And since it’s summer and I’m so far behind in my book reviewing, I’m going to have to leave it at that. Oh well.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars — Book club selection

It’s summer. Cut me some slack.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars – Book club vacation reading

The beginning is slow, but stick with it. There are a lot of scenes sitting around a room over drinks philosophizing, and Frank definitely loves the sound of his own voice.

“This whole country’s rotten with sentimentality,” Frank said one night, turning ponderously from the window to walk the carpet. “It’s been spreading like a disease for years, for generations, until now everything you touch is flabby with it.”

“Exactly,” she said, enraptured by him.

“I mean isn’t that what’s really the matter, when you get right down to it? I mean even more than the profit motive or the loss of spiritual values or the fear of the bomb or any of those things? Or maybe it’s the result of those those things; maybe it’s what happens when all those things start working at once without any real cultural tradition to absorb them. Anyway, whatever it’s the result of, it’s what’s killing the United States. I mean isn’t it? This steady, insistent vulgarizing of every idea and every emotion into some kind of pre-digested intellectual baby food; this optimistic, smiling-though easy-way-out sentimentality in everybody’s view of life?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

“And I mean is it any wonder all the men end up emasculated? Because that is what happens; that is what’s reflected in all this bleating about ‘adjustment’ and ’security’ and ‘togetherness’ — and I mean Christ, you see it everywhere: all this television crap where every joke is built on the premise that daddy’s an idiot and mother’s always on to him; and these loathsome little signs people put up in their front yards — you ever notice those signs up on the Hill?”

“The ‘The’ signs, you mean; with people’s name in the plural? Like ‘The Donaldsons’?”

“Right!” He turned and smiled down at her in triumphant congratulation for having seen exactly what he meant. “Never ‘Donaldson’ or “John D. Donaldson’ or whatever the hell his name is. Always ‘The Donaldsons.’ You picture the whole cozy little bunch of them sitting around all snug as bunnies in their pajamas, for God’s sake, toasting marshmallows. I guess the Campbells haven’t put up a sign like that yet, but give ‘em time. THe rate they’re going now, they will.” He paused here for a deep-throated laugh. “And my God, when you think how close we came to settling into that kind of an existence.”

“But we didn’t,” she told him. “That’s the important thing.”

Wow. The ego is mind-blowing, and the sexism there more than a little apparent. Well, part of that is certainly the time period. I’d love to discuss that element of the book with someone else — whether the author’s goal is to speak to society’s and his wife’s emasculation of Frank as the source of his troubles, or perhaps that his ego and fear of emasculation is what blinds him to his real troubles. Veddy veddy interesting, IMO.

No matter what the author’s intent — in the end, it doesn’t really matter — this books is one that gets the gears turning. It sums up the frustration of the American dream so precisely and deeply, making you both love and hate it’s characters, making you cringe at their pain while you kind of root for their downfall. Yates succeeded in depicting my ambiguous feelings about this country of mine with simple but evokative prose and characters that will whisper in my ear for some time to come. Brilliant.

What ever happened to Yates, who was apparently quite popular in his time? I may have to pick up another of his novels.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

I was tempted not to finish it. The first half is so utterly painful, the story of a 15-year-old girl who has been date raped and all the typical victim doubt, blame and shame that I utterly loathe in the newspapers and don’t want to see rehashed on the page. (With no twists from the newspapers’ usual stories either, which might have made the story less like the deplorable thing every other teen in America seems to go through.) At the halfway point, however, the story expanded beyond the incident and I was able to muck my way through.

Expanded beyond the incident? That’s an understatement. How about ballooned out of all reckoning into graphic novels, suicide, the plight of native Americans, dog mushing races and beyond.

No personal offence to Jodi or her fans, and not to say that her other books aren’t leaps and bounds better, but on top of the experience of this one novel I’ll have to say: Sorry, I’m just not that into you. And sorry for leaving this review on such a corny note, but that stupid phrase seems to sum up my feelings completely.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars – Mediocre vacation reading

When fifteen-year-old Clary Fray heads out to the Pandemonium Club in New York City, she hardly expects to witness a murder — much less a murder committed by three teenagers covered with strange tattoos and brandishing bizarre weapons. Clary knows she should call the police, but it’s hard to explain a murder where the body disappears into thin air and the murderers are invisible to everyone but Clary. Equally startled by her ability to see them, the murderers explain themselves as Shadowhunters: a secret tribe of warriors dedicated to ridding the earth of demons.

I finished it in three days. I still say, “Meh.” But it was cotton candy for the brain, the mindless silliness that cleared my head between two non-fiction biographies. Judge me if you will.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars – Mediocre vacation reading

The title character, the cellist, was a real person. He truly did witness a mortar attack on a group of people trying to buy bread, 22 of whom were killed. He really did set up his cello in the street and play Albinoni’s Adagio for 22 days in honor of the dead. Our three main characters — a female sniper, a father trekking across the city to find water and a baker on his way to work — spiral around the tale of this cellist, this crazy musician who makes himself a daily target, this man who somehow expresses what they all need to hear.

A small decision. Nothing to think about. You’re hungry, and come to this place where maybe they will have some bread to buy. Of all the places to go, you come here. Of all the days to come, a particular one chooses you. At four o’clock in the afternoon. It’s just something you do because life is a series of tiny, unavoidable decisions. And then some men on the hills send a bomb through the air to kill you. For them, it was probably just one more bomb in a day of many. Not notable at all.

She reaches down and picks up a small piece of glass. Glass is disappearing from the city. It’s either blown up or removed to prevent it from becoming a projectile when it inevitably is blown up. One pane at a time the windows through which people see the world are vanishing.

This is how she now believes life happens. One small thing at a time. A series of inconsequential junctions, any or none of which can lead to salvation or disaster. There are no grand moments where a person does or does not perform the act that defines their humanity. There are only moments that appear, briefly, to be this way.

It amazing how much humans can adapt, how much they can take and still survive, how quickly we can all revert to a primitve subsistence existence. And it’s amazing to me that this travesty happened. In the 1990s, not the 16th century. The image of people huddled against a brick wall, steeling themselves for a quick dash across an exposed intersection, where a dead man lays sprawled with a sniper bullet in his head: That picture is going to haunt me for the rest of my life, as will Galloway’s spare yet evocative writing style. He’s a writer that makes you feel as if his story was always true, was always there, floating invisibly in space. He simply plucked the words from the air and captured them between two covers.

Please, pick up this tiny novel and open your heart to it. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in years.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

In some ways, I’m truly amazed that a man wrote this story, so compelling is the way he speaks of his mother’s early life, the obsequious way she’s forced to deal with men, her fear, her impotence and especially the limits placed upon her. Chaperones, clothing, words. She turns to alcohol — which was (is?) illegal in the Muslim state — that she buys in secret from the local baker. How else is one supposed to cope with the stress of being under the sword, as Suleiman thinks of their situation, alluding to One Thousand and One Nights/Arabian Nights?

What would come out? Could he make music, could he sing? Scheherazade did, night after night, unable to look up into a sky or rest in the silence and solitude of her garden, hearing a wicker chair creak with the comfort of her own weight. She, I am certain now, was one of the bravest people that had ever lived. It’s one thing not to fear death, another to sing under the sword.

This novel is packed with meaning and careful prose, which makes it a slow read. But it also feels like you’re imprisoned in a small space just like Suleiman and his mother. The way the boy reacts to the stress is dead-spot-on kids’ behavior. He lashes out at his real friends, he becomes disobedient, he turns violent and tearful by turns, he feels crushing guilt.

Concern. I think that was what I craved. A warm and steady and unchangeable concern. In a time of cloud and tears, in a Libya full of bruise-checkered and urine-stained men, urgent with want and longing for relief, I was the ridiculous child craving concern. And although I didn’t think of it then in these terms, my self-pity had soured into self-loathing.

In the end, I think this novel reads more like autobiography than fiction. It seems like a novel should have a little more forward momentum. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the characters, the style and the plot are incredibly well done, by a very talented writer. I’ll definitely have to see if he’s written any novels since.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

And that’s about all I have to say. I cannot deconstruct the author’s style. IMO, she’s a story teller, not an “author.” (Pronounced as Auuuu-thor, with a British accent, of course.) And she tells a story well. Even cutting her that slack, I got a little pissed off at the beginning of the fourth book, where her heavy handed exposition was driving me nuts. “So Vampire X — you know, the one who tried to kill me last year?” Or, “My friend, who had shocked me when I found out he was a werewolf?” Yes, I get it. Your publisher wants a first-time reader to be able to pick up the last book and follow along. Your publisher is pandering to me, and therefore, so are you. Shut up and let’s get on with the blood-sucking drama already.

Was it a satisfying conclusion? I suppose so. I didn’t really expect anything but an uncomplicated happy ending, so no surprises there. I know, SHOCKER! But I enjoyed burning my way through the books. They’re my equivalent of watching a marathon of Golden Girls on Lifetime, or re-watching all of the Sex and the City episodes. Are they surprising or challenging? No. But that there is some great entertainment.

