The Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

Mer A. recommended this book to me, after I mentioned Didion as an author on my reading list. Wow. Fabulous. Mer's recommendation mentioned some oddities with Didion's style, which I'll address below.

The book takes place in a fictional Latin American country, and is narrated by the matriarch of a family who controls much of the business and politics in the country. The narrator was born in the United States, but moves to this country as a young adult. She claims early on in the book that the story is not about her, it's about a woman named Charlotte who flees to this country as an adult when her life in the U.S. starts to fall apart. However, it is clear to the reader (well, at least to this reader) that her telling of the story is as much about her as about Charlotte.

Early in the book she characterizes Charlotte as a norteamericano, a classification in her world that determines how Charlotte is treated and how she integrates with the local community. The following passage well illustrates the mirror the narrator looks into in her telling of the story:

"As the child of comfortable family in the temperate zone she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents, attentive godparents, one brother named Dickie, ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver, as well as with a small wooden angel, carved in Austria, to sit on her bed table and listen to her prayers. In these prayers, the child Charlotte routinely asked that "it" turn out all right, "it" being unspecified and all-inclusive, that she had been an adult for some years before the possibility occurred to her that "it" might not. She had put this doubt from her mind. As a child of the western United States, she had been provided as well with faith in the value of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of cleared and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of progress and education, and the general upward spiral of history. She was a norteamericano."

Didion has a very rhythmic writing style, which I enjoyed. That passage above is of a style common in this book: sentences that would be considered "run-on" anywhere else, coupled with a strong ability to capture a particular theme quickly. In some cases, Didion was more likely to break her rhythm onto separate lines, connecting them by using the same words in a different way. This style definitely brought me into the book and into the narrator's head:

"Anyway." Charlotte folded the pages of her unfinished Letter with a neat vertical crease as children fold their weekly themes. "It's not just a new sentence. It's a new paragraph."

It occurred to me that I had never before had so graphic an illustration of how the consciousness of the human organism is carried in its grammar.

Or the unconsciousness of the human organism.

If the organism under scrutiny is Charlotte.

Thematically, the book was largely about Charlotte's relationship with her daughter, who disappeared as part of a radical political organization. I think there were ways in which I would have connected with the book even more if I had children. That said, I may have appreciated themes in the book I would have otherwise missed had I been more focused on the mother-daughter narrative.

For example, avoidance. Charlotte's move to Latin America is the most extreme example of her propensity to avoid the things in her life she doesn't like. She refuses to acknowledge her daughter's defection initially:

"Marin...was at that moment, even as the two FBI men occupied Leonard's Barcelona chairs, even as te fat FBI man toyed with one of Leonard's porcelain roses and even as the thin FBI man gazed over Charlotte's head at the 10' by 16' silk screen of Mao Tse-tung given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three, skiing at Squaw Valley. Or so Charlotte tried to tell the FBI man."

Finally, ideas around separation were common in this book. Charlotte is norteamericano, thus treated differently. She also expects to live by different rules as her counterparts. The dialectic of how she acts and how she is treated through her life reinforces this. The narrator's comment on this is extreme:

"Charlotte had no idea that anyone else had ever been afflicted by what she called the "separateness."

And because she did not she fought it, she denied it, she tried to forget it, and, during those first several weeks after Marin disappeared and obliterated all the numbers, spent many days without getting out of bed. I think I have never known anyone who led quite so unexamined a life."

This book takes more patience than most books. It nudged me through the story rather than ushering me. I enjoyed that about it, but not everyone will.

Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy

Mer A. recommended this book to me as she handed me a nearly hip-high pile of her castoffs. I was not a huge fan, despite Mer's verbal recommendation and Ann Patchett's quotation on the cover.

This story follows a family through four generations of dysfunction and secrets. The book kept my attention, but the writing was nothing special and the story was implausible. This is the first book I've read all year that I did not dog-ear any pages for the purposes of remembering a special line or quotation. I would have forgiven the uninspired writing (or at least questioned if it were just subtle and not uninspired) had the plot been more plausible. However, the story involved so many unlikely romantic trysts, and so many moments where the characters could have saved themselves forty or fifty pages of heartache, that I could not get past that.

The praise on the front and back cover suggest that this book masterfully captures a family through several decades of life. However, by the end of the book I was disgusted by the sexual pairings, bored waiting for the members of each generation to grow up, and tired of the third person omniscient narrator's omniscience.

Given all the praise for this book, coupled with a soft spot I have for first-time novelists, I'd be open to reading the sequel, but it's not high up on my list.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

Over the past few years, I had seen sullen-looking college students all over Boston reading this book. Finally, after noticing it in the memoir section of Trident, I finally picked it up myself. It ended up being a great choice, full of wonderful writing and well-developed themes; also great because it has short chapters which are perfect for reading during a busy week.

