Top Books of 2009

Happy New Year, readers.

Oddly, I don't think I have a favorite book or even a shortlist this year. I read a lot - 52 books, 35 fiction and 17 non-fiction. I started to serious track book recommendations and most everything I read this year was something I planned to read. (There were a few exceptions, like Under a Yellow Sun and Blind Assassin, both picked under duress during book emergencies.) The list of books 'on deck' continues to grow at a Sisyphean rate, as do the piles of books around the house.

I paid more attention to comparative reading this year - Zeiton and City of Refuge were both reflections on Katrina which unintentionally had a lot in common with Blindness. I enjoyed reading about language in Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, Land of Invented Languages, and The Professor and the Madman. And I got to see the South Pacific in Come Onshore..., and Lost Paradise. The fiction I read was a typical mix - plenty of foreign settings and a mix of science fiction and supernatural topics.

Here are the books I liked the most this year, alphabetized by author.


Fiction

Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - A family is spread throughout Nigeria during the civil war.

The Thing around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - A collection of short stories about Nigerians at home and in America.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - A woman's high society life is contrasted with excerpts from a dark novel one of the characters is writing.

A Guide to the Birds of Easts Africa by Nicholas Drayson - Quaint story about a small town in Kenya and a love triangle.

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff - Brigham Young's 19th wife tries to leave him, while in the present a young boy escapes from a fundamentalist polygamous sect.

Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner - The story of several American families living in Cuba right before Castro's rise to power.

Disappearance of Irene dos Santos by Margaret Mascarenhas - A young girl disappears in the Venezuelan wilderness and years later all the people involved tell their parts of the story.

City of Refuge by Tom Piazza - A family struggles to make decisions about their future after Hurricane Katrina strikes their home in New Orleans.

Blindness by Jose Saramago - An unnamed city is suddenly struck by an epidemic of blindness.

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld - A fictionalized account of Laura Bush's life, from childhood leading up to her husband's being president.

Space Between Us by Thrity Umregar - The relationship between a privileged woman and her house servant in India is explored.


Airport Reads

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card - A young boy comes of age at Earth's most elite training school to prepare to lead troops in an intergalactic war.

The Spy who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre - Named the "Best Spy Novel of all time" by Publishers Weekly, this is about a retiring spy's last mission.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez - After a world-famous techie dies, the programs he has left embedded in the Internet come to life.


Non-fiction

Zeiton by Dave Eggers - A Syrian family survives in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey - Complete history of diagramming sentences, including memorable illustrations.

Lost Paradise by Kathy Marks - A journalist travels to Pitcairn Island to report on the trials of a series of prominent men accused of sexually assaulting young girls.

In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent - The history of several languages that have been created instead of evolving, from Klingon to Modern Hebrew to Esperanto.

The Monty Hall Problem by Jason Rosenhouse - This history of one of math's most famous and frustrating brainteasers.

The Addict by Michael Stein - A psychiatrist chronicles a year in his treatment of a young drug addict.

Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All by Christina Thompson - An American woman falls in love a Maori man while in New Zealand studying.

Runners-up

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry - (Fiction) A family has supernatural experiences in modern-day Salem.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown - (Fiction) Another thriller starring Robert Langdon, this time involving the Masons and Washington D.C.

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly - (Fiction) A young boy travels through an enchanted forest to escape his unhappy life.

The Power of One by Bruce Courtenay - (Fiction) A young white boy grows up in South Africa at the dawn of apartheid - his small challenges are contrasted with his country's larger ones.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger - (Fiction) American twins inherit their estranged aunt's London apartment located next to a cemetery.

Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan - (Non-fiction) Indictment of our food system, examination of how to eat more healthily and ethically.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows - (Fiction) A writer in postwar England becomes fascinated by the small community on Guernsey Island during the war.

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester - (Non-fiction) A history of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the major contributors being an inmate at an institution for the criminally insane.

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Happy 2010, all.

Fourth Hand by John Irving

I found this John Irving book on a clearance table several years ago and just go around to reading it. It is a weird book. The story is about a news reporter whose hand is bitten off by a lion while he is on assignment. A woman who doesn't know him decides to donate her husband's hand to him for a transplant, but the husband is still alive.

The story follows not just the reporter and the donor's wife, but also the hand surgeon, his housekeeper, and several women with whom the reporter is involved. In some cases, Irving spent large sections of the book telling back stories for these characters. The book shared many themes with others by Irving: physical disability, egregious sexuality, India, a circus, and a very broken main character. He also makes some strong comments about the 24-hour news cycle through the main character's working at a CNN-like station.

I'm not sure I'd strongly recommend this book. It kept my attention but did not make any large points about love or life that haven't been made before, even by Irving. Stick to Garp.

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

I received this novel from www.BookClubGirl.com but had a conflict with work during the online chat so I just got around to reading it. It was a very unusual book and I enjoyed it.

The story follows a family who lives in Salem, MA. Against a backdrop of tourist buses and daily re-enacted witch hunts, the Whitneys read lace - that is, they can see the future in the patterns of woven lace held up to a person's face. Throughout the book, the reader discovers layers of recent family history and how things are not always as they seem for the Whitneys. Uniquely, the middle third of the book is a 'short' story written by one of the characters (Towner) and based on her life, which adds to the mystique and storytelling within the book. If Towner does not already seem to be an unreliable narrator in the first section of the book, her fictionalized account of her life firmly sets her there in the second.

What I also liked about this book was that it was an old-fashioned story set it modern times. There is an element of life in Salem and in the fictional island off the coast that is timeless - people's homes are accessible only based on the tide schedule, there is a strong presence of folklore and magic and a notable absence of Twitter and Facebook. It was hard to remember that this story was taking place in the current time and not it the 1700's. Certainly that is a function of the presence of history in Salem but also of the story Barry chose to tell.

It is nice to find an author doing something unique.

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Meredith recommended this book to me - great pick! Sittenfeld's (author Prep and Man of My Dreams) novel is loosely based on Laura Bush's life. The story follows a young woman (Alice Lindgren) from her childhood through middle age, culminating in her husband's (Charlie Blackwell) becoming president of the United States.

