Top Books of 2008

Happy New Year, readers.

2008 was a notable year for me personally -- I married Webster and finished grad school. Literarily (is that a word?) it was a great year too; I read over 40 books with almost a third of them being non-fiction and nearly half making the "Top Books" list.

If you read the reviews (click on the book for the link), you'll see that many of these were recommended by you - my readers! Please continue to send recommendations to me, because they increase the number of good books I get to read each year. And don't forget that this blog is updated throughout the year with short reviews of what I've most recently finished.

So without further ado...the list.


Book that most changed my life: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan - Examination of what and how we eat in America today and how to improve it. I still think of what I learned often while cooking or eating.


Fiction I could not put down:

• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen - Old circus performer looks back on his life
• Run by Ann Patchett - Affluent white family adopts two black children in Boston
• A Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier - Life in the semi-dead world that people go to as long as someone living on Earth still remembers them
• What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman - Mystery about sisters, abducted 20 years earlier
• Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond - Woman loses her fiance's daughter at the beach one day
• Garden of Last Days by Andrew Dubus III - Imagining of one of the hijackers last few days before 9/11 and the lives of the people he interacted with

Runner-up Fiction:

• People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks - Imagined history of the Sarajevo Haggadah
• The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao - Dominican adjusts to life as an immigrant in a memorably voice.
• A Free Life by Ha Jin - Chinese family seeks the American dream as immigrants
• Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon - Women hosts radio show in failing Latin American country
• The Gravediggers Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates - Epic about a woman's life escaping abuse and poverty
• In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar - Coming-of-age book set in Libya in the 1970s.

Great Non-Fiction:

• Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood - Microsoft Exec is inspired to leave Microsoft and start a global charity for libraries in developing counties.
• When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin - White man returns to Zimbabwe to see the collapse of the country mirrored by the collapse of his aging parents' health
• Monkey Girl by Edward Humes - An examination of the recent fights about intelligent design versus evolution in school systems
• Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls - Woman grows up in abject poverty with unfit parents
• The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman - Gentiles who own a zoo save numerous Jewish families during WWII with nationalistic and naturalistic motivations
  

So that's it for 2008. Here's to a 2009 that is happy, healthy, prosperous, and full of great books.

Love, Sheryl

The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman

I bought this at Borders a couple months ago and really enjoyed reading it. It's a true story about a family who owns a zoo in Warsaw Poland in the 1930s. When WWII breaks out, they become part of the Polish resistance, assisting numerous Jewish families to hide and escape Poland.

The character development was superb. The motivation of both the husband and wife, based on their love of nature and their nationalist, was clear throughout the book. The characters were depicted as greatly compassionate and intensely brave but not without their foibles.

Another thing I liked about the book was a general history of Poland during WWII that explained some of the military and national issues that I had not known. My knowledge of WWII is rooted in Holocaust studies and the impact on the Jewish community, but it was interesting to read about the larger geo-political issues that created that environment.

I also appreciated being reminded of some major figures in the Warsaw ghetto, such as Janusz Korczak, gentile doctor who cared for Jewish orphans and died at Treblinka with them, and Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira, who brought joy and hope to a community in great despair. I did struggle with Ackerman's style of writing sometimes, though, when she wrote of the Nazis journalistically instead of with anger and hate.

Overall, a really interesting read about ordinary people compelled to the extraordinary in a time of crisis.

Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

This book was on the New York Times' 2008 Notable Books list. I was surprised to find it on the shelf at the library and picked it up right away. The novel is by an American who has studied in Argentina, and her style includes the magical realism commonly found in South American literature. She is also a doctor, which comes through in her writing.

The story follows a psychiatrist who is treating a patient who has disappeared. At the same time, he begins to suspect that there is a woman in his house pretending to be his wife, and that his wife has disappeared as well. As he embarks on a trip to Argentina to track down his wife, we start to wonder if he is losing his mind or experiencing a strange collection of incidents. The unreliability of the narrator becomes a major part of figuring out what is going on.

While I enjoyed the first half of this book, I found the second part, leading into the climax, to be more tedious than anything. The things happening in the book were confusing and I could not find the links and symbolism that should have been there for me to appreciate his breakdown completely. I did think Galchen ended the book well, but I would have appreciated better editing in the middle.

Under the Tree this year

Yay. I received two books from the top of my list for Christmas from my in-laws: Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed and David Wroblewski's Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I can't wait to read them.

Hybrids by Robert Sawyer

I flew through this, the last of Sawyer's three books comprising the Neanderthal Parallax, during our delayed flight to Rochester for Christmas. I really enjoyed both Humans and Hominids, and held off on reading this as long as possible.

Like the previous two books, this is about the characters on both sides of a portal that links our world with that of an alternate world based on Neanderthals' not becoming extinct. In this book, Mary and Ponter work out what it means to be a couple in love across these two worlds.

I enjoyed this book but thought that Sawyer tried to cover too many issues in too short a book. Within the 400 reasonably-fonted pages was an attempt to address our penal system, privacy, homosexuality, fidelity, and a few other big items. While I always appreciate the social commentary science fiction enables, I thought this book could have been better without quite so much of it.

That said, I did like the book and will miss looking forward to more books with these characters.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Wow. I first noticed this book when a stranger sat down next to me a brunch a few months ago with it. She recommended it and I've been looking forward to trying it.

This is a memoir about a woman's unusual childhood. Walls grew up as one of four children with two unbelievably creative, irreverent, and irresponsible parents. She moved around a lot as a child, living in intense poverty and often being forced to leave places in the middle of the night due to financial and social obligations her parents didn't fulfil. The family often lives without food, heat, electricity, and other necessities for over a decade.

It is easy for the reader to feel angry towards her parents and the other adults in her life, but Walls does not relate any of that in her writing. She tells her story with compassion and wit - with the eye of an adult but the heart of a child. Her journalistic background (she now writes for MSNBC) shines through as she relates her stories.

