Top Books of 2011

Happy New Year, Readers.

2011 brought lots of exciting changes.  I started a new job within Dell in February, which led to an extraordinary year of learning among a wonderful new set of people.  The startup for which Webster worked was bought over the summer and he is adjusting to working for a large company, but enjoying the challenge.  Webster and I went to Belize in February and Spain in August.  Lucy - well, c'mon, she's a dog.  But she's great. 

I read over 30 books this year.  Looking at the list, I see that only 6 of them were non-fiction, which is not what I would have estimated.  Also notable is how many of the books were set in a different time and place.  What is it I'm trying to escape? 

Here are my Top Ten favorites in alphabetical order:

Lots of people read and recommended Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.  It was an intersting story - a poor black woman with an aggressive form of cancer dies, and her cells are used for decades without her family's knowledge or approval.   What was most interesting, however, is neither the science nor the socio-economic circumstances, but the relationship that forms between the author and the family.  While completely anathema to pure journalistic values, it turned the book into more of a memoir, which I really enjoyed reading.

I'm still not sure I really know what Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann is about, but it was good.  It interspersed stories about several New Yorkers during the summer of 1974 with the story of Phillipe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers.  The writing was excellent and I was overwhelmed by how the characters' lives (at least ten different people) ultimately intersected. 

I read The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli on a long weekend getaway to Toronto. It's a love story about a young American photographer in Vietnam durng the war, the older American she falls in love with, and his Vietnamese assistant.  It's also a strong commentary on what it means to chronicle a war.  I thought this was a near-perfect book - writing, plot, characters.  I still don't know why this didn't get more positive press.
 

Meredith A. recommended Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson and it was a great read.  Not dissimilar in style to Alexander McCall Smith, this book was a fun story about a proper English gentleman who falls in love with a Pakastani neighbor, much to the chagrin of his materialistic son.  The situations in the book are simple, but it is the irony and tenderness with which the story is told that I liked the most.

Makers by Cory Doctorow is the most creative book I read this year.  I read it while we were in Belize and it kept me up late at night.  The story is set in the near future and is a wild ride through 3D printing, innovation, crowdsourcing and all sorts of other things.  The density of Doctorow's ideas was difficult to keep up with, but fun.  As a techie, I found it really amazing how Doctorow could take technical ideas and make them social ideas. 

When I picked up Our Kind of Traitor at the airport on a business trip, I wouldn't have expected it to land on my end-of-year list.  Sure, le Carre is a famous author in his genre, but I think of most spy books as fun airport reads and little else.  However, this one stayed with me all year: the way le Carre makes this story unfold is unlike any other airport book I've read.   The cover of my copy has an ambitious quote from the Globe and Mail: "Let me be specific, I think the man deserves the Nobel."  See for yourself.

Something about Outlander by Diana Gabaldon caught my eye in the bookstore.  When we went to Spain with Tyler and Jena in August it was the most perfect beach read.  The improbable story is about a woman who reunites with her husband in Scotland after WWII only to accidentally time travel back to 18th century Scotland and be accused of being a British spy.  I'll leave the rest of the 500+ narrative to the author, only to say that it's the perfect mix of trash and historical fiction.  (The first sequel of five more books - Dragonfly in Amber - was more of the same.)  

 

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson was one of the first books I read in 2010.  I remember reading it and thinking, "if I like everything I read as much as this, it will be a good book year."  The novel is about a Japanese-American man accused of murder in a small town off Puget Sound.  It takes place in 1954, with the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII still fresh in the memories of the townspeople.

State of Wonder was the book I was most excited to get my hands on in 2011, as Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors.  This book was about a young woman sent into the Amazon by her pharmaceutical company to find a researcher who has been difficult to contact and a colleague who died under mysterious circumstances.  The descriptions of the setting were detailed and evocative, the characters were complex, and the plot was surprising. 

If I had to pick a favorite book this year - which I'm NOT doing - it might be Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum.  At the very least it was a viscerally memorable book.  Narrated by the daughter of a woman who survived during WWII, this basic narrative is outlined on the book jacket: all Trudie knows of her early life is a photo of herself, her mother, and a Nazi officer that she finds hidden in her mother things.  It is the way the story unfolds, and the burden that children carry even when they don't know the entire truth, that grabbed me.  Thanks to Terry M. for putting this on my list several years ago.
 

And then these are the other books I really, really liked.

The Big Short, Michael Lewis' book on the current financial crisis, and The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr's comparison of the cloud computing revolution to the introduction of centrally made electricity, were two nonfiction books that both took strong points of view on current topics while explaining them in English.  Yes - I know what a credit default swap is.

The Given Day is a novel about Boston in 1918-1919, during the Policeman's strike.  Dennis Lehane, known more for his pop culture books like Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River, paints a vivid portrait of the city during that time, including race relations, union politics, and Babe Ruth.

The Passage by Justin Cronin fulfilled my post-apocolyptic quota for the year.  A whopping 784 pages of the world ending, the survivors figuring out what to do, and oh, yeah, epic battles with vampire-like glow sticks.  Great fun.

The book club I recently left read both Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez (historical fiction about slave women who traveled on vacations with their masters in the U.S. during the 1840's) and A Thousand Cuts by Simon Lelic (about a school shooting and bullying - in a few different ways).  I liked those books and miss that book club.

Well that is it for 2011.  Best wishes for a wonderful 2012, with lots of health, happiness, and, of course, great books to read.

Sheryl

Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon

I really enjoyed Outlander and this is the second book in the series about a woman from the 1940's who time-travels back to 18th century Scotland.  This book starts twenty years later in the current time (the 1960's), when she visits Scotland with her daughter.  In this sequel, in the past, she and her husband Jamie travel to France to try to prevent a bloody revolution in Scotland. 