This is a memoir written by a poet who grows up without knowing his father, only to meet him as an young adult while working at one of Boston's Pine Street Inn homeless shelter. His father suffers from mental illness, perhaps schizophrenia, and ends up homeless in Boston. Flynn charts both his own trajectory into young adulthood with no direction as well as his father's life story, at least as much as he can piece together.

I definitely enjoyed this book more than I otherwise would have because of its being set in Boston. The Pine Street Inn is near the edge of my neighborhood and I recognized many of the locations he mentioned. I've also read several books touching on the Irish in Boston and this fit that genre well. In Flynn's case, his association with his Irish roots and friends from childhood was sadly plagued with alcoholism. He writes of one of his friends,

"When he got off the school bus he could see his father sprawled out. His mother said, I give up, handed my friend the address and the keys. My friend wasn't old enough to drive, but he learned. He tells the story now as if he were speaking of raking the leaves."

Aside from the descriptions of Boston, I also liked this book for its description of his troubled relationship with his father. When he meets his father for the first time, he is 27 and struggling with his own ability to grow into adulthood. Flynn writes,

"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up."

This book does a great job of "showing not telling" (as a great writing teacher once taught me) the complexities of this relationship. Flynn wrestles with inevitability and fate and responsibility, using an effective combination of vignettes, conversations, and letters.

And last, but by no means least, Flynn is a poet. Thus, his writing is superb and unique. He has a style that transcends standard literary devices such as metaphor or hyperbole. In describing a homeless man that he knows, Flynn writes,

"Brian wears three army blankets over his head like layered ponchos, a hole cut in the middle of each, making his slow way up, stopping at a barrel to poke for half a sandwich, half a beer, stopping at each payphone, checking the change slot, knowing that the phones release dimes secretly."

This would have been a good book had it described a difficult relationship between father and son, or a young man's first few years working at a homeless shelter, or covered any topic with equal skill. Lucky for us readers, it does all three.

The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean

I saw this book at the Trident Bookseller Cafe waiting for Mer W., requested it from the library, picked it up and read it on the train going home for Passover, all in four days. It was a great read, the kind of book I found myself daydreaming about reading when I was doing other things.

The book follows parallel stories, one in the present and one in the past. In the present, a family is convening in a beach town for a wedding; in the past, the matriarch of the family is a young woman in Leningrad during WWII who works in the art museum. It was a very carefully written book, scarcely wasting a single word. Like A Fine Balance, it was a book that I could watch happening in my head, as if it were a movie. One of the strangest things about the book for me was that it was about a non-Jewish family during WWII. It is interesting to have read Suite Francaise within a few months of this to see how far-reaching WWII was across Europe.

In some ways, the story occurring in the past was a standard war love story. Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy goes off to war, girl is sad, boy and girl reunite. But the main character's life while her husband is at war is fascinating, as she and her family survive in a shelter and she continues to work in the art museum as all the art is crated and shipped off.

The writing about love in the book is sublime, "She has been in his life for so long," the author writes, "that he can hardly recall a time before her. Over the years, they have grown together, their flesh and their thoughts twinning so closely that he cannot imagine the person he might be apart from her."

It is no mystery why I found myself cradling the book at times as I was reading.

The modern-day story has some interesting themes, too. The most striking was the questions surrounding care for elder relatives. Also prominent were the dichotomies between someone's life story and how they are perceived as a senior, best captured in this passage:

"...a battered old photograph in a silver frame on her parents' dresser, a studio portrait from the thirties. She was told it was her mother, the only image of her that had survived the war, yet the girl in the photo bore no resemblance to Helen's actual mother. Besides being impossibly young, the girl wore an expression that was not the one Helen recognized, the dark eyes soft and as romantic as a poet's. She didn't think her parents were lying, exactly, but neither could she reconcile this sepia-toned girl with the sturdy woman in shapeless housedresses who cooked liver and onions and ironed gift-wrap and ribbons to be reused. Her imagination failed her."

Perhaps most interesting is that this is a short book to cover all this ground. Just 250 pages or so, with big margins.

The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner

I have enjoyed Weiner's novels for several years. However, this book of short stories was uneven and disappointing. The first three stories shared the same characters, which made me think that the book was going to be a set of vignettes about this family. However, the rest of the stories were about all different groups of people, including (indulgently) some characters from her other books.

Many stories shared a theme around swimming, or characters who swam, but other than that, I found no ideas or themes that were shared through the book. I admit that I am not always a fan of short stories, but I'll pick up a Hemingway or Munro book now and then and don't feel this way about those.