I hope Walls decides to share a bit more of her story going forward. I would like to know the details of her life once she grows up which are condensed into a few short chapters at the end of this book. But I am grateful that she decided to share this much - it is a brave book and one that I am happy to have read.

The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III

This was a great book! I had read Dubus' House of Sand and Fog several years ago as part of a now-defunct book club and liked it. However, I had been avoiding this book because it included 9/11 content and while I did enjoy Safron Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I have not otherwise sought out that theme.

Glad I did choose this book though. It's fiction, based on the idea that some of the real 9/11 hijackers were found to have spent time at Florida strip clubs to disguise their devoutness. This book follows several characters through a few days: a hijacker-to-be, the stripper he meets one night, her daughter, her landlady, another patron at the club, and a bouncer.

The characters were all exceptionally well-developed with distinctive voices. The story moved quickly, and the writing was excellent.

River Run Bookstore in Portsmouth New Hampshire

We were in Portsmouth for our anniversary this weekend and stopped by River Run Bookstore. Though small, it had great sections on Science, Mystery, and Sustainability. It was also serving as the neighborhood meeting post that morning - many folks were out of power and heat due to the storm and everyone was comparing notes at the bookstore. There was a great story posted on the wall about how when the store moved locations there was a human chain of volunteers that moved the boxes of books to the new store. Before leaving, we bought two books there for holiday gifts.

Later in the day, we found the sister bookstore to River Run that sells secondhand books - it was tiny, but had lots of appealing books for $5 (softcover) and $7 (hardcover). Webster bought an Umberto Eco book but I used my willpower to avoid both Three Cups of Tea and the Jeanette Winters book, both on my library queue.

Below the secondhand bookstore was a great travel and map store called Gulliver's. We found two books on the Azores, which is looking like this summer's destination for us.

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

I really enjoyed this book. It looked short, but was reasonably dense so it took me a few extra nights to finish. I had seen it on several book lists (I think it was a Booker Prize shortlist) and I was excited when it came up on my library queue.

The book is about a nine-year-old boy growing up in Libya in 1979. His father is rather cold and involved in some sort of secretive political activities. His mother copes (or doesn't) with alcohol. This book follows a few months of time when his father and other family friends are taken by the authorities and he is trying to understand what is going on.

What I most liked about this book was that it told a story from a young boy's point of view without its being a juvenile story. While he is confused about what is happening (though it is clear to the reader), the narrator does not become so childish as to make the book too basic for an adult audience (like in Tomato Girl).

The Regulators by Richard Bachman

I was on a whirlwind tour of several customers with a coworker named Lance when we got to talking about books. Turns out he is a huge Stephen King fan and pointed me towards this book as well as its partner, Desperation by Stephen King, which tells the story from a different point of view.

I really enjoyed this book although it's far from the mainstream fiction that makes up more than half of what I typically read. This book is pure science-fiction with some horror built in. It is gruesome, clever, and creepy. It centers around a quiet neighborhood that begins to experience very strange phenomena one afternoon that quickly escalate into large-scale violence. That description does not do the plot justice, but I don't want to ruin any of the surprises in the story. I had forgotten how good Stephen King's writing can be and it was fun to rediscover him.

I can't wait to get to Desperation to see the other half of the story.

Monkey Girl by Edward Humes

The full title of this book is Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul. It is about a legal fight about teaching Intelligent Design in a public school system in Dover, PA. In telling the story about Dover, Hume also gave a thorough history of teaching evolution and creationism in public school systems around the country throughout the 20th century. The book was well-researched and clearly written.


I learned a lot reading this book. I hadn't realized exactly what Intelligent Design (ID) was; I had always said, 'yes I believe in evolution and yes I believe God made the world and those things coexist.' But the followers of ID in the book discount the fossil record, claim the world is just 6000 years old, and believe that people and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time. ID believes that Darwin is wrong and that we didn't come from a common ancestor to monkeys.

In this community, and many of the others mentioned in the book, ID is just a sneaky way of bringing creationism into the classroom. I was absolutely shocked at how openly so many of the people in the story believe that America is a Christian country and how that should inform our public school curriculum. It made me want to join the ACLU immediately.

The book covers several different aspects of the case, including small-town school board politics, the legal fight about ID, and the motives and personalities of many of the main characters. Of particular interest to me was the depiction of a Brown Professor (Ken Miller) who is the author of a biology book considered by the school board and later, a key expert witness for evolution. While I never took any courses with him, he did teach the freshman biology course that influenced me to read Galapagos.

The book also spends some time describing the Discovery Institute, a clever organization founded on the belief that "teaching the controversy" of evolution as a "flawed theory" with "gaps" is the first step in bringing creationism back into science classes. The Discovery Institute is very careful with their positioning and end up withdrawing from this particular case because they believe that the creationists try to position ID too strongly as a religious belief. While the Institute is founded on religious principles and believes that creationism should be taught in schools, they are careful to distance themselves from hyper-religious creationists to keep their reputation scientific and professional.

My favorite part of the book was the last quarter which was excerpts from the transcript of the actual case. The dialogue is fascinating. There are school board members lying under oath, school board members with no knowledge of what ID or evolution is, and lawyers for ID who don't know when they are winning or losing the case. Ken Miller's testimony is passionate and clear.

My only objection to the book is that the author, though purporting to write a journalistic book, didn't seem able to remain impartial as a journalist. His obvious bias towards evolution made me feel like although I agree with him I would rather have read a more balanced book. But then I think, really? would I really have read a book supporting ID? I am not sure.