The book was a continuation of Outlander and I enjoyed it in a similar way.  While some of the fun of the first book was the novelty of the time travel and the story, the plot in this book is still compelling.  There was more historical information to keep track of in this book too.  Finally, I liked how this book also starts to play around with some of the metaphysical problems with time travel.

Looking forward to reading the next book in a few months.

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

Yuck.

This book was the first pick of a new book club I just joined. By the author of Devil in the White City, this book is about Ambassador Dodd, the American ambassador to Germany.

I guess the story of his being the ambassador is interesting enough. Considered by many to be underqualified, he moves his family to Germany in the 1930's, refusing many of the benefits in housing and transportation that are offered an ambassador. His daughter, estranged from her husband in the U.S., becomes well-known in German society and I can't describe her as anything less juicy than a hussy. She sleeps with Nazis, Fascists, and several notable writers, seemingly blind to the potential damange it could do to her father's career.

I really disliked the writing style: it felt like I was reading something really dry for school. Occassionally, Larson would foreshadow something very deliberately, but I never appreciated the payoff. I know his previous books were well-liked, but I'm not sure if I'd try them.

Boomerang by Michael Lewis

Generally speaking I like Michael Lewis and this book was pretty good. Mostly it was a chronicle of his visits to several countries with massive economic problems in 2011: Iceland, Greece, Germany, Ireland, and California. (OK, California is not a country but he covers San Jose and some surrounding towns with similar attention.) I think it started as a series for Vanity Fair. He covers each country in its own chapter, exploring the parts of each culture that contributed to their economic issues. Iceland's insular nature, Germany's quest for external perfection, Greece's friendly corruption - each of these qualities discussed using Lewis' personal experiences with people he meets there. Unlike many of his other books, he doesn't make any grand conclusions in this one. Rather, reading it is like getting a set of detailed emails from a really smart friend who is traveling the world to figure out what is happening in the world economy.

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

This book was excellent.

I've read a lot of Holocaust literature, starting in junior high school both as part of my Hebrew School curriculum as well as on my own.  I remember novels like When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit and Number the Stars, as well as memoirs by Frank, Frankl, and Weisel, among many others.  At some point as an adult I (guiltily) felt a little overwhelmed by how much about it I had read and stopped choosing these books. But in recent years I got a lot out of books like Sarah's Key and The Book Thief. 

When Terry recommended this a one of her top 11 books - ever- I bought it.  It had sat on my shelf until last week. And, wow - t was one of the most impactful things I've read in a long time.  It was heartbreaking and emotional and not a book I will forget for a long time.

As the book jacket explains, Trudy is a college professor who has grown up in Minnesota after surviving WWII in Germany as a child.  Her only knowledge of her father is a photo her mother Anna keeps hidden of the two of them with a man in a Nazi uniform.  I kind of thought that I could figure out what the story was going to be about, but in fact I was reasonably off-base.

Indeed some of the book takes place in Germany during the war, and the reader learns how Anna comes to have a relationship with a Nazi. But the circumstances are not what I expected.  The balance of the book, told in alternating chapters, takes place in current times, where Trudy is trying to understand her past through a research project.  She knows that she does not know the entire story...but Anna won't talk about it and Trudy has grown up knowing it is a missing piece of her history.

Part of what made this book so compelling was that the narration was unflinching.  Blum never used a metaphor, or ended a scene leaving the reader to imagine an atrocity.  It was also compelling because the characters were really good.  Neither Anna nor Trudy was expressive, but they were both characters I rooted for. 

Definitely recommended.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Like many avid readers, I was a huge fan of Eugenides' Middlesex and anxiously awaited the arrival of this novel.  I enjoyed it, although not as much as I did Middlesex. 

The story is about a young woman named Madeleine, her boyfriend Leonard, and her platonic friend Mitchell.  The story follows them from their senior year at Brown University in the early 1980's  (and some flashbacks to earlier times) through their first few years after graduation.  Madeleine and Leonard meet in a class about literary criticism; the "marriage plot" in the title is an oft-returned-to basis for the classic novel that, the class suggests, is dead. After college, Mitchell goes to India to further explore his ideas around religion, while Madeleine and Leonard navigate post-college life together. 

I didn't know the book took place in Brown when I chose it - I picked it based on author alone. I was delighted to recognize the setting and to learn that Eugenides went there too.  His descriptions of the end of college were very well-done.  I so keenly remember the parties after college ended, and the friends who struggled in ways Madeleine and Leonard and Mitchell did.  This entire book was kind of what I had hoped Emperor's Children to be. 

And even thinking about the book as if I were not a Brown grad, I would have liked it.  Madeleine was a really well-constructed character, and it was hard to believe her author was male.  All the characters were well-developed, even some of the minor ones, like Madeleine's sister and her roommates. I also enjoyed reading about Mitchell's trip abroad, and appreciated Eugenides' description of Leonard's struggles with mental illness.

I am not sure everyone would like this book, but it did capture a very specific place and time; one I remember quite vividly.

Incidentally I caught an interview with Eugenides on NPR the other night, too.

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

Along with much of the rest of America, I'm a bit obsessed with polygamy.  Both Big Love on HBO and Sister Wives on TLC hold my attention.  So when Mer A recommended this book I thought I'd like it.

The story is about a polygamist with four wives and dozens of children who goes through a mid-life crisis.  He meets a woman outside his marriage(s) and falls in love with her, causing great chagrin in a few spheres of his life. Meanwhile, each of his wives is facing her own personal crisis, as are several of his children.