One story is about a woman who transforms her job helping kids write college essays into helping someone write a personal ad. That she misjudges one of the applicants (who ends up having a disabled brother) and falls in love with her "ad" client is reasonably predictable. The highlight of that story is her client's description of himself, "Can juggle a little. Can bake cookies. Have read every book Raymond Carver and Russell Banks have ever written. No pets, though. Should I get one?"

In another story, she seems to struggle with ideas around teenage pregnancy and parenthood, and child abuse. It too is predictable. Like in the story described above, though, the writing is as good as the theme is boring:

"How had the high school dropout, the teenage mother, wound up with this angelic child while she, who had a Master's degree and a mortgage and a husband, who'd insisted on a drug-free birth and had breastfed even after her daughter bit her at least once per feeding, ended up with a shrieky, miserable, brat?"

The title story was about a woman whose interference with her ex-boyfriend's wedding registry actually changes history in a sci-fi Back-to-the-Future way. Kind of a cool idea, except in the afterward, she mentions that it is being developed into a movie script. How those thirteen pages can turn into an hour and a half worth $10.75 I'll look forward to seeing.

The one highlight of the book for me was the afterword, where she describes how each story came to her, and under what circumstances she wrote it. Like Suite Francaise, it was a neat opportunity to understand how writers think. She mentions in the afterword that the stories were told in the order of the characters' ages, which I did not notice but thought was cool.

Vows by Peter Manseau

This book is scandalously subtitled, "The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and their Son. " Given that, it is the not-too-scandalous story of a priest and nun who each leave their order, fall in love, get married and have a family, and spend their lives trying to reform the Catholic church. Mer A. reminded me of it; it had been on my booklist for a while.

This book is written as a memoir by the son of the former priest and nun. I enjoyed reading this book, at least partially because it was set in Boston. It was interesting for me to get some of the history of all the Catholicism in Boston, and learn about the history of so many of the buildings and institutions I've read about in the paper. The book also gave me a better understanding of many of the emotions and practices behind Catholicism.

The first half of the book talks about the Catholic community starting in the 1960's. This description of the women who became nuns after high school is a good example of the complexity in the Church that the author does a good job in depicting:

"Each girl arriving at Bethany that day had her own tale of how she got there, of course. Climbing up toward the novitiate were eighty stories of beneficiaries or victims, depending on how you view the outcome, of the circumstances that could send a teenage girl into the convent. Some had sisters in the order; some had alcoholic fathers and a reason to leave home; some wanted to further their education and saw no other way. A few felt called by God."

The relationship between the author's parents was not as central a storyline in the book as I expected. Instead, Manseau used their relationship to highlight some of the aspects of the Church that he saw in most need of reform. He comments on his parents' desire for reform more than his own; many of the people in the book (and in his childhood-life) are other former priests and nuns who were struggling with the same dichotomies his parents were. I was most struck by the difficulty of reforming an institution such as the Catholic church, and the willingness that people involved in such reform had to holding on to the pieces of it they found meaningful in the face of injustices.

It was hard to tell in some parts of the book how much Manseau was reporting on his parents' feelings about something versus stating his own opinions. For example, when commenting on the different jobs new nuns got at the novitiate, he writes,

"Every slight you received was a cross to bear, and wasn't it the cross they were there for? Some crosses weighted more than others, though, and who got which cross seemed a matter as predetermined as the stain of original sin."

As the book progresses, Manseau makes increasingly more frequent references to the recent sexual abuse scandal, culminating in several chapters on how it impacted his family and people he knew. This is when his discussion of the church changes from criticism to a scathing rejection.

"Much has been written about celibacy's role in the abuse scandal, but very little has been said about the possible effects of this symptom of celibate culture: the seminar's attitude toward basic relationships, the distrust of which might have been just as damaging to those who persevered at St. John's as the denial of their sexual impulses. In the name of preventing particular friendships, the seminary system seems to have done its best to create a clerical class filled with men who never learned that other people are more than objects from which something may be obtained."

I think this book was written at a good time. The sexual abuse incidents have publicized an important discussion about the need for reform in the Catholic church, and this book depicts just how hard that reform will be to achieve, and just how long some people have already been fighting for it.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfeld

What a great book. I really enjoyed reading this story about a young journalist who is asked by a dying author to write her biography. The book jacket accurately describes the book as "...a tale of Gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire."

