Karen

Happy go lucky Toby comes home from the bar late at night and is attacked by burglars who are rifling through his apartment. They leave him with a traumatic brain injury, which turns his life upside down. After some months of trying to recover, Toby agrees to move in with and look after his uncle Hugo, who is dying of brain cancer. Hugo lives in the Ivy House, a house that Toby and his two cousins Susanna and Leon have known and loved all their lives. When a human skull is found in the hollow of an old elm tree in the yard, old secrets start to surface as well.

This was a creepy novel. French makes the most of Toby's uncertainty, so that I didn't know how much to believe his telling of the story, even though he is the narrator. Also, throughout the story Toby reveals himself to be oblivious to other people's feelings and problems, self absorbed, and mean, and as the story goes on, Toby begins to understand a little bit of this himself. The murder is solved ambiguously, and by that time Toby has lost his assurance that he knows himself. I didn't like Toby, but I liked the book.

Nathaniel, 14, and Rachel, 16, are left in the care of their boarder by their parents for more than a year in post World War II England. That's how this novel starts out. The boarder, dubbed The Moth by the children, has a motley group of friends and acquaintances who fill the house and take on quasi parental roles in the children's lives. The first part of the novel deals with the confusion of being left by their parents and the unconventional experience of being raised and shaped by this group of likable but shady people, told from Nathaniel's point of view.

The second part of the novel deals with Nathaniel at various stages of adulthood, attempting to get to know his mother after she returns and after she has died. In the process he comes to understand more of what happened when he was a teenager and gains some insight into himself.

This is a gorgeous and mysterious book about incomplete vision, being hidden from others and from oneself.

This is a good old fashioned family epic, telling the story of a Korean family that makes its way to Japan for work and ends up staying there because of World War II, the Korean War, and all the changes these upheavals brought. Children are born, and then grandchildren, and because of Japan's citizenship laws and Japanese attitudes towards Korean people, generations of Koreans grow up as “foreigners” in the land of their birth.

While this lovely novel tells the stories of the individuals who make up this particular family, it also tells the story of the Korean people who lived and worked, were born, grew up in and were part of Japan–and still are. At times it seemed like characters were introduced only to drop away after a while, and I found that disappointing. Viewing the story from the perspective of the primary character, Sunja, who is born at the beginning of the novel and is a very old woman at the end, makes that dropping away seem more natural, since some of the characters are more central to her life than others. Also, viewing this as an historical epic where individuals play their parts and then drop out is a way of understanding this aspect of the novel.

I recommend this for the historical information represented in the novel, and a compelling, enjoyable story about a family's struggle to stay together and thrive in very tough circumstances.

This is a novel about an Albanian woman, Hana, who has been living as a sworn virgin, a man named Mark, for the last 14 years, immigrating to the United States and becoming a woman again. The story of how Hana became Mark ( and to some extent why) is interspersed with the story of Hana adjusting to life in the States and life as a woman again. I could have used a bit more explication of the social rules that made it necessary for Hana to become a man and why it was an honor for her foster father that she did so. There is very little explaining in this novel, and for the most part I appreciated that. I had to take everyone as I found them even as they were culturally very different from what I'm used to. But the sworn virgin custom is SO different from anything in my culture that I feel like it warranted a little more explanation than it got.

This book was written in Italian and translated into English.

There are three novellas in this book, along with a “postface” for each one, written by the author. Marguerite Yourcenar wrote in French, so these are translated into English.

The first novella, An Obscure Man, concerns a young man of Dutch extraction but brought up in England in the 18th century. He stows away on a ship bound for the Americas, where he stays and lives for a couple of years. When he comes back home, he finds his family dispersed, so he goes to Holland and gets a job in his uncle's printing house. He lives in poor health and dire poverty until he is taken into a wealthy man's household and given easy work to do. His minimal, self-acquired education allows him to observe, read, think and form opinions about the culture he sees around him–art, philosophy, music. The story moves from the gritty physicality of the streets, hovels, taverns and brothels to the clean, airy, impersonality of a grove of trees on a windswept island, and a life of struggle and illness to apprehension and acceptance of death.

The second novella concerns a young boy, the son of the “obscure man” in the first story, brought up in an Amsterdam brothel and mentored by a famous actor. He strikes out for a life in a company of traveling actors and contemplates all the “lives” he will live through the people he will play in the theater.