I liked the way this book was very dryly humorous.  I don't think that always comes across well in novels, but the way the characters alternated who was telling the story, all from a third-person perspective, helped make it work.  Unfortunately, I didn't love the book overall.  I found the main character pathetic rather than sympathetic, and the other characters too minor to invest in. 

I could see this making a good movie.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

I am a huge fan of Ann Patchett (author of Bel Canto) and couldn't wait until this came up in my library queue.  Oh the jealousy I felt when I saw it in Thea's e-reader a few weeks ago.

The story caught my attention right away.  It's about a young woman named Marina who works at a drug company.  Her colleague Anders goes to the Amazon to check up on a researcher (Dr. Swenson, a former professor of Marina's) who has been incommunicado.  When Anders dies under mysterious circumstances, Marina is sent down there by CEO Mr. Fox (also her boyfriend) to find out more.

This book was great. It was a mystery, although not in a traditional way.  The characters were well-developed, and there were several secondary characters, each of whom was multi-faceted. Marina's journey - first to Anders' family's home, then to South America, and finally a village deep in the Amazon, was very thoroughly described.  What I liked best, though, was that the story was surprising. There were several parts of the story that were completely unexpected, some plot twists, and some of the characters' choices. 

Highly recommended.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

After reading this short profile of Dan Fogelman (the screenwriter for, among other things you'd know, "Cars"), this book caught my attention.  I have enjoyed post-apocalyptic novels for a long time, insofar as you can "enjoy" them, and this one sounded great.

It starts out with several seemingly unrelated storylines - a prisoner on death row, a young girl, and mysterious medical excursion in South America.  Slowly, these stories combine into a story of a medical experiment gone bad - so bad, in fact, that it brings on the end of the recognizable world.  The book continues many years on, where some survivors are living in a fortress and follows their life for a while.  After that, it follows a few survivors who leave the fortress in search of some necessary supplies - and after that, it would be a shame to tell you what happens rather than suggest you read the book yourself.

The thing about this book is that it is an epic.  It's 1,000 pages of pretty small print, and I just got lost in it.  In a good way.  The characters were compelling, the story engaged me, and the author created decades or even centuries of history.  (It was not until I finished that I found out that this is the first of a planned series of three.)  I also liked the varied devices the author used - narrative mixed with some episolatory and diary entries.

Reviews of this book compare it to Stephen King's The Stand. It certainly felt like a similarly monumental read.  And, in fact, King was quoted on the back of the edition I read.  If you like this kind of book, this is an excellent execution.

WWW: Wake by Robert Sawyer

LOVE LOVE LOVE Robert Sawyer and his great science fiction.  Starting with Rollback, I've enjoyed several of his books, so I jumped in and bought all three in this series.

Well this one was really strange.  Not that his other books weren't strange - following the Neanderthal branch of evolution for example - but this one was really unique.  The story follows a teenage girl who is blind.  She's well-adjusted and settled into her life with a loyal best friend and plenty of technology to enable her to be connected to blogs, friends, and other resources online.  However, when she is offered the chance to try a new medical procedure to restore her sight, she takes it.

After this procedure, she can't see our world, but she can see some organized sets of images in her head.  Through the help of her physicist father and her doctor, she figures out that the most immediate effect of her operation is that she can "see" the structure of the Internet.  Not the EM fields in the space we live in, but the logical connections between sites and pages.  To tell you anything else about the book would ruin it, but it gets a lot weirder after that.

Reading this book was pretty quick - I get the idea that this book was written as Young Adult sci-fi.  That didn't bother me because the concept was cool, but it did make for a slightly less sophisticated book with less social commentary than his other novels.  If you haven't read Sawyer in the past, I'd suggest Rollback, Flash Forward, or Hominids as better places to start. 

I am interested to see where Sawyer takes this story in the two sequels. 

Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carre

Picked this book up in the Toronto Pearson Airport.  I had enjoyed The Spy who Came in from the Cold, and after a long week of business travel it was time for something easy. 

The book is about a young British couple who meet a Russian mobster while on vacation in Antigua.  Unsuccessful in extricating themselves from his friendly overtures, they find themselves in the middle of a dangerous negotiation. 

What I liked most about this book was that the point of view the story was told from was very unique.  Most of the spy novels I have read follow a career spy into a new situation, or follow a new spy into his or her first escapade.  This, delightfully, did neither. While a quick plot-driven airport read, the book also paid great attention to building the characters. 

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

I associate Dennis Lehane with good thrillers, like Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone.  In this book, however, he takes a historical topic and turns it into a page-turning novel.

This book follows two men: Danny and Luther.  Danny is a white police office in Boston who father is the Chief of Police.  Seeking a detective badge, he agrees to go undercover to infiltrate several organizations accused of being anarchists.  However, he finds the labor union organized by the police in no way anti-government and begins to believe in what they are doing.  Meanwhile, Luther is a black man who falls in love with a woman and follows her to Ohio where she has family.  When he runs into some trouble down there, he ends up moving to Boston and working for Danny's family.
 
The book follows both of their lives and their decisions in Boston around 1917-1920, and gives a very colorful depiction of the city in those days.  The story's climax is during the multi-day Boston policeman's strike, which throws the city into chaos.  Intermixed throughout the entire book are short vignettes about Babe Ruth, during the height of his baseball fame. 

Lehane's great writing really kept my attention.  I was hoping for the characters to have things work out and I was interested in the politics in Boston.  The Ruth stories also helped describe the time and place outside of the two main characters.

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

I had noticed this book, the first in a series of seven, in Barnes and Noble a few months ago.  I go back and forth on historical fiction, so I wasn't sure if I'd like it.  Given its length (850 pages) I decided it'd be a good vacation read.