The style of the book took some getting used to. It was written in an old-fashioned tone, more like what I would expect from a book written in the 19th century. The narrator is a young woman, ostensibly in modern-day Enlgand, but many of her comments and her lifestyle suggest an older time. Perhaps if I had read more Austin or Bronte it would be humorously familiar. For example, here she describes her return to the author's mansion:

"When I went back to Yorkshire, I received no explanation for my banishment. Judith greeted me with a constrained smile. The grayness of the daylight had crept under her skin, collected in shadows under her eyes. She pulled the curtains back a few more inches in my sitting room, explosing a bit more window, but it made no difference to the glloom. "Blasted weather," she exclaimed, and I thought she seemed at the end of her tether."

There is a lot in the book for book-lovers specifically. Not only is the main character the daughter of a bookseller and herself a bibliophile, but she is interviewing an author, and several pivotal scenes occur in libraries. At one point she runs a fever and faints, and a doctor is brought in. He suspects that her ailments are in her head. "I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he had inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course."

The book is a mystery, and a good one. There are several great twists, and enough clues that the reader could play along if desired. But it's also a great novel. There are wonderful moments of symbolism, plot, and good thick characters. The charaters form a wonderful canvas where Setterfeld gives us parallels and comparisons between them throughout the book. Each character individually taken is complex and compelling, but the real beauty is each of the characters taken in contrast to the others. In some cases it's governess/doctor or twin/twin or mother/daughter or lover/lover, but the pairs are amazingly effective in further elucidating the characters.

I often felt spooked and chilly reading it, as if it were raining outside, which in the book it often was. Setterfield created what I would describe as several layers of a fairytale world, and I fell right into it.

What is the What by Dave Eggers

This was a special book. I am an unabashed Dave Eggers fan; he is one of the few authors whose books I look forward to prior to their release. This book is a fictionalized account of the journey one of the "lost boys" of Sudan across Sudan and ultimately to Atlanta, Georgia. Valentino, the protagonist, is one of thousands of young boys who walked across Sudan during the country's Civil War. The book alternates between present time in Atlanta, and his childhood in Sudan.

Strangely, Eggers and Valentino position the book as a novel, not as a biography. Given how broadly Eggers interpreted his own life in A Heartbreaking Work... and still called it nonfiction, that this was considered fiction was a surprising choice. Valentino explains it in the preface:

"This book was born out of the desire on the part of myself and the author to reach out to others to help them understand the atrocities many successive governments of Sudan committed before and during the civil war. To that end, over the course of many years, I told my story orally to the author. He then concocted this novel, approximating my own voice and using the basic events of my life as the foundation Because many of the passages are fictional, the result is called a novel."

Voice is probably the most impressive aspect of the book. Often while I was reading, I forgot that it was not written by Valentino. Given that English is not Valentino's first language, it is hard to believe that there is not a little bit of Eggers in the voice. However, I did hear an interview with the two of them where Valentino remarked that he was amazed that Eggers captured his voice as well as he did.

The Eggers/Valentino team portrayed certain events with amazingly succinct descriptions. I was impressed by how effectively Eggers combined a short episode with an emotion. As the reader, I was easily led through Valentino's range of emotions: most notably, fear, grief, anger. The following scene took place during the boys' march across Sudan.

"Deng walked behind me, insisting on holding my shirt. This was a practice favored this night and on later nights by the youngest boys--holding the shirt of the boy ahead. Deng and I were certainly among the smallest of the walking boys. The most accommodating boys would remove an arm from its sleeve and allow those behind them to use the sleeve as a leash. Many boys did this with their younger brothers. There were many pairs of brothers in the group, and in the morning, when roll was called, when I heard their names called I felt such envy. I knew nothing about my brothers now: whether they were alive or dead or at the bottom of a well."

And this episode occurred once he was living in a refugee camp in Ethiopia:

"More boys arrived every day, families too. Every day I saw them crossing the river. They came in the morning and they came in the afternoon and when I woke up more had come in the night. Some days one hundred came, some days many more. Some groups were like mine, hundreds of emaciated boys, half of them naked, and a few elders; some groups were only women and girls and babies, accompanied by young SPLA officers with guns tied to their backs. The people came without end, and each time they crossed the river, we knew it meant that the food we had would need to be further divided. I came to resent the sight of my own people, to loathe how many of them there were, how needful, gangrenous, bug-eyed, and wailing.

One day a group of boys threw rocks at a group of new arrivals. The rock-throwing boys were beaten severely and it never happened again, but in my mind, I threw rocks, too. I threw rocks at the women and the children and wanted to throw rocks at the soldiers but I threw rocks at no one."

Eggers and Valentino do no less of a superb job describing Valentino's life once he makes it to the U.S. Several months ago, I saw a movie called "Lost Boys of Sudan" at a local theater, then met a few of the men who had immigrated here. The theme of that movie, mirrored in this book, was that while moving to the U.S. certainly got the boys out of danger and offered them many opportunities they would not have otherwise had, it was an extremely difficult transition.