The third, “Anna, soror...,” is the story of a brother and sister growing up in 16th century Naples, in a hothouse of religious piety.

These are not quick reads–the themes of these stories are heavy and the language is so heady that it takes time and concentration to read and understand them. In the postfaces she wrote for these, she said she had originally named them after painters (like Caravaggio for Anna, Soror...), and that fits with my experience reading them.

This complex novel is structured like a tree. The section headings tell you that as soon as you look at the table of contents. In the opening section, Roots, you're introduced to a group of characters from several different walks of life who are all drawn (Close Encounters style) to the West Coast, where a fight is underway to save ancient stands of redwood and Douglas fir trees. Some of them meet in activism while others seem to be on the periphery of the story. However, they are all struggling in one way or another with prevailing attitudes about the importance of trees in the world.

Following sections, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds deal with the characters' activism, a cataclysmic event, and the results years later. I don't want to give too much away.

The characters are all fascinating and it's easy to get caught up in following them and feeling their feelings. On another level, though, the human characters are not the most important part of the story. This book reminded me of a non fiction book I read called Stone: an Ecology of the Inhuman, by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Cohen portrays stone, a seemingly inert substance, as active, dancing, even collaborating with people, but in a time frame that we have trouble appreciating. So it seemed to be in The Overstory. It is hard for humans to appreciate the close connection between themselves and trees when trees move at such a comparatively slow rate (and can live for so much longer than humans, which makes them look even more like mere material). The book asks us to step back from our human perspective and look at life on earth from a more expansive place—from the perspective of tree time, or even geologic time.

So, there is a definite story, a plot which is structured in a certain way, and which is engrossing, with interesting characters. There is a point, or a moral (don't read this book if you object to obvious points to the story). The two work together to make a rich, layered book that I found satisfying to read.

This is a prickly book, a retelling of Beowulf where the character of Beowulf is an anti-hero and Grendel and his mother are sympathetic, if hard to understand. Social norms are satirized, especially consumerism and traditional gender roles. There is a fabulously awful chorus of older women who show up throughout the story to criticize the clothing, entertaining, and decorum decisions of Willa Herot, the more traditional of the two main female characters. There's an element of magic to the story, too, as the dead are present and comment on what's happening. The chapters are told from varying perspectives, so the reader is always trying to understand who is speaking when a new chapter begins.

Not only does the story parallel the story of Beowulf, but other elements of Beowulf are also present. Fragments of Anglo-Saxon style alliterative verse throughout the story, and the writing overall has an mythic, epic quality. Chapters begin like poems or songs, with words like “Listen!” “Behold!” and “Lo!”

I really enjoyed this take on Beowulf. The element of social satire and turning the story upside down made me think about the original in a different way. I want to go back to my Seamus Heaney translation and see how many of the surprising bits of The Mere Wife have a parallel there. I highly recommend.

This is a novel about a young woman's first year of college. Her name is Selin, she's Turkish-American, and she goes to Harvard and enrolls somewhat haphazardly in a bunch of classes she doesn't know anything about. That much could be a synopsis of the entire novel actually: she follows her curiosity, almost in spite of her self doubt and her awkwardness. She follows her curiosity doggedly. One of the places it leads her is into a stilted relationship with an older Hungarian math student who is about to graduate. She allows him to enroll her in a program that sends her to Hungary for the summer, where she is supposed to live in a village and teach English to schoolchildren.

I loved Selin, although I struggled with seeing her as passive, allowing things to happen to her when she could have taken a more active role. One of the things I admired about her was her willingness to see would happen as she let each situation play out (no spoilers, but there aren't any awful situations here). Her observations are so funny, and seem to come from such a fresh perspective, that she really is a delight.

Also, I guess I should read Dostoevsky's The Idiot now, to see what the references are.

I enjoyed this memoir of a young woman dealing with grief over her mother's death and the disintegration of her family, who decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail through California to Oregon. The book is presented as a tale of how Cheryl Strayed worked out her self destructive behavior on the trail (“From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail”), but the story doesn't really record the process of becoming “found” so much as present it as a result of doing the hike. The story of the hike is told along with the story of the mother's death, the falling away of her stepfather and siblings, and her drug use and infidelities to her husband. It's clear that she saw the hike as a kind of salvation even before she started it. But once the story reaches the actual hike, it doesn't dwell on salvation or redemption, but on the details of her life on the trail— which are pretty interesting. You as a reader are free to come to your own conclusions about why or whether the hike was redemptive, but in the meantime you get to enjoy a pretty good adventure story.

