Karen

Librarians, mermaids, traveling circuses and a touch of the supernatural make this an enjoyable read. I admit, I found the main character, Simon Watson, to be a pretty lame example of a reference librarian, his supposed profession. He kept asking his circulation colleague to do his research for him, when every reference librarian I know would have been elbowing people out of the way to get started on the research themselves. However, Simon Watson is an exasperating character in other ways too, so maybe this was just another one of his flaws.

The main idea of the book is that Simon becomes aware, through an old book sent to him out of the blue by an antiquarian book dealer, that his family's troubles go back much further than his and his parents' generations, and that they are part of an alarming pattern. The process of uncovering the pattern and discovering the source of his family's troubles make this a suspenseful mystery. A substantial part of the book also takes place in an 18th century American traveling circus. The story telling in these chapters is excellent–they were my favorite part of the book.

I read this in long stretches on the couch over my Christmas vacation, and I heartily recommend.

I read this for the Luther Seminary Book Club. Most of Boy, Snow, Bird is narrated by Boy Novak, a tough blonde girl raised by an abusive, rat catcher father in New York City. She escapes to a small town in Massachusetts and sets about creating a life for herself there, with a kind of fast talking Hollywood dame bravado. The tone of the book is somewhat frothy–you don't doubt that Boy is equal to her challenges.

But Boy marries a widower with a beautiful and beloved daughter, Snow, and gives birth to her own daughter, Bird. Suddenly it's not Boy's well-being you're concerned about anymore.

This story is presented as a reworking of the Snow White fairy tale, and there is a lot that is fairy tale like about it. There is the glimmer of the supernatural at work on the periphery, in small details like Bird and Snow occasionally not appearing in mirrors, and the mysterious lookalike woman Boy meets on an empty road near the beginning of the book. There's the fairy godmother figure in the person of the cranky middle aged widow who runs the bookstore.

There is also hard reality in this fairy tale–the legacy of racism for light skinned African Americans who could “pass” for white, and the hurt in those families for the members who could not pass.

There was so much potential for a really great book, but I thought it failed to deliver. Instead of working out the tangles of Boy's new family by marriage, it asks us to accept that those tangles simply dissolve, while we are diverted back to Boy's beginnings with the rat catcher. Details which seemed significant earlier are dismissed without further development. The ending was a disappointment.

A poor but plucky heroine with wit, ambition and a carefully hidden heart of gold makes her way through New York society in 1937-38. This is a fairy tale, where Kate Kontent impresses influential people with her hard work, grasp of grammar and love of literature and makes socially advantageous friends because of her integrity and kindness. She endures romantic disappointment and dramatic revelations with fortitude and imagination, and, in general, her friends and lovers do too. I enjoyed reading this–in fact, I stayed up too late one night to finish it–but I did think that everyone had a little too much civility for some of the events of the story. In her anger, Kate allows herself to be rude to the man who deceives her, but then she repents and actually goes to apologize. But what do I expect of a fairy tale heroine? She has to be virtuous enough to deserve the happy ending that inevitably comes.

There is so much to love in this book! The introductory essay to Pioneer Girl describes Rose Wilder Lane's influence on Laura Ingalls Wilder's writing of the original story, the search for a publisher, and the process of refining the story so that it became the Little House on the Prairie series. The essay is followed by the text of Pioneer Girl, which is exhaustively annotated with notes from historical sources or additional information about the text. After the text, there are appendices with additional stories, and photographs of corrected typescript from one of Wilder's manuscripts. Scattered throughout the entire book are photographs of the people from the stories, and illustrations from the original books.

Pioneer Girl includes some stories that were later left out of the Little House on the Prairie books. There are people struggling with alcoholism or bad marriages, mean spirited people in romantic rivalries and opportunistic wheeler-dealers. In the story of the hard winter of 1880-1881, we find out that the Ingalls had another young family staying with them through the winter, and that it created a lot of tension in the household. It's fascinating to see the fuller picture of life in pioneer settlements, and the Laura in this book comes across as aware of people's foibles and able to protect herself from them. Wilder's writing in this version is more like the newspaper column writer that she was for many years–events are reported more briefly than in later versions of the story, with a reliance on small details rather than elaboration to convey the events' significance.

I read this book slowly, with fascination, over the course of 4 months. It's a book to go back to, to learn from all the supplementary material, or just to enjoy the gem of the story.