Many of the "lost boys" had minimum wage jobs, difficulty adjusting to school, unfriendly neighbors, and a life-long culture shock. The structure of the book, juxtaposing this life with his life in Sudan, succeeds in demonstrating the different universes of suffering and how experiencing a small injustice after a large injustice does not make it any more just.

In one passage, Valentino says:

"The thought of all that time wasted, so much time sitting on that wooden stool, cataloging, smiling, thanking, filing--all while I should have been in school--is to much for me to contemplate."

"I was taking home less than $200 a week after taxes," he comments, "I knew men in Kakuma [Ethiopia] who were doing better than that, relatively speaking, selling sneakers made of rope and rubber tires."

I realize there are a lot of quotations in this entry, but the writing in this book was really special. One thing I did not mention is that it's funny, too. There are laugh-out-loud moments, and a drifting sardonic internal monologue that found humor in tragedy. Finally, Eggers did a wonderful job structuring the book so it had an ending. Since Valentino is still living, I was pleasantly surprised to feel some amount of closure (albeit mixed with curiosity) upon finishing the book.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book, and learned a lot, too.

Country of Origin by Don Lee

This book was recommended to me by Deena last June. She and I overlap somewhat with books, although she is more of a fan of mysteries than I am. Her comment on it was that she liked it, but it was "nothing spectacular." I think that's a fair assessment.

The book is about an American who disappears in Tokyo and the various people connected to her life. From the jacket, this book purports to be not only a good, old-fashioned mystery, but also a search for identity. I did not find that to be true. True, many of the characters were multi-racial and struggling with identity. And Lee did include some colorful descriptions of various groups within Japan. "The Japanese were yasashi, wet," he writes, "They stuck to one another in tribes like wet, glutinous rice. They were warm, gentle, emotional, whereas Westerners were dry and hard and individualistic, like thir rice, which fell apart into solitary grains."

But as a whole, the struggles with identity and race and background were not fully enough explored to make for good reading. The book was too pulpy to be an identity book and too poetic for a mystery. I was also distressed by some of the depictions of the sex trade in Japan, even though I'm not typically a book prude.

The narrative itself read quickly and the mystery aspect of the story was reasonably compelling. I also liked that as a mystery, it was possible to play along with the characters and start figuring out different aspects of the story.

I did enjoy the humor written into the book. The main character collects idioms incorrectly munged into Japanese, and her list of them is hilarious. I also appreciated how well-developed some of the characters were. Contained in one of their backstories was a great description of someone's thoughts about a huge mistake he made, "Occasionally he thought what had happened in Sao Paulo had changed him, had disrupted his development from the person he had wantd to be in to the person he was now..."

Overall, I think that this book needed to more fully commit to being either a great mystery or a great novel. I would most strongly compare this to another mystery I was not crazy about, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. However, I read a lot of novels set in other countries that address identity, so I'm open to the idea that I am spoiled that way.

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis

Let me start by saying that I loved this book.

When I read, I dog-ear the bottom corner of each page that I enjoy so I can return to them while writing my blog entries. For this book I started dog-ear-ring on page 45 and gave up on page 71 since it was nearly every page. I think I noticed this book on Slate.com's booklist, although once I started reading it, I realized I had also read excerpts from it in the New York Times Magazine a few months back.

The book interweaves two stories. One is of the aggressively rising salaries of the left tackle in football, tracing the history back to Lawrence Taylor's dominance as a defensive lineman. Now, if you are reading that sentence and don't know what a left tackle or defensive lineman is, don't despair. One of Lewis' gifts is his ability to explain what is going on in the strategy of a football play without dumbing it down. I started the book knowing just how the scoring works in football, but little else. By the end of the book, I had learned a significant amount about football, prompting me to wake up my ever-agreeable fiancee Webster one night and have him draw out all the players and their positions. Did you know that unlike baseball, the offensive and defensive players are different guys??

The second story Lewis tells is of the high school career of a black child named Michael growing up in inner city Memphis. "Big Mike" is discovered as a football prospect, and then adopted by an affluent white family and placed in a suburban Christian high school.

It's Mike's size that first attracts attention (although his agility and his memorization skills follow shortly after), "Hugh's next thought was that he misjudged the boy's mass. No human being who moved that quickly could possibly weigh as much as 300 pounds. 'That's when I had them weigh him,' said Hugh. 'One of the coaches took him into the gym and put him on the scale, but he overloaded the scale.' The team doctor drove him away and put him on what the Briarcrest coaches were later informed was a cattle scale: 344 pounds, it read. On the light side, for a cow, delightfully beefy for a hgih school sophomore football player. Especially one who could run."