The story starts with Claire, a young combat nurse, in 1945 - right after the war.  She has just reunited with her husband and they are enjoying a holiday in Scotland.  One day, while sightseeing in the area, she stumbles into a mysterious formation and suddenly finds herself in 18th century Scotland.  Landing in the middle of a set of kingdoms that is at war, she is suspected of being a British spy.  The balance of the book follows Claire's story as she figures out how to survive there, and if there's a way to get back home. 

I loved this book and could not put it down.  I am so looking forward to reading the next several books in this series.  This was not a serious book, though.  It was a quick read and had less historical content than I expected, although I believe the extensive details about her surroundings were accurate.  I would also comment that the lascivious nature of some of the scenes made it perfect beach reading!

Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

When Greg heard I was headed to Barcelona, he heartily recommended this book.  Cindy had also recommended it a while back, but I skipped it because I had not enjoyed the other novel by Ruiz that I read earlier this year (The Angel's Game).  However, once I planned on traveling to Spain, I decided to give him another shot.

This book was much better.  It was about a young boy who works in his father's bookshop.  He comes into possession of a rare book (also called Shadow of the Wind) by a mysterious author, and the balance of the novel is his unraveling the story of this author.  Many people are anxious to get their hands on this book, and he runs into all sorts of characters, both savory and not.  The book spans many years, and during that time the boy grows up and as he is consumed by this author, he is also consumed by love for a particular woman.  Another present theme is the relationship he has with his father, which changes as he grows up. 

The book takes place in Barcelona - but not the one I visited.  The Barcelona in this book is dark and mysterious and Gothic.  I liked reading this and really enjoyed doing so while in Spain.  The story kept my attention and the main character was worth rooting for. 

Another book spree

Bought a whole pile of books, some for my upcoming vacation and some for when I get back:

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Outlander: with Bonus Content
The Given Day: A Novel
I Am a Strange Loop
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
The Distant Hours: A Novel
WWW: Wonder
WWW: Watch
WWW: Wake

The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk

This was another choice from the top 2011 British book list.  Excellently written but I had some major problems with this book.

The novel mostly follows Thomas and Toni, who are unhappily married - well, maybe not unhappy, but not happy.  He decides to stay home with their daughter when Toni gets a new opportunity at work.  Thomas' brother is an energetic entrepreneur whose wife is a struggling artist.  Cusk does a fabulous job describing each of these characters (as well as their parents, children, and even their houseguests and tenants) and their dissatisfaction with their lives.  The writing was superb, with many characters each given a unique voice and a unique burden to carry.  But she makes them so dissatisfied and so disinterested in improving their situations that I didn't get invested in any of them.

Cusk also writes this book as a characters study of middle-class people, rather than as a story. There's little to no plot and fairly little change in the characters' outlooks.  I kept waiting for something to happen.  Their lack of interest in interacting with each other was pervasive even in light of a few major events towards the end of the book.  Not only was this book not uplifting, it was dissatisfying.  I'd try Cusk again, but hope for more next time.

The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead has remained one of my most memorable reads, so I was happy to see he had a new one out. 

The Illumination is speculative fiction, and refers to a phenomenon that strikes society unexpectedly.  Suddenly, people's pain is visible as colored lights.  If you have a cut on your finger, your finger glows.  If you have a kidney stone, it is lit up for everyone else to see.  The implications of knowing who is in pain and in what way becomes a new factor in interpersonal interactions.  Something about this book kept making me think of Saramago's Blindness - the use of a physical ailment to make a societal point. 

This novel follows six people as they navigate in this strange new world - starting with a patient at a hospital when this all starts. Five other major characters emerge, each of them coming into possession of a set of love-letters written by the husband of the patient's hospital roommate.  These love letters form the basis of the connection among the rest of the characters, who are otherwise reasonably unrelated.

I like Brockmeier and I liked this book because it was interesting, but I'm not sure I "get" it in the end.  The two devices - the illumination of pain and the love letters - didn't mesh enough for me.  I did enjoy the characters and their stories, but wished for more out of this book.

The Upright Piano Player by David Abbott

Somewhere I saw a British list of top 2011 books (so far), and I added a few to my library queue. 

This novel is about Henry, who is divorced from Nessa (who cheated on him), recently retired (forced out of his own company), and estranged from his family (including his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson).  While the story starts with a tragedy in the current day, the rest of the book takes place in the past.  That sets up a strange dynamic for the reader - I knew throughout reading the entire book how the story was going to end, but now how the characters got to that point.  That technique reminded me of Vonnegut's in Galapagos: the author forced you to focus on something other than the storyline by telling you the ending. 

There is nothing else about the book that reminded me of Vonnegut.  But Abbott is a good writer: concise and clear.  He's the type of writer who can define a character with just a few sentences.  Most of the story is Henry's although there are a few chapters told from other characters' points of view. 

It's a very ironic book - the reader knows that Henry's efforts to be more self-actualized are futile, but he doesn't.  The real tragedy in Henry's life was not just the event that ends the story, but the depth of pain and growth that he goes through beforehand, believing he has found redemption.

Velva Jean Learns to Drive by Jennifer Niven

Deena recommended this to me along with a few other books.  I thought it was fine.  The story is about a young girl growing up in North Carolina in the 1930's.  She has dreams of pursuing a career at the Grand Ole Opry but she also falls in love with a former troublemaker-turn-preacher from her hometown with whom her life would be decidedly less dramatic.  Her internal battle between remaining loyal to her home and loyal to her dreams forms the majority of the narrative.

The book seemed very basic to me.  It had a textbook beginning, middle, climax, and denouement, with no real surprises.  Velva Jean's voice was young and stayed young even as she aged into her later teens.  And the ultimate decision she makes is not surprising. 

