Karen
This is a fantastic book. It's a modern day fairy tale about a black family living in New York City. After calamity strikes, the father, Apollo Kagwa, goes on a quest to find his wife and child again. I won't say more about the plot so as to avoid spoilers. Suffice to say, it is a gripping tale.
One of the many things I loved about this book is its deliberate challenge to the reader to think about the purpose and message of fairy tales. Fairy tales come up often in the course of the story, in the conversations between characters and in allusions to classic fairy tales. Maurice Sendak's story Outside Over There is a touchstone for the main character, Apollo. At one point in the story (I'm trying to find it again in the book, but so far no luck) someone tells Apollo that only a bad fairy tale has an easily discernible moral. There is also a discussion of the familiar “happily ever after” ending.
There isn't an easily discernable moral in The Changeling–or, there might be one, but it's by no means the only thing going on in this book. And the life it shows is complicated enough that even if it did end with, “and they lived happily ever after” you'd know better than to believe it.
This is a cerebral novel about (narrated by) a graduate student of literary analysis who decides he wants to work with “things” instead of in the conceptual stratosphere that he has been used to so far in his academic career. So, he takes up the idea of writing a biography of a celebrated biographer from the beginning of the 20th century whose magnum opus is the 3 volume life of an 18th century British traveler with an absurdly long and disparate list of accomplishments. He begins his research, finds some initially interesting documents and connections, and then (to my mind) allows himself to be derailed.
I recognized some elements from other A.S. Byatt novels in this one: a crisp, white bed from the novel Possession, a sort of personification of Vera, one of the narrator's love interests, and the scent of sweat from Fulla, the other love interest, straight out of Angels and Insects. I think these two love interests are supposed to be complementary to each other, and each of them does fulfill the narrator's desire to work in the realm of “things” in different ways. I wished that these love interests were not set up this way, though, because it made me lose interest in the story–I thought it was a cop out.
The narrator comes to the conclusion that his biographical work is turning out to contain more about himself than about his subject, and there's a suggestion that all biographers' work is that way. He seems to give up the biographical work and turn to assisting his love interests (separately, and it is implied, each without the knowledge of the other) in their work, which in both cases in scientific and involves “things.”
There are sparks of interest in this novel, but overall I thought it was a disappointment.
I love retellings of familiar stories. I like to see what new insights emerge when a story I know well is told from a different perspective, or moved into a different culture or time period. So, I was really looking forward to this retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of Mr. Rochester. My conclusion: it's a perfectly good book, well researched and written, competently fleshing out what we know of Mr. Rochester from the original novel, but it doesn't offer much, if any, new insight to the story.
As a side note, I thought the author's treatment of slavery in Jamaica was too detached. Mr. Rochester comments from time to time that being around slavery hardened him to the horror of it, but the reader doesn't experience that in the story. Maybe that would have been hard to write, but since slavery was omnipresent in Jamaica at the time, it didn't feel honest to have slavery in soft focus for that part of the book.
Bottom line: just reread Jane Eyre or get this book from the library. No need to buy a copy.
This book tells the story of how an intrepid librarian from Timbuktu, Mali, collected hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts from all over the country, established libraries for them, and then had to spirit them out of Timbuktu when the region became a war zone.
As part of the story, the author spends quite a lot of time setting up the uneasy relationship between the Malian government and the Tuareg tribes, as well as the introduction of Wahhabi Islam into the region. I learned the names and histories of the three main Al Qaeda commanders, and learned about how they formed an alliance with Tuareg rebels to take over the northern part of Mali and establish a caliphate.
It's a fascinating story that is readable and compelling. My one complaint is that it is much more a story about how Wahhabi Islam is a threat to the culture of Mali than it is a story about librarians or even the texts that were threatened by war. I would have liked to know more about the texts themselves and some of the people who helped protect them, but these were not given the same in depth treatment as the details of the conflict.
Mary Ellen Hannibal describes various “citizen science” endeavors, their origins, how they work and the impact they have (or can have) on efforts to preserve critical habitat, threatened species, fragile and rare ecosystems, and indigenous communities. The book is engagingly written in an informal, first person style. Hannibal has a personal connection with each of the endeavors that she describes (many of them are based in California). I wish I'd had more time to spend with the book.
This is the fascinating story of Frantz Schmidt, the executioner of Nuremberg, Germany, in the mid- to late 1500's and early 1600's. His father was forced into the profession by chance, and Schmidt spent his 50 year career trying to restore the social acceptability of his family so that his children would not have to follow him into the same profession.
The book makes use of a sort of diary that Schmidt kept, a record of the people he executed or punished, and what crimes they were convicted of that warranted the punishment. As a young man in his 20's, the records he kept were taciturn–just the name, the offense (such as ‘thief'), and the punishment. As he aged, though, his descriptions began to have more narrative. Joel Harrington, the book's author, uses these narratives, along with other available documents like town records, to piece together a picture of what law enforcement was like in Nuremberg and what Schmidt's attitude to his work was.