This was a fantastic book, so much fun to read. I picked it up at the library only because of the title. I have memories of walking down Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley with my parents in the early 1970's and what a wild place it was, even though I was just a little kid. So, I didn't know what the book was about, but the title was evocative for me and I liked the ornate orange and blue cover.

The two main characters, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, own a used record store that specializes in jazz and have been close friends for many years. The future of the record store and their friendship is called into question when a wealthy former football player announces his plan to open a media superstore a block away in their economically depressed neighborhood.

Alongside that major source of conflict, Gwen and Aviva, married to Archy and Nat respectively, work together as midwives and are also close friends. As the book opens, Gwen and Aviva are attending a home birth that goes wrong and then get into a conflict with the doctor who takes over their patient's care when they take her to the hospital.

SO much more happens in the book after all of this is introduced. You will be in the company of delightful characters who struggle with father/son relationships, sexuality, marriage, neighborhood politics, issues of gentrification, relations between whites and blacks, among other topics. Several of these people have encyclopedic knowledge of music, especially jazz. A couple of them are movie buffs, and in particular are fans of blaxploitation films. Barack Obama makes a guest appearance. I really loved this book and I think you should read it.

This book is designated “young adult,” but it's a challenging read. The writing is spare. Action is mostly communicated by dialogue without attribution and there's little description and no explanation of what is going on. Yet, although the writing is spare, there is a lot going on. The story takes place in three time periods in the same geographical area. The three storylines have some things in common, including an ancient axe head, a man who is troubled by disturbing visions and a woman who attempts to protect and love him. In each time period the people are experiencing terrible violence of different kinds. The three threads are brought together at the end of the book in a way that's unexpected and powerful, but also raises questions. I recommend this if you like to mull over your books for days after reading the last page!

I wasn't wowed, but I enjoyed some of the characters in this tale of a rural town enough to keep reading. I felt sceptical about how things were tending to work out “well” for people. Spinsters were finding male companionship, farmers in trouble with their cooperatives were finding anonymous benefactors who paid for legal representation, grumpy old skinflints were becoming kind, generous and emotionally insightful, and struggling artists were finding greater confidence in their artistic vision. I'm not saying this stuff can't happen and books shouldn't be written about it, just that I feel suspicious when it all happens in the same book.

I learned a lot from this book about the ancient ecology of Britain before it became a country of cattle and sheep, and the ancient ranges of large animals like elephants, bears and lions. I learned, to my surprise, that some of those large animals could be reintroduced in Britain and the United States and do fine, even benefiting the ecosystems there, as long as there was public support. And I learned quite a bit about the debates among conservationists about just what they are supposed to conserve and the best ways to do it. So, Monbiot's book contains a lot of eye-opening information, and a way of looking at wildlife and ecology that is different from most conservationists that I have read. However, this book would have benefited from some serious editing. At times it reads like a series of rants, where Monbiot makes the same point repeatedly, asks rhetorical questions, accuses government officials of being in the pockets of agriculture lobbyists, etc. By the end of the book I had lost patience with the ranting and skipped over whatever didn't seem to be imparting information. I'm glad I read this book, but others may not have the patience to wade through Monbiot's opinion pieces.

Lovely, threaded with sadness, but also love. Each poem/chapter has a topic, and the progression does not always feel linear, but the cumulative effect is to tell the story of Jackie's family and her growing awareness of herself as a writer. I read straight through without flipping to the end, so it was a delight to find pictures of the family on the last pages.

When I was in 4th or 5th grade I read a children's biography of Joan of Arc and became obsessed with her. After that, I read everything our school library had about her...and then moved on to other obsessions. Reading Kathryn Harrison's new biography was not at all like reading those books selected for children–not even the ones that didn't gloss over the horror of being kept chained in prison, interrogated by hostile prosecutors or burned to death.

Harrison's biography includes both testimony from people who knew Joan of Arc and spoke at her “nullification” trial (the trial that cleared her of her heresy and witchcraft conviction 30 years after her death) and representations of her from the biographies, plays and movies which have portrayed her over the centuries. It is a mixture of historical evidence and cultural interpretation that is not particularly well integrated.

Harrison's own portrayal of Joan is as a Christ-like figure. She interposes scenes from the Gospels in places where Joan's life could be said to be paralleling the life of Jesus and frequently points out other ways in which Joan is a kind of Messiah for her people. I found the emphasis on Joan as Messiah a little overbearing, in fact–the point was clear to me after 2 or 3 examples and I could have done with less reminding.