The first three-quarters of the book was a careful examination of relationships and marriage. Alice is a likable narrator. One of the reasons I didn't read this book immediately when Mer recommended it is that I was taking a break from everything Bush, along with the rest of the country. But Alice is a protagonist for whom I was rooting - through tragedies in her young life to a crazy weekend meeting her inlaws-to-be for the first time to her relationship with her on-again off-again best friend, she is a sympathetic character. She grows up and marries Charlie, discovering how imperfect he is but also how to keep her marriage together. Having just celebrated my 9th anniversary with Webster (only one of those married, for those of you keeping score) it made me think about how much our relationship had changed and how unrecognizable it may be thirty years from now.

Towards the end of the book, Charlie is elected president and Alice reflects first on her life in the White House and then on the 'war on terror.' Because Alice is still in love with Charlie, it was hard to tell initially if Sittenfeld was excusing or crucifying Bush. In fact, Alice is likable enough throughout the story that it was hard to dislike her with the virulence I had disliked everything Bush. But ultimately Alice's describing Charlie's time in the White House does read as an indictment of Bush - even more so than the semi-climactic ending Sittenfeld plans for the story.

My gripes with this book were structural. Most notably, Sittenfeld skips huge sections of time between the sections of her book. The first gap is understandable: we leave Alice as a high school student and find her again right after college. But later in the book, Charlie's rise from governor to national candidate is omitted completely, the last section of the book opening with the Blackwells already comfortably installed in the White House with a war going on. While election night is depicted as a flashback shortly thereafter (complete with a familiar supreme court case involving Florida), there were many parts of the timeline that were missing. She explains in the afterword that there are plenty of other books that depicted campaigns and that wasn't the point of this book; I didn't buy it - it made for a choppy transition that unraveled a lot of the great character development she had done earlier in the book. Without seeing the couple go through a campaign and adjust to life in the White House, the final section of the book reads more like a summary - almost like a busy family's annual Christmas card - than it does an active narrative.

That aside, I enjoyed reading the book. Like Prep, American Wife is a page-turner, and reflects on relationships, ethics, and our political system. Recommended.

2009 Drawing to a Close

My 'Best Books of 2009' is coming along and I'll post it shortly. I've also been updating my 'On Deck' list - taking out some books I'm not as interested in and adding some new ones I've heard about recently.

Meanwhile, check out the other 2009 booklists below - most are fiction but have links to nonfiction within. They stress me out a little because this time every year my 'On Deck' list grows to unmanageable proportions!!

New York Times Top Ten
New York Times Top Ten per daily book critics
LA Times Favorite Fiction
NPR Foreign Fiction
Times Literary Supplement
Best Bookclub Books (from Flashlight Worthy Blog)
Best Canadian Fiction (from Globe and Mail)
New York Times 100 Notables
Washington Post Top Books
Chicago Tribune Best Books

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Dad bought this for me the day it shipped and I just got around to reading it. I am on vacation from work this week so I breezed through the 450+ pages. It was recognizable as a sequel to Brown's other books starring Robert Langdon - fast-paced and written with the screenplay in mind.

The story opens with an old friend summoning Langdon to Washington DC to fill in as a guest speaker at a large conference. When he arrives there he soon finds out that there are other motives behind the invitation and he is thrust into a time-constrained treasure hunt involving Masonic secrets.

While the book kept my attention and I was interested to know what would happen next, it was frustrating because the puzzles that Langdon has to solve are not ones that the reader can "play along" with. That would have made the book more fun. I seem to remember that frustration from his other books too. Unlike his other books, this one had less of a focus on religion and more on the secrets behind the Freemasons as well as Noetic science, which is loosely the scientific study of metaphysics.

The book was fun and a good vacation read.

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Courtney and Laura recommended this book to me and when I was at Courtney's house she lent me her copy. They are usually both very reliable book recommenders but I can't say I agree with this one. I found this book so disturbing I nearly stopped reading it - more than once.

The book is a memoir about Burroughs' childhood. His mother is mentally ill and his father is absent, so, oddly, he goes to live with his mother's exceptionally eccentric psychologist. This doctor is reasonably disturbed himself and lives with his wife and several children.

The doctor's house is always a mess, there is no stability with regards to school, food, or even the house's physical nature itself. The therapist encourages Burroughs and the other children to participate in really unhealthy behaviors - for example, at one point Burroughs wants to quit school so the doctor coaches him as to how to fake a suicide attempt. And Burroughs is thrust into a sexual relationship with another member of the family. At the time, he is a young adolescent, and the incidents are graphically depicted in the book.

I don't blame Burroughs for writing the book - he is an excellent memoirist: unflinchingly honest and good at picking particular anecdotes to characterize large portions of his life. However, I do think his editor and publisher should have protected him more. Many reviews of the book describe it as 'funny' and 'hilarious' and I didn't think that was accurate at all. There were a few parts of the book where I chuckled out loud, but wished I hadn't. While I appreciate that Burroughs may have found humor in his past and uses that to cope, the story he tells is not one of his recovery, it is one of a young boy who is in a terrible situation. I don't see humor having a place there and I felt very sad for him. Reading this book I had the same feeling I had when I saw Brokeback Mountain - people in the theater were laughing and somehow only I knew it was not a comedy.


I can't recommend this book, despite how well I thought it was written, because I think it was disturbingly exploitative. I would, however, read something else by Burroughs in the future.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Jamie gave me this book over the summer after she read it. It got lost in my bookshelves until last month, when I found a local book club that was reading it. It's my first visit to this book club so I am writing this before my head is filled with other people's ideas.


The is an epistolary novel - that is, a story told through a collection of letters with no other narratives. Typically, this style frustrates me, but I enjoyed it in this case. It made me reflect on what we express these days through email and texting compared to letter-writing. I email as much as the next person but this book made me long for letters, too.

I found it unusual that it was written by two authors. Theafterward explained that one author is the niece of the other, and the younger one took over when the older one became to ill to finish the book. The niece commented that it was easy for her to take over since the story was really written in her aunt's voice.

