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.