Tomato Girl by Jayne Pupek

This book was okay. It was about an 11-year-old girl growing up in the South. She starts to notice her father's increasingly friendly relationship with the "tomato girl" - the girl who sells tomatoes to his store. As she copes with no longer being the most important woman in her father's life, she also begins to lose her mother to mental illness.

The narrator's voice was memorable...precocious and caught between wanting to take care of her mother and wanting her father to take care of her. She also goes through the pain of discovering the meaning behind the things that she sees going on between her father and the Tomato Girl. It was sad to see how lost the narrator was as an 11-year-old and how she didn't know (as the reader did) that these were not things someone her age should have to deal with herself.

However, I didn't love reading the book. I didn't find myself rooting for the narrator consistently and I didn't think the writing was anything special.

Wally Lamb is back!

I just learned that Wally Lamb has a new book coming out in November. Hooray! I found his recent compilations of essays by women prisoners a poor replacement for his excellent fiction.

Books Galore!

A few weeks ago Jo lent me Devil in the White City which she really loved. I also went on a request-apalooza on the library's website. I took the day off for Rosh Hashonah last week and went to the library after synagogue. Yesterday, Web and I went to Borders and I splurged on a book on the clearance rack by Mario Vargas Llosa and a new book called The Zookeeper's Wife.

So...I have a lot of reading to do all of a sudden!

The Birthdays by Heidi Pitlor

This book was about three siblings all relating to pregnancy. One is a single woman, accidentally pregnant, one has a wife pregnant with twins through IVF, and one has a wife pregnant from a donor. The family convenes for their father's birthday for a long weekend. The book follows their struggles coping with relationships and with their pregnancies. The author did a good job of explaining each of the characters' personalities, incorporating stories of their shared childhood.

It was a quick read and nothing special, but I was interested to know what would happen to the characters.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

This is the last of the fiction books I had bought for Aruba. It was also one of the greatest books I had read in a while. Every now and then I miss a book that America loves (for example Life of Pi) and this is one of those.

This book is narrated by an old man in a nursing home. He is watching a circus get set up in his town and recalling his life in as a worker in a circus during the Great Depression. I loved the story and how well it was written. I knew nothing about circus life and felt like it was reading about life in a different country. I also appreciated learning about life during the Great Depression. Clearly, Gruen did an incredible amount of research on these topics. Finally, the way the past and present were woven together was better than in any fiction I've read recently.

Highly recommended!

The Gravediggers Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates

I had never read anything by Joyce Carol Oates which is kind of strange, given how prolific she is and how much of a staple American author she is. I picked this one up for our trip to Aruba, but just got to it now.

Reading this book was ok, I liked it but did not love it. In retrospect, however, I think it's really well-written with an exceptionally good character portrait of the main character Rebecca. Rebecca is the daughter of immigrants who flee WWII and end up in upstate New York. Her father, a mean, unhappy man, becomes the town gravedigger. His personality haunts her for her entire life, including her choice of partner and style of raising of her son.

It was not easy to read in that some terrible things happen to Rebecca, and Oates does a good job of creating tension. But it is a memorable book and I'd be interested in reading other books by Oates.

Inheritance of