However I did appreciate two things about this book.  First, Niven did a great job creating a very detailed setting.  I felt like I knew just what Velva Jean's home and town looked like and what it would feel like to walk around.  The other thing I liked about the book was that Niven had several characters and situations all of whom were struggling with dilemmas of staying versus leaving, progress versus status quo.  In fact one of the story lines is about a road that is being built through their area, and the different characters' points of view on whether it is "going out" or "coming in". 

This is Niven's first novel, and it shows.  She has some great ideas but I hope she matures as an author so they come in a format easier to appreciate.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

I decided it was time for me to learn more about what happened with the bailout, so I took this off the bookshelf.  Web had read it a few months back.

Michael Lewis is one of my favorite non-fiction authors.  In past years I've read Moneyball, The Blind Side, and Liar's Poker.  Malcolm Gladwell describes him a "the finest storyteller of our generation" and I agree.  This book is about the financial meltdown.  Particularly, Lewis writes about a few oddball bankers, some on the fringe of Wall Street, who accurately predicted the mortgage-backed securities crisis.  Lewis profiles some colorful people on both sides of the situation - those who bet on these securities and those who bet against them. 

The most interesting part of the book, aside from the personalities, was that because he was profiling people who bet against the industry, he had to explain in detail to the reader one of the strangest financial instruments: the credit-default swap.  Basically a credit-default swap is insurance you buy against a particular security dropping in value, except you don't have to own the security to own the insurance.  It's a really strange security that spawns a really strange market that is at the core of the meltdown.  Michael Lewis says in his book, "Dear Reader: If you have followed the story this far, you deserve not only a gold star but also an answer to a complicated question..."  And thank goodness, because I sweated through a couple of those pages.

This book rounds out a few places where I've learned about the crisis; the same week I read this book we caught HBO's excellent Too Big to Fail documentary.  A few months ago I listened to This American Life's episode about Magnetar, one of the hedge funds in the middle of the crisis.  And last week's New York Times Magazine had a cover story on Sheila Bair, the outgoing chairwoman of the FDIC.  Together, those pieces of media gave me a good grounding on what the heck happened to our banks.

An Open Letter to Barnes and Noble

I love to read books.  Actual books.  I'm one of the few people in my generation (mid-30s) who has not moved to an e-Reader.  Which is why I have felt incredibly excluded as a customer in my last few trips to Barnes and Noble.  At my local store (the Prudential Center in Boston) no less than half the floor when you walk in is branded with nook items and accessories.  (Know what used to be there?  Among other things, the travel section.  I miss daydreaming about where my next trip is going to be. Now travel is mushed into the back of the store.)  More people staff the nook part of the store than the info desk.  They don't answer "book" questions.  And when I renewed my membership for another year once I had purchased something, I was pitched on the benefits available to me if I got a nook.  (Apologies to that cashier because I definitely bit his head off.)

I was in Toronto recently and stepped into an Indigo bookstore.  Know what was there?  Books.  Staff picks, tables and table and rows and rows of books.  It was a BOOKstore.  And I read a lot of books each year - around 40 or so.

I wish I had been someone who loved independent bookstores, but to be honest I have always liked B&N just as much as any independent book shop.  In fact, shopping there felt like shopping in a carefully-designed and carefully-maintained private store.  I always thought the first few tables of recommendations (paperback favorites, new in paperback, etc) were right on with respect to what I should read next.  When the Kindle first came out (before there was a nook), I said one of the reasons I didn't think I'd like it was that I love the feeling of browsing in a book store and reading jacket after jacket in a careful determination of what to buy.

I'm no Luddite.  I work at a high-tech company in a technical role.  I got a Tivo before it was cool and set up my own RF remote.  But I do like books, actual books, with deckled edges and smells and beautiful covers (never the movie edition), and I want to shop for them.  If it's not fun to shop for them in a B&N store anymore then I'm just as likely to buy on Amazon since I'm buying other household items and groceries there anyway. 


I know I'm in the minority.  But I'm also a Barnes and Noble fan historically, so I wanted to be fair and let you know how it feels to shop in your stores these days.

The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr

This is a technology/business book so if you read my blog purely for fun, you may want to skip this.  However, if you have even a small inkling of interest around technology, read on.

This book is about "the cloud."  The first half of the book skillfully compares the move to centralized generation and distribution of electricity to the move to centralized computing resources.  The analogy is fascinatingly accurate.  The second half of the book talks about what that means for the future of the IT industry and of our interactions with technology.  Carr uses great examples like Savvis, Google, and Microsoft to illustrate "cloud" technology.

What I really liked about this book is that Carr used examples that I think would be relevant if you didn't work in technology, but that were familiar to me as a technologist.  I also liked how accurately he described what was happening to technology as it moved into the cloud.  It definitely made me think about what my job would be twenty or even ten years from now.

What was most remarkable about reading this book is that it was published in 2009 and some of the predictions and novel concepts already seemed like second nature to me.  That made me respect Carr for his prescience but also regret my letting this languish on my "to read" list for so long.  Score one for not waiting for The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You to come out in paperback.

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

I went into Barnes and Noble to buy a guide book for a long weekend in Toronto, and this book caught my eye.  This year I've gotten to read several books that were nearly perfectly constructed/composed and this is another one.

The story takes place during the Vietnam War.  It's about a female photographer who falls in love with another American photographer, and it's also about her relationship with that photographer's Vietnamese assistant.  Through telling what is ostensibly a love story, Soli also paints a vivid picture of the war.  The book covers several years' worth of time, as well as ranging from locations in Saigon to remote villages in the countryside.  On numerous occasions the photographers are embedded with army squads and there are detailed accounts of their activities. 