Harrington's argument is that although Western societies in the 21st century no longer have public executioners, we are not as removed from 16th century Nuremberg as we like to think. We still struggle with fears of violence and other kinds of lawlessness and frustration with the inability of law enforcement to completely protect us. Our customs have changed, we have access to better investigative tools and more humane punishments, but at bottom we are still in the same predicament that the city fathers of Nuremberg and their executioner were.
I mostly read this book on my lunch breaks at work, believe it or not. It was gruesome, but in a matter of fact way that I didn't find hard to take. It also has a lot of humor and is quite readable.
This is a book you can read in a few hours, and if you like creepiness, you'll like it a lot. The story is told in a dialogue between Amanda, a woman who is dying in a hospital, and David, a neighbor's young son. David is trying to get Amanda to understand something important about how she got to where she is and what is happening to her, so he is coaching her through recounting her memories of the past few days. Those memories are full of mounting dread that seems at first to be out of proportion to the circumstances, but turns out to be entirely justified.
The writing is spare. There isn't a lot of description, but I had a vivid picture from the few words Amanda gave to her surroundings, and I came to some conclusions about what was happening from her observations. This book does a lot with little, and doesn't give anything away. If you read it (and I recommend it), let's talk about it.
Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper. Of the Sherlock Holmes pastiches I have read, this is one of my favorites. Watson is treated with respect for his medical expertise, his experience as a soldier, and his capacity for friendship. Holmes is portrayed as more kind than in some other versions of his character, but he is single-minded in his pursuit of problems to solve. The solid portrayal of Holmes and Watson, combined with the details of the Ripper killings and investigations, result in a wonderfully creepy book.
I think the best way to describe the genre of this book is to say it's a novelized account of the places where the lives of the great mathematicians Kurt Godel and Alan Turing echoed each other, and overlapped. I found it moving, but I think someone who doesn't know much about the work of these two men (Turing's work on computability coming out of his response to Godel's theorem of the incompleteness of mathematics) would have a hard time appreciating it. Some basic knowledge is assumed.
The third person omniscient viewpoint which alternates between Godel's and Turing's stories is completely absorbing. The predicaments of these two men's lives shown side by side makes a compelling story. So, It was jarring to have the occasional interruption of a narrator commenting on her relationship to the truth or the reality of other people. I wish the author had left those reflections out and let those themes speak for themselves in the stories she was telling about Godel and Turing.
Otherwise, this is a sensitive book about a pair of geniuses who struggled in tandem for a while. I recommend it.
All the characters in this novel called Freedom are driven by compulsions. Compulsion is the central problem, and the characters have varying degrees of success in recognizing and dealing with their compulsions. In the process, you the reader have to accompany them through some painfully terrible decisions. What makes this an enjoyable way to spend your time is really good storytelling. Patty and Walter Berglund and their friend Richard Katz are likable people, recognizable in their human failings. The Berglunds' son Joey is so unlikable that you want to know what he's going to do next. Franzen makes a gripping story out of these people's struggle to find meaning for themselves and preserve their relationships. You might even say Freedom is compulsively readable.
I enjoyed the historical setting of this book, the picture of life and society in England during the reign of Richard II. The lesser known poet John Gower (a friend of Geoffrey Chaucer) is also a blackmailer and a fixer, so he comes to hear about some unaccounted for corpses that appear in a ditch below a public privy. So the story begins, and it involves sheriffs, mayors, lords, a smith, a poacher, an abused wife, and a nation expecting a war with France.
John Gower as a character leaves me cold, but I like his setting, so I keep reading these books.
Three parallel stories happening in 2003, 1958, and 1592, all in places named Venice.
In 2003, an ex-military policeman named Curtis is sent out to Las Vegas (to stay at the Venetian) by an ex-military friend to find Stanley Glass, an old gambling friend of his father's, who supposedly has a gambling debt coming due.
In 1958, a 15 year old juvenile delinquent calling himself Stanley Glass hitch hikes and bums his way from Brooklyn, NY to Venice Beach, CA to find the author of a mysterious and poetic book called The Mirror Thief, whose main character is a 16th century alchemist and doctor named Crivano.
In 1592, Vettor Crivano is in Venice, Italy plotting to smuggle glassmakers and mirror makers out of the city to take them to Constantinople to work for the Turks, treason punishable by death. Originally from Cyprus, he was captured in battle by Turks when he was a young man and taken away to become a janissary. He has been sent back on this mission to bring back glassmakers under the pretext of escaping from Constantinople with the remains of a Cypriot war hero who was known to have been skinned alive by the Turks.