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

I received this book at Christmas last year from my now-inlaws. It's about life in a graphic design office. I enjoyed how well the author was able to capture what it is like to work in an office. For example, he did a great job of characterizing how people gather in certain cubicles to discuss certain things. He also perfectly captured the spirit of everyday occurrences like what it's like to arrive in the morning and get settled with coffee and whatever free bagels are available that day. He used "we" throughout the book, instead of a particular character's identity, to further depict the communal nature of the office. The book made me nostalgic for the office I used to work in; now that I work at home I don't have these interactions.

I was not as captivated by the plot. There is a partner at the firm whose battle with cancer is a mysterious theme to many of the employees. There is also a continuous threat of layoffs that influences the characters' behaviors and leads to the main action in the book. However, it was the familiarity of the office that held my attention, not the storyline. I'm not sure if that was intentional on Ferris' part.

If you've ever worked in a cubicled office (or are interested in what it's like) I think you'd get a kick out of the sociological commentary this book offers. Otherwise, it may not hold your attention.

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis

I've enjoyed Michael Lewis' sports books and decided a while ago to try one of his other topics. This one has been sitting on my shelf for a while.

This book is about Michael Lewis' years working at Salomon Brothers as a salesperson. He intersperses chapters about his experiences working there with characterizations of Salomon Brothers as a company and historical perspectives on different types of financial vehicles. He explains the bond market and its origins in the instantiation of variable interest to address inflation. He also explains how the change in commission policy changed the stock and bond markets. Most interestingly these days, he traces the origins of the mortgage bond market and how mortgages are packaged and sold as investments.

Overall I thought the book was interesting and contained an appropriate level of technical detail to keep my interest and assuage my curiosity.

Away by Amy Bloom

I almost returned this book to the library without reading it but something made me renew it and give it one more try. I'm glad I did. With one exception that I will get to later, this was a great book that I enjoyed reading and looked forward to each night.

The story is about a woman named Lillian who leaves Eastern Europe in 1924 after her family is brutally murdered. She lands in America, lives with distant relatives, and tries to start her life over. However, she finds out that her daughter may still be alive, so she begins a dangerous trip across the United States and up through Canada in hopes of eventually reaching Siberia. Along the way, she meets many interesting characters and, like most heroines in journey novels, finds out a lot about herself.

My only criticism of the book is that there is an unusually high number of sexual situations. Individually, each of the encounters served a purpose in the narrative, but put together they seemed egregious rather than appropriately descriptive.

That aside, I did enjoy reading this story and spending time with the characters.

Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama

Several months ago I noticed this in Lib's bookshelf and asked to borrow it. With the election looming, I decided to prioritize reading it sooner rather than later.

This is Obama's first book, following his early life through his matriculation into Harvard Law School. The first third of the book covers his early childhood, including when he lived in Indonesia and subsequently Hawaii. The second third addresses his years as a community organizer in Chicago. The final section of the book talks about his time in Kenya, a lengthy visit with his father's side of the family after his father's death.

What I was most struck by was how honest he was in the book. In a country where just ten years ago we talked about whether our president inhaled, Obama freely admits to a period in his life when he did drugs. He talks openly about race and his confusing feelings associated with being biracial. He is also very critical of his time as an organizer and what he saw in inner-city Chicago.

The book was reasonably well-edited. It was easy to read and held my attention. The one exception was a lengthy family history towards the end of the book. In other places I was surprised to see some 'Joe sixpack' colloquialisms that seemed forced.

This is the first time I've read a book written by a candidate in a current election, so I have little to compare it to. It did not seem to be written by someone looking to be president one day, which I appreciated. Either way, the contents of this book weren't going to change my vote.

Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, CO

Thanks to Dave for recommending the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver Colorado. In Denver for a business trip, I took a few minutes to browse in this great bookstore! It was three stories tall, had great old factory beams holding it up, and was filled with great clusters of books and places to read them.

http://www.tatteredcover.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp

Kind of made me want to make it a tradition to start visiting independent bookstores wherever I travel.

Tomato Girl by Jayne Pupek

This book was okay. It was about an 11-year-old girl growing up in the South. She starts to notice her father's increasingly friendly relationship with the "tomato girl" - the girl who sells tomatoes to his store. As she copes with no longer being the most important woman in her father's life, she also begins to lose her mother to mental illness.

The narrator's voice was memorable...precocious and caught between wanting to take care of her mother and wanting her father to take care of her. She also goes through the pain of discovering the meaning behind the things that she sees going on between her father and the Tomato Girl. It was sad to see how lost the narrator was as an 11-year-old and how she didn't know (as the reader did) that these were not things someone her age should have to deal with herself.

However, I didn't love reading the book. I didn't find myself rooting for the narrator consistently and I didn't think the writing was anything special.

Wally Lamb is back!

I just learned that Wally Lamb has a new book coming out in November. Hooray! I found his recent compilations of essays by women prisoners a poor replacement for his excellent fiction.

Books Galore!

A few weeks ago Jo lent me Devil in the White City which she really loved. I also went on a request-apalooza on the library's website. I took the day off for Rosh Hashonah last week and went to the library after synagogue. Yesterday, Web and I went to Borders and I splurged on a book on the clearance rack by Mario Vargas Llosa and a new book called The Zookeeper's Wife.

So...I have a lot of reading to do all of a sudden!

The Birthdays by Heidi Pitlor

This book was about three siblings all relating to pregnancy. One is a single woman, accidentally pregnant, one has a wife pregnant with twins through IVF, and one has a wife pregnant from a donor. The family convenes for their father's birthday for a long weekend. The book follows their struggles coping with relationships and with their pregnancies. The author did a good job of explaining each of the characters' personalities, incorporating stories of their shared childhood.

It was a quick read and nothing special, but I was interested to know what would happen to the characters.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

This is the last of the fiction books I had bought for Aruba. It was also one of the greatest books I had read in a while. Every now and then I miss a book that America loves (for example Life of Pi) and this is one of those.