I really liked so many things about this book.  The characters were really well-developed and I was rooting for them throughout the book.  The description of Vietnam was a great education for someone like me, just slightly too young to understand the impact on the US firsthand.  And the plot was incredibly engrossing.  Nancy Pearl from NPR said of this book, "“Devastatingly awesome…It's one of those books that I didn't want to put down — I resented everything else that I needed to do in my life, because I didn't want to stop reading it.”  I definitely had the same experience.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

I had been excited about reading this book for a while  While it sat unread in my bookcase I caught a Law and Order episode based on the same idea. 

Henrietta Lacks is a black woman who lived in Maryland in the 1940's and '50s.  She had a very aggressive form of cervical cancer and after her death her cells were harvested without her family's knowledge.  Those cells have been a cornerstone of scientific research for the past several decades, while Lacks' family members have had marginal and oftentimes troubled lives.

Skloot's book reads like a novel in some places, a memoir in others, and an interesting article for the balance.  Never is it a dry scientific text, although it does cover the science behind cells and gene therapy.  I don't think you have to be technical to enjoy the book.  Other sections focus on Henrietta's childhood and illness.  Most memorable to me was the latter part of the book where Skloot forms a close relationship with Henrietta's daughter Deborah, now in her 60's, and the two of them work together to find more additional information about Henrietta. 

This was a good read, although more personal than I expected.  Skloot's a great writer.

A Thousand Cuts by Simon Lelic

My bookclub chose this as our May book and when it didn't arrive in time for a trip to San Fran, I bought a second copy at the bookstore in the ferry building.  Good thing I liked it.

The story starts with a brutal shooting in a school.  One of the detectives assigned to the case, Lucy, senses that there is more to the story than what it seems and embarks on an investigation that is belittled by her male colleagues.  Meanwhile, what she finds is a systemic problem in the school that led to this tragedy.  Lucy is determined to figure out what is going on and resolve it, against several systems that don't want her to.  I enjoyed watching how Lelic played with the same themes in different settings.

The most interesting thing about this book, though, was not the plot.  The way Lelic told the story was to alternate narrative chapters with chapters that were a transcript of each of the witnesses' stories.  His creation of so many credible voices was really fun to read.  There were clear villains and heroes but also people stuck in untenable situations. 

I really enjoyed reading this book and would look for more by Lelic in the future.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Laura B (now Laura H) recommended this book to me after her book club read it.  Within thirty pages I kept remarking to Web as I read it each night before bed, “this is an incredibly ambitious book” and I think that summarizes how I feel about it.  Ambitious-good, as in, choosing a very lofty theme and complex route to get there, not ambitious-bad, as in, sets high expectations for itself them doesn’t meet them.  This may well be the best-crafted book I’ve ever read.

The story takes place in the summer of 1974, around the time when Philippe Petit found a way to string a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center and walk across it.  The story of how he prepared for this feat is like a memorable musical theme that plays throughout the book, but it isn't the main plot.  The story is about ten New Yorkers and what their lives were like that summer.  The characters range from prostitutes and graffiti artists to a set of mothers who have lost their sons in Vietnam.  Each character is incredibly well-developed, and many of them are also incredibly sympathetic. 

What is special about the book is how McCann ties all the stories together and calls on Petit's story as an interlude.  His capture of place and time is exquisite.  I think it will be a while before I find another book as special as this one.

The Glister by John Burnside

This book made several of the year-end lists in 2010 so I picked up a copy.  The premise was compelling – a town built near a major chemical plant starts experiencing strange disappearances of its young men.  I expected it to be an eco-thriller, and I was under the impression it had a supernatural bent.

Well, it may have started out that way.  The writing was good and the characters interesting.  The narration passed from one character to another, not linearly.  However, at some point I just totally lost track of what was going on.  Those of you who read this blog regularly know that this is not a normal occurrence for me.  But Burnside took a left and I kept going straight and then the book ended. 

Certain online reviews expressed a similar confusion.  Can’t say I would recommend this book, and I feel cheated out of what I thought it would be.

Man in the Woods by Scott Spencer

This was another book I had on my list from the year-end reviews.  The action starts when a man accidentally sees another man hurting a seemingly harmless dog and decides to intervene.  The story is about what happens to each of them, and what the impact on each of their lives and relationships this meeting has.  It is also about the background each of the men has.

I though this book had great potential.  The characters were guided by very strong moral directions which made them easy to connect to or root against.  I also enjoyed the drama and build up that the author represented with internal dialogue.  However, something did not work for me overall in this book.  The main character’s girlfriend was a very spiritual person who writes self-help books – think Elizabeth Gilbert.  But she was also overly sexual, which I couldn’t help but be distracted by and suspect the male author of fantasizing a bit.  I also didn’t love the book as it went on: the final third was not that compelling and some of it seemed reasonably predictable.

I think I’d try something else by this author but this one didn’t do it for me.

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Sara in my book club suggested this title and it was a great choice.

The story is about a group of slave women who accompany their plantation masters annually to a vacation resort in Ohio.  The premise is unusual and I was glad to find out it was based on a true story, because it would have required a significant suspension of disbelief otherwise.

Lizzie, the main character, is a likable woman.  She has several children with her master and is very focused on ensuring that her kids have access to education and other benefits.  She describes being in love with her master, and feeling like he loves her back, but the reader can easily see that his special treatment of her is far from a healthy love. The first part of the book talks about her first summer at the resort with him.  In later parts of the book, Lizzie relates how her relationship with her master started, and what the (strange) logistics were around their interactions on the plantation.