Many issues around affirmative action, privilege, and education are themes throughout the book. Unlike other books I've read that cover the same subject matter, Lewis describes the situations incredibly clearly, and the ethical concerns are laid out for the reader with no prejudice in any particular direction. One way he does this is through his descriptions of the other people in the story, "Leigh Anne Tuohy [his adoptive mother] was trying to do for one boy what economists had been trying to do, with little success, for less developed countries for the last fifty years. Kick him out of one growth path and onto another."

In another passage, Lewis writes, "Sean [his adoptive father] was interested in poor jocks in the same way that a former diva might be interestd in opera singers, or a Jesuit scholar in debators. What he liked about them was that he knew how to help them. 'What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss,' he said, 'was what not to do: beat up a kid. It's easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing to do is to build him up.'"

I am still unsure of Lewis' opinion on the issues surrounding Michael's getting into college and subsequent college career, which is fine with me. As a mark of a good book, I am unsure of my own opinion on some of these issues as well. But I have not stopped thinking about him. I have nothing but praise for this book, and can't wait to read his baseball book, Moneyball. My only regret is that football season isn't for another several months, so I won't be able to apply what I learned in this book.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

This book was also on the New York Times list for 2006 (or was it Slate.com?). I really enjoyed the story and the cultural background that See so skillfully painted. It could have been just another "Ya-Ya sisterhood," or just a depiction of 19th century Hunan province, or just a coming-of-age story, but it was all of those things and more.

This story follows two "Old Sames" -- girls matched at a young age as soul mates based on the characters in their names and on the dates of their birth. As the narrator (Lily) says early on in the book, "How could we conceive of deep love, friendship, and everlasting commitment when we were only seven? We had not even met, and even if we had, we didn't understand those feelings one bit. They were just words I wrote, hoping that one day they would come true."

Old Sames are just one of the structured women's friendships mentioned in the book. Other characters are part of "sworn sisterhoods" after marriage as an alternative. A women's writing style called Nu Shu also played a central role in the story. Women wrote to each other in this poetic language. Lily and her Old Same pass a fan back and forth on which they correspond in Nu Shu.

The story begins when the girls are seven and follows them through their senior years, which in the 1800s in rural China is actually about 50. During their lifetimes, the girls have parallel experiences with footbinding, marriage, sexuality, the pressure to have sons, and the changing political (and thus economic) climate. See plays with fate and destiny through the book, leaving Lily to comment at one point, "But this is the nature of fate. You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you."

The scenes that describe the girls' footbinding are especially memorable. I had read about footbinding in the past, but the mechanics were explained in complete and grotesque detail. Also memorable were the relationships between the girls and their mothers-in-law...what they described as fair treatment sounded downright abusive to me. Later in the book, the women make a treacherous trek through the mountains during the Taiping Rebellion which has some unforgettable scenes.

My only negative criticism of the book is the occasional modern idiom that Lily used. Her voice sounded otherwise authentic, but I think the editing missed a few phrases. This surprised me, since the book was obviously well-researched and carefully thought out.

I would definitely recommend this book. Bring your passport -- you will be transported to 19th century China.

My Name Is Bill by Susan Cheever

I heard about this book on NPR, when Susan Cheever was being interviewed about a more recently published book. Having read several books about about addiction and recovery, I decided to learn a little more about the life of Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The first half of this book was about Bill's early life, and there were many characteristics of his upbringing that probably reinforced his alcoholic tendencies. He was a guy who strove for perfection, never felt comfortable in his own skin, and who had low self esteem and a mother with high expectations. Bill seemed to develop an alcoholism that was in part a product of the puritanical New England world he grew up in.

The later part of the book covered both Bill's evolution as an alcoholic (and ultimately recovering alcoholic) as well as the evolution of the organization that became Alcoholics Anonymous. There was a lot of administrative conflict within the organization which was discussed. As a business person I found the sections around how AA was conceived and the arguments around the mission of AA very interesting.

While the story was inspiring, I was not a fan of Cheever's writing style. She was too poetic at times, and sometimes it seemed like she was working too hard to tell a specific story. Early in the book, she told several anecdotes out of chronological order, which I did not like. These factors made me feel like I should have considered one of the other biographies about Bill that had been written. (I would definitely like to read Bill's wife's biography -- she was the founder of Al-anon.)

As someone whose main exposure to AA was through NYPD Blue episodes, I enjoyed learning about the spirit of the group and some of the thought behind it. I was interested to learn that Bill insisted on anonymity not just to protect the members, but also to protect the organization. There are strong connections between alcoholics and grandiosity, so anonymity removes the potential for fame. Bill himself even turned down an honorary degree from Yale to ensure the validity of AA.