I seriously hope that young girls are reading other things that DO challenge the mind a little. Though I know I have friends who still find her intimidating, check out Jane Austen. Seriously, they’re love stories, straight-up love stories. They just have a different language and culture in them.

No vampires, though. Bummer.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

I’m going to note right now that this is me, and a lot of readers — I’ve heard — think David Foster Wallace is overly intellectual, incredibly dense and even unreadable. So be it for those readers. But if the worlds that Wallace creates were real, as real as they feel to me, it’s a place I would certainly visit, fit right in. Those other readers just don’t have to come.

Case in point, let’s talk about Weight Watchers. Picture a very large fat man sitting at a restaurant table explaining why he’s trying to get even fatter in an attempt to swell to the size of the universe, not an atom to spare. Watch your fingers, he’s hungry!

We each need a full universe. Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void caused by that diminution of Self.

Yes, you can read it twice. There’s no shame in that.

Oh the fat man? He’s joined by a colorful cast of weirdos and nutcases. A woman whose body temperature won’t regulate itself, so has to be in a room that’s 98 degrees. Patients strapped in chairs that move along an electronic track at a psychiatrist’s office. A talking, cursing parrot. A one-legged druggie who keeps his stash in his prosthetic. There’s a manmade black-sand desert in the Midwest. A group of escaped senior citizens may or may not be trying to take down a baby food company. You get the point. This is crazy stuff. And crazy stuff brilliantly written.

For instance, character Rick Vigorous describes an emotional (Lolita-esque) memory of riding in the car with his neighbor’s teenage daughter, who he has a little crush on.

In the passenger window beside her were reflected at an angle the images of the oncoming cars and trucks, and there was her image, there, too, waiting; and the cars and trucks bore down in the window and emptied head-on into her reflection, were swallowed and exploded, and out the back of her reflection into my sleepy face came fragments of lights, the street made pale, and a wash of scent.

Yes the scent really came off her head, not off images exploding into light in glass; I am not a complete shitty fool.

Ha! You see that, what he did there? Went off on a flight of fancy and then cut it back to earth. I hope I’m not the only one who has read this book that laughed.

Obviously, I think this is a fantastic book and I loved pretty much every minute, feeling a little sad when I reached the end. But just like his more famous novel Infinite Jest, it’s one I’ll treasure for a long time. Jest is probably better in the big scheme of things, but Broom is shorter and less menacing for certain for readers who’ve never attempted Wallace.

Believe me, from the bottom of my heart which beats faster for this man, David Foster Wallace was an amazingly gifted author with a unique, agile and playful mind. I won’t go further into his death, because it truly saddens me, except to say that even if he’s gone, I’m glad he existed. When someone reaches that far inside your head and seems to truly understand you, perhaps even to share a lot of your major personality traits, it’s a really moving experience.

Sniff. Blub. Seriously. I love him this much.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

The story line is nothing too all-fired unique: one of those stories where several characters tell the intersecting stories of their lives, and it’s assumed that when they coalesce at the end, there will deep some *deep* or *important* meaning (a la the movie Crash). I know y’all know what I’m talking about. But the voices of the characters and the language used to tell their stories catapulted this novel above that perhaps-overused plot device. These are vivid and surprising women, each unique and interesting. And the language? I swooned. With a style very similar to my fave Toni Morrison, Naylor’s words are are sensuous and tactile; they fall like marbles, bounce, spin around, roll away, rhythmic and sonorous. Much credit has to go to the voice talent on the recording, certainly, but these words have life, have feet to get up and walk about the room. That part about swooning? Really, my heart beats faster and my knees weaken when I hear an author who can string a sentence like this: Morrison at the beginning of Jazz, Nabokov in Lolita (“Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” You see what I mean? Knees. Weak.)

As suspected and hammered over the head with, the ending was *deep* and *important,* like you knew it would be. I prefer my “morals of the story” to be a little more organic and less predictable than that. But the journey to get there was a fun one and that made this book worth reading, on paper or on tape.

Note: I bought the book on Audible and have the file in my possesion, if anyone wants to take a listen.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

[E]ven as a kid, Mendel Shpilman seemed to intuit the messy flow that both powered the Law and required its elaborate system of drains and sluices. Fear, doubt, lust, dishonesty, broken vows, murder and love, uncertainty about the intentions of God and men, little Mendel saw all of that not only in the Aramaic abstract but when it appeared in his father’s study, clothed in the dark surge and juicy mother tongue of everyday life.

After his death, all hell breaks loose for Landsman and his investigation snowballs into one clue or adventure after another.

Mendel’s funeral:

For an instant the crowd, the afternoon, the whole wide world of Jews breaths in and forgets to breathe out again. After that it’s madness, a Jewish riot, at once violent and verbal, fat with intemperate accusations and implacable curses. Skin diseases are called down, damnations and hemorrhages. Yelling, surging black hats, sticks and fists, shouting and screaming, beards fluttering like crusander flags, swearing, the smell of churning mud, of blood and ironed trousers.

(I just love that at the end, the ironed trousers.)

It’s certainly over the top. I understand that Chabon is being playful with this alternate history and I appreciate that. However, there were points where I thought maybe he’d gone a bit too far, especially in regards to the detective stereotyping. The hard drinking, divorced, go-with-his-gut, insubordinate yet gifted detective is oh so familiar, and there were points where I felt like he was relying on that too heavily at the expense of the character and the story. But on the whole this was a really good read, one I’d recommend as heartily as Cavalier and Klay.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

With the size and scope of the work, you’d think I would. The author arranges for the characters to bump into most of the important people of the day: Charles Darwin, Count de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, John Jacob Astor, John Fremont and more. And the characters also dip their feet into so many issues or philosophies of the times, including republicanism, the opium trade, the creation of Utopian communities, the rise of Mormonism, the speeding up of society thanks to technology, the gold fever, and etc. and etc.

In the end, it’s more like the characters are witnesses to all of the history going on around them, but they don’t actually DO much themselves. They’re just along for the ride, rather flimsy foils for the real character, which is the time period itself. The cover quote calls it “a joyful, wild gallop through a joyful, wild time to be an American,” and I would agree. But perhaps the author gave the horse a little bit too much freedom, not reigning the story into a smooth, compelling plotline. Certainly entertaining in places, the novel sludges to a boring stop in others, and it seems the real action didn’t begin until halfway through the book!

I made it through to the end and found the experience not unpleasant, so there’s that. But I also wouldn’t recommend the lengthy tome to friends. I’d recommend it to a good editor, who would cut 200 pages.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

And yes, sigh, I’ll get the third one from the library, too. Of course, I’m No. 141 on the library’s wait list. By the time I actually get the novel, I’ll hopefully have read enough meatier literature to justify another three-day reading spell in bed.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

Perhaps this book was flung together in a more haphazard way that the first one, or perhaps there’s just only so far you can stretch this world before it shatters like stale taffy. (Dorian Grey is NOT a fairytale character!) Whatever the reason, I struggled to finish this novel and would recommend to anyone who craves a dose of whimsy to stick with the first book and move on. Nothing more to see here.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars – Mediocre vacation reading

And, most frustratingly, lots of typos and strange punctuation. Especially commas:

I am offering you a choice that I think no girl in your situation has ever been offered, before.

Or:

The princess who was to be his daughter-in-law, had arrived.

Also a few instances of “an” where “and” was meant. That kind of thing. Tres annoying for a grammar nazi, you know.

Frankly, I’ve heard the tale inside out and I’m not interested in rehashing what I know. If you have something new to offer — like the mostly historically accurate Tudors series, with its powerful sensuality and handsome Henry — I’m all ears/eyes. But life’s too short and busy to struggle through something I’m not really liking. However, if someone else wants the book — which I got for the low, low price of $1.50 — you’re welcome to it.

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars – Unfinished business

Cruel? Yes. Snobbish? Probably. But what can I say? I’m a writer myself and I take my reading seriously, and in my opinion, this first-time novelist doesn’t share either trait. Stilted dialog. Flat and unknowable characters. A long-winded book that doesn’t end up saying much of anything, meaning there was very little physical and environmental description and it contained a relationship — the focal point of the book — that had no spark. Not that it’s Horan’s fault, really. (Read on.)

This is the story of Mamah Borthwick, the mistress of Frank Lloyd Wright and the woman for whom he built Taliesin. The woman who was splashed across the pages of the papers due to the scandal and then vanished into a footnote in the great architect’s biography. (If there was such a scandal, where’s the passion, huh?) She’s a feminist and a free thinker, especially considering the time period, but it doesn’t seem like there’s enough information to draw upon to do her story justice. Most first-hand evidence of her life, like her journals and correspondance, was destroyed, and the author was forced to draw upon the newspaper articles and the few letters she could scrounge. So no wonder the story seems light and insubstantial, a skeleton without meat or humanity. Either fabricate a little more and have the guts to flesh the poor woman out, or stick to a straight non-fic telling of her life. But in this bare-bones manner, it does Mamah’s memory poor service.