This book is narrated by an old man in a nursing home. He is watching a circus get set up in his town and recalling his life in as a worker in a circus during the Great Depression. I loved the story and how well it was written. I knew nothing about circus life and felt like it was reading about life in a different country. I also appreciated learning about life during the Great Depression. Clearly, Gruen did an incredible amount of research on these topics. Finally, the way the past and present were woven together was better than in any fiction I've read recently.

Highly recommended!

The Gravediggers Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates

I had never read anything by Joyce Carol Oates which is kind of strange, given how prolific she is and how much of a staple American author she is. I picked this one up for our trip to Aruba, but just got to it now.

Reading this book was ok, I liked it but did not love it. In retrospect, however, I think it's really well-written with an exceptionally good character portrait of the main character Rebecca. Rebecca is the daughter of immigrants who flee WWII and end up in upstate New York. Her father, a mean, unhappy man, becomes the town gravedigger. His personality haunts her for her entire life, including her choice of partner and style of raising of her son.

It was not easy to read in that some terrible things happen to Rebecca, and Oates does a good job of creating tension. But it is a memorable book and I'd be interested in reading other books by Oates.

Inheritance of Loss by Kirin Desai

This book had been on my list for a while and I thought it was one of those classics that I would love once I got into it. I wouldn't say I loved but I can see why it is so well-respected.

The book follows the lives of a small village of people living in India, near the Nepali border. As the politics around them heat up into unrest and war, the lives of these people begin to unravel in parallel. One of them has a son who has immigrated to the U.S., and his life there is no better.

Well-written with intriguing characters, this book kept my attention. I thought it was a great "time and place" book, with excellent descriptions of both people and settings.

The Groom to Have Been by Saher Alam

This was the first of five books I bought for our trip to Aruba. I bought it from the 2-for-1 table at Borders, and I think I had heard about it on NPR. I finished this on our first day of vacation. It was pretty well written and kept my attention.

The book was about a Muslim Indian who grew up in Canada. He is reasonably assimilated into Canadian (and American) culture but agrees to let his parents arrange his marriage. Just when he begins all the preparations for his marriage, he begins to see a family friend in a different light and wonders if he should be with her instead.

I didn't find the book that different from other similarly-themed books I've read. About forty pages from the end, I thought to myself, "he could end up with either girl and it would not be unpredictable." But I enjoyed learning a bit more about Muslim Indians, and Alam added a tasteful backdrop of 9/11 to the story that I appreciated. A good read, but nothing unusually special.

Flash Forward by Robert Sawyer

I was unexpectedly downtown and decided to try Wagamama for dinner. Not wanting to eat alone, I popped into Borders and picked this book up for company. I still have not read the third book in Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, but Borders didn't have it.

Flash Forward was as good as Sawyer's other books. It was a quick read with interesting plot, a little romance, and compelling characters. The book is about a phenomenon that a group of scientists cause accidentally. The phenomenon brings everyone in the world forward twenty years and gives them a short view of their lives then returns them to the present. The majority of the book focuses on how each of the main character copes with knowing where they think they'll be in twenty years.

Again, Sawyer has written a fun book, sci-fi only incidentally. It was less social commentary and more commentary on controlling our own destinies. Either way, enjoyable.

Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

Webster's parents (now my inlaws!!) gave me this for Christmas last year and I just got around to it. After the baseball book I was feeling kind of uninspired about reading and thought this would get me back on track. Russo's Empire Falls had been one of my favorites.

Unfortunately this book did not hold my attention quite as well. It was about a man looking back at his life, focusing on his childhood relationships with a best friend and a girlfriend. The girlfriend becomes his wife and the best friend becomes estranged from the couple, and the book switches between past and present to detail how this threesome ends up where they are. Several marriages were explored, and the action takes place both in the U.S. as well as Italy.

Russo's writing is consistent: deeply-developed characters and great descriptions of time and place. However, the book was not as well-formed as Russo's other books and I didn't like the characters enough. Overall, not a win for me.

The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World by Joshua Prager

I liked this book, but wow, was it detailed. It took me weeks to get through (which is unusual for me) and at times I must admit to skimming some pages.

The story is about the 1951 National League pennant race where Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit a home run off Ralph Branca of the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the playoff game that brought the Giants into the World Series. Prager gives a great history of baseball in telling the story, describing well the role baseball played in America's psyche, particularly in New York.

One theme he explores is the sign-stealing that may have enabled Bobby Thomson's home run. His style was to stipulate early in the book that there was spying, then weave extensive biographical information about all the characters in the story, including the electrician who first set up the sign-stealing system and the bat boy who slapped hands with Thomson after his homer. Prager also focused on the archtypes of the "hero and goat" that Thomson and Branca took on, following their lives after the game.

Overall, I liked the book and found many of the themes very accessible. Sign-stealing brought to mind last season's Patriots. And Ralph Branca became to Brooklyn what Bill Buckner had been to Boston. I loved how well Prager described New York's attachment to baseball. I just thought the detail in some cases was a little overwhelming and I could have done without the 100+ pages of endnotes as an airport read.

Going back to the library

I guess my eyes were bigger than ... err ... my eyes or something because I have some books going back to the library today I wish I had read:

Evening is the Whole Day
Inheritence of Loss

Also, a disappointing Experiment in Love by the usually-dependable Hilary Mantel, and a book about Kevin Mitnick called The Fugitive Game that I thought would be awesome but sucked.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin

This book has inspired me to once again keep track of promising books I return to the library unread, since this book is one I have taken out three times and finally read this time 'round.

The memoir is about a white man who grew up in Zimbabwe in the 1960s and '70s. He leaves Zimbabwe as an adult, working for various news magazines and media outlets in Europe and the United States. This story picks up as his parents are getting older and require more attention as their health fails, and, in parallel, Zimbabwe under the rule of Mugabe begins to fall apart. Godwin weaves stories of his childhood and current-day life along with a history of Zimbabwe and its current state.