Young white American convert to Islam with a punk sensibility travels all over the US visiting Islamic landmarks, puzzling over the identity of WD Fard, and meeting girls. He mostly rides Greyhound and often sleeps outside or in lobbies. At one point he compares himself to a wandering holy man who carries no money. The landmarks he visits are often related to Nation of Islam, and although there are plenty of traditional Muslims in his circle, his heart seems to be with NOI through Malcolm X.

I wanted to like this book, but I just didn't. There was a lot to be interested in in it, but the meandering way it is put together made it seem like a young guy's travel diary got published without editing out the self-indulgence. It went on too long, and the meet ups in various towns with girls who were lying to their parents were annoying.

Sorry, I don't recommend.

This is a gorgeous book about a blended family, risky childhood, and adults coming to terms with their past. The things that happen aren't gorgeous themselves–in fact, some of them are awful and painful–but the contemplation of them is.

Near the end of the book there's a section that takes place in a zen dojo in Switzerland, where one of the daughters of the blended family has been living for many years, practicing meditation. It struck me that the attitude of the narrator towards the family and events in the story is that of compassionate detachment, much like the attitude you're supposed to cultivate towards your own thoughts and feelings in meditation. The attention given to some of the most painful parts of the characters' lives is unflinching, yet compassionate. It's this that gives the book its gorgeous feeling.

This is a well told story of a 16th century North African man, Mustafa, who sells himself into slavery to alleviate his family's poverty during an occupation and drought, and ends up accompanying a Castilian nobleman on an ill fated voyage to the New World in search of gold and other plunder. The story is told through the eyes and voice of Mustafa. As we follow his experiences on the expedition, we also learn about his past and how he came to be a slave. We also see the leaders of the expedition through his eyes. As the expedition breaks apart and the companions meet various forms of hardship and disaster, the relationships between them change. This is the heart of the novel, and I thought Laila Lalami did it so well. With the subtle and not so subtle changes in relationship as circumstances change in the story, she illuminates the effects of colonialist attitudes, slavery and racial prejudice on people and the lives they are able to live.

I really enjoyed this novel's beautiful storytelling, but I learned from it too.

Reading this book reminded me of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, only partly because the protagonist in both is a young girl named Laura. This trilogy ( Lark Rise to Candleford is three books in one) is about a young girl growing up in a rural hamlet in England in the 1880's and 90's. It is really the barely fictionalized memoir of Flora Thompson, who grew up in a rural hamlet at that time. The first two parts of the book are more about what life was like for country people at that time than they are about Laura herself. How did people spend their time, what did they eat, what did they do for work, what was school like, what was church like, what were the holidays for people in a country villages, what were the customs that were followed—all of these questions are addressed. In the second part, Over To Candleford, Laura and her family visit relatives in the town of Candleford and the book begins to be more about family relations and the relationship between the hamlet of Lark Rise and the town of Candleford. In the third part, Candleford Green, Laura goes to work in the Candleford post office as a young woman and the book begins to address the changes that were happening in society and focuses more on Laura herself. It's a hefty book, but really lovely and interesting reading. I'd never heard of Flora Thompson before I ran across the BBC TV series that was based on this book. She is a treasured

Once in a while you read the right book at the right time. This book was it for me. A woman who is a writer is mourning the suicide of her closest friend, another writer. The dead man's third wife asks the narrator to take her husband's dog, a Great Dane that she never wanted and doesn't connect with. The dog also appears to be grieving. The woman and the dog, Apollo, make their way together in her tiny apartment in a building that doesn't allow pets.

This is not a sentimental story about how dogs heal our griefs with their love. For one thing, Great Danes have a short lifespan of only 5-7 years, and Apollo is already at least 5 years old. We know more death and grief are in store for the narrator. Also, Apollo is feeling the grief of his human's loss too. He needs quite a lot of care himself.

It IS a quiet story about coping with the shock and loss of suicide. It's also about writers and whether writing is an honorable vocation. It's very readable, and I loved it.

This is a very readable yarn about a man, Samuel, whose mother, Faye, walked out when he was a boy. Many, many things happen in this book, some of which we might not need to know about. We're introduced to and spend significant time with characters who serve a minor purpose and then sink out of the story. If the storytelling hadn't been so good, I might not have finished the book. As it was, I enjoyed the read but didn't think it was anything special.