I also enjoyed thinking about what makes meetings effective. Webster suggested it was knowing that you were not alone, and that you were answering to a room of people depending on you. In the book there was also a lot of discussion of the importance in AA of recovering alcoholics helping other people to get sober. There were several years while Bill was starting AA before it was successful when all it was doing was keeping him sober.

This book sparked my curiosity not only about Al-anon, but also to read about how the philosophy of AA translated to Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, and the other similar organizations. I was also interested to investigate Cheevers's dismissive treatment of whether AA works for non-religious people. I remember hearing about an organization that was atheistic rather than deistic (like AA) and wonder what percentage of alcoholics recover through the 12-step methods from AA specifically.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards

Finally, a book I liked reading. This one made it on to my booklist from the New York Times’ 2006 best-books list, I think.

Memory Keeper’s Daughter told the story of a couple who have twins, and the husband discovers that the daughter has Downs Syndrome. He decides to tell his wife that she died at birth and gives her away, ostensibly to live in an institution. However, the nurse charged with bringing her to the institution decides to keep her instead. So far we are on page 20, so I’m not ruining anything for you.

This book had a significant number of well-written characters, at least seven. Following their lives over thirty years is no small feat, but Edwards does a great job of it. And the book ends up being only marginally about Downs Syndrome, although it is worth mentioning that the attitudes towards D.S. in the 1960s and ‘70s portrayed in the book are disturbing. This book is about what all great books are about: love, betrayal, siblings, marriages, regret, and so on.

There were some great contrasts in this book, between the mothers of the babies (Caroline and Norah), the fathers of each of the children, the birth mother and her sister, and of course the children themselves as they grow up. I’ve been thinking a lot about how siblings can often reveal an alternate version of one’s self, a more extreme or less extreme picture of one’s fears and desires. This book takes that concept and applies it to all the parallel characters masterfully.

Caroline, the mother of the child with Downs, was probably my favorite character, and I think she is supposed to be. One of the things about her I loved is that she sees her struggles as a mother as specific to her child’s disability. It is clear to the reader (partially through the contrasts to Norah, the other mother) that these concerns are specific to mothering, not to mothering a child with Downs. As she learns this through the story, one cannot help but think about one’s own pains and examine whether they are unique to us or more universal.

There was also just some plain great writing in the book. At one point, a character's sister asks her, “Do you and David talk about big things or small things.” At another point, one of the characters "nodded, unable to speak above the sound of the river, the smell of its dark banks, the starts roaring everywhere, swirling, alive." Though this is not a short book, at times Edwards says a lot with a few carefully chosen words.

Towards the end of the book, Norah finds boxes of photographs that her husband had kept. "Norah glanced at the boxes of photographs, wanting to take that young woman she had been by the arm and shake her gently. Keep going, she wanted to tell her. Don't give up. Your life will be fine in the end."

And for many of the characters, it is.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

This book first came to my attention as an Amazon recommendation. I recognized it from the Barnes and Noble table that has the Oprah-esque trade paperbacks I usually enjoy. The Haftorah for my bat mitvah was about the city of Gilead, so I thought I might also have a connection to the book that way. Unfortunately, it’s probably my least favorite book in a long time.

Gilead is a novel written as a series of letters (or maybe one long letter) from a minister to his son, when the father finds out that he is dying. It is set in Iowa in the 1950's. The letter format is a device the author uses to enable the narrator to tell his life story; unfortunately for the book it is not believable that this man’s secrets and concerns would go into a letter to his son.

The first third of the book goes through the minister's life story slowly, weaving his family's stories with mundane events taking place in the present. I enjoyed this part of the book, expecting that it was properly preparing the reader for what he’d face later in life. Many of the stories were charming and some of them captured charaters with incredible detail.

"Once we baptized a litter of cats. They were dusty little barn cats just steady on their legs, the kind of waifish creatures that live their anonymouse lives keeping the mice down and have no interest in humans at all, except to avoid them. But the animals all seem to start out sociable, so we were always pleased to find new kittens prowling out of whatever cranny their mother had tried to hide them in, as ready to play we we were. It occurred to one of the girls to swaddle them up in a doll's dress--there was only one dress, which was just as well since the cats could hardly tolerate a moment in it and would have to have been unswaddled as soon as they were christened in any case. I myself moistened their brow, repeating the full Trinitarian formula."