The story is about a woman named Juliet who is an author in England in the mid 1940's. She takes an interest in Guernsey, which a quick Google showed me was a British island off the coast of France. Guernsey was occupied by Germany during WWII and Juliet becomes entranced by a small community of people who remained there during and after the war. After corresponding with them for several months, she takes a trip to meet them, in hopes of finding fodder for her next book.

Many of the the letters in the book are to or from Juliet - she corresponds with many of the Guernsians as well as her editor, a best friend, and a love interest. There are some other ancillary characters who also have letters in the book, which I think gives the book a lot more color and dimension. While Juliet and her friends are not unreliable narrators, they do take a particular point of view and it was interesting to see small glimpses of others.

Shamefully, I have not read any Bronte or Austen. This book piqued my interest in that a little bit though. Juliet recommends some of their books to her friends in her letters, and I believe there would be some parallels in her story and their characters' stories. I was also interested in how enthralled in the love story I aspect of the book I could get without there being much lasciviousness at all. I'm not dependent on racy scenes to interest me in a story, but the love story was completely G-rated and yet also completely compelling. Another feature I think I'd find in a Bronte or Austen book.

This was a surprisingly enjoyable book that I'd heartily recommend.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Jo recommended this to me as one of her recent favorites. They story is set in the future where we earthlings are fighting an intergalactic enemy. The army on Earth recruits the best and brightest children to try and build its forces. This book follows the story of a young boy named Ender as he goes through the army training regiment.

Ender is a sympathetic and pleasant character to follow. Occasionally, his behaviors and thoughts seem unusually advanced for his age. Initially, he struggles with homesickness, and as he gets older, he also finds ethical dilemmas and challenges in being an effective leader.

While I didn't think this book was exceptionally unique, perhaps it was in 1977 when it was first released. Social commentary, common to most good science fiction, presented in the book, but I didn't find anything unusual about it. Mostly, he comments on how we perceive war as both serious and as a game. He also had some strong comments on advanced situations we put children in. Amusingly, Card makes reference to several futuristic technologies that today we would consider "email" and "IM".

Overall the book kept my attention and I would read more by Card.

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown

Just in time for the long Thanksgiving weekend, this was a great "beach read." It wasn't strictly chick-lit in that it was more complex than Shopaholic or Devil Wears Prada, but it wasn't literature either.

The story starts on what should be a victorious moment for Janice whose husband's company IPOs for billions of dollars. Instead, she is served divorce papers the same morning. Her younger daughter, Lizzie, is struggling with adolescence and her older daughter, Margaret, is finding her fledgling magazine career suddenly overwhelming. The three women spend the summer together coping with their respective problems.

This book could have been a significant examination of women's lives when they fall apart. It could have been a hilarious story of plotted vindication. Instead it was somewhere in between - more colorful romp than serious analysis, but complex nonetheless. Certain scenes seemed intentionally pulpy in a satiric way, but they came across to me as surreal and vivid, not as social commentary.

One major disappointment I had reading this book was that the men were poorly created characters - nearly all of them were one-dimensional and completely villainous. While there was a "girl power" theme to the book, having positive men in the story wouldn't have threatened that theme and would have made it more realistic. The women were better developed, in some ways daring and in other ways dreadfully predictable. Certainly character development was not the best part of the book.

Still, I was interested to read through to the end. At the book's conclusion, Janice seems to find her stride, but still has tactical problems in her life to address. Margaret has a few major issues to work out, but has a lot of opportunity in front of her too. Fittingly, young Lizzie seems to be at the precipice of starting completely fresh - which is what the reader wants for her.

Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg

I like to think that is compassion and not a macabre desire to watch personal car wrecks that brings me to read so many books on mental illness. Unlike books by Caroline Knapp and Elizabeth Wurtzel, Hurry Down Sunshine chronicles the onset of mental illness from the point of view of the patient's father. I expected this to be similarly enlightening as The Addict, which was told from the doctor's point of view, but instead found it to be more complex. In retrospect, that makes sense - Dr. Stein's book is about his career, about experience and treatment. Greenberg's story is no more personal than Stein's, but it is the first time he is going through any of this so it is raw in a way The Addict is not.

Simply, Greenberg's daughter Sally has her first manic episode as a teenager with few warning signs. One day she is a creative, offbeat kid, and the next she is hurriedly brought to the ER and then hospitalized for what is later diagnosed as bipolar disorder. He chronicles Sally's fight back to health over her summer vacation from school. He touches on his relationship with both his wife and his ex-wife, both of whom play prominent roles in her recovery. Also in his narrative are interactions with his brother, also suffering from mental illness.

I was surprised by what seemed like an unsophisticated approach toward his daughter's healthcare. Perhaps it was the combination of the author's last name coupled with the New York setting, but I expected the neurotic Jewish approach to illness that I grew up with: find the best doctor possible, then agonize endlessly about his credentials and treatment, culminating in aggressive doubt and hushed second and third opinions. Instead, Greenberg entrusts Sally to an inpatient facility he knows nothing about, then enrolls her in an outpatient program he knows nothing about. I empathize with Greenberg's being grateful for whatever he can find with immediacy that helps her. In every way, he clearly desired the best path towards healing for Sally - I was just caught off-guard by an aspect of the narrative I expected to read about just not existing in his experience.

In other places, I was frustrated by parts of the story I wanted to know more about that he left out. For example, there was a short section on his lack of healthcare but he does not return to discuss the particulars of how he addresses Sally's illness financially. I suppose there is a relationship between the author and the reader where he balances what he wants to tell me with what I want to read. But typically with memoirs I am more aligned with the author than I was here. Perhaps that is indicative of this being a (generous and brave!) therapeutic activity for Greenberg. Or perhaps it is my expectation of a familiar narrative not being fulfilled.

That aside, this book was fascinatingly honest. I am appreciative of Greenberg's openness in sharing his story.