It was hard to read the descriptions of how cruelly the slaves were treated.  One minute they are sitting in a dining room with their masters, "playing house" and the next minute they are shackled to a tree as punishment for something.  Equally hard to read was the differences they could see between their own lives and the glimpses of freedom afforded to blacks in the North.  I had a hard time remembering that this occurred reasonably recently.

This book was an easy read, written in a style that reminded me of YA books used in a classroom setting.  That didn't take away from my fascination and sadness in the story.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

The title of this book caught my attention as a clever idea - I like when authors play around with the meta-components of a story.  In this case, the story is about a boy whose father builds time machines.  As he grows up and goes into the business of repairing time machines, he comes to terms with the complex relationships that define his family.

Yu makes many obvious nods to the pantheon of classic science fiction.  Readers are expected to be familiar with ideas like the paradox of meeting one's self while time-traveling and the alternate realities that spring up every time you make a decision.  The main character has a relationship with his custom computer and his "nonexistent but ontologically valid dog."  All of that was clever and fun to read. 

But what I really liked about the book was that all of this was really a mechanism for writing the story of how someone can grow up and learn about their parents as people.  Certainly science fiction fans would enjoy the setting and innovations, but the story was sweet too.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly but continually expecting a different result.  Which is what I did when I decided to read another one of Jonathan Franzen's books. 

The book starts off pretty well, it's about a family living in the suburbs and Franzen does a great job describing the place in their neighborhood this particular family had.  Patty, the mom, is a near-perfect wife and mother, Walther, the dad, is reserved but well-liked.  Their son Joey is difficult, dating the slightly lower-class next-door neighbor's daughter, and their daughter Jessica was a near-perfect child. 

After an initial introduction, the book changes into a memoir written by Patty about her life growing up leading to how she met and married Walter.  This part of the book was enjoyable as well - Walter's charismatic roommate, Patty's manipulative best friend both figuring prominently in the story.  But after this section, the book take a difficult turn.  The narration leaves the memoir and follows different member of the family.  Some of their stories - like Joey's failed businesses - are interesting.  But some parts of the book are significantly overwritten and veer into very strange political commentary. 

By the time I was 2/3 of the way through the book I was exhausted!  The details were extensive, the speeches some of the characters give way too long, and the overall story loses its direction.  The characters each make predictable mistakes.  Then they have to find their way back to being authentic.  By the end of the book, most of the loose ends were tucked neatly away, but at 550+ pages, I didn't really care that much by then.

I think I'm pretty much done with Franzen.  Sorry, Oprah.

The Angel's Game by Gabriel Ruiz Zafon

This book had been on my reading list for a while; I believe it was on one of the year-end book lists.  It is a mystery set in Barcelona in the 1920's. 

I was hoping to like this book.  The story is about a young author who is fired from his job at a newspaper and then approached by a mysterious man to write a particular book for him.  The man is not who he seems, and neither are some of the other characters.  Ruiz Zafon does a wonderful job evoking a creepy, gothic Barcelona that is scary and damp and filled with suspicious characters.  But where the book fell short for me was that the plot was very complex with a long cast of characters.  Significant portions of the book were devoted to discussions of theology and belief systems that did not connect to the plot for me.  And there were several surprises and plot twists that were annoying to me rather than delightful.

Ruiz Zafon remains one of the most admired contemporary mystery authors, but this one missed the mark for me.

Makers by Cory Doctorow

WOW.  Wow.  WOW.  Loved.  This.  Book.

I don't remember where I first read about this book but the author's name caught my eye since he's one of the editors at Boing Boing, a great tech blog.  I took it to Belize and could not put it down.  It was a wild ride and I kept appreciating Doctorow's storytelling ability as well as his sharp eye for how technology impacts us.  I will warn you, though, that this book is not for everyone.  If you are not a geek, nerd, techie, or otherwise appreciative of things like the idea of a 3-D printer, then I'd skip this.

The story is incredibly imaginative and I don't want to ruin too much.  One of the first things that happens in the story is that Duracell and Kodak merge, and the new company's mission is to fund innovation in small pockets around the world.  Silicon Valley reporter Suzanne flies to Miami to check out what engineers Lester and Perry are funded to do - and she discovers them living in an abandoned mall cranking out interesting things on a 3-D printer.  In the early part of the book, Doctorow's demonstrates his grasp of how innovation can be iterative. 

As the book goes on, he exercises his ability to make social commentary about IP law and corporate espionage.  Then while you were busy paying attention to that, he's made you completely invested in several characters fraught with foibles.  And once you are distracted by that, he starts in on the value of open source communities and user-created communities, but without really making the book about technology.  Oh, and he takes on Disney and dieting on the way because, heck, why not?

I came away from this book with my brain chugging to keep up with Doctorow; I felt like he was a tour guide to the future. 

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

Mer recommended this book to me and then I suggested it to my bookclub.  It was fantastic.

The book is about a widower who lives in a small town in England.  Upon the death of his brother, he becomes embroiled in estate problems with his brother's family and his son.  At the same time, he grows close to a Pakistani widow who runs a shop in town.  In his quest to navigate his family and his love life, he must break with many of the social norms of his proper English town. 

There were two things I really enjoyed about this book.  First, there was something reminiscent of Alexander McCall Smith's work in the earnestness of the characters and their simple situations.  Like in his books, the writing was clear and easy to read, and the plot was simple to follow.  Both of those qualities often made me forget how ambitious the book was.

The other thing I enjoyed was how well Simonson captured the inconsistent nature of "proper" society.  Her depictions of neighbors interacting and of social events perfectly described the implicit prejudices around race and class that the characters would have, on the surface, denied. Many reviews have referred to this aspect of  the book as being a "novel of manners" in the spirit of Jane Austen.  Perhaps it is past embarrassing that I haven't read anything of hers by now.