I did find this book fascinating and very readable in its historical detail, though. In particular, I had not realized as a 5th grader how upsetting it was for a 15th century woman to dress as a man or for a commoner to dress as a noble. I had not realized how much recorded testimony there was from both of her trials, either. Although I had learned many basic facts about Joan of Arc as a school kid, I learned more from Kathryn Harrison's book, especially about what it's possible to know.

All in all, I'd recommend this book with the caution that Harrison's attempt to both write a biography and mythologize Joan of Arc's story doesn't quite work.

Told mostly from the perspective of a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer's, a fellow poet, John Gower. It has details of daily life in 14th century England (and Spain and Italy), historical events and characters, and a complex mystery that takes almost the whole book to unravel. Very enjoyable.

A beautifully crafted story of the friendship between two young working class girls in 1950's Naples, Italy. The story is told from the perspective of Elena, the girl who is able to go to high school, and follows the progress of their lives and friendship as they grow from little girls to young women. In the process, we also get to know the inhabitants of the neighborhood where they live–their parents, their neighbors, the grocers, teachers, barkeepers, bakers and mechanics. We also get glimpses of the dark stories that the adults have from “before”–before the girls were born. Who was a Fascist, who is a Communist, where some people get the money that finances their business, who has a financial hold over whom in the neighborhood–all these things are undercurrents in the story that occasionally surface to disturb us. The depiction of the girls' friendship is anything but sentimental (it's not an easy friendship) but as a whole it's very moving. When I finished the book I was in awe. Also, I was on fire to get the next book (this is the first of a trilogy) to see how the story continues.

Another book club selection. I found this book so painful to read. The lives of Darling and her friends are brutal, and Bulawayo tells the story with plainness and an attention to detail that does not spare the reader's squeamishness. On the other hand, Darling has a voice that is mischievous and curious, witty and imaginative, so that it is hard to stop reading about her. I had to take breaks from reading, but I always found I wanted to go back for more.

The story starts out in Zimbabwe, with Darling living in a shantytown, running wild with a bunch of other shantytown children. She's hungry and feral, but she knows who she is and how she belongs to her place. The second half of the book takes place in America, with Darling adjusting to life as a teenaged immigrant with an expired visa. She's aware that she's not at home, she's homesick, but she can't go back without giving up her chance to escape the brutal life she left behind. Both halves of the book are heartbreaking, but in a way the second half is more heartbreaking, even though it contains what we might think of as the hope that Darling might truly escape the brutality of her old life.

Most of the book is written in the voice of Darling, but there are a couple of chapters that are told from a collective voice. Although this book tells a painful story, there is a lot of pleasure in reading it, because of the precision and originality of NoViolet Bulawayo's writing.

A fascinating book about Islam in America and its relationship to global Islam in light of controversies within the religion about who has authority to speak for Islam. This is very much an academic book, with 30 pages of notes, and technical language that was hard for me, an outsider to the field, to understand. It is also highly engaging, though, because the academic arguments are illustrated with narratives about several American Muslim “student travelers” who are studying at overseas Islamic universities and in more informal settings, in hopes of bringing back knowledge and authority to their American mosques. In most cases, the Americans feel they have been enriched by their study experiences but that they have not accomplished what they had hoped. Their voices and their stories were my doorway into this totally unfamiliar subject.

Alongside the academic argument about American Islam's relationship to global Islam, there is a nice history of the development of Islam in America, including the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple of America. I learned more about Malcolm X than I had known before, and learned about some of the most notable American Muslim leaders and organizations. One of the themes of this book is that Islam had presented itself as an egalitarian refuge to black Americans struggling with the racism of American society, so that a racially aware Islam developed in the US as a specifically American strain. The specific needs of black American Muslim communities are apparently not well understood when people from those communities go overseas to traditionally Muslim countries for study. Also, there appears to be tension (or lack of understanding) between immigrant Muslim congregations and predominantly black American congregations.

This was a challenging but rewarding read. I scratched the surface of what there is to know about Islam and its history in the US, but what I learned is important stuff.

Station Eleven is about a catastrophic flu epidemic that kills so many people that modern civilization comes to a stop. The epidemic and its aftermath are shown through the experiences of a group of people all connected to a famous actor, Arthur Leander, who dies of a heart attack onstage while playing King Lear the night the epidemic comes to Toronto.