I wanted to like this novel–a Joan of Arc story set in the future, in space!–much more than I actually did.

There have been catastrophic wars on Earth, and the surviving elite have “ascended” to some kind of space station called CIEL, where no one is allowed to live past age 50 and people fetishize skin grafting and body art to a bizarre degree. The leader of CIEL, Jean de Men, was one of the chief combatants in the wars, and brought people to CIEL with a vision of a new life enhanced by technology. However, CIEL is draining the ruined planet Earth of the last of its resources, and the people living on CIEL can no longer reproduce, so life there appears to be a dead end.

Christine, a 49 year old woman living on CIEL, and her old friend Trinculo, a gay man whom she has loved since childhood, get in trouble with the authorities by flouting the rules. When Trinculo is sentenced to death, Christine decides to intervene in his execution and try to spirit him back to Earth. Her defiance is bolstered by finding out that her hero, Joan of Dirt, who was supposedly executed by Jean de Men, is still alive.

Meanwhile, back on Earth.... We learn a little bit of Joan's story, how she heard the Earth singing as a young girl, became a warrior during the wars and fought viciously against Jean de Men. We learn that she is living underground with her girlhood companion and fighting a guerilla campaign against CIEL's supply lines from Earth.

There's so much here, with references to medieval art and literature, themes of environmental destruction and human fascination with technology. It's very rich. It's also brutally, grossly violent in both plot settings, Earth and CIEL. Unfortunately, aside from the violence, which is presented without any ambiguity, it can be hard to tell exactly what is happening or why it is happening. In this way it reminded me of the book The Life of Elves, by Muriel Barbery, in which you need a high tolerance for not knowing what's going on. I endured the violence because I was intrigued by the premise of the story and the richness of the content, but I am hazy on what actually happened in this book's plot.

This book gives a history of the climate change movement and an analysis of why global attempts to act together to stop or slow climate change have fallen short of their objectives. Jamieson shows why standard economic and ethical arguments aren't suited to showing us why it's important to do what needs to be done to address climate change, and thus aren't motivators for us. He also accounts for political interests undercutting attempts to make changes in the United States. Jamieson has some suggestions for proceeding, but he acknowledges that at this point climate change is not going to be stopped.

In spite of the technical language in the sections on economics and ethics, I thought this was a pretty readable book. The history of climate science and investigation into climate change was especially interesting for me, since I didn't know how long ago people began to think that climate change was coming. I found the analysis depressing, but not surprising, and Jamieson's suggestions for how to proceed modest, but probably realistic. Obviously this isn't a cheery beach read, but it's a worthwhile one.

OK, this is not much of a review, but wow! What a book. A family epic, starring Miguel Angel De La Cruz, otherwise known as Big Angel, the family patriarch. The plot takes place over two days, when Big Angel, weak and sick with cancer, is presiding first over his mother's funeral and then over his last birthday party, after which he knows he will die. But the backstory of how he came to this point takes place, of course, over many years and back and forth across the US/Mexico border. This book needed to have a list of characters in the front, detailing how they are all related to each other. It's a wonderful read.

A mysterious and philosophical novel. A widower finds out that he has a fatal condition that will bring his life to an end soon, so he closes his medical practice, signs on to be a census taker, and travels the country with his son who has Down Syndrome. The unnamed country has the practice of marking people who have participated in the census with a tattoo on a specific rib. The towns and cities are referred to with letters of the alphabet, and the census taker and his son travel from town to town, encountering all kinds of people and gathering information for the census. In addition to hearing the stories of the people he meets, the widower reflects on the life of his son, what the occupation of census taker is, and the life of his dead wife (who was a famous clown and attended something called The Shape School).

The world of this novel is intriguing and rich, but I felt frustrated that I was only given the bare outlines of it. What is this world, and why are things the way they are there? Why do they perform the census this way? Is the widower performing the census correctly, or is he really fouling it up? And while the widower tells us that he took on this job so he and his son could see the country, I have my doubts that this is really for the benefit of his son. I wanted more background, more detail, something to latch onto in the heavy mists of this book. I enjoyed reading it, but I could have enjoyed it more.

Retelling of the Iliad from the point of view of Briseis, the slave/concubine of Achilles. I'm drawn to read these “famous story retold from the point of view of the silenced women” books, and inevitably I'm disappointed by them, because their point seems to be just to demonstrate that the women are/were silenced. Although this book is well written and readable, I don't know that it adds anything to the Iliad, which has always been a brutal story.