Poor woman. To go through so much hell for love in the age before readily available divorce. To be such an aspiring feminist and writer, and yet to procrastinate and doubt away your time, and wind up with no work to your name. I do see why Horan wanted to take a crack at her life. Nice crack, but unsucessful. Wanna know how I got through it? The lovely lady who invited me to the club told me that the book ends with Mamah’s death, and an interesting and untimely death it was. Save that for your own carrot if you want to read the book. If you want to know the secret, click here.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars – Mediocre

Not to sound even more judgmental and snobbish than I usually am (see above tangent), but I am one of those people who deplore the state of American readers. God bless Harry Potter. I read the first book and love the movies, but if all you’ve read in the past year is Harry, the Golden Compass and Twilight, I’m probably going to downgrade you as reader. Not as a person, take note. But only as a reader. That said, the overwhelming success of the Twilight series — especially among ADULTS — was offputting. (I mean, come on. Even Oprah puts non-young-adult books on her list. You’d think women would read “The Road” or “Grapes of Wrath.” Even if I hate the fact that she put her O stickers on Steinbeck and McCarthy.)

However, I was very, very surprised that I liked Twilight. Trite and formulaic? Yes. Catering to the yearning teenaged girl in all of us? Yes. But did it make me want to fall in love with a vampire? Hell yes.

Even being the book snob that I am, sometimes it’s so fun just to reconnect to the joy of reading, where you can’t wait to see what happens next. Throughout my childhood and into the teens, I was the kind of person who could hole up and read an entire book in one day, and this was one of those. If I had a whole day without work and obligations anymore, of course. As is, it took me three. But the joy? It was there and I relished it.

I’ll admit, the culminating drama at the end was a little unbelievable and forced. The narrative climax was a bit hit-you-over-the-head and please-please-suspend-your disbelief. But the relationship between the main characters is cute and engaging — even if it contains more than a bit of the of wishful thinking that every girl indulges in.

Like Harry Potter, I’m very glad I read the first one. I don’t know if I will continue into the second, but I suspect my romantic tendancies will trump my literary sensibilties and I will. Of course, I will be disappointed if I never find out what a real relationship (you know, IT) is like between a vampire and a mortal. But it’s a young-adult book, so I’ve resigned myself to the thought that I’ll never know. Perhaps they can make an adult version for that part? Here’s hoping.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars – Book club vacation reading

As I said, my prescribed dose of whimsy was over due (all blindness and murder lately), and the irreverent and playful tone of the historical scenes were up to the task:

Upon those travelers who make their way without maps or guides, there breaks a wave of exhilaration with each unexpected change of plans. This exhilaration is not a whore who can be bought with money nor a neighborhood beauty who may be wooed. She (to persist in personifying the sensation as female) is a wild and sea-eyed undine, the darling daughter of adventure, the sister of risk, and it is for her rare and always ephemeral embrace, the temporary pressure she exerts on the membrane of ecstasy, that many men leave home.

Charmingly meta, unique, like finger painting with words: I loved the tone. And the sex! Nothing wrong with a little historical randiness with the god Pan. For about half the book, my belief was suspended and I was flying high, riding the ferris wheel.

But sheesh, as we continue along our journey, we lose all focus, snowballing into long dialogs in badly written accents (see below) and conjectures about how flowers killed the dinosaurs, the human’s “flower brain” and how perfume can stave off death. Suddenly, not so much fun. Belief unsuspended crashing to earth.

We’ve got ourselves stuck in a cyclic system that makes true freedom, true growth impossible. In the arts, a period o’ classicism is followed by a period o’ romanticism. Then ’tis back to the classical again. ‘Tis as simpleminded as a bloody pendulum, and for me, at least, it robs art of any real meaning. Same thing in society. A conservative cycle, a liberal cycle, then a conservative cycle again. Action and reaction, back and forth, like the tides. As long as we’re trapped in these cycles, we can’t expect much in the way o’ liberation, we can’t even expect fundamental change except the awful slow variety where each step takes a million years or more.

Hmm. I think this character is trying to talk about shedding the bad habit of surrendering to death without at fight and saying, “I quit!” However, I more thought that he was talking about the stagnating plot — or maybe American politics. But at that point, I really didn’t care anymore if the “base note” of the immortal scent was beet pollen, or how beets symbolize the human condition. (Seriously, people.) And the ending? Nothing happens, or nothing too interesting. It’s as if the author reached a certain word count and put down his pen.

Mr. Tom Robbins has a voice that appeals to me, that’s for certain, enough so that if I run across his other books, I’ll gladly take another whirl of whimsy. But I think he fought the plot and the plot won on this one, leaving both parties the worse for it.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars – Mediocre vacation reading

Obviously, the character of Pap stuck in Jon Clinch’s mental turbines, as well, so much so that he created this carefully crafted, earnest and deep novel to tell Finn’s story, the story that came before the story of his offspring that we all know and love. We don’t know Finn — he’s an unknowable man, even to himself — and we certainly don’t love him, or even like him in portions of the tale. Just as he is the roguish boy’s dangerous father, Finn’s story is starkly adult where Huck’s a whimsical, dark where Huck is light, heavy as the river water that Huck floats upon so light-heartedly.

This place has been here from the beginning and it will be here in the end: Adams County, hacked from the wilderness by naming’s brutal baptism long before Illinois was a state or a territory or even so much as a dream.

A primitive landscape and a primitive man, Finn’s life consists of exchanging fish for whiskey, of committing acts he thinks are sinful and berating himself for his actions afterward. He’s a drunk and a slob and a bully and maniac, yet we also get to see the man as a spurned son, a struggling father, a man trying to keep his head above water and his demons in the closet.

Bit by bit he descends to the level of drunkenness that he had attained previous to arriving home and then he proceeds beyond it, venturing into territory that the boy has seen before only on occasions when the fish have been especially plentiful and the harvest of whiskey has thus been particularly bounteous. For a man who enjoys his drink he permits it to make him miserable. He rages against the blacks and the government and the law, all of which he insists have conspired to bring him to ruin. Something about his drunkenness gives him the idea that he must stand up in order to orate properly, and every time he attempts to do so he loses his balance and falls, spilling his drink and catching himself with his sore left arm. This only fuels his wrath and his urgent sense that remaining successfully upon his feet is essential to his thwarted purpose and so he rages against the table and against the chair and against the tub of salt pork over which he takes a tumble for they too just like the blacks and the government and the law have been laying for him since the day he was born.

“Finn” is not a prequel to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and it’s not an addendum. Certain revelations, however, made in the novel make you rethink the character and perspective of Huck in the original book, including the true identity of Huck’s mother: a black woman and a former slave who Finn treats as a common-law wife and his property, both in turn.

Whu? Huck Finn is a … yes, that’s right. At least in this fictional universe, that is.

Is there a certain point in human history where we run out of stories to tell? I once wondered if, because there are only a finite number of musical notes, there were a finite number of original songs. Lord knows that Hollywood wants to simply remake or re-imagine a previously successful story or set of characters every three years or so, or is able to churn out sequels like they’re going out of style. (Please, why can’t they go out of style?)

In terms of novels, I’ve read a few — “The Hours” comes to mind — that make me think the remaking and re-imagining are entering the world of literature. And considering how much I liked both “The Hours” and “Finn,” I’m thinking that such revisitation might not be so bad. With the talent, calculation and passion Clinch brings to Finn, he added depth and mystery and humanity to my memory of Twain without changing the classic tale. He made the literary world that much more of a complex and downright interesting place to be.

(Sorry to the book club I skipped because I hadn’t finished the book yet. It was a solid choice, and I’ll be sure to get on the ball quicker next time.)

Rating: 4.5 stars – Hardcover book club selection

TENSE CHANGE: I am liking this book. I am. However, I had to put it down in order to start on a novel for a book club, a more pressing obligation seeing that there’s a firm deadline. (Not that I made the deadline — the election got in the way. Geez, I’m a failure.)

All moaning and self deprecation aside, I *will* pick it back up again. As for when, who knows?

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars – Unfinished business

Like most kids, I used to wonder what it would be like to be blind. I’d close my eyes and see if I could make it to the kitchen, to the bus stop, just by counting steps. Losing my sight, that plunge into emptiness and infantile helplessness, is the scariest of all disabilities for a book-junky like myself. But never did I take the fantasy as far as to imagine that the blindness could be contagious, that when everyone has gone blind, there are no good samaritans to help you across the street or to teach you braille, no one left to reorient you to the world, no one with the eyes to look into a microscope and find a cure. In this novel, Saramago takes that blind world to its inevitable destination: a world where other people don’t really exist unless you bump into them, where names no longer matter and homes are forever lost, where shame for your actions is a thing of the past and inhibitions fly out the window. In this dark world, it’s difficult if not impossible to perform the most basic human functions of eating, cleaning onself and even shitting — get used to the word, readers, because you’re in for a heap of shit here.

Through the eyes of the doctor’s wife, the one unfortunate person who keeps her vision in the novel, we have this pure helplessness and chaos thrust upon us. The rape and murder, the theft and betrayal, the starvation. But mostly the filth, of unwashed bodies and excrement-slick city streets and rotting corpses and putrid food. While she’s not the narrator of the story, the doctor’s wife leads the reader along much like her husband and the other blind people in her care, taking us by the hand and guiding us through this vile and primitive place that was once a civilization.