I loved this book. For one thing, it is timely. For many reasons, the end of the world has been on my mind a lot lately. But I think what I really loved about it was that the story of the epidemic's aftermath is the story of pieces of the old culture surviving and perhaps being made new.

Station Eleven is going to stay with me for a while.

Such a strange story of an unhappy family in a seaside Canadian village in the early part of the 20th century. In some ways this is a story of village life; everyone knows each other's business, each person has an important role to play in keeping the village alive. The characters and their relationships are what make this such a strange story. Why does Margaret hate the church rector? Why are Orkney and Alaric Vas so unhappy with each other? Why is the lighthouse keeper so unpleasant, and why does he still seem to be attractive to women in spite of this? The people and the things they do are startling and raise so many questions about their lives outside the boundaries of the novel. Against this background, the young man Fabian Vas is exploring his passion for painting birds and for sleeping with Margaret Handle, the mail boat captain's daughter. Other than his pursuit of improvement in his art, the events of the novel mostly happen TO Fabian, who is a rather passive young man even when he objects to what is happening. When he finally does do something definitive, the results are ambiguous. Is he a betrayer? Is the ending of the book happy?

I couldn't read this in long sittings. The characters were prickly and hard to sympathise with and it wasn't a comfortable story. However, Fabian Vas's voice felt authentic, and the uneasy, ambiguous story he told presents so many opportunities for exploring the motivations of our fellow humans. I recommend.

Not an easy read. It's obvious that the author has great admiration for Genghis Khan and the Mongols people, but his sensationalist style gets in the way of telling the story. What saved this book for me was fascinating detail about Mongol society and customs, and what made it possible for them to conquer and rule over such a vast territory. I have seen reviews of this book that take issue with Weatherford's presentation of the facts, so I may now have some incorrect beliefs about Mongol history, but I did think the subject was deeply interesting. I read this for the Luther Seminary book club and wouldn't really recommend it to others. Find a better book about the Mongols!

Since I am flailing instead of walking in the dark, I thought this would be good for me to read. The author, Barbara Brown Taylor, says that it is not a how-to book, but I'd guess that many people pick it up hoping that it contains instructions. And at the end, there are some coy instructions that would be given if it were a how to book: basically, become curious about your own darkness. The body of the book consists of the author's writing about becoming curious about physical darkness and her own emotional/psychic darkness. I'm sympathetic with her complaint, that mainstream Christianity does not acknowledge a place for darkness in human life, that darkness is used as a metaphor for evil so that we become afraid of darkness, even wholesome darkness. Her chapters about her excursions into various types of darkness are not How-To pieces, certainly, but they are worth pondering if, like me, you feel you are thrashing around in the dark (whatever kind of dark). It's a slender book and her writing is beautiful, but her advice is just a suggestion.

An eye opening book about how certain illnesses (TB and cancer are her two examples) are used as metaphors–either to characterize the type of person who has the illness or to indicate something is wrong in a society. In her introduction, Sontag says, “My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness–and the healthiest way of being ill–is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.” Proceeding from this point, the book is a sad journey through the old attitudes towards tuberculosis and the people who had the misfortune to have it–and an infuriating catalog of the ways cancer patients were still being blamed for their illness in 1975. Much has changed in cancer treatment since this book was published, but other illnesses are equally baffling and just as prone to being used as metaphors now. Also, positive thinking is now pushed on all who are ill no matter what their disease, so the book does not come across as outdated.

The book also prompted me to notice the ways that I use my own ailments as metaphors for my character, and to understand that, while I might no longer beat myself up for having digestive problems, there might also be a loss in letting go of the symbolic and metaphoric thinking that I use to try to understand them.

Very rich book, well worth reading and pondering

Disappointing. Peter Carey has written some of my favorite novels ever (Oscar and Lucinda, The True History of the Kelly Gang), but this one seems like it is not fully formed. The synopsis sounds good: mysterious woman unleashes a computer virus which open up prisons in both Australia and the US. Discredited journalist is brought in by a friend connected to the hacker to interview her and write her story. People turn out not to be what they seem and a journalistic cyber thriller ensues. Lots of the connecting parts are engaging and well told, but they don't connect very well into a cohesive whole. I have a pretty good idea of what happened, plot-wise, but certain parts of the storyline which seemed significant frustratingly don't amount to much. Point of view shifts at odd times, so I was occasionally confused about who the narrator was. A major focal point of the story is a 1975 coup-like political action that Americans pulled on the Australian government, which obviously has reverberations into the future and plays a part in the hacker's motivations–but although the significance of that political action is clear, it's not clear how it fits into the main action of the story. So, this book is messy.