In a Perfect World by Laura Kasischke

I received this book from Book Club Girl's Blog, and read it in preparation for an online book club discussion scheduled for next week. It was OK, not great. I read it quickly and was interested in the story the entire time. What was disappointing was that it relied heavily on familiar archetypes for characters: a widowed pilot with three children who marries a flight attendant anxious for a family. She has a snarky mother, he has a bratty teenage daughter and a cute 6-year-old son. You could probably write the general narrative of the book just based on that description.

There was, thankfully, a large component of the book that was not predictable. In the backdrop early in the book, an epidemic of "Phoenix Flu" spreads across America. Initially, it seems to have the severity of an H1N1-like disease, then starts to impact America sharply. As it becomes more serious, Americans are banned from most other countries, complicating the pilot's ability to fly commerically. Then parts of the healthcare system and infrastructure begin to break down; certain celebrities die from Phoenix Flu. And it continues to debilitate the country.

This twist was fascinating because it was a woman's point of view on the anarchic demise of a society. Most stories like this, classically A Canticle for Leibowitz and modernly The Road or Oryx and Crake, take a masculine point of view with fighting, violence, and anger. While the protagonist in this book certainly fights for survival with her family, she also fights for emotional stability. She describes her reaction to the increasingly desperate situations she faces practically and introspectively, but also shares moments of grief and pain and sadness that I don't see in the other pieces. Her desire for connection and satisfaction of spitirual needs is much more present than in the masculine equivalents.

I was appreciative of this alternate point of view, but it didn't overcome my objections to the book: the cliches were too prominent and the plot too predictable. A decent airplane read, though if the guy next to you starts to cough, you'll want to switch to Sky Mall.

Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner

I really enjoyed reading this book. It was a fictional account of an enclave of Americans living in Cuba in the late 1950's. Leading up to Castro's rise to power, the book followed several families' stories as they came to Cuba as employees of United Fruit and Nicaro Nickel Mine.

Large sections of this book were narrated by two adolescents whose parents worked for these companies. Precocious and observant, they provided a candid view into the double standards around race and class between the Americans and the Cubans. The reader also sees how ignorant the Americans are around the magnitude of the political situation, both nationally and locally. There are descriptions of cocktail parties right out of "Desperate Housewives", and of Parisian-style ice cream parlors, representing a lifestyle that is a sharp contrast to what is happening in most of the country at the time.

There are other narrators who take smaller parts of the story, most notably a dancer at a cabaret who is active in the political underground and her lover, an international drifter. Their sections of the story evoke very strong atmospheres also, in the steamy cabaret, the ill-run rebel camps, and the increasingly dangerous city. Notably, the cabaret dancer is named "Rachel Z" in the book, perhaps a tip of the author's hat to her place in her own family's Cuban story.

What I liked most about this book was that it was not told in strict chronological order. As each narrator took over, time shifted, sometimes back and sometimes forward. At several points, their stories overlapped and the same moment was described from different vantage points, sometimes to my surprise. This kept several of my fingers in different chapters of the book as I was reading, eager to compare these fragments to each other to understand better what Kushner was trying to say about each character.

I have not read much set in Cuba and this was a delightful introduction and a well-preserved place and time.

TBR

Every reader has a TBR - to be read - pile. The other night, I assembled mine. Ouch.

These are just the books that I own (or have borrowed) and actively want to read. Here's what my pile looks like for now:

Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Seeing by Jose Saramago
The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry
Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut
Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
The Theory of Everything by Stephen Hawking
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
The Fourth Hand by John Irving
World Without End by Ken Follett
The Unforgiving Minute by Craig Mullaney
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Here's what I did not pull down from my bookshelves:

1. Books I've started and mean to go back to (e.g., The Millennium Problems by Keith Devlin, A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel and Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman)
2. Books that are technically Webster's but sounded interesting enough for me to want to read (e.g., Nonzero by Robert Wright, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burough and John Heltar)

3. Most of the books on the "On Deck" list at the right that have been recommended to me but I haven't purchased.

I was far too overwhelmed to look at all those books in a single list at once!

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Last time I was in Florida, Mom and I went shopping at Pembroke Pines, a beautiful outdoor mall with a huge Barnes and Noble. While browsing, I noticed that Adichie, whose Half a Yellow Sun I had enjoyed earlier this year, had released a new collection of short stories.

I really enjoyed this book. I don't read many short story collections and didn't connect with Olive Kitteridge. But this was really a spectacular effort and probably a better book than Half a Yellow Sun. Adichie writes very crisply - in roughly ten pages each, she creates a set of independent stories about both modern-day Nigeria and Nigerians living in America. I thought she created characters with more depth and emotion than in her HaYS, despite having less real estate per character.


I also liked how the stories were not connected - I didn't notice any characters or situations even subtly referring to each other. Some stories were told in first person, some in third person, and one is even told in second-person narrative, which is quite unique. She represents both men and women, of all age groups. And she represents people who are satisfied and those are unhappy, on both sides of the ocean. But those differences in tone and style didn't leave with me feeling like I had read a carelessly thrown-together collection of unrelated stories. On the contrary, Adiche used this wide variety of situations and characters to provide a single worldview of Nigeria as a country with a rich history and a complex set of interactions with the 'Western' world.

Great read.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

This book, the second mainstream novel by Time Traveler's Wife author Audrey Niffenegger, is probably the book I was most looking forward to reading this year. This book did not immediately strike me as strongly as TTW did - I was a third of the way through the book before I actually cared about what was happening. But after finishing the book I wonder if it actually is more of a masterpiece than TTW - the premise is equally enchanting and there were more characters to care about. I don't think TTW was a great book purely because of its unusual premise but that certainly was the most notable and creative aspect of the book. Her Fearful Symmetry is different - a more subtle achievement.

The story is about a set of twins who inherit a flat in London from their aunt, who is their mother's estranged twin. The condition upon their living there is that they must stay for a year and their parents cannot visit them there. They decide to go and this book chronicles their time there.

The twins meet their aunt's boyfriend who lives in the flat below them and works at a nearby cemetery, as well as her hermit neighbor who lives in the flat above. They live in her apartment with all her books and clothes and other possessions, and begin to get used to London. Telling you any more would be unfair - suffice it to say, the girls and the reader have a lot to learn about their aunt and their mother.