All told, a great read.  I'd try something else by Simonson but (impressively) this is her first novel.

The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

I have been saving this sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for vacation, so when we left for Belize I started it on the plane.  While the first book in this series had a raft of characters to develop and describe, this book focused on a subset of those characters.  In particular, this book is really about Lisbeth Salander: she becomes more obviously the central character than she was in the first book.

Salander begins the book more balanced and adjusted than we've seen her in the past.  She deals with real estate problems and updates her appearance.  She does ultimately kick ass and take names, but before that happens, her character has matured and we get to know her better, including some detail about her early life.  We also follow Mikael Blomkvist, the publisher from the first book, who decides to publish an expose on the sex trafficking industry.  Blomkvist and Salander begin the book in unrelated storylines but ultimately (not without Salander's hacking skills) their paths cross again.

I enjoyed this book even more than I did Dragon Tattoo.  I thought the characters were more compelling and the story easier to follow.  I also appreciated Larsson's continued themes around exposing abuse of women as a major social problem.  I can't wait for my next vacation to read the final book in the trilogy.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

I suggested this book to my book club and it was our February pick.  Many of my book friends have been reading it and it received numerous positive reviews. 

This novel is about a set of twins who are orphaned in an small Catholic Ethiopian hospital.  They are lovingly raised by a married doctors who work there.  The book chronicles their lives from birth through adulthood, spanning both Ethiopia and the U.S.  While the twins are very different personalities, they are quite close, and both become doctors themselves.  The narrative switches between a few different voices, but the majority of the story is told by one of the twins.  Though ultimately professionally successful, he struggles with issues of identity for much of his life, haunted by his missing parents. 

I liked this book but it was long in places. There were descriptions of medical procedures that seemed unnecessarily detailed, as well as a lot of detail around the political backdrop of Ethiopia.  That said, it was also stunning in places, with exceptional writing and twists in the story that I was not expecting.  About halfway through the book it dawned on my that the memoir I had just finished reading was also set in Ethiopia and it was interesting to compare the depiction of the country in both books.

For my doctor friends I'd say this is probably required fiction, for everyone else, it's for the readers more tolerant of a long, involved, densely written story.

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ewa recommended this to me several years ago and although I have given it to several people as a gift I had not read it myself. 

Ali's memoir of her childhood in Africa and subsequent immigration to Europe is memorable and shocking.  She grows up in both Muslim Ethiopia and a secular Kenya, and as she gets older is troubled by the treatment of women in Islam.  Her childhood is very traditional - she is ritually circumcised, her absent father makes a lot of the family decisions, and she sees women being beholden to men's choices.  The first third of the book that covers this part of her life is gripping, but long.  At some points it was confusing as to why so much of the book was what felt like background.

The next part of the book chronicles her escape to the Netherlands where she seeks asylum and settles into this very different society.  She has a boyfriend and a job, and decompresses from her years of oppression.  The contrast between her life in the Netherlands and that of her life in Africa is where many of her political ideas come from.  At some point in the book she begins to argue quite aggressively that Islam is bad for women and thus bad for societies.  She suggests that any Islamic country is intrinsically backwards based on their treatment of women.

It is this core belief that begins Ali's ascent into politics, which is the subject of the third and final part of the book.  She becomes a highly public figure in Holland politics and, at times, is seen as quite contraversial.  As she struggles with the demands on her public life, she faces difficult choices in how much is at stake when she stands up for what she believes in.

I enjoyed reading about Ali's life and I appreciate the honesty in her memoir.  While the flow of the narrative was uneven, the story was fascinating. 

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

This was a great book - not sure how I missed it a few years ago when it was on the bestseller list.

The story starts as a courtroom drama - a man has been accused of murder in a small town on an island off the coast of Washington state.  The accused is Japanese and the victim Caucasian.  Since it is 1954, the memories around WWII, both foreign and domestic, are still fresh. While parts of the book revolve around the proceedings of the case in a way familiar to those of us in the Law & Order generation, other sections dive into many of the characters' personal histories.  Most memorably, the accused, the victim, the accused's wife, the prosecutor, and a local reporter.  Through these characters' backstories, the town's character is also revealed. 

The most memorable moments in the book were not around the case.  One that sticks in my mind was when the Japanese learned they were being taken away from their homes.  Another notable section described the relationship between a Japanese man and a family he was purchasing land from.  And there is a love story between two characters when they were teenagers that is similarly unforgettable.

Several years ago I read When the Emperor Was Divine, also about this period in history.  While I remember that book as ethereal - strong characters without names - a single family's devestating experience in an internment camp told in what I remember as a fugue/dream - this book was much more solid.  I like to think of these books together, telling different versions of a similar trope.

It's only January, but I suspect this book will be one of my favorites for the year.  It had solid plot, interesting characters, excellent setting of place and time, and a good resolution. 

Book Spree

I got a gift card at work a few months back and I've been wondering what to do with it.  Today I decided to go on a shopping spree at Barnes Noble.  With a trip to the West Coast next week and vacation soon after I got everything in paperback.

Here's what I got.

Cutting for Stone
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
Let the Great World Spin

Makers
Angel's Game
Those Who Save Us
The Glister
Too Much Happiness
Pack of Two
Velva Jean Learns to Drive

I'm very excited.

What to Read in 2011

WOW - Not barely out of 2010 and The Millions had a comprehensive list of great books scheduled to publish in 2011.  Kevin Brockmeier, Ann Packer, and Ann Patchett all have new books as do a slew of other authors.  it is hard to believe how long my reading list is about to get!

http://www.themillions.com/2011/01/most-anticipated-the-great-2011-book-preview.html