However, at about the third-mark, the narrator begins to hint at bad feelings he has towards his best friend’s grown son, Jack. The focus of the plot in the remainder of the book is foreshadowing the events Jack is involved in and finally telling his son (and the reader) what they are. While the actual story about Jack was compelling and surprising and everything you’d want it to be, its placement in a letter someone else was writing was not well done. And the supposed suspense around what it was, the supposed hesitancy the narrator had about telling his son the story, did not achieve anything.

This is the second book in a row that I’ve commented had the reader wondering about some future bad thing that was going to happen through most of the book. In both cases, the focus the author put on this anticipation and buildup was not enjoyable to read. It’s not a fundamentally flawed style, for example, God of Small Things does this quite effectively. But particularly in Gilead it had me impatient, not engaged.

One thing I did like about the book was the actual narrator. He comes across as a humble, pleasant, kind man. Though fictional, he restored a little faith in me that in fact there is a way for religion to be a completely positive force in the world. He reminds me of a minister I once met on a plane to Kansas. That said, the book was hardly worth the read just for the narrator.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

This was an unusual book, which reminded me almost immediately of Atwood’s The Handmaiden’s Tale. Lisa Olin and Sara Coe each recommended this one to me, so it quickly rose the top of the to-be-read list. I had never read Remains of the Day by Ishiguro but I ignored my standard guilt at skipping a classic by the same author and plucked NLMG off the shelf at the library.

As Lisa said when she recommended it, the book is good but is not about what’s on the book jacket. I’m going to try to write about the book without giving away the major pieces of the plot. It’s ironic, or coincidental, or something, because in the book, the characters are referred to as having been “told but not told” about the unusual circumstances under which they live.

I would categorize this book as “mainstream science fiction,” in that it is science fiction incidentally not primarily. (I’d also categorize The Time Travelers Wife and a childhood favorite Girl with the Silver Eyes similarly. Even Passages, which probably falls more squarely in the fantasy realm could be described this way too.) There are elements of the book that are not possible with today’s science and medicine but these aspects of the story are juxtaposed with people who live in a society that is otherwise recognizable as ours. Certainly, social commentary emerges. One of the things Ishiguro does quite well is to effortlessly teach the reader his specialized vocabulary for this alternate world. Only in Handmaiden and perhaps Everything is Illuminated have I seen language used this way this well.

The book follows three main characters, Kath (the narrator), Tommy, and Ruth, starting when they are all students at Hailsham, ostensibly an idyllic boarding school. There are clear, well-written moments of adolescent angst; the manipulation and volatility of some of the characters also felt extremely accurate. I also related to the following passage, highlighting the importance of certain possessions:

"I don't know if you had collections where you were. When you came across old students from Hailsham, you always find them, sooner or later, getting nostalgic about their collections...You each had a wooden chest with your name on it, which you kept under your bed and filled with your possessions--the stuff you acquired from the Sales or the Exchanges. I can remember one or two students not bothering much with their collections, but most of us took enormous care, bringing things out to display, putting other things away carefully."

At first it is easy to read those personality characteristics as standard pre-teen behavior but as the book progresses, additional underlying forces emerge that explain the behavior more fully. As the narrator comments, the students are "...waiting for the moment when you realise you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you--of how you were brought into this world and why--and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs." Waiting and anticipation was a strong theme in this book. At a later point in the story, the narrator comments, "it was like she'd been waiting and waiting for me to do something to her and she thought the time had come now."

The characters know, having been "told but not told," that something ominous is coming. In one passage, Tommy is describing a new type of animal he had begun to draw, unconsciously describing society's responsibility to him:

"If you make them tiny, and you have to because the pages are only about this big, then everything changes. It's like they come to life by themselves. Then you have to draw in all these different details for them. You have to think about how they'd protect themselves, how they'd reach things."

There were some choices Ishiguro made around Kath's voice that I question. Given his (the author’s) recognition for excellent writing, I can only presume that the tone of her voice is intentional. However, the lack of emotional connection that Kath has in telling the story is surprising and not entirely justified from within the story. She also has a habit that I can only describe as annoying where she ends each chapter with a “teaser” such as, "We started to walk back toward the main house then and I waited for her to explain what she meant, but she didn't. I found out though over the next several days." In some ways, this mirrors the imperfect information that the characters have about their own lives, but it didn’t draw me in to her story as I think it was supposed to.

I hesitate to even comment on the climax because I don't want to give it away. I'll limit my comments to the following: the climactic moments are wonderful and horrible, and a scary commentary on the myths we create for ourselves.

I struggled while I was reading this book because of my problems with the narrator. However, having written about it here I appreciate the story and the themes more. As I felt after seeing The Sixth Sense , I want to go back and read it again knowing the ending. That's probably the best recommendation I can give a book.