If I have a criticism of the book, it's around the slow start. Niffenegger spent a little too much time building up the mysteries and questions without moving the plot along enough - from the book jacket we already know about the will and the flat, but it's page 64 when something interesting finally happens and nearly page 150 until things get moving. The structure reminded me a bit of TTW - I remember that book requiring 50-60 pages until I had a grasp of what was going on. Here, nothing is that is difficult to follow, but I was similarly frustrated waiting for the book to 'start'.

That aside, the book was still one of my favorites this year. The story, once it got started, was very unusual and kept my attention. I had that "can't put it down/want to savor it" conflict for the entire second half. The writing was great; the cast, both the twins and the other major characters, was compelling. And both the climax and denouement were well worth it. I remember that about TTW too - Niffenegger takes care to make every last word of the book count, not just tie up loose ends in the last few pages.

I will definitely be recommending this one for a while.

A Guide to the Birds of East Africa by Nicholas Drayson

This was a delightful read. I had heard about this book in a few different reviews and it seemed like it would be similar to Alexander McCall Smith's Ladies' Detective Agency books.
I was pleasantly surprised to find it accessible and quick, like Smith's books, but less like a fable.

The story follows a group of birdwatchers in Kenya. One man in the birdwatching group falls in love with the group leader and tries to muster up the courage to ask her out. As he is preparing, a nemesis of his from high school returns to the city and sets his sights on the same woman. To determine who should get to date her, their friends design a hilarious contest around birds.

I really like how Drayson made the drama of the contest something that I could relate to and get invested in, despite my complete lack of knowledge of birdwatching. I also liked how funny the book was - there were several parts of the story where I chuckled out loud. Finally, I appreciated how multi-dimensional his characters seemed, even when he used just a paragraph or short anecdote to describe them.

Was it an accurate representation of modern-day Kenya? It was hard to say. Like Smith, Drayson created a set of situations that seemed timeless - there were cars and telephones, and mention of AIDS, but no other markers that indicated the decade in which the story was set.

As to who wins the contest? You'll have to read it to find out.

Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All by Christina Thompson

This book catches everyone's attention with its title, taken from Darwin's exaggerated account of Captain's Cook's first interaction with the Maori people. The book tells two stories: one is of the author falling in love with a Maori man while doing post-graduate research in New Zealand, and the other is of the explorers of the 17th and 18th centuries and their interactions with the indigenous people of New Zealand. The parallel is well-done.

Thompson did a good job balancing both stories. Her own life is fascinating, as she and her eventual husband adjust to life together while they are living all over the world. The historical pieces held my attention equally - Thompson uses a combination of letters, historical documents, and other books to put together a coherent and reasonably complete account of several hundreds' years worth of interactions between Europeans and Maoris. And I wasn't bored.

Earlier this year I read Paradise Lost and that was an interesting background for this book. The tragedies on Pitcairn Island detailed in Paradise Lost had their genesis in the clash between Europeans and indigenous people - a theme Thompson returns to several times in her narrative. Another point of reference I had was Hulme's The Bone People, which I had read several years ago - the fictional account of a small group of Maori. Thompson's description of her husband and his extended family didn't come right out of The Bone People but was not inharmonious with it either. Together, these three books were interesting to think of together in learning a little something about that part of the world.

Even taken alone, Thompson's book was a good read - serious scholarly work to be sure, but also personal, making a good combination.

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See

A few years ago, I enjoyed See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, so when Shanghai Girls came out I put it on my library queue. Yes, I know the cool kids have Netflix queues, but I have a library queue. In any case, I shouldn't have been in such a rush because it was not one of the best things I've read this year.

The story follows two sisters who grow up in Shanghai in the mid 1930's with every privilege. Suddenly, their father is bankrupted and he promises them to Chinese men living in the U.S. to pay off his debt. Young, naive, and reluctant, they go to America and their lives change completely.

While See's writing is very good and the story moved quickly, I didn't get that 'into' the book. The narrator, who is the older sister, had a detached style of storytelling. While this may have been an attempt to create a character who protected herself by being unemotional, it ended up creating a character who I didn't care enough about. There were also a few parts of the book where ostensibly large secrets were revealed, but they weren't surprising to me at all.

What kept me most interested in the book was the descriptions of the environs in which the sisters lived, both in Shanghai and in Los Angeles. See did a great job of describing scenes on the street, interiors of stores and restaurants, and details around everyday life that transported me to the settings she was describing. In Shanghai, it was the upper-class life the girls lived, and in Los Angeles it was the tourist-friendly Chinatown that was alien to the Chinese characters. I wish See had made the characters and story as compelling as the settings were.

Assorted Nuts by Sandy Bax

Disclosure: The author of this book is someone I know, and some of the people in her story are close friends of mine. This made it hard to be objective -- but it's fair to say that this book stands out as incredibly honest and, at times, side-splittingly funny among what I've read this year. It's not a perfect book but I am awed that someone I know could have written an entire book from scratch just because one day she sat down and decided to start doing it. I am also flattered to have received a pre-release copy which really made me feel like a serious book critic.


The book is a memoir, one that is built around the author's daughter's wedding, but told almost entirely in flashbacks. Bax covers a range of topics, including her childhood, several marriages, having a child, substance abuse, and breast cancer. Nothing is too private for Bax to share in the book, which is probably her most important characteristic as an author - her complete transparency in telling the stories with all their details. Bax's voice is clear throughout, and knowing her, I know it's authentic. I found myself laughing out loud (to the chagrin of a car full of Amtrak passengers) at several parts, and appreciating how important humor had been to Bax throughout her life.


Bax is a great storyteller which is not true of every memoirist. There are reflective parts of the book where my attention wandered a little but I was always drawn back in by the next set of anecdotes, fresh and cleverly told. From stories about her childhood with her siblings to later interactions with her ailing mother (and everything in between), she has a way of telling a story that is powerful: the story represents a particular incident but also encapsulates a stage of her life in just a few paragraphs.