Incredibly well-written, poignant, and educational, this may be one of the best things I've read of late.

The Woman who Can't Forget by Jill Price

I had high hopes for this book. Jill Price is a woman with a really unusual memory - given any event, she can tell you the date of it, and given any date, she can tell you in complete detail what she did - for the past thirty years. I expected this book to be about the neuroscience experiments she was involved in at various labs, and perhaps about how she developed coping mechanisms over time. Well boo on me for wanting a scientific book. Because this is a whiny memoir.

Price spends some of the book detailing her sessions with scientists at UCal to better understand her disorder, but the majority of the book is about how difficult her life is because of her memory. Something about the tone of the book and her voice made it difficult for me to muster up any empathy towards her. I did feel like she probably had other developmental problems other than just her extreme memory, and that the people in her life should have protected her better from writing this book. I felt disgusted when she met a man online (who she later married) who called her "hun" in their first IM - so weird.

Most importantly, I didn't think that many of the issues she recounted were attributable to her disorder, and thus she was just another person wanting to self-importantly write about how hard her life is. Her social anxiety and issues with attachment were no different from other memoirists' depictions, certainly not enough to justify a book about her.

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood

I absolutely loved reading this book, so much so that I even read a couple pages one day during an incredibly boring conference call. John Wood writes a fascinating memoir of leaving his high-power job at Microsoft in favor of starting a non-profit organization. He founded the non-profit Room to Read after a visit to Nepal, and several years later it is thriving with millions of dollars of grants and programs in several countries.

Room to Read's purpose is to set up libraries and schools in underserved countries. John Wood is courageous, bright, and a great combination of dreamer and executor. Early in the book, he starts with a grass-roots effort to get books to Nepal. As time goes on, he uses all his skills and all his connections to make Room to Read a successful business, and it is as interesting to read as an entrepreneurial book as it is a humanitarian one. I finished this book feeling both ashamed and inspired.

Plague of Doves by Louise Erdich

I admit, I read a review of this book on Slate and it looked good. But I read this book in its entirety because it was about Native Americans, based on a true story, and I felt guilty stopping. I am glad I finished it but I did find second 20% of it or so a little hard to follow and kind of boring.

The story follows a set of Ojibwe Indians and caucasians in North Dakota over several generations as their reservation and town become more and more intertwined. The central story in the book is of a violent crime that results in several Indians being lynched. The book tells the story out of order, so as time goes on, relationships and occurences take on different meaning with different background.

The writing was pretty good, although the voice of one particular character, the grandfather, was hard for me to follow. I enjoyed learning about Native American life in modern times which I am woefully undereducated about. The story that Erdrich waves, if you can work through the parts that are tricky to read, is sad, surprising, and rewarding to finish.

Wall St. Journal Summer Reading

Thanks to Dave who saved the Weekend Journal section, I have the Wall Street Journal's Summer Reading Guide. This year's list is heavily bent on foreign stories, which I'm sure I'll like.

The paper is easier to read, but here is the link to the electronic version: http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/info-flash08.html?project=SUMMERBOOKS08

The Girls by Lori Lansens

I read about the book on Slate and got it from the library during a "had-too-much-Diet-Coke-at-a-Red-Sox-game-am-up-late-let's-binge-on-book-requests-from-the-library's-electronic-database-at-3-in-the-morning" episode. It has an ambitious premise: it's about two girls in their late twenties who are craniopagus twins - joined at the head. The girls have unique identities and personalities and one of them sets out to write her autobiography.

The book was well-written, and the two girls' voices sufficiently different to be interesting. I had a hard time remembering they were attached sometimes because their parents would reward one with a trip somewhere or punish one with a grounding and both girls were subjected to the event. However, the characters were likable, the story had many surprises throughout the narrative, and the overall effect was a book I looked forward to reading each night before bed.

The only thing I did not like was the ending. There is an inevitable ending the story suggests early on, but the execution of the climax and denouement was poor. Too bad, since it was a memorable book overall.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Not since Caroline Knapp's Appetites has a nonfiction book changed my point of view about something so strongly. Since they are both about food I think that tells me something about myself. This book, by the author of Omnivore's Dilemma (which I have not read yet), is summarized on its cover: Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.

Pollan says that what gets complicated is what it means to eat "food". Is what is in our supermarkets today food? Or is it food-like substances, bloated by corn syrup and soybean oil? He gives a history of the FDA and discusses what basis they have for recommending different nutrients.

His rhetoric borders on being a little conspiracy-theory at times, faulting the government with providing bad information to us about food based on lobbyist groups, but his message overall is smart. The micronutrients that we fortify our white bread with are not necessarily effective independent of their complementary nutrients naturally occurring in foods. Our foods are filled with soy and corn because we can get the most calories per acre of those foods. We eat far too much meat for a healthy diet. Low-fat foods are tricking America into eating 20% more calories per day than we did in the 1980's

To deal with this, he makes some suggestions of varying simplicity to incorporate into our lives. For example, shop the perimeter of the grocery store, that's where the fresh foods are; don't eat anything that does not spoil eventually; don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize. (He also says to eat every meal at a table, (not a desk), but I'm not ready for that one yet.)

While I'm not giving my Snickers addiction up just yet, I believe that Pollan is right: food has gotten too complicated. I've already had a few extra bananas this week because of this book.

The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond

Lisa recommended this to me, and since we've only had really divergent opinions on one book (Corelli's Mandolin) in our entire friendship, I moved it to the top of my list. (I almost accidentally took out a book called Year of Frog which I must admit to now being incredibly curious about.)

