their memories, and the first murder trial in twenty-three years. A murder trial is anything but impersonal in such a small community, and we walk through the reflections and encounters of community members as they recognize how their lives are intertwined with each other. They held their breath and walked with care, and this made them who they were inside, constricted and small, good neighbors.

Illegal immigrants, racial prejudice, World War II, childhood romances, relocation camps, strawberry farms, and salmon fishing weave in and out of the story and the island. And, of course, at the end we finally find out the truth. But will justice be done?

104 Books You Really Should Read

2009-08-17T21:21:00.001+04:00

This is not a meme; I spent hours compiling this list myself.

Ordered by difficulty and alphabetically. Roughly. I have read every one of these books, and I did not include any books which I myself have not read and been changed by. Which means The Kite Runner is not on here, because I haven't read it yet....

It is 104 because I could not stop after 100.

How many of these have you read? What would you add to the list, and why? Have any questions about any of these books?

1. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
2. Dr. Doolittle, Hugh Lofting
3. Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder
4. Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry
5. Over Sea and Under Stone, Susan Cooper
6. Stories from Grandmother's Attic, Arletta Richardson
7. The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald
8. The Secret Garden, Francis Hodgeson Burnett
9. The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White
10. The Wheel on the School, Meindert DeJong
11. Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne
12. A Winter Book, Tove Jansson
13. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle
14. Aesop's Fables
15. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
16. All Creatures Great and Small, James Harriot
17. Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery
18. Another Fine Myth, Robert Asprin
19. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
20. Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates, Mary Mapes Dodge
21. Heidi, Johanna Spyri
22. King of the Wind, Margurite Henry
23. My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George
24. Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
25. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
26. The Black Arrow, Robert Lewis Stevenson
27. The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
28. The Giver, Lois Lowry
29. The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
30. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie
31. The Outlaws of Sherwood, Robin McKinley
32. The Prisoner of Zenda, Anthony Hope
33. The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy
34. The Wizard of Oz, Frank W. Baum
35. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
36. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain
37. A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah
38. A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
39. Born on a Blue Day, Daniel Tammet
40. Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
41. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
42. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
43. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
44. Links, Nuruddin Farah
45. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
46. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
47. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
48. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
49. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
50. Short Stories, Rainer Maria Rilke
51. The Bronze Bow, Elizabeth George Speare
52. The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean Auel
53. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
54. The Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Boom
55. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
56. The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Edward Eggleston
57. The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells
58. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
59. The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
60. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
61. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
62. The Swiss Family Robinson, Johann D. Wyss
63. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
64. The Yearling, J.K. Rawlings
65. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
66. Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
67. Treasure Island, Robert Lewis Stevenson
68. War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
69. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
70. Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
71. Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
72. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
73. 1984, George Orwell
74. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
75. Animal Farm, George Orwell
76. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Die Sijie
77. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
78. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
79. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
80. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
81. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
82. How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn
83. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
84. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
85. My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
86. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexandr Solzhenitzen
87. Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis
88. Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde
89. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
90. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel DeFoe
91. Silas Marner, George Eliot
92. Tales from the Scriptorium, Paul Auster
93. The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat
94. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin
95. The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
96. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
97. The Illiad, Homer
98. The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara
99. The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
100. The Prince, Machiavelli
101. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
102. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
103. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
104. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Ivanhoe

2009-08-17T20:48:00.003+04:00

Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott

One of the most easily located landmarks in Edinburgh is the monument to Sir Walter Scott. The gothic steeple rising over his statue can be seen from all over the Northern side of the city.

Having just visited the capitol of his country for the first time, I found it appropriate to re-visit his most famous book. I thoroughly enjoyed it as a young teen, and thoroughly forgot it in the meantime. Which was an unfortunate thing, as it is an excellent tale of chivalry, adventure, and the thin lines between law and right.

What struck me most in the midst of this merry tale (with appearances by Robin Hood and his legendary gang, Prince John, King Richard the Lionhearted, and more knights than you could shake a lance at) was the deep animosity between Saxons and Normans, and the even greater hatred everyone cherished toward Jews. I am glad modern Great Britain is more accepting, but it is worth remembering that our past is not as pure as we often conveniently believe.

I also really enjoyed the exploration of identity; several times Scott makes use of masks and anonymity to showcase the difference in the way a person is treated when gaged by ability and character, and how he is treated when more commonly labeled by name, rank, and country. (In what ways do you do this?)

Overall, a delightful jaunt through the castles, forests, and lanes of medieval England.

The First Official Post

2009-08-17T20:30:00.002+04:00

Hello! Welcome to my book blog. It may or may not be updated regularly, and will probably depend strongly on how often I travel to Finland to buy more books. But the idea is for me to share my opinions on stories I encounter. Hopefully you will reply with stories and opinions of your own.

Let the reading begin!