If there's one thing about the book I would have wanted to be different it's that certain parts of the book (most notably Bax's childhood and first marriage) were told slowly with plenty of detail while other pieces (such as the sections on breast cancer and alcoholism) were given proportionally shorter airtime. Given the bravery of the author in sharing intimate details, perhaps it was easier to write at length about the parts of her life that had happened longer ago. Whatever the case, I was invested enough in the story and the journey she was going through that I could have read an entire book about her life through her daughter's birth, then another book about the more recent years.


That said, the structure of the book, as a series of trips into different parts of her life as she's reflecting on all of this at her daughter's wedding, is a nice way for her to cover a lot of material without needing tell a continuous narrative. Now, I happen to know that Sandy just became a grandmother - again. Hopefully she is taking some notes on the experience that will one day become a sequel - may I suggest A Little Nuts - about the grandkids.



Congratulations, Sandy.

The Strand Bookstore

Web and I got to New York Saturday around 3 and headed down to Union Square. We checked out the farmer's market then went to the Strand Bookstore - famous for having "18 miles of books".

And it felt like we walked through all the 18 miles! The first floor had a great selection of tables laid out with popular books and the Strand's customers' top 80 books. (Interestingly, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Wells, which I had never heard of but Jo recently recommended was among the top 80.) It was my first look at Eggers' Wild Things with its furry cover. Also on the first floor was a huge selection of cookbooks and fiction. I could have moved in there. The basement and third floor had non-fiction, including huge sections on art and design. Each major section had a table for the top books in that section, an option I really liked. They seemed to intersperse New and Used books in all the sections.

The top floor, only accessible by elevator, had been recommended to me by Kung...it had special editions and rare books. The first thing we both noticed getting off the elevator was the delightfully musty smell of old books. It was fun to see unedited galleys and very old editions. It was obvious that serious work went on there assessing and repairing books.

Of course we bought two books from downstairs: Seeing by Jose Saramago (the sequel to Blindness), and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Web's lucky he got me to leave the store at all.

City of Refuge by Tom Piazza

I noticed this book reviewed on one of the book blogs I read and bumped it up in the queue since I had just read Eggers' Zeiton and wanted to compare the two stories about New Orleans. While Eggers' was non-fiction and this was a novel, I came out of the two books with reversed reactions - Eggers told a story while Piazza's best accomplishment with this book was a reasonably comprehensive view of New Orleans in the months after Katrina.

Surprisingly, reading this book felt much more like reading non-fiction. There were two families whose lives the book followed and certainly their stories were compelling, but it was the city of New Orleans itself that he seemed to take the most care in characterizing. The characters were reasonably predictable in their concerns and their conflicts, and he made some easy choices: for example, making one of the families affluent and white while the other was poor and black, and making one of the main characters a newspaper reporter. But I forgave Piazza his trite setup for his portrait of the pure devastation and ruin that New Orleans experienced.

During Hurricane Katrina, Web and I had been traveling in Argentina. Skillfully avoiding televisions and newspapers to fully immerse ourselves in the culture there, we had little idea what was going on at home until we got back about a week after the storm. It was hard to understand how bad things were, and completely surreal to believe it was going on in the United States. Even reading this book I had a hard time believing that our government really reacted this poorly, and I felt shame reading the descriptions of the city and how it was that so many people lost their lives.

When I chose to read the book I was hoping for more of a story with characters I cared about, but I value what I got out of the book - a sad education on the before and after of New Orleans, with a cautiously optimistic view of the rebuilding that continues today. Eggers says in his forward that he did not intend to provide a comprehensive survey of Katrina, but Piazza may have succeeded in doing this. Ironically, the line between non-fiction and fiction that has been subject to much discussion in literary circles lately (and that has historically been navigated carefully by Eggers) seems to have been toyed with by Piazza too - his characters are composites of so many of the both heartbreaking and uplifting stories that we've heard in the years since Katrina, the situations all potentially leads for stories in the New York Times or Newsweek.

I'm not sure that I would say I liked this book more or less than Zeiton - I liked both of them, and neither was what I expected. Together, they gave me a multi-dimensional view of an important chapter in our recent history.

The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos by Margaret Mascarenhas

I think this is one of the best books I've read this year. The backdrop of the story is a friendship between two girls, Lily and Irene, who are growing up in Venezuela during the revolution. Irene disappears while they are on vacation and fifteen years later, Lily finds herself on bedrest towards the end of her first pregnancy wondering what happened to her friend.

The book is told from alternating points of view, forming a complete story through several different narrators who each take one chapter. Irene's fate is revealed at the end but it was easy to forget that as the main theme because Mascarenhas weaves several other compelling stories and characters into the book. There are numerous love stories, glimpses into revolution politics, and native Venezuelan folklore all centered around this family and, tangentially, around what may have happened to Irene. Some of the narrators are unexpected - they seem to be minor characters - and it is not until pretty far into the book that certain connections between people are made.

This book also felt like a classic South American novel - some magical realism, some political statements, and at the heart of it, excellent storytelling. There was a style that made many of the chapters seem like someone telling me a story - I didn't like all the characters but I did grow to understand most of them.

I'm surprised this book did not get more exposure, but I'm glad I didn't let that dissuade me from giving it a try.

The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty by David Harris

When I read Michael Lewis' Blind Side and Moneyball, I missed out on some of the fun by reading during their respective off-seasons. Though I noticed this book a few months ago, I waited until the start of the NFL season to read it.

The story is about Bill Walsh, coach of the 49'ers during the 1980's. Walsh coached the 49'ers through several Superbowl victories and worked with Hall of Famers such as Joe Montana, Steve Young, and Jerry Rice. Walsh is probably most well-known for creating the "West Coast Offense," a collection of strategies that changed passing into a more flexible and common move in the NFL.

What was most interesting in this book was not the evolution of the strategies or the history of the team, although those were covered well. Harris' character study of Walsh as a really successful, emotional, easily offended, sometimes brash, coach was the fascinating part. I had no idea that a coach would feel so humiliated or inadequate that he would cry or decide not to talk to his players for months. Harris also did a great job of describing the relationship between Bill Walsh and the 49'ers' owner, Ed Bartolo, as well as Walsh's early disappointments in not being promoted to be the Bengals' head coach prior to his career with the 49'ers. The whole characterization of Walsh made me understand Belichek's not shaking hands after the Superbowl loss a lot more.