The three stories are obviously connected, and it is part of the fun of this book to try to figure out what the connections are and what they mean. Each story is fully fleshed and engaging on its own. I'm still meditating on the sum of the parts, but this was a very enjoyable book.
I am sure that a lot of this book went over my head, but it was wonderful and fun to read.
The basic idea is that Sybilla, a highly educated American woman, is living in London in the 90's, doing a menial typing job to support herself and her small son, Ludo. At the beginning, Ludo is 4 and has already learned Greek, Latin, and Hebrew and is reading through a list of classics in order to convince his mother to teach him Japanese. We learn who Ludo's father is and why he isn't involved in his child's life, but Ludo doesn't know these things, although he wants to. The second half of the book is narrated by Ludo, aged 11, as he goes in search of his father, or a father. The Kurosawa film The Seven Samurai is a touchstone for the characters in the book, and I think the second half of the book is a kind of retelling of the film's story.
I skipped over the details of Biblical Hebrew and Japanese grammar, and still enjoyed this hilarious, touching and very, very smart novel.
A young woman caught up in the 1700's slave trade of what is now Ghana has two daughters who never knew each other. One of them is shipped overseas to become a slave on an American plantation. The other one marries a British colonial officer and lives a life of relative ease. This novel follows the women's descendants through modern times as they struggle with the corrupt systems that upheld slavery and perpetuate injustice and suffering long after slavery itself is no longer practiced.
Yaa Gyasi keeps the story moving, stopping to tell a story about each generation on their own side of the Atlantic. If I have a complaint about this book, it's that I wanted more from each of those generational check-ins. I wanted to spend more time with those people. It felt like this could have been a beloved book series, with an eagerly awaited last installment with the present generation. As it is, the final modern day story felt a little bit rushed to me. But it's a deep story, and a beautifully written family epic. Highly recommend.
The only name the narrator of this book has is his title, “Captain.” He's a man pulled between two poles in many ways–illegitimate son of a French Catholic priest and a Vietnamese village girl, educated in America, assistant to a general in the South Vietnamese army, and a spy for the Communists. He's also “blood brothers” with a fierce anti-Communist countryman AND an equally fierce secret Communist.
The story covers the Captain's escape from Vietnam during the fall of Saigon with the General and his anti-Communist blood brother Bon, their time as refugees in California, and their secret journey back to Vietnam in an attempt to continue the war against the victorious Viet Cong.
It's both a spy novel in the tradition of John Le Carre and a dryly funny novel about being a Vietnamese refugee in America. The Captain characterizes himself as a man who can see both sides of any issue. He is ambivalent about whether that is a virtue or a hazard. What he describes of his life shows us that the accident of his birth means that he is not fully accepted in any of the worlds where he travels. In Vietnam he's a bastard and a half breed, and thus disreputable. In Western society, although he has an advanced Western education, he's burdened by all the preconceptions and stereotypes foisted upon Asians generally and Vietnamese particularly.
This is just a brilliant book, for the combination of complex character being pushed and pulled by forces both inside and outside of him, spy thriller, and wry social commentary. I loved it.
An eye opening history of white trash in America. It covers indentured servitude from our colonial beginnings, lack of rights for squatters during American expansion, African slavery vs. poor whites in the pre-Civil War South, eugenics, all the way to the present time where white trash plays a part in contemporary culture: TV shows like The Dukes of Hazzard or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as white trash presidents, etc. I was a little disappointed that the book focused mainly on the South, but I loved how it brought in race, self-presentation, and pop-culture. I thought the book did a good job of showing how class and power are tangled up in so many of the historical discussions about what's good for society or what should be done about social problems.
The quote I keep coming back to, because I think it sums up the gist of the book, is this one, from Lyndon Johnson (another white trash president): “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” It's worth reading the book for all the richness of detail and the many connections that flesh this idea out.
“Stone: an ecology of the inhuman” examines the relationship of humans to stone for the purpose of encouraging a perspective that is not human centered. It points out, for instance, that viewed from the perspective of the short lifespan of a human being, stone is inert, stationary, unchanging, but from the perspective of geologic time it is none of those things. It uses the examples of monuments such as Stonehenge to suggest that stone can be seen as collaborating with humans to carry messages into the future for us, but also as performing their own kind of slow dance that one needs a sense of geologic time to appreciate. And it uses medieval lapidaries, or studies of the different kinds of stone and their properties, to show that although phrases like “Dead as a stone” were already in use, people in medieval times had a sense of stone as being much more lively, if not actually alive, than we do today.
This book is fascinating and fun to read, but dense. I could usually only read a few pages at a time. It is full of metaphoric, allusive and even playful language. Several times I laughed at what seemed to be puns that were meant seriously.