I could not put this book down. I was totally entranced by the story of Abby, a photographer in her early thirties whose fiance's daughter disappears when she is watching her one day. The story takes place (mostly) in San Francisco, and Richmond's descriptions of the neighborhoods and beaches are quite good.

Now, the book was not perfect -- Richmond kept interrupting the story to present information on memory and hypnosis and other topics that were keeping Abby up at night when the little girl went missing. Sometimes I thought these interludes were interesting, sometimes they just broke the flow of the book. There was also about fifty pages in the middle that seemed to drag a little. I was scratching my head saying, "ok, the girl's still missing, Abby's relationship is falling apart, what now?" The other problem I had with the book which may be my fault, not Richmond's, was that I kept skimming paragraphs and pages of description to get to the more plot-oriented parts.

But in the end, Richmond presented a complete plot: beginning, middle, end, denouement. The writing is well-done, Abby is complex and familiar, and the story is compelling.

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

I really liked this book. It is a fictionalized account of a love affair that took place between Frank Lloyd Wright (the architect) and Mamah Cheney, a client of his. The book is set in the early 20th century, and takes place in both the United State and Europe.

While this book is most identifiably a love story, it also explored how pervasive Wright's opinions about design were in his personality. I enjoyed learning more about Wright, although I am tempted to read a biography of him soon to learn what is really true about him and what was imagined by Horan.

The book also tackled themes of feminism, as Mamah gets a job translating essays by Ellen Key (Swedish feminist) into English. In doing so, Mamah struggles with how early 20th century feminism viewed her leaving her husband (ok) and children (bad).

What I liked most about the book was how much the author was able to teach me about Wright and about feminism without my noticing.

Soliciting Recommendations!

This is the time of year when I've generally gotten through all the books from last year's booklists that I am interested in and despite my bookshelves being overwhelmed with books I haven't read I'm on the prowl for new recommendations.

In addition, I'm looking for good biographies of The Beatles, Freddie Mercury, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

What say you, reader?

A Free Life by Ha Jin

I remember liking Ha Jin's Waiting (although I can't remember what it was about other than something relating to a ponytail) so when I saw this on the shelf I picked it up. I didn't even notice until now that it was a book about freedom and I was reading it during Passover.


The book is about a young family who immigrate from China to the United States and what their first decade or so is like in the U.S. I was enthralled by the story and the decisions they faced. It is probably the best book I've read in a long time that gave me a window into a particular 'universe' so elegantly. I learned a lot about the economics of starting over in a new country, and especially enjoyed the sections about their owning a Chinese restaurant in Atlanta.



I did not think the writing was as good as it could have been, although the story was, but that may have been intentional since the main characters' first language is not English. Aside from finding the style simplistic and lacking in physical details in places, the book was intriguing.

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

I think I saw this book recommended somewhere; in any case it showed up in my library queue. It's about a man who is recovering from a bad accident. One day he sees something that reminds him of childhood and becomes obsessed with re-enacting scenes from his memory to the tiniest detail. The author played with concepts around memory and reality, as well as authenticity.

While the book started off slow, I really enjoyed the middle 75% of the story. However, I was disappointed in the ending. Like the Sopranos, it didn't really end, although I don't think McCarthy has any illusions about their being a movie made of this book. If you've read this and have any insight, please comment below!

Humans by Robert Sawyer

Humans is the second book of the "Parallax Trilogy" Sawyer wrote about a parallel Neanderthal world that contacts our world. I usually wait a bit longer between books of the same author but I could not wait to read this continuation. I was not disappointed.

Sawyer continued to build his vast social commentary, this time focusing on reproduction, environmental issues, and criminal justice. At the same time, he draws some interesting conclusions about the fossil record and what we know about evolution. While it is not entirely clear that the fantastical nature of the Neanderthal world could have been derived from the differences between humans (ok, Robert, I'll call them homo sapiens) and Neanderthals, I'll let Sawyer chalk it up to the randomness inherent in the creation of multiple worlds because I liked this book so much. He created a great pair of universes and a believable love story to boot.

I do not know how long I will go without breaking down to read the finale, Hybrids.

I'll Fly Away by Wally Lamb

This book is a continuation of Lamb's 2002 compilation of woman's' writing from the York Correctional Institution (i.e., Jail) entitled Couldn't Keep it to Ourselves. While I enjoyed the original book for its honesty and the stories around how women got into situations that ended with their committing crimes, this follow-up was disappointing.

After a multi-page forward about the political troubles at the York jail, the book has about a dozen women's' short essays and poems with no discernible theme. While I'm sure the writing was therapeutic for the prisoners and their teachers, it's less than inspirational for the reader.

I'm ready for Lamb's next novel already. Which he promises is coming.

Update on the Book Swap

A few months ago I mentioned going to a party with a book swap. This weekend we actually did it and here are the results:

• I gave a book about the invention of longitude based on my lifelong obsession with maps


• Web gave a book on the science of science fiction writing, because he loves sci-fi and most people don't know that about him


• Sara gave a book about storytelling since she is a new mom and has been struggling to be creative in her stories to her son at night on three hours' sleep


• Ethan gave Tom Sawyer, a childhood favorite of his


• Jamie gave Bill Clinton's Giving, because she once met him at a basketball game


• Jay gave a Real Simple cookbook because he used to cook dinner for his mom when she worked late


• Jenn gave a book about travels in India and one of crossword puzzles because of one lifelong and one new obsession


• Greg gave me a book on modern art and one on the game of Go. I could have pegged him as a Go aficionado but the art was a complete surprise.
  

All in all, a fun way to learn a little more about close friends.

Wildfire by Nelson DeMille

I bought this book (and Michael Crichton's Next) at Costco a few months ago before several business trips, thinking they would be good airport reads. Something about the cover art turned me off and I just got around to reading it now.