It is this feeling of being guided and herded, just like those afflicted with the white blindness, that leads me to shout out, “DON’T go see this movie.” Boycott it now and pretend it was never made, folks, because there is no way in hell or Hollywood that the frightening, feral world of this Nobel Prize-winning novel can be reproduced visually. I’ve never before perceived that as readers, we are essentially blind. It is only through other’s words — through the artform of storytelling — that people, places and situations are painted in our minds. But Saramago obviously grasped this concept of the reader as sightless, and he uses the idea like a sharp weapon to make the book a searing experience. And with odd formatting — little puncuation, fewer paragraph breaks and no quote marks — he furthers that feeling of unfamiliarity, of strange newness and disorientation. Staring at a white page dotted with words really does feel like the white blindness, the doctor’s wife our only point of reference and we hang on tight for fear of becoming lost. How, tell me, could this feeling of blind terror of words on paper ever, ever be reproduced on the big screen?

[W]e went down all the steps of indignity, all of them, until we reached total degradation, the same might happen here albeit in a different way, then we still had the excuse that the degradation belonged to someone else, not now, now we are all equal regarding good and evil, please, don’t ask me what good and what evil are, we knew what it was each time we had to act when blindness was an exception, what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves, one should not trust the latter, forgive this moralizing speech, you do not know, you cannot know, what it means to have eyes in a world in which everyone else is blind, I am not a queen, no, I am simply the one who was born to see this horror, you can feel it, I both feel and see it and that’s enough of this dissertation, Let’s go and eat. No one asked any questions, the doctor simply said, If I ever regain my sight, I shall look carefully at the eyes of others, as if I were looking into their souls, Their souls, asked the old man with the eyepatch, Or their minds, the name does not matter, is was then that, surprisingly, if we consider that we are dealing with a person without much education, that the girl with the dark glasses said, Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

I know, I know. I’m a maudlin reader, forever falling in love with books about difficult subjects. And I’m also a literature snob, reveling in complex and unique writers, all dense sentences and poetic license. So of course this book is right up my alley. But all that aside, I can’t imagine anyone taking this literary journey and not being shocked at the new human experience Saramago plucked from his imagination and made real. Hip-deep in this book, you can not help but be amazed — as I constantly am — at the power and the art of words on a page.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

But we don’t see them fall. The book isn’t about the people jumping out windows or the flames or the trapped firemen. It’s about the shock, about how ordinary people became unmoored after the devestation, left to drift in a new world where the very ground seemed unsteady. His marriage cracks with stress, his wife returns to England with no promises of reunion, and Hans speaks to the human effect of such earth-shattering personal and public tragedies.

In search of a fresh point of view, (I) wandered to the window there. Snowflakes like coffee grinds blackened the insect screen. Powdered ice, blown up from the window trough, had gained on the sill and now crept up the glass. I was, it will be understood, afflicted by the solitary’s vulnerability to insights, so that when I peered out into the flurry and saw no sign of the Empire State Building, I was assaulted by the notion, arriving in the form of a terrifying stroke of consciousness, that substance — everything of so-called concreteness — was indistinct from its unnamable opposite.

Kicking a rock or patting a dog is, I suppose, enough to rid most people of this variety of bewilderment, which must be as ancient as our species. But I didn’t have a rock or a dog to hand. I had nothing to hand — nothing but the glass of a window under assault from a storm.

Hans is in a fog, ambling somewhat passively around a New York full of colorful characters, craziness and cricket. Cricket? You know, that prissy game that’s a little like baseball but with more rules? Through the order and structure of a recreational cricket league, he tries to prop himself up, to return to his youth, when everything was just-so, lined up like matched socks in a drawer. But in truth, his cricket association only complicates existence, bringing him into contact with men from the Caribbean, Africa, India, Pakistan. He’s the only white man playing the whitest of sports, but a foreigner just as much as them.

So, we have that it’s about cricket and 9/11 and shock. But don’t be surprised if there are a few twists, such as the fact that the story is bookended at beginning and end with murder. Yes, MURDER, I say!

My only complaint? You find out that Hans and his wife will kiss, make up and reunite on page 2. Page 2! I figured it was a spoiler for me so I’m allowed to blurt it out on you. What a dramatic waste.

My only regret? I got the book wet while in the hot tub — that fabulous, private, balcony hot tub we enjoyed on vacation — making it the second such piece of library property I’ve water damaged in the last year. If they think they’re going to get my library card, though, they’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

Rating: 4.5 stars – A hardcover book club selection

One word for this book — or rather for the author, who didn’t impress me before — and that word is:

Meh.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

With the typical bluntness of many Russian authors — but none of the complex sentence structure and pretense of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, for instance, IMHO — the reader climbs into Shukov’s (as he’s called) shoes. His cold, cold boots stuffed with rags, which he is allowed to dry on the stove every third night. We put on his scanty and ragged clothing (anything more than regulation will be taken away) against the chill, and our muscles ache from the hard work of laying bricks in weather so frigid that the mortar freezes if the work’s not completed quickly. The turnip broth turns cold on the table and the bread freezes solid.

Did I mention it’s cold? Siberian cold? Yes? Perhaps I stress this fact because I read this book, the WHOLE book, during a very slow day of volunteering for the El Paso County primary elections, held in a room whose AC was powerful enough to personally contribute to global warning. The volunteer next to me pulled up his hood. I rubbed my hands between my legs as I read. I felt Shukov’s pain.

As, of course, the reader is meant to. The book was one of the first that told the inside story of the Soviet work camps, and was therefore quite shocking and influential. Today, it remains so, but for different reasons. Yes, the gulag depicted is an awful place to be: I’d chose hell over this place, because I’d rather sweat to death than feel ice crystals forming in my blood. But what I found amazing was Shukov and his fellow prisoner’s attitudes toward their imprisonment. Illustrating the ultimate in human adaptation, they don’t rail against their unjust treatment. There’s nothing to be done, after all. They get by, they trade cigarettes, they finagle extra meal portions, they stamp their feet in the cold, they pester the guards. Although I’m hardly an expert, their attitude of basic survival — even cheerful survival when they can — seems so very Soviet. They allow themselves to be molded be the camp, accepting what they cannot change. They work the system when they can, but they sigh and let the system work them when they can’t. They’ve seen what disobedience causes, and it’s often not worth the high price. In other words, they accept that they’re pawns in a machine that eats pawns for breakfast, so they squeeze joy out of camaraderie, nicotine and the absence of pain.

Read in honor of the author, who died Aug. 3, 2008. I’m sorry only his passing caused me to take up his work, which I find clean, concise and cutting. Oh and cold. Very, very cold. Brrr.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

But I’m self-aggrandizing, I know. The sharp, artful voice and aching melancholy of Cormac McCarthy has been there since he set pen to page, continued to be there as he won the National Book Award and wasn’t discovered when MY eyes met his words. All the Pretty Horses, written in 1992, proves that. However, I can’t help but feel again that I have stumbled upon something momentous, something meant just for me in a small way, something beautiful that will make my eyes twinkle and my voice sigh when I try to convey just how remarkable an accomplishment All the Pretty Horses is.

But McCarthy describes that startling feeling of discovery better than me in his stark, biting dialog.

“I never knowed there was such a place as this.
I guess there’s probably every kind of place you can think of.
Rawlins nodded. I wouldn’t have thought of this one, he said.”

In this case, the two main characters — teenagers from Texas ranches who travel into Mexico looking for work as cowboys — have found a level of pain and misery and degradation previously unimaginable. Their coming-of-age trek has been blown off course by the harsh desert wind, slapped about by the hand of fate, which knocks out of them the idea that they’re entitled success, happiness, even life. It all begins with a chance meeting with a younger stranger who claims his name is Blevins, and that one chance snowballs through love, talent, destiny, friendship, hope and crushing loss until we wind up in a place that’s brutal and bloody yet truthful.

And somehow beautiful:

“He picked out the smallest doe among them and shot her … The sky was dark and a cold wind ran through the bajada and in the dying light a cold blue cast had turned the doe’s eyes to but one thing more of the things she lay among in the darkening landscape. Grass and blood. Blood and stone. Stone and dark medallions that the first flat drops of rain caused upon them. He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

Only McCarthy could explain to me this masculine strength and honor and adventure so deftly, me! Who usually shies away from Westerns and is allergic to horses. Even I can see how the stark lines (and again, stark prose) of the landscape and of these characters’ lives are somehow more telling, more primal than every flowery, curl-i-que tale. The latter rely on embellishment and literary trickery to establish depth. Whereas the pure, beautiful depth of McCarthy’s work aches in your bones and raises goosebumps on your skin.

I’m afraid to say there’s going to be lots more Cormac McCarthy on my plate and on my bookshelves in the future. Anyone know which one I should tackle next?