Bright spots: Funny dialogue between the discredited journalist Felix Moore and his frenemy Woody Townes. The dramatic story of Celine's mother and how Celine came to be. The love story between Gaby and Frederic.

This was a gripping story right up to the end. The main character, Pete Snow, is a likeable social worker with a huge district in Montana and a lot of personal problems. He becomes involved with a reclusive millennialist through trying to help the man's young son, who shows up in town malnourished and inadequately clothed one day. The main reason I didn't give this book a higher rating is that the story of the millennialist and Pete's personal problems get such big build ups that the ending feels abrupt and completely anticlimactic. Still, the setting of Montana in the late 70's/early 80's, the drinking habits and personal foibles of many of the characters, the impossible burden of keeping sane while taking care of kids in terrible circumstances, the paranoia of the federal government at the time of President Reagan's shooting–it all combines to make a really great read.

An acerbic, disillusioned professor of English and Creative Writing writes a series of letters of recommendation, revealing himself and the lives of those around him in the process. This book grew on me. I wasn't very engaged when I started, but about halfway through I realized I was enjoying it quite a bit. The letters are outrageously funny, sometimes because they accomplish the opposite of what a letter of recommendation is normally supposed to do. By the end, the book had done much more than make me laugh (at how little English departments are appreciated, at how eccentric and quarrelsome academics are, at how maddening administrative procedures can be)–it had filled me with sympathy for people dealing with the pain of being alive, and with appreciation for a well-written and hilarious, if completely counterproductive, letter of recommendation.

This slim novel captures loneliness so well, there were pages that were painful to read. The chapters alternate between the perspectives of the man and woman who are the central characters. Although they are both lonely, they manage it and manifest it differently. I was thankful that this book did not make the resolution of loneliness a simple matter of hooking up with another person–it was more a matter of finding a new place to start out from within oneself. I sympathised with the desire to set the turtles free, and I rooted for it to be a success, but I thought it went off far too easily.

For such a slender book, this took a long time to read. The story is of a young woman (early 20's) who signs on to spend a year as staff at a remote Lutheran retreat center in the Cascade Mountains where she has been going with her family since she was a child. She expects her boyfriend (whom she calls The Intended for about half the book, before giving him his name) to come along a little bit later to be with her, but soon receives a letter from him saying that he's not coming, he's going to Europe with another woman instead. This echoes the break-up of her parents' marriage, where her father told her mother at the last minute that he was not coming to Holden Village with them. The story becomes one of struggling through an in-between time that bridges the end of an important relationship and the start of a new life at a writing program in the spring–yet to be determined which one, since the author is sending out applications in the fall and winter while she's at Holden Village. The in-between time involves a lot of casting around, trying to figure out what to do with herself–sleep with the cook? Drink a lot of red wine from a Nalgene water bottle? Hold herself at a distance from the rituals and procedures that the center has developed for governing itself? Her behavior is not exemplary, but her evocation of the sense of claustrophobia and doldrums that set in on the villagers as the winter progresses provides something of an explanation for that.

I enjoyed the book. I didn't think the author showed a lot of insight into her own state of mind or behavior, but I felt that her description of Holden Village as a place and a community made up for that somewhat.

I loved the concept of this book, a critique of the societal command to “be well” (or at least try to be well) that people in the West live under now. Cederstrom's argument is that the wellness command actually imposes guilt and stress on us, makes us narcissistic and takes our attention away from problems that may be more important to solve. In the course of the book he also points out that the motivation behind encouraging people to be well or pursue wellness is not a concern with the actual well being of the people being “encouraged” (or coerced, as the case may be), but the realization that healthy people are more productive, less expensive employees.

All of this resonates with me and I started reading with glee. I was disappointed by sloppiness in places, though. Although the book has a notes section, some assertions that should have had sources cited did not. Unfortunately this made a couple of the middle chapters seem more like polemic than argument.

Overall, though, the critique is good. The last two chapters on electronically assisted control and on people who try to wriggle loose from the wellness command are especially good. I'm glad this book was written!