This is a good old fashioned love triangle novel with a contemporary setting. The three main characters are young African Americans who are up and coming in their own ways. Roy and Celestial are newlyweds, while Andre and Celestial have known each other since infancy. Roy and Andre are college friends. When Roy goes to prison for a rape he did not commit, their relationships begin to shift.

The story is told from the perspectives of Roy, Celestial,and Andre in turn. Each character is both sympathetic and flawed. I spent about an equal amount of time being mad at each of them and rooting for them, although by the end of the story I had a clear favorite of the three.

This is a really enjoyable book with a deep story to tell about love and marriage.

Tomb Song is hard to review. It is the story of the adult son of a prostitute sitting by his mother's bed as she's dying of leukemia in a hospital. Family history and memories of his relationship with his mother are certainly a part of this tale, but so are stories of his real and/ or hallucinated trips abroad and his exploits with drugs and politics. This can also be read as the story of the narrator becoming a writer. The narrative is hard to pin down. In some ways, this is a good book to read on the bus or on lunch breaks, because sections are short, sometimes less than a page. But reading it in short bits like that can also add to the sense that nothing quite fits together, that it's not a coherent story.

The author, Julian Herbert, is a poet, and it shows in the story. The language is vibrant, pictorial. There are refrains that appear here and there, like “My mother isn't my mother; my mother was (music, a virus).” There are arresting Images like a traffic cop standing in one's bloodstream saying, “keep moving, keep moving,” or characterizing love as a virus that “ injects itself into something; it reproduces without thought; it egotistically takes possession of its host, without consideration for the species, taxonomy, or health; it is symbiotic.”

So, the experience of reading this book was beautiful, strange, and disorienting. I finished it feeling like a lot of it went over my head. If you don't mind feeling that way, you'll get a lot out of this book too.

This book, ostensibly about two white college friends who are obsessed with black music, and who make a recording that takes on a life of its own, deceived me in a dark and beautiful way. I was drawn into the story about the two white guys, and felt a lot of sympathy for Seth, who was from a working class background and didn't have the glamour and privilege that his friend Carter had. The book seemed to be about their friendship, and I settled in for a novel about this rich boy-poor boy friendship over a background of obsessive record collecting and pre-WWII black music. Then the book took a turn and I began to realize that it was not a story particularly about Seth and Carter at all, and the very fact that I thought it was says something about me and the culture I've grown up in, where white appropriation of black culture is so normal.

White Tears won't be for everyone. I would call it a ghost story of sorts, but I've also seen it called a horror story, and I can't argue with that. It's haunting, for sure. The clarity of the first part of the book gives way gradually to the shadows and ambiguity of the second part of the book, but some things are not left ambiguous. I don't have a high tolerance for gruesome violence, and I stay away from anything labeled ‘horror,' but I couldn't put this book down. It's one of the most riveting books I've read in the last year.

How ridiculous to rate W. B. Yeats, for God's sake.

This is a lovely collection of folklore and tales about encounters with faery people in County Sligo in Ireland, where Yeats lived for many years. Yeats as the collector of tales is present in the book, as he uses the first person to describe who told him the tales and what the circumstances were. Even the longest are only a few pages, and many are less than a full page, so they are easy to read in quick snippets when you have a few minutes–lunch breaks or waiting for the bus, for example.

Very funny satire about a black man, Bonbon, whose hometown Dickens, CA gets taken off the map because it is an embarrassment to the city of Los Angeles. Bonbon embarks on a project to put Dickens back on the map and in the process becomes a slaveowner and a segregationist. The book begins with Bonbon waiting to have his case heard by the Supreme Court, so the story of how all this came to be is told in a long, hilarious flashback.

Much of the humor in this book feels taboo, at least for white people, at least to share in public. So, part of the book's charm is having permission to laugh at things that it wouldn't be right to laugh at if your white colleague said them in the break room at work. These are touchy subjects, and rightly so. One of the things that makes it feel good to laugh is that the characters in this book are fully human. No one is a caricature. While the town of Dickens and some of its inhabitants may be something of an embarrassment, they are treated with love even while they are being laughed at.

There's a genius description of riding public transportation in LA that I would like to copy down and enjoy long after I return this book to the library.

I thought the story was longer than necessary, but it was a lot of fun to read. I think Paul Beatty is a genius.