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

I can’t, however, stop myself from thinking that certain books are more audio-y. I wouldn’t want to hear something dense or intellectual through my earbuds, because I’m usually exercising, painting, sewing or otherwise physically engaged while listening, unable to give it my full attention. So audiobooks are my vacation stories: historical fiction, westerns, sci fi, chick lit. My version of a summer blockbuster movie — pure entertainment and a gripping tale.

This work of science fiction didn’t disappoint. It’s the story of three modern-age childhood friends who experience a unique era of the Earth, when some sort of field thingy blots out the stars and places the planet in a static time-warp thingy. (For descriptions of the plot that don’t involve the word “thingy,” pick up the book. HE makes it all make sense.) In other words, while only minutes go by on Earth, thousands of years pass in the outside universe. Suddenly, the fact that the sun will go supernova in a few billion years becomes vitally important, and human culture reacts in such interesting ways when they know their days are numbered and they’re powerless to stop it.

“Or are they?” says the blockbuster movie announcer man in his booming voice. The three main characters march toward their doom, each doing their own thing to change the world’s destiny, and a terrific suspense (and suspense of disbelief) builds. It was really a fun story, a tale that ended in a nice sequence opp that I might just download next time around.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars – Book club vacation reading

It is the story — duh — of Oscar Wao, the first-generation son of a single mother from the Dominican Republic. While the Dominicans (especially the men) have a reputation for masculine prowess and womanizing (I don’t know Spanish that well, but the book must have at least six Spanish words for pussy vagina), Oscar is instead an overweight and over-vocabularied nerd of the highest degree. Sci Fi and fantasy novels, comic books, anime: You name it, Oscar loves it, and the narrator inserts these great nerd references whenever humanly possible. Check out the geek speak when describing the binding thread of the Oscar’s family’s story, a supposed curse or fuku placed on Oscar’s grandfather but common in many Dominican stories:

“It’s important to remember that fuku doesn’t always strike like lightning. Sometimes it works patiently, drowning a nigger by degrees, like with the Admiral or the U.S. in paddies outside Saigon. Sometimes it’s slow and sometimes it’s fast. It’s doomish in that way, makes it harder to put a finger on, to brace yourself against. But be assured: like Darkseid’s Omega Effect, the Morgoth’s bane, no matter how many turns and digressions this shit might take, it always — and I mean always — gets its man. “

Yes, this book won the Pulitzer Prize. And yes, it cusses like this on almost every page. And hell yes, I love what the world of literature is coming to. (No sarcasm here. I promise.) Diaz can be simultaneous crass and erudite. While cussing can often be juvenile, Diaz uses it like a cultural weapon and proves he’s doing it deftly, purposefully. The below, for instance, is a description of Oscar’s mother as a girl:

“I mean, what straight middle-aged brother had not attempted to regenerate himself through the alchemy of young pussy. And if what she often said to her daughter was true, Beli had some of the finest pussy around. The sexy isthmus of her waist alone could have launched a thousand yolas.”

An allusion to Helen of Troy and the word pussy on the same page? With vocab biggies like isthmus and alchemy? Wow, or rather Wao.

And while Oscar may be a lumbering, pitiful and heart-rendingly sweet geek, he’s still a Dominican, passionately interested in women, who thinks girls “were the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the DC and the Marvel. Homes had it bad.”

I loved joining Oscar on his quest for romance, in his depths of self pity and despair. I loved watching the present and the past of the story unfold, seeing the patterns but being left wanting more, wondering, my mind tripping back over the story to make connections. But perhaps above all, I loved this witty, bantering voice Diaz masters in the narrator. He’s part David Foster Wallace with his footnotes and educated allusions, and he’s part street-level shit talking at its finest, silver tongued and savvy. It’s simply excellent prose, even if you get a little confused at the Spanish sections — don’t worry, everything absolutely vital is translated. Much like Oscar’s life, the novel was wondrous, taking the nitty-gritty everyday and sprinkling some magic dust and cuss words to take it to the next level of meaning.

Can I put this on our wedding registry? Anyone?

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

Though I found the novel lukewarm in general, I did enjoy the comparison between the main character and some of her friends who make different (read: not so great) decisions, which accurately portrayed how little things (or things you think are small potatoes) you do in your teens can change your entire life. That the main character emerges unscathed from the morass of high school is depicted as a mixture of brains and luck, which is really what it takes get through those stormy years. At least, so it seems to me in hindsight. I often think that if I was given another set of circumstances or thrown a curve ball or two, it would have been very, very easy to stumble off a cliff, changing my life as I know it. As a teen, you’re really unaware about how precarious it all is and, again, how much pure luck factors into things.

This little teen tale will soon disappear from my brain as quickly as it was absorbed, I’m sure, but it was just what the doctor ordered: Like a sorbet between courses, easy reading sometimes cleanses the palate, making reading fun again after a particularly heavy tome. Not every book has to be meaningful or unique. Sometimes you just want to hear a story, any story, just to reawaken your joy of books.

Books, books, books. So many books.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

Long story short — unlike my excuse — the book sat with it’s book mark 80 pages from the end for almost two weeks, even though it was an artful and compelling novel, a book worthy of it’s Booker Prize. Tackling vast philosophic and historical issues like imperialism, capitalism, slavery and racism, you might think that the tale would be preachy or snobbish. But instead, the author fleshes out characters that feel right at home in this (to the modern mentality) foreign, brutal and immoral world. The rich son of a trader whose religion is commerce and revenge. His cousin, a fallen-from-society doctor who signs onto a slaving ship, writing himself off into whatever pain he can find. The conscripted sailors, the seasoned and brutal captain, the cringe-worthy depictions of Africans sold into slavery.

All told in a somewhat formal style. In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of the writers of the time period of the book — probably an intentional touch meant to drive the reader deeper into the past. However, the prose lacked the confusing flourishes of the period enough to lull a modern reader in, and the style was often striking and original.

(The slave ship was) a member of a vast fleet sent forth by men of enterprise and vision all over Europe, engaged in the greatest commercial venture the world had ever seen, changing the course of history, brining death and degredation and profits on a scale hitherto undreamed of.

That the ship was a mere corpuscle in this nourishing bloodstream was not easy to imagine for the men aboard her. To them she was a universe of routine tasks and routine sounds — the bell marking the half hours, shouted orders, the way of the waves, the wincing tune of the timbers as they were exercised by the sway of the sea. Forces less tangible but equally determinate worked on the men and they were set in relation to one another in sympathy or antipathy, as happens in all communities.

The title refers to trade, to the blindly ambitious commercial and imperial endeavors of the day, which were sanctioned by king, country and God.

Money is sacred, as everyone knows, he said. So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it.

To take something as vile and despicable as slavery and immerse a reader in a world in which the practice is defended, is seen as common sense and morally just — and then to slowly have the characters wake up to a sense of disgust … I believe it takes an author of real talent to succeed at such a large undertaking, especially without denigrating or simplifying the historical figures involved, keeping them human and complex.

Deep? Yes.  Light reading? No. But Sacred Hunger (I agree with what I’ve heard) is just as worthy of critical praise and readership as the other book that shared the Booker Prize that year, The English Patient. And I think it could make just as good of a movie, too, replete with lots of ocean panoramas and violence, exotic locales and people and ideas.

And I think it’s worth the $2.10 I owe the library for the privilege of reading this intense novel.

So yay for shortcuts, like this easy, breezy novel about Queen Esther, a young Jewish virgin taken forcibly into the harem of King Xerxes and who beguiles him to the point that he makes her Queen. From the throne — where she’s given little power but lots of almond-oil beauty treatments, fancy clothing and tweezings — she is able to prevent the massacre of Jews in Xerxes’ Persian empire. As a story of girl power, it’s lacking. Esther only gets what she wants because she’s a beauty and she becomes a master of feminine persuasion. (No requests for heads on platters here.) But it was an interesting look into the female world of antiquity, especially of the drugged, catty harem women.

I’m told The Red Tent needs to be next on my list of biblical fictionalizations that flesh out the lives of women in traditionally male-dominated Christianity. And even if it makes me look like an up-tight nerd to put such a book on my list of summer/vacation reads, so be it because No. 1, I’m comfortable in my nerdiness. And No. 2, those chick-lit-reading beachgoers just won’t go to heaven because of their ignorance of the (fictionalized) Bible, right? Right?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I have a lot more about Christianity to learn.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

This Booker Prize-winning novel definitely deserved its accolades. Though it took me much, much longer than normal to get through the book (my fault, not the novel’s), I loved every little description, every meaningful encounter, every private thought. Though the story ostensibly revolves around a tragedy of youth where a young relative visiting from England dies, the tale encompasses so much more and paints a thoughtful portrait of India during that time period.

Communism and unions and the division of wealth are seen in the family’s ownership of Paradise Pickles and Preserves. Gender roles appear in the “men’s needs door” allowed in the uncles bedroom, contrasted against his sister who left her drunken husband, who is considered immoral. Westernization: Is everything foreign more valuable than what comes out of India, including people?

But yet, the overwhelming theme is loss, tragedy and guilt. Not an uncommon theme, I admit. But the talent of Roy, her offbeat yet poignant descriptive ability, brings the theme to a higher level. Take, for instance, her description of Estha, who retreats into silence in reaction to his cousin’s death:

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It send its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, emtombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.