This is a very typical DeMille John Corey book. In case you are not familiar with this series, the John Corey books feature a very sarcastic protagonist who retires as a New York City detective but works for the FBI. He is always getting himself into trouble and uses very unusual tactics to solve crimes. Incredibly, he has a beautiful and talented girlfriend / wife who plays his straight man (woman?)

This particular story was about an elite group of business people and government officials who hatch a plan post-9/11 to address the growing terrorist threat. Problem is, their plan is itself terrorism and Corey rightfully disapproves and figures it out just as it is being executed. He throws himself into trying to stop the events from taking motion.

I liked it. Completely what I wanted from this type of book.

Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

I first read about this book where most people did, referenced in Freakonomics. Freakanomics talks about a young sociologist who did extensive research in the economics of gangs, seeking to understand who makes money in a gang and how the money flows. The particular question he was asking to attract attention was, "why do so many drug dealers live with their mothers?"

So when Venkatesh' book was published I was first in line (err...on the electronic library queue) to read it.

I was a little disappointed with the theme of his book at first, because I though it would be about the results of his research. Instead it was about the methods and experiences used in his research with few conclusions. It was more of a memoir of the spending several years with this particular gang.

That said, I did learn some of the material I was interested in about day-to-day economic life in a (Chicagoan) gang. I had no idea that most of the gang violence we read about in the papers is based on turf wars over drugs. I also appreciated learning about all the different below-board businesses run by gangs and how they make money. I would have enjoyed more insights like that and fewer soliloquies about Venkatesh's moral dilemmas.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

This book should be called "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar WOW." This book was incredible -- narrated by a voice stronger than nearly any other character I've ever read.

The book is about a young man named Oscar who immigrates with his mother and sister from the Dominican Republic. The book alternates between each of their stories to paint a family history that spans the D.R. and New Jersey, going back several generations. Having read several books lately that take place in an unnamed South American country, it was impressive to read such a carefully researched and executed story taking place specifically in the D.R. and the Dominican-American community.

Though the story is often tragic, Diaz masterfully injected humor and sarcasm throughout the telling of the story. The writing is great - the voice of the narrator is strong and particular from the first page. This books makes me want to read Diaz' earlier book (Flood) as well as a couple strong-voiced books I've skipped in the past. Beloved comes to mind.

The Assist by Neil Swidey

I heard Neil Swidey interviewed on NPR when this book was published, and I think I had also read a few excerpts in the Boston Globe Magazine several months earlier.

This book started as a series of articles in the Globe about the coach of the Charlestown, MA high school basketball team. This coach took high-risk kids from all over Boston and made a state champion team several years in a row. While this was hardly a Michael Lewis level of writing, it was an interesting story about a dedicated coach and some inspirational students. The author painted a vivid picture including racial, educational, and class-based angles.

I was left dissatisfied with the end of the book, though. The book seemed to end at a certain date, rather than at a natural end of a story.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

I had liked Brooks' other books (Nine Parts of Desire and Year of Wonder) so I was excited to see that she had written another. This book was probably my favorite by her and one of the most engaging book I've read in a long time.

The book is about a famous illustrated manuscript known as the Sarajevo Hagaddah. (Interestingly, the Sarajevo Hagaddah really does exist, although the rest of the book is fictionalized.) The book opens with a well-known ancient book restoration expert being called to Sarajevo to look at a Hagaddah that is rumored to be a particular ancient illustrated Hagaddah. Brooks uses her journalistic background and skill in storytelling to imagine a history of the Hagaddah reaching back to the 1400s. Each time the main character learns something new about the Hagaddah, the books goes back 100 years further into the past to learn where the Hagaddah started.

I really enjoyed the stories and main character's personality. It was also fun to read this book with Passover coming up.

Senator's Wife by Sue Miller

Sue Miller is typically one of my go-to authors when I don't know what to get at the library or when I haven't read anything I liked recently. I noticed she had a new book out so I decided to try it. Unfortunately, I was disappointed with this one.

The story follows a young newlywed couple (Nathan and Meri) who moves into a two-family home. Their neighbors are a well-known, well-liked senator and his wife (Tom and Delia). While the Nathan is impressed by their famous neighbor, Meri (suddenly pregnant and lonely) gets to know Delia and learns that their marriage is not as happy as it would seem. Delia continues to support Tom publicly, but their private relationship is far more complicated.

I think the story is supposed to contrast an old marriage with a young one, and to humanize the "stand by your man" strategy practiced by political wives today. Instead, I thought the book was preachy, slow-moving, and the characters one-dimensional. While there is a stunning climax, it did not make up for the entire book's dull pace.

Eye Wide Shut

When I get really tired but I'm reading a good book in bed at night, I start to read with one eye closed at a time. I close one eye to rest it, read with the other eye, then close the second eye and read with the first one.

I did not realize that was unusual until recently. I also have my 14-digit library card number memorized but I knew that was weird from the start.

What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman

This was on one of the booklists recently and I am glad I took it out of the library. It is a good old fashioned mystery, well-wrtten and well-constructed.

The story is about elementary-aged sisters who are abducted from a suburban mall. Decades later, a woman shows up in their hometown claiming to be one of the girls. As the story of their abduction is told through flashbacks, questions about the woman's identity emerge. The story is further enhanced by excellent characters, including her mother and several members of law enforcement and social services.

What I liked about this book was that it was straightforward and easy to read, like a simple novel. However, it was also deceptive in its complexity, as the climax demostrates. I'd definitely like to read other books by Lippman in the future.

Challenging Book Swap

So this weekend we were supposed to get together with three other couples for an annual holiday dinner. (Yeah, scheduling is tough.) Each year, we usually assign one recipient to each attendee to keep the gift exchange simple.

This year I proposed that we each give a paperback book to our recipient. The book had to tell the recipient something about the giver that they didn't know. I thought it would be fun because we know each other - to differing degrees - reasonably well.

