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.