I absolutely love the irreverence of Roy’s language. Random capitalization. Repetition. Her unique titling of people and things: Estha becomes Ambassador Pelvis with his special-occasion puff; Rahel is labeled a fountain in a Love in Tokyo due to her hairstyle. Roy reaches into the brain to pull out descriptions I would never have dreamed of, but that immediately bring images to mind. For example, the twins’ mother’s appearance is gauged in toothbrushes. As she stares in the mirror, she thinks she could definitely hold one under the fold of her bottom — several even — but her smaller breasts couldn’t support one.

And unlike heavier works by just-as-gifted authors, the words alone are not the only joy of the novel. The story itself will make you ache, both in its occasional sweetness and innocence as well as its tragedy. The guilt, whether deserved or not — in this world, tragedy almost seems inevitable — is palpable. But sometimes the best of books make you feel the worst, right? And despite it being the author’s first novel, this is definitely one of the best.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

The title of the novel refers to everything that the narrator, 13-year-old Henry “Hank” Toohey, doesn’t have but wants: the green pastures of the country, grass without lawn ornaments or the clothes of errant spouses who’ve been thrown out strewn about, and Grace, the sharp-tongued, big-hearted girl-next-door he’s in love with. The plot centers on Henry’s quest to bring his brother back from the brink after his fiancee’s death and reunite his parents by declaring his love for Grace in public, reigniting the love within his family’s memory and making things happily ever after once and for all. Yes, it’s a 13-year-old’s logic, but that’s what makes the idea so real, so touching and, of course, so doomed to complications.

Complications include bike riding, television-remote hijacking, seminars on how to take a bra off, haggling with local businessmen (all of whom want you to watch their new cable TV ad; very amusing), sitting on train tracks, neighborhood games of tag, making out behind dumpsters and more. But such juvenile antics are mixed with heavy adult topics like alcohol abuse, unfaithful marriages, death and poverty.

In fact, one of the most vibrant characters is Henry’s neighborhood itself, whose residents and houses are colorful, unique and also incredibly human. Henry’s words can be both humorous and amazingly touching. Take, for instance, his description of the neighborhood church:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the cavernous St. Ignatius Church in the heart of Holmesburg in sunny Philadelphia. Let’s get ready to worship. The temperature inside is 98 degrees with higher humidity, but it still ain’t as hot as Hell, so pipe down and keep the top buttons buttoned. And shut up. And buck up. Open your hearts and your wallets. Bow down before the three oil paintings behind the altar of St. Julius Erving, St. Robert Clarke, and St. Richard Ashburn. Then light a candle at the statued feet of Jesus and Mary, who slouch and suffer on the altar, their hearts torn from thorns and burning like tire fires set by parishoners one dollar at a time in the name of someone dead.

It’s a quick, fun and interesting read. I’m interested to see, however, how this freshman author can take it to the next level, if he’s done anything recently that learns from this book or builds off his first novel experience. I can’t find anything online, though, so I guess I’ll have to ask my friend to check his My Space page.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

Jenna Bush bucks tradition with low-key nuptials
By Maria Puente, USA TODAY

Jenna Bush is getting married Saturday, a semi-historic event that America will not get to see. CNN will not be going live to the ceremony. People magazine will not be snapping cover pics. Paparazzi will not be hanging from hovering helicopters.

That’s because Jenna, the first presidential child in decades to marry for the first time during her father’s term, will not be wed at the White House. One of President Bush’s twin daughters, Jenna, 26, will marry Virginia Republican scion Henry Hager, 29, in an outdoor wedding at her parents’ country retreat in Crawford, Texas, secluded with about 200 of her closest family and friends.

Via Petulant in Shakesville.

Every thread, every thought is woven together so gracefully. There was a moment at the kitchen table when I read the last page where the art of the novel hit me full force, making me see how this narrator’s personality and world view effected not only way we are told the tale, but the tragedies and triumphs of the plot beneath. In a way, Stevens is the ultimate unreliable narrator: Without artifice or intentional deception, we nonetheless see that his story is not the WHOLE story. While he spends time documenting the philosophy of his profession and his absolute dedication to it (the persona is a suit one never removes except when utterly alone, he notes), the reader sees what the unperceptive, dutiful butler doesn’t: what is really happening in the world, who the people around him truly are, their emotions, their desires.

Take, for instance, Steven’s experience on the road trip the novel centers around. Having rarely traveled far from his employer’s estate and never for simple pleasure, he observes the “greatness” of the scenery in such a unique way, what becomes a very signature way of the character.

“And yet what precisely is this ‘greatness’? Just where, or in what, does it lie? I am quite aware it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of the beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of it own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it. In comparison, the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and American, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.”

Demonstrative scenery? I say! Another great instance is how, because of the jovial character of his new American employer Mr. Farraday, Stevens attempts to master the art of making witty retorts, something too casual and unplanned to be easy for him.

A certain incident “is as good an illustration as any of the hazards of uttering witticisms. By the very nature of a witticism, one is given very little time to assess its various possible repercussions before one is called to give voice to it, and one gravely risks uttering all manner of unsuitable things if one has not first acquired the necessary skill and experience. There is no reason to suppose this is not an area in which I will become proficient given time and practice, but, such are the dangers, I have decided it best, for the time being at least, not to attempt to discharge this duty in respect to Mr. Farraday until I have practiced further.”

The personality of Stevens is so alive and real, despite the obvious typecasting as “the butler,” partially because he doesn’t see himself as a type. Where he is blind, we can see and we can ask. Has he really reached the peak of his profession? Has he really become the ultimate butler he so lovingly describes? Or has his whole life been subsumed within this duty? Is his success actually a failure? Can we not love this character wholly and completely anyway, even as we ache for him?

As I said, the poignancy of this device hit me hard on the last page, at which point I burst into satisfied tears, confounding The Boyfriend. “I thought you really liked the book,” he said. “Oh yes,” I sniffed and blew unattractively into a tissue, relishing the emotion the book released.

Ishiguro, like a star athlete, makes perfection seem so simple. A good author can take a pile of letters, a collection of words, a string of sentences, and create with these simple tools a unique and solid experience, something as real to a reader as a friend, a memory or a souvenir of an eventful vacation. Though I’m a library rat, this is one book I will consider buying, just so the sight of it on the shelf can renew that flood of emotion and amazement this talented author created in me. Just so the joy — and pain — will never leave me.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

Despite the stars, I thought maybe it was the movie’s fault. The book, after all, won the Booker Prize, something I hold in very high esteem, too. So I picked it up and — guess what — still a little disappointed.

The characters are certainly wonderfully unique and complex. Oscar, an Anglican priest who pays for divinity school by gambling at the track, is a gawky, awkward and naive young man who is afraid of water. Lucinda is a young woman who lost her parents and gained an inheritance, though she feels so guilty about the unexpected boon that she seems to want to lose the money as fast as possible in various games of chance. The two gamblers are thrown together during a England-to-Australia boat trip and fall in love — and into scandal.

Carefully and artfully told, slowly and surely, the tale is surely interesting. However, perhaps a little TOO slowly, especially near the end. While some great images from the conclusion of the book stuck with me — a glass church floating down a river, for instance — the wrap up left me cold, confused. I felt indignation for these complex characters I’d come to love so much, who I saw as simply being dumped off in the middle of nowhere plot-wise. Just like the movie, the book seemed disjointed. Now I usually like novels that don’t hit you over the head with the moral of their story, but a trail of breadcrumbs is sometimes nice, and I felt I missed (or the book lacked?) some unifying thread, something to make it hum and resonate.

But despite these somewhat minor flaws, I’d pick up anything Peter Carey wrote without a second thought when I come across him in the future. His rich prose is creative and magnetic, unusual and unique. And I still rate the novel …

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

Often meeting in the unpeopled woods or along the desolate roads that connect isolated homes with small, saloon-centered towns, the characters in this book dance around tragedy, as if the threat of the next disaster is always in the air. As if they are just waiting to see what the world will hurl at them next, steeling themselves for the blow. The main source of this steel is Louise White Elk, a teenager and the most sought after girl in the area, not because she’s pretty (although she does have an uncommon, strange beauty to her) but due to the strength and mystery of her spirit. Along with Baptiste Yellow Knife (powerful and sharp with the old magic) and Charlie Kicking Woman (the law officer of the reservation, policing his own people), Louise stumbles upon the story of her life. Her life is not flowing or plodding but confrontational, always forcing her to make decisions or take action, never allowing a moment’s rest. It’s all she can do to stand up to it, to take one more day on her shoulders.

While it sounds incredible sad, and it is, this book is also poignant and revealing and engaging. As disorienting as a tornado that pulls you out of your own quiet existence, this whirlwind story is also tinged with the the powerful meanings and larger-than-life characters of myth. While it was certainly tragic, it’s still the sort of story to tell around candlelight or campfires, the kind that curls up around your heart inside you, somehow keeping you warm despite the weight of it.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover.