I recommend this for an intellectual workout.
This was a quick, pretty easy read. It's the story of Penelope told by Penelope, the mythically patient, loyal wife of Odysseus, who waited 20 years for him to come home from the Trojan War. She is telling her story long after she has died and spent centuries in Hades, so some of her story includes updates on what the major characters are doing now. The tone is a little bit comic, a little bit resigned, like a Nora Ephron book, except that the story has a chorus that steps in to provide a darkly humorous commentary. The chorus is made up of the 12 handmaidens of Penelope who were slaughtered by Odysseus and Telemachus for supposedly colluding with the suitors who were occupying the household and pressuring Penelope to marry them.
The chorus was one of the best parts of the book, as far as I was concerned. I also liked the scenes from Hades. It's a little too easy to dismiss Penelope as not having enough of a spine or being too easy to dupe, but the chorus provides the clue that there is more to the story. There's also a brief academic gloss at the end which gives a more plainly worded possible interpretation–and although I liked having the alternate interpretation, I wished it had been worked into the story rather than spelled out in this way.
The Gap of Time is a retelling of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, set in 2013 England, Louisiana, and Paris. It follows the play pretty faithfully, but adds details–like what the boyhood friendship between the two “kings,” Leo and Xeno, was like. The parts of the book dealing with those two have an atmosphere of twisted melancholy. Xeno designs games, and the one he is working on involves Dark Angels who are trying to thwart human efforts to find the thing that will allow them to save the world. MiMi (Leo's “queen”) is a torch singer whose inspiration is a poet who dreamed of an angel who fell into the courtyard of a building and couldn't free himself because to do so would have destroyed the building and its occupants. Leo is an egocentric, violent business tycoon who is kept barely in line by his business manager, Pauline.
By contrast, the life of Perdita is pretty sunny. Her adoptive father and brother love her and she has a simple, but good life. She has unanswered questions about her origins, though, so it is clear that the life she has lived with Shep and Clo can't continue the way it has been. But knowing that the end of the story restores the lost child to her family, I feel much sorrier for Winterson's Perdita than for Shakespeare's. This is not a family situation I would wish on a bright young woman.
I liked this book for its rich detail, its atmosphere, the interesting way it adapted the older story to tell a new one. I had a hard time putting stock in the happy ending, though, since the rest of the story was so dark. Surely this family's problems can't be healed easily?
Clever. There's a thin veneer of a spy story, but that's not really what this book is about. None of the characters are especially likeable, but they are all telling stories and some of the stories are about themselves. We know some of the stories are untrue, and others we wonder about. Even though I didn't like the characters at all (well, there was one marginal character I liked for his authenticity who was absent for most of the story), I wanted to know what was going to happen in their stories and what they would make of themselves.
This is the servants' view of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
The story of what is happening among the Bennet family's servants is woven together with the servants' view of the events of the Austen novel. Familiar signposts from the Austen novel are there, so you always have a sense of where you are with regard to that timeline, but the servants are people with their own concerns and the focus is on them.
Jo Baker's writing makes this a real pleasure to read. For much of the time she maintains a brisk pace, with the humorous observation of social conventions that you expect in a Jane Austen novel. Her humor also has teeth and delivers a satisfyingly sharp bite in a few well chosen scenes.
A satisfying page turner set in post-WWII and civil war Barcelona. The story hinges around a boy's determination to find out what happened to the author of a book that he found in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. The past is very much present, because most of the characters have a history from the civil war that they are carrying forward.
Smoke is set in an alternate 19th century England, where people's sinful thoughts and feelings are manifested in different types of smoke emanating from their bodies. Society is ruled by the noble elite, who supposedly do not smoke, while everyone else is doomed to be stained by the evidence of their unworthiness.
Three of the main characters are boys in an elite school where they are supposed to learn to control their smoke–their clothes are inspected each day for evidence of failure, and punishments are meted out. The fourth main character, Livia, is the daughter of a highly prestigious family who has nearly mastered her smoke when the three boys from the boarding school arrive at her home.
It's hard to categorize the story. It is partly a mystery, because the main characters learn that what they have been taught about their history and religion is not true. They are led to question what smoke really is, and how England's powerful elite have turned it to their benefit. It is partly an adventure story or a quest, because the three friends set off to try to learn more about some of the mysterious aspects of their society and to uncover any wrong doing if they can. There are aspects of romance and horror, too.
The characters' view of the nature of smoke becomes more nuanced as the story progresses. The friends meet coal miners who are not phased by being covered with soot, and one in particular who says he looks forward to sharing his sweetheart's smoke on their wedding day. Later in the story there is a character who truly doesn't smoke–he is unable to–and he is pitied.
I'm not sure questions are answered by the end of the book, but it's imaginative and well written. I really enjoyed reading it.