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 ;)
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
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.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
The Monty Hall Problem by Jason Rosenhouse
Since I saw this book was mentioned on Jason Kottke's blog I anxiously awaited its release. Having majored in math in college, I always enjoy books that are for the general public with mathematical themes. This one is about one of the most contentious math problems in recent history.
The problem goes like this: you are on a game show faced with three doors, one of which contains a car. You choose a door, the host (Monty Hall) opens one of the other doors to reveal that it is empty. At this point in the game, should you stick with your original choice or should you switch to the other closed door? The answer (you should switch) is not intuitive, and as Parade Magazine's Marilyn vos Savant found out after writing a column on the topic in 1990, has caused many heated arguments among the top mathematicians.
Rosenhouse's book traces the history of this problem, covering the earliest known mention of it, several variations on it whose solutions are equally non-intuitive, and including various mathematical proofs for how to solve it. While the reviews claim that it has very little math in it, I think that's misleading - I enjoyed the math, but it was hardcore. Having just attended a reunion for a math-oriented summer program I attended 20+ years ago, I was jonesing for some math, but for the average reader this might be too much.
However, there was plenty of reading that was not focused on math - Rosenhouse also spends several chapters surveying the literature on cognitive and philosophical ideas around the problem. Cognitive scientists seek to figure out why it is so unintuitive - after seeing the Bayesian proof for the answer I was struck by the same question. Studies have been done that indicate that this lack of intuition crosses cultural and linguistic borders. Rosenhouse even spends a few pages on quantum mechanics, suggesting how this problem might help us understand those concepts better.
My only disappointment with this book was that there was some lackadaisical editing - a few of the math sections had inconsistencies that I found distracting though they didn't impact the math. That aside, I really enjoyed reading it and hope Rosenhouse chooses to address some other math problems with similar books in the future.
Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies
I read about this book in a quick blurb and picked it up mostly because I am a big fan of Law & Order: SVU and the author plays one of the detective's wives on the show. I admit - I was curious.
This book is a true story, chronicling Gillies' marriage as it disintegrates unexpectedly. Seemingly happily married, she and her husband move to Ohio with their two sons, and within a year of their settling in, her husband has an affair and decides to leave her. She tells the story with equal parts regret, sadness, hindsight, and triumph, making it a very compelling read. It often felt like I was reading a long email from a close friend who was catching me up on her life. Gillies is very accessible and many of the comments she made about herself both big (she was always trying to make everyone around her feel comfortable) and small (she was going to say yes every time she was offered a glass of water) reminded me of myself.
There were aspects of this book that were hard to read, since she seemed so familiar and her marriage seemed similar to mine in some ways - she and her husband were not afraid to argue with each other, for example. And she never expected this to happen in her life - it came at her irreparably with scarce warning. I vacillated between feeling superior, enumerating the ways this could never happen to me, and feeling slightly terrified.
I read this in one big gulp and it definitely impacted my mood for the two days while I read it - not since Prozac Nation had I felt so connected to a book emotionally. Bravo to Gillies for courageously opening up to provide an extremely compelling narrative.
This book is a true story, chronicling Gillies' marriage as it disintegrates unexpectedly. Seemingly happily married, she and her husband move to Ohio with their two sons, and within a year of their settling in, her husband has an affair and decides to leave her. She tells the story with equal parts regret, sadness, hindsight, and triumph, making it a very compelling read. It often felt like I was reading a long email from a close friend who was catching me up on her life. Gillies is very accessible and many of the comments she made about herself both big (she was always trying to make everyone around her feel comfortable) and small (she was going to say yes every time she was offered a glass of water) reminded me of myself.
There were aspects of this book that were hard to read, since she seemed so familiar and her marriage seemed similar to mine in some ways - she and her husband were not afraid to argue with each other, for example. And she never expected this to happen in her life - it came at her irreparably with scarce warning. I vacillated between feeling superior, enumerating the ways this could never happen to me, and feeling slightly terrified.
I read this in one big gulp and it definitely impacted my mood for the two days while I read it - not since Prozac Nation had I felt so connected to a book emotionally. Bravo to Gillies for courageously opening up to provide an extremely compelling narrative.
The Condition by Jennifer Haigh
I received this book by agreeing to attend a dial-in book club discussion with the author. I like to think that this is the beginning of my semi-professional career in book reviews!
The Condition is about a family whose youngest child Gwen has a condition called Turner Syndrome; this condition means she does not physically age past early adolescence though mentally she keeps maturing. One section of the book takes place just before the family notices that Gwen has this condition, and the rest takes place twenty years later. There are several flashbacks as well, filling in much of the interim time.
I was not immediately drawn in by this book. I thought the first section contained several trite characters that were not well-developed and that relied on well-known stereotypes to establish their personalities. As the book progressed, however, I became more impressed by the writing and the character development. The book is really a series of vignettes about each of the characters, many of them unrelated, that loosely intertwine around a current crisis to form a narrative story. However, I was most swept up in the book during the back-history around each character, rather than during the current story.
At first I thought of Hamilton's When Madeline Was Young would be a good book to compare this one to, WMWY's addressing a family's coping with an adult who doesn't age mentally, but they turned out to have little in common. I did find some recent reads to compare it to though: lately I have come upon several books where I was fooled by who the protagonist is. If I remember my 7th grade literary terms correctly, the protagonist is the character who changes. In both The Gathering and The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, the protagonist was not who I expected it to be. What I liked most about this book was that, uniquely, the protagonist was the family unit, not any single individual character. While individual characters did change through the book, it was how the entire family operated that really transformed through the narrative.
I ended up really enjoying the book and I am looking forward to the discussion with Jennifer Haigh. My only regret is that I read it a week before a visit to Martha's Vineyard, not realizing ahead of time that its Cape Cod setting would have been a good choice while on the Island.
The Condition is about a family whose youngest child Gwen has a condition called Turner Syndrome; this condition means she does not physically age past early adolescence though mentally she keeps maturing. One section of the book takes place just before the family notices that Gwen has this condition, and the rest takes place twenty years later. There are several flashbacks as well, filling in much of the interim time.
I was not immediately drawn in by this book. I thought the first section contained several trite characters that were not well-developed and that relied on well-known stereotypes to establish their personalities. As the book progressed, however, I became more impressed by the writing and the character development. The book is really a series of vignettes about each of the characters, many of them unrelated, that loosely intertwine around a current crisis to form a narrative story. However, I was most swept up in the book during the back-history around each character, rather than during the current story.
At first I thought of Hamilton's When Madeline Was Young would be a good book to compare this one to, WMWY's addressing a family's coping with an adult who doesn't age mentally, but they turned out to have little in common. I did find some recent reads to compare it to though: lately I have come upon several books where I was fooled by who the protagonist is. If I remember my 7th grade literary terms correctly, the protagonist is the character who changes. In both The Gathering and The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, the protagonist was not who I expected it to be. What I liked most about this book was that, uniquely, the protagonist was the family unit, not any single individual character. While individual characters did change through the book, it was how the entire family operated that really transformed through the narrative.
I ended up really enjoying the book and I am looking forward to the discussion with Jennifer Haigh. My only regret is that I read it a week before a visit to Martha's Vineyard, not realizing ahead of time that its Cape Cod setting would have been a good choice while on the Island.
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