Humorous, dark, satiric, warm, compassionate and lyrical, this book of interconnected short stories (written in 1949) has stood the test of time and I’m happy that the National Book Award judges had the good sense to see that, even way back in the day.

But… well, there was one little thing.

(Audience groans, sensing a tangental rant.)

WTF?! We’ve progressed to the point in time where we’ve developed the technology to visit and colonialize the planet Mars, but Martian wives are still cooking and serving dinner to Martian husbands every night? A Martian woman, Mrs. Ttt, answers the door to the first group of astronauts and she says, “If you’ve made my crystal buns fall in the oven, I’ll hit you with a piece of wood … I’ll see if you can have a minute with Mr. Ttt. What was your business?” In other words, I’m busy baking and if you need anything important (read: not baked goods) you need to talk to the man of the house.

Yes, yes. I realize this book was written a long time ago, decades before the sexism in these examples would have been noticed or discussed. But, man oh MAN, if we’re going to dream up a fake future where we see cool new mental abilities and fabulous technology, couldn’t we for one moment assume that there might be one corner of the universe where the men would bake us cookies?

Oatmeal raisin. You hear that, honey?

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

I LOVED this book. I read most of the series in elementary school, and I re-read this prequel to the series at least two or three times. And I was in the library, walking past the YA section, and the thought of this book came into my head. This was one great kids book they hadn’t yet made a movie of (too bad). Did they still have it? Did kids still read it? I turned into the children’s section of the library to find out, and there it was, sitting on the shelf along with most of the rest of the series, sitting there to tell me that not much could be wrong with the world if kids are still reading about Martin the Warrior (mouse), Gonff the mischievous theif (mouse), Dinny (mole), Tsmarina (wildcat) and the other squirrels, otters, badgers, rabbits, weasels (gee, I wonder whether they are on the good or bad side, huh?) and more of Mossflower Woods.

No, it’s not complex writing. But the plot still feels decently original after all these years and the heart-warming effect I remember from so long ago was still there. I read it through in a matter of four days and it was a very fun retreat into fantasy. It’s a book I think should be required reading for kids aged about 10 or 12, though I don’t know if every adult would love this book the way I do. So much of their appeal to me is pure nostalgia, a craving for the lost days of childhood where I spent hours hidden in the stacks at the library and once read 2,000 pages in one month during a Book-It contest. So maybe this series will never make it among grown ups the way Harry Potter or others have. Maybe after a certain age, you’re never going to like this peanut butter and banana sandwiches if you didn’t first taste it in your youth.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

But not in the lurching, painfully grotesque and almost comic way of horror films. Oh no. Max Brooks brings us first-hand dispatches from the fronts of World War Z, the humans’ fight against the zombie infection has become known. Speaking to soldiers, scientists, civilians and skin-of-their-teeth survivors, Brooks compiles this oral history of the recent conflict skillfully and reverently, trying to preserve as close to the truth as can be told. Hence, the patchwork nature of the book, piecing together different narratives to provide the widest perspective possible. Brook’s effort is heroic and …

OK, I can’t keep it up anymore. While the author of this fun tango with the undead keeps character all the way through (even to the dust jacket), pretending that the Z war did occur and that he is only recording “the facts,” I just can’t do it. But man, that perspective sure does make the book fun. It’s not horror, really, although there are aspects of that genre. Instead, the novel reads like true history, the characters feel like real people, the situations would be likely to happen if such an infection ever did spread. It’s like the TRUE story of what would happen — to me, to you, to everyone all over the world, to our culture, to our attitudes — if humans became reanimated, wanted only to feed, infected others with their blood and could only be killed by destroying their brains.

Yep, I know. It sounds silly. But Brooks will make you see it, he’ll make you believe.

Just in case, perhaps a copy of this book should be kept in a fire-proof safe in Washington D.C. If a zombie invasion ever did happen, it would probably be a great blue print on how to get out the other side alive. Just in case, you know.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars – Book club vacation reading

Well, I picked up this book in the easiest way possible: off the shelves of librarian-recommended tomes located near the elevators. It’s like a grab bag for the book addicted where all the prizes are chosen by the similarly book-obsessed. Score!

And this book was a pretty good score, at least for the mood this reader was in at the time. The Girls is the story of, of course, two girls. Sisters, twins. Actually, conjoined twins of the craniopagus variety, joined at the head and sharing too many vital organs and arteries to ever be separated. In addition to relating numerous unique details about day-to-day life conjoined in such a way (Rose being the stronger twin who walks the girls about the world and Ruby being the smaller, her feet never touching ground but her face pretty and unharmed by their joining), the book delves into what it means to live a single life as a joined one. How their lives and personalities are entwined in the same way their bodies are, how it’s impossible to think of them as one unit nor, really, as two unaffected individuals.

And in the end, as all endings go, how universal their condition is. How we all have limitations and how we all never stand on our own, but are linked to those around us in ways we don’t realize unless pressed. About personal and communal destiny.

There are scenes in the book I’ll not soon forget, including almost drowning during a childhood game gone wrong, the helplessness of such a normally benign situation. And of course, the way in which they can be taken advantage of that a normal person would not, yet how their unique situation allows them to bear the blows fate deals out with a strength unknown in single, unjoined people.

A great story told by a good story teller, this book takes the reader out of their own life and yet allows the to see that life upon returning in a new light. It’s a remarkable journey, one that I probably wouldn’t have put on any of my to-read lists, but that I’m glad I picked up on the wall by the elevators. Sometimes, it’s just such a fateful mistake (like two eggs not completely separating) that leads to an experience one wouldn’t have expected. Thanks, PPLD librarians, for this fun read.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

So I’ll keep it brief.

Good story. Entertaining,if somewhat dark. (Hey, I don’t have a problem with dark.) It’s the tale of a family curled into a ball of secrets, a decaying ball of self-disgust and recrimination and fear.

However, the dramatic story line felt a little forced: The father’s justification for the decision that sets off the plot (I’ll be vague in case there’s one or two people who I actually read this BEFORE me) never jived for me. There was so much dealing with the consequences of his choice, and not nearly enough dealing with the choice itself.

Nonetheless, a good story if not a great novel, and worth checking out. But probably not worth RE-reading for all of you who beat me to the punch.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

Bridge of Sighs, again, was not surprising or unique. In fact, parts are a bit repetitive of his previous books (another textile mill town?) and of the tried-and-true plot lines of many other authors (love triangles, odd-man-out moments, pressures to follow/rebel against family ways, etc.). But Russo really takes the time to introduce the reader to the people — the REAL people — of his tale. He gives them pasts, futures, secret dreams, idiosyncrasies, talents, faults. The words that come out of their mouths ring of truth, as if it wouldn’t be possible for that particular character to say or do anything else in that particular moment in time. And I find this getting-to-know-you dance with the characters so comforting. You can sit back, kick up your feet and just let these people wash over you.

Same, too, with the plot. It meanders along toward a conclusion that, yes, probably could have been guessed, at least most of it. But it has a feeling of inevitability, like gravity pulling a stream downhill. There will be no eye-brow furrowing moments of complexity, no enigmatic word play, no meta-fiction farces like jumps in time or point of view. It’s just a straight-forward story. There is pain and loss, of course, as in any story, and those are emotional moments. But the reader comes to terms with it as the characters do, led along by the patient explanations and logical justifications of the author. In other words, everything happens for a reason, a reason that will be pondered and put into context by the characters in the story — unlike in real life, where shit happens for absolutely no reason at all and there is no omniscient narrator to help you make sense of it. The characters do the real heavy lifting, and the reader is along for the ride.

Hey, I love good eyebrow-furrowing plots, meta farces and enigma as much as the next person. Actually, I love it, probably more than most. But books like this are a balm on occasion, a welcome respite during which you can trust you’re in the hands of a master story teller, one that wouldn’t lead you wrong.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

“Try his original, the award-winning, break-through, tour-de-force Goodbye, Columbus,” they told me. “Give him another chance.”

So I did. And now I come back to the teary groupies and I say: “I don’t like Philip Roth.”

He’s so topical, so timely. With Human Stain, he brought up the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. In this work of years before, it’s mostly about premarital sex and contraception and sleeping with one another versus marriage. It’s about the extended adolescence during and right after college, when we should have grown up a bit but haven’t. And it’s about the choices we make — or nearly make, and then reverse at the last moment — that change everything, from which part of town you will live in to what kind of job you’re going to have. Oh, and premarital sex.

All Roth wants is to tell the reader his point of view on current topics of interest. He couldn’t get a radio show, so he writes fiction. Ok, ok, ok. That is harsh. He’s a good writer of fiction — the use of fruit in the novel to illustrate financial success, for instance. But COME ON PEOPLE! He’s almost a John Grisham, except he tackles more than one theme and isn’t as action-oriented.

His prose touches me in no way, at least not in any way a well-written magazine article couldn’t do. I feel no spark of inspiration or empathy. I feel only coldness and method. Please? Can someone explain it for me? Is it just that Roth is a “man” writer, or what? Or is it just that he’s stumbled on some good insights about controversial issues at exactly the right times to reap all the awards?

Anyone?