Web and I headed over to Barnes and Noble to find gifts and realized I had given out a difficult assignment! There are not that many things about me that people don't know. I have been cooking a lot more lately, but since I was planning to pull off dinner for eight from scratch, I didn't think that fact was surprising enough. I've had a massive obsession with all things football this season, but we host a Superbowl party each year, so I didn't think that would be that interesting. Webster had similarly difficult time. He found that most of the interesting tidbits about him don't make for great books. For example, he has a secret passion for ping-pong. And he likes to eat all the items on his plate at dinner each time he chews on a forkfull.

I think we chose good books in the end but I left feeling a little disappointed that I wasn't more interesting. Webster said he thinks I'm plenty interesting and just open with my friends about what I'm into.

Our dinner was postponed due to several attendees' kids getting sick, but I'll post all the books and their explanations once we reschedule and celebrate.

Rigged by Ben Mezrich

I think I have officially fallen out of love with Ben Mezrich. I was a huge fan of Bringing Down the House, his book about students at MIT who figure out a scheme to win millions in Vegas. (It's being made into a movie now.) However, I was disappointed with both Ugly Americans and Busting Vegas, the two books that followed. I had no particular criticism of either one, other than that neither was the fun ride that Bringing Down the House was.

When I heard Mezrich interviewed on NPR recently, I thought his new book, Rigged, sounded interesting. It was about David Russo, a recent Harvard MBA graduate who goes to work at the New York Mercentile Exchange. The "Merc" is an exchange that is otherwise filled with Brooklyn-born Jews and Italians who were traders because their fathers had been traders. Originally for potatoes, then butter and eggs, today the Merc is where oil futures are traded. Russo quickly becomes central to the management of the Merc, then attempts the impossible - to bring a sister trading floor to Dubai.

I expected this book to explain the technical details of how an exchange works, how oil prices are negotiated, and what it means to have two exchanges for the same commodity on opposite sides of the world. Instead, Mezrich spends the pages detailing Russo's encounters with alcohol, women, and ego-driven traders. Some of the book's most dramatic moments are when Russo cheats on his girlfriend and when he is forced to jump out a hotel window. While some of this detail is necessary to describe both the traders in New York and the different but equally-raucous environment in Dubai, Mezrich robs us of the actual financial details of the story. He trivializes some of the most interesting issues in favor of the glamorous, glitzy details that sell books. Ugh.

Now I have to go find another book on the New York Mercantile Exchange just to understand what the heck David Russo did, how, and why. And I'm annoyed with Mezrich because he obviously knows all these things and just left it out of the final published product.

More on Brockmeier

I Googled Brockmeier since I liked his book so much. He says the coolest thing in an interview on his Random House website:

"I'm a list-maker---I always have been---and over the past few years I've been keeping and regularly reconsidering a list of my fifty favorite books."

I am so incredibly jealous! I should do one of those each year - maybe on my birthday - and see how my tastes change over time.

From the top of his list:

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
All the Days and Nights by William Maxwell
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Death in the Family by James Agee
Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
The His DarkMaterials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
The Complete Short Stories by J.G. Ballard

A Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

This was a very unusual book.

Half of the story takes place in "The City," a limbo-esque location where people go when they die. In the book, they live there until there is nobody left alive who remembers them, at which point they actually go to a more final resting place. The author based this concept on a belief in certain African societies that such a place exists. The other half of the story is about a woman trapped in a research post in Antarctica who trying to figure out how to communicate with the outside world since her satellites are damaged and power sources are quickly draining. Brockmeier skillfully weaves these two stories together in an incredible way.

This was not one of those books with two stories where one of them was more interesting to the other and I thus spent half the book trying to get to the good parts. Both stories were compelling and I wanted to know what would happen.

One thing I loved about Brockmeier's writing was his use of small anecdotes throughout the book to quickly get the reader more background on a particular character or environment. I have not seen this technique used as successfully as this in anything I can remember.

I ought to put his first novel on my reading list.

Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

Unlike much of what I've been reading lately, this book was one I plucked off the new fiction shelf in the library with no review. I liked it a lot.

The story is about a woman who hosts a radio show in an unnamed Latin American country. The country has been ravaged by war and her radio show is a chance for people who have lost friends and relatives to say their names and hopefully find each other. In parallel, the woman has lost her husband to the war and she meets someone in the book who may be able to help her find him.

One reviewer compared the world Alarcon creates to that of Orwell or Huxley. I did not find it to be nearly as dystopic as that. Surely it was not a country I'd want to visit, but it was far more realistic and 'possible' than those other portrayals of the future. I found it to be more similar to Didion's Book of Common Prayer or Saramago's All the Names. Like those books, its being in a created country forced Alarcon to provide the historical backdrop, not just the plot. While I didn't think the history he created was entirely original (he seemed to rely on a composite of Latin American histories), it was well-developed and complete.

Considering this was a first novel, I thought it was excellent.

National Book Critic Award Finalists Announced

Joyce Carol Oates is having a VH1-style 'Best Week Ever.'

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/01/2007-national-book-critics-circle-award.html

Run by Ann Patchett

I love love loved this book. Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors, so when it came up on the library's hold queue, I was very excited - "like your birthday or something," said Jo. I didn't even realize until I brought it home that it was set in Boston, a block from my house.

The story is about an affluent white family who adopts two black boys. The main story takes place within two or three days surrounding a car accident, but Patchett spans several decades of the story by taking us back into the history of the adoptive family and of the boys' mother. She experiments with ideas around family, success, and identity, all with a cast of characters that I couldn't help but root for. The writing, too, was superb.

I tried to explain the entire plot to Webster on a walk to brunch the other day. In doing so, I realized how complex the story was, and how much I liked that about the book, although I didn't notice that while I was reading it. I did get a kick out of reading a well-researched story set in my own neighborhood.