Overall, a great read, particularly for September.

Time of my Life by Allison Winn Scotch

I saw this on a few booklists and recommendation lists and it was always sort of in my subconscious of books I'd get to one day. Then I read a review that said that it definitely wasn't chick-lit and was quite thought-provoking so I got to it sooner rather than later.

Meh. Nothing special, probably chick-lit. The story is about a woman who is married with a young child and lives in the suburbs. She sometimes longs for the ex-boyfriend and urban life she left behind and one day she wakes up back in that life again. The book is about her conflict in seeing the problems with the life she didn't choose and missing the one she did choose. It was a quick read with no real surprises.

Maybe part of why the book did not enchant is that there is no one ex-boyfriend I return to, wondering, "what if...". I certainly have moments where I wonder "what if...", but they are not about any one person in particular. I'm not sure that even if I had felt that way that I would have enjoyed this any more than I did.

Zeiton by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers always distracts me from whatever I am doing with his compulsively readable books. Fortunately I read this at night (all in one sitting) so all it interfered with in my life was a night of sleep.

This book is a chronicle of one family's experience after Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrahman (the husband) is a Syrian-American who decides to stay in New Orleans during the hurricane to look after the properties his family owns and manages. His wife Kathy and their children evacuate when the mayor suggests it.

First Abdul takes care of his own house and possessions, then starts to paddle around New Orleans helping out people in his neighborhood. Kathy and the children make it to a family member's house outside the flood zone. They both expect their lives to go back to normal reasonably quickly, but then things take an unusual turn.

As New Orleans succumbs to the issues that followed Katrina we are familiar with (overcrowding in the Superdome, lack of proper medical and evacuation resources, looting, rioting, etc), Kathy and the children remain away from Abdul, traveling to a friend's home in Phoenix. Abdul continues to help his friends and neighbors, then suddenly Kathy loses touch with him. The balance of the book is what happened to each of them after they lose touch. Interspersed with the narrative is a lot of Abdul's personal and family history. The book ends with a followup of where the family is in 2008, several years later.

Eggers' superb writing aside, this book was incredibly interesting as all my knowledge about Katrina had been from sources like CNN and a recent story in the New York Times Magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009/08/30/magazine/index.html). This look at one family's story was a new point of view for me. Abdul and Kathy were Muslim which also put an interesting twist on the story - on more than one occasion, other people who were angry or overwhelmed with their own situations wanted to blame the state that New Orleans was in on terrorists.

The other things about this book that held my attention were the parallels I could draw between it and Saramago's Blindness. These books both dealt with what happens in an environment when the usual social services and government are overwhelmed and typical life is no longer possible. Saramago did it by blinding a city while in this story Katrina provided the impetus, but in both cases the behavior of the citizens and the people in charge was, literally, unbelievable.

Tom Piazza's City of Refuge is on my reading list and I think I'll read it sooner rather than later so I can compare that to this.

The Lost Symbol

So today a package from Amazon showed up at my door (thanks, Dad!) with a big red sticker on it reading, "Do Not Deliver Before September 15th". Yup, Dan Brown's newest book "dropped" today. Apparently there was a lot of mystery and secrecy around its release, but now I have a copy and look forward to digging into it.

In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent

This book was a pleasure to read; it was like having a friend describe an incredibly interesting PhD thesis over lunch. In this book, Okrent surveys five types of languages that have been intentionally invented by individuals or groups.

The first section covers several attempts at "philosophical language" starting in the 1600's, which sought to improve people's ability to communicate. Then she covers several attempts at a universal language, such as 1800's Esperanto. She goes on to discuss symbolic languages, including different countries' 'dialects' of sign language. The following section is on logical languages, concluding with a final section on, no kidding, Klingon.

What I most liked about this book was that it was not out to prove or claim anything important - it was a pleasant survey of the different attempts humans have made to invent language, and a cursory evaluation of their level of success. Okrent did a nice job of characterizing the language inventors, many of whom are quite...err...quirky to say the least. It is the rare humanitarian who has no selfish motives for inventing a language.

Okrent also drew a few light conclusions about why different types of languages because popular at certain times. For example, Esperanto and Modern Hebrew both emerged in the late 1800's amidst a socialist ethos and as a reaction to nationalism. I had never thought of it that way.

I also enjoyed Orkent's attempts to learn each of these languages. She makes several efforts to converse with practitioners of many of the languages, and her experiences are both funny and informative - without drawing any major conclusions, she demonstrates the difficulties in having a natural language brain process an invented language.

Blindness by Jose Saramago

I chose to read Blindness on this vacation because Saramago is Portuguese. Web had devoured it a few vacations ago and I had enjoyed Saramago's All the Names, so I had high expectations for the book, and I wasn't disappointed.

The story is about a city where all the occupants inexplicably and suddenly go blind. Though I had read All the Names several years ago, Saramago's style and rhythm were immediately familiar to me (scarce punctuation, no proper nouns) as was the setting (an unnamed city with semi-military bureaucratic government). All the Names was more about the anonymity of individuals in such an environment, while this book shared more of the themes from Lord of the Flies - what happens to society when it is stripped of its typical order and rules?

The story in Blindness follows a small group of citizens as they navigate the new order in the now-blind city. With a few well-written phrases and anecdotes, Saramago completely characterizes the people who we follow in the story, making it irrelevant if we like them or not and more relevant that they are our only window into the story. That was a real contrast to Olive Kittridge where I got really stuck on not liking the characters. I really enjoyed Blindness, finding it very accessible, and surprisingly easy to read given Saramago's fame and accolades.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

This book really disappointed me. Despite having loved short stories in my teens (I would devour the excess short story compilations my mom would bring home from the high school she taught at), I have not found too many authors I enjoy in this format as an adult, with the exception of Alice Munro. That said, Olive Kitteridge was so highly acclaimed that I decided to give it a try.