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars – Mediocre vacation reading

Countdown: No. 2 out of 4 books read but unblogged

I have to say that I liked Wolff’s style. He was descriptive and natural in his tone and the rhythm of his storytelling. But the story itself left something to be desired. Sure, I loved his discourse on Hemmingway and Rand, books I loved myself in the past. He nailed the youthful perceptions of those great novels, outlining their gut-level reactions and the later thoughtful dissections that any reader of the two authors makes. And the tension he drew between the classes and religions of the students was excellent.

However, the main character’s choice that leads to his downfall was obvious to me, obvious that the smart boy I had come to like would not do such a thing, or at least not do such a thing and have no response at all to the consequences of it. It seemed blatantly unexplained, as if the reader was supposed to fill in the gaps of intent. I am not such a reader, at least not in this context. The other main flaw was the time travel of the book’s last section, where we flash forward in time, glossing over the consequences I spoke of before to later years, where the narrator can make sweeping rationalizations and suggest the greater meaning of the past. It reeked of artifice. It reeked of “moral of the story.” And it didn’t like its reek at all. On the last word, I was disappointed that my hopes for the book halfway through lay unfulfilled.

Sigh.

Still worth the read, especially if you can explain the divergence of the ending to me in a way I could understand. Wolff’s prose is artful. But sometimes the ends screws up the means, and I can’t whole-heartedly endorse the novel after reading the last page.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

So here’s a countdown: tackling No. 1 out of 4 read but unblogged books.

And it’s really a shame that I waited on this novel — History of Love — because I loved it and my review will not be as effusive as the work deserves. In this book, Nicole Krauss weaves a narrative web that modern readers are all too familiar with: Several separate characters work their way from beginning to end, slowly revealing how they are all more related than we supposed. In the past, I’ve told y’all how trite I find some stories that utilize this structure, but History of Love succeeds, mostly because of the striking characters Krauss creates.

Foremost among these characters is Leo Gursky, a reclusive old man who senses his death is near. Fearing he will die a New York death where his rotting corpse is found 10 days post-mortem, he makes an attempt each day to be seen: spilling his change on the floor at a local coffee shop, trying on dozens of pairs of sneakers and even volunteering to be a nude model for an art class. He’s a sad soul with a past that ripped out his will to write, a talent he’s enjoyed since he was a young boy in pre-Hitler Europe.

And it is again with the subject of writing where Krauss proves herself adept. Threading through the multiple characters of the story is another story, a unifying story: excerpts of a book Leo once wrote long ago for the girl he loved. It’s The History of Love inside the History of Love, a tactic that’s been successful before (Midsummer’s Night Dream, off the top of my head). But this story is abstract and Calvino-esque, a crisp departure from the rest of the book’s prose, and it’s depiction of the raw, universal actions and emotions of love is one reason all the characters coalese so nicely.

But all this is intellectual jargon, the talk of a writer dissecting the success of another writer’s work. This book is not purely intellectual. It’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s touching, it’s joyful and it’s engrossing. I remember turning to The Fiance in bed halfway through the first chapter and remarking how wonderful it was to be recommended a book, to open that book and to enjoy it from start to finish. While I love to read, sometimes it feels as if the sheer volume of books in the universe makes it difficult to choose the right ones. It feels like work sometimes. But Book of Love was a a joy.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

The novel tells the tale of young Elizabeth growing up outside of Johannesburg in the 1960s, the daughter of a dedicated doctor and a depressive mother, who is taken care of a great deal by her beloved Xhosa nanny, Salamina. Not that her parents are absent from her life or the story — not in the least. Their relatively liberal politics and attitudes allow Elizabeth to embrace Salamina, and her illicit daughter who must be hidden from authorities, as an extended family. When this family begins to be ripped apart by tragedy as well as the political climate, Elizabeth’s world is seen as beloved and beautiful as well as tragically, perhaps irreparably flawed. “Don’t make your home here,” Lizzie’s father says under the backyard Syringa tree one frustrated evening.

The language throughout the novel is carefully artistic and the author certainly turns a few unique and/or pretty phrases. Even so, my only complaint would be that this novel seems to be written specifically for the book club set, for bespectacled women with college degrees to sit around with coffee and debate in hopes of expanding their minds. And I don’t say that only due to the rather lame questions listed in the “A Reader’s Guide” in the book’s rear or the Oprah Magazine quote on the cover. It’s fuzzy to me why this pre-planned nature bothers me, this pandering to an expected audience, but I can say that it makes it feel less genuine, more hot-button-topic than universal or timeless. I suppose only time will tell, though.

I don’t expect the reverberations from this read to echo through my life, but I do expect the experience to ripple through my reading list as I attempt to repent for my glaring ignorance of South African history. Forgive me, Mr. Mandela.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

This is the story of the title character, Naomi, who lives with her great grandmother and her brother Owen, who is whip-crack smart but suffers some physical birth defects. The girl’s parents, long absent, become a force again in her life and circumstances cause Naomi to step outside her elementary existence to find what it means to be happy in a complicated world. It’s this complicated world that I was enamored with in the novel.

Instead of Christopher Robin and his 100 Acre Wood or the privileged, upper class boy in the Velveteen Rabbit, among other rather antiquated figure of kids’ fiction, this book is about our modern world. A young girl deals with her mixed heritage, a mother who has been in and out of rehab, an aging guardian who some think isn’t young enough to raise a family again. I was refreshed to see a novel set in a trailer park, that deals with custody issues and physical deformities. That’s what kids have handed to them in today’s world often, and they need a heroine who they can relate to on that level. The author tells a story of hope without ever talking down or resorting to obvious cliques.
Even though I appreciated the novel only on a young adult level (in other words, I wouldn’t have picked it up if not for the book club), it was a breath of fresh air, talking about controversial issues that grown-ups sometimes shy away in a way that speaks to adults and children alike. I hope every girl (or boy, I suppose) who reads it can see that finding their voice — their inner Lion (or Leon in Spanish) — is a noble and attainable feat of bravery.

And she would have been right. It was best-selling. It just wasn’t good. Not inspired in the least. Characters I got to know but not care about who did things that I could have predicted in the first 100 pages. Worse, the narrator goes off for paragraphs about these characters perfectly obvious thoughts: He was an ambitious man. She felt jilted. Really? I kind of intuited that from the fact that he was a cancer researcher hoping his experiment is publishable and she just got dumped. It doesn’t take a genius, people.

But worst of all, there on almost every page is one of my biggest, most bitched-about pet peeves in writing EVER: an omniscient narrator that switches between the characters heads, knowing all of their intimate thoughts, all at once. In this case, she could often switch brains three times on one page and I wanted to scream: My god, woman! You might as well type  “I am taking the easy way out of telling a story” on your keyboard. Lazy, uninspired woman. Wait, did I say uninspired already? I did? Well, she deserves it twice.

Come back to me Allegra, darling, when you have something that has grabbed your heart to write about, something that springs from deep in your brain that is genuinely yours, that teaches me something about the world that I didn’t know or hadn’t seen in that way before. Don’t give me words and actions to fill up a page and create a plot arc. Give me a hearty meal instead of fast food. Again, you seem like a very intelligent woman with a good grasp of the written word. Just a little genuine inspiration (there’s that word again) might do the trick. Of course, I’m a little blocked myself at the moment, so perhaps we could spread it around, yes?

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars – Vacation reading

In this young adult novel, we see Tamara’s struggle against the liberal views of her parents (gee, don’t most teens have the opposite battle?) and her struggle to define herself outside of her past. She tries church, she meets boys. However, the greatest struggle lies in her mother’s battle with TB, which isolates the mother from the family and threatens their status quo.

Willis’ novel is an excellent study in the mindset of the female teenager (somewhat morbid and inscrutable even to the teen herself) and describes the way crisis forms both the identity of the self and of the family, bringing its members closer together (than they ever realized they already were) in the language of the teen: simple yet poignant.

But I’m not a teen anymore. I appreciated the book, and would recommend it for teens, tweens and the parents that attempt to understand them. However, it’s a bit of a no-brainer for me now, akin to my reading of Speak (though Some Things That Stay is rendered with more talent).

This images of cows, absent mothers and flying girls will remain in my head. But I’m afraid my rating (based on my present state in life and of mind, being an adult) will be lessened because of it. In other words, have your adolescent daughter, even a college-aged daughter read this. And of course, Reviving Ophelia. Please read that, too.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Vacation book club reading

Yes, the sky was now a devastating, home-cooked red. The small German town had been flung apart one more time. Snowflakes of ask fell so lovelily you were tempted to stretch out your tongue to catch them, taste them. Only, they would have scorched your lips. They would have cooked your mouth.

Lovelily? I love it. And I loved the whole book, which never dragged or became cumbersome, but strung out like a tale told by a fire. A story about reading written for readers — there are so many good books based on this premise.

Thanks to Jes’s reviews for the recommendation. Haven’t we always shared a fascination with WWII and the Holocaust, Jes? We did (*blush*) construct a diorama of a concentration camp in the fifth grade for an independent project. Man, we were geeks. Very morbid geeks.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars – Hardcover book club selection