Yuck. Not yuck for the format, because I could see what Strout was doing - she wrote several stories all related to the same characters spanning fifty years or so. However, the title character was completely unsympathetic and unlikable that it marred my desire to read more about the town and its citizens. Perhaps I thought someone with such a unique name would be quirky and likable - which may have been my own problem.

But while I liked some of the other characters in the town, and I respected the scope of what the author attempted, the book just didn't hold my attention. I didn't enjoy being a voyeur into the town's secrets enough to want to find out what happened next. If I hadn't been on vacation I'm not sure I would have even finished reading it.

Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

This book had been on my reading list for years so I finally decided to give it a try. The story is about a British child named Peekay growing up in South Africa as apartheid is beginning in the 1930s and '40s. As a young child, he is sent to a boarding school where he is terrorized by the older children, a formative experience that influence many of his decisions going forward.

While he is bright and well-educated, Peekay's lifelong dream is to become a world champion boxer, and he pursues this dream alongside his other experiences throughout the book. (I had no idea how much strategy went into boxing - I started to get very interested in how the fights were orchestrated although you could enjoy this book without any interest in boxing.) The reader follows Peekay for roughly fifteen years, and sees him grow into a empathetic and strongly principled young man, keenly aware of the racial inequalities around him. Courteney does an excellent job of showing how apartheid was developing in different environments within South Africa - Peekay goes from boarding school to an evangelical environment, works at a jail, attends prep school, and works in the mining industry. What a fascinating collection of settings.

A few parts of the book were a little too "O. Henry" for me, introducing unlikely coincidences to move the plot along. That aside, I enjoyed reading the book and thought the author did a good job of representing realistic emotional growth. There was an innocence about the narration that sometimes made me feel like I was reading a YA novel, but there was enough sophistication that it still kept my attention. I think part of why it felt that way is that Peekay has a strong collection of adult role models and mentors throughout the book but is effectively abandoned by his parents early on, at least emotionally. So in some ways he grows up very quickly and in other ways he is taken care of by many adults along the way.

Apparently, Courteney wrote a sequel called Tandia that I will have to check out. This book certainly will stick with me for a long time.

Last Kabbalist of Lisbon by Richard Zimler

This was the first book I read in Lisbon. It tells the story of a young man in Lisbon during the 1500s whose Jewish family and friends are threatened as the Inquisition spreads from Spain through Portugal. The book is part historical novel and part mystery story - reviews compared to In the Name of the Rose and Count of Monte Cristo. While I didn't think it reached the level of complexity represented by those books, I did enjoy it.

For me, though, the experience of reading this book will always be intertwined with my own experiences of getting to know Lisbon as a tourist. We had a great trip there, and on our first afternoon took a walking tour of several neighborhoods. Our guide, extremely knowledgeable and agreeable, answered myriad questions we had about the city and the history. At one point, we were walking through the Alfama, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Lisbon. I said that our guide book mentioned an old Jewish quarter in the Alfama and asked her to point out any buildings or items of note. She responded apologetically but quickly - there were no real remnants of Judaism left for us to see. While I usually seek out the Jewish sites while on vacation, there was practically nothing in Lisbon, except for a memorial plaque in one of the main squares commemorating the slaughter of Jews during the Inquisition. Our map noted one synagogue which I distantly remember visiting on my last trip to Lisbon ten years ago, but compared to other countries I have visited there was precious little to see.

So it was with that backdrop that I read The Last Kabbalist - the narrator describing how Jews were tortured and burned in the streets, then my own visit seeing where Lisbon, otherwise very cosmopolitan and diverse, is today. In conclusion, I engaged with the book very deeply but I don't know how much of my affinity towards it coincides with my visit there.

Miscellany

We are back from Portugal and adjusting to our re-entry. Vacation was wonderful and I am pretty sure from a non-scientific study that there are more bookstores per square foot (square meter I suppose) in that country than anywhere else! And it is always fun to see books I recognize in a foreign language. Plenty of reviews to follow - I read all four books I brought with me.

Reading Rainbow is ending, after 20+ years of bringing books to kids via television. Despite the irony, I liked the show as a kid and had a heck of a crush on Levar Burton. But you don't have to take my word for it.

Obama's vacation to Martha's Vineyard has been in the news a lot here in Boston. I just saw a list of the books he brought with him: George Pelecanos's "The Way Home," Richard Price's "The Lush Life," Tom Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded," David McCullough's "John Adams" and Kent Haruf's "Plainsong."

Off to Portugal!

We leave for Portugal tonight - I am so excited.

I have four books with me, Olive Kittredge, Saramago's Blindness, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, and Power of One. A nice mix of selections I've wanted to read for a while and those associated with Portugal.

Web's bringing Ludlum's Bourne Trilogy which he has already started and is impressed by.

We also have a Lisbon guidebook, a Portuguese phrasebook, and two guidebooks for the Azores. So that totals 11 books which is far more than the number of shirts I'll have with me ;)

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff

This is a book that I saw on enough lists and enough displays that I decided it must be in my genre. It is an ambitious novel, telling two stories: the first story is that of Brigham Young's 19th wife, Ann Eliza, who leaves Young and seeks to convince the government to outlaw polygamy; the second story is set in modern times, where a boy who has run away from a fundamentalist latter-day saint group (long ago splintered off from Mormonism) discovers that his mother has been accused of murdering his father and needs to decide how he can help her.

The contrast between the beginnings of Mormonism and fundamentalist latter-day group is well-done, however I couldn't stop envisioning scenes from HBO's Big Love - my fault not Eberhoff's, since he draws on narrative, letters, Wikipedia entries, and other literary devices to tell a colorful and detailed story. I found myself rooting for both Ann Eliza and her modern-day counterpart accused of murder, although the modern story kept my attention slightly more than the older one.

I definitely enjoyed this book - it was an ambitious undertaking, each half on its own a complete story. I wouldn't go so far as to say I enjoyed it as much as Middlesex or A Fine Balance, but it had that same 'saga' quality to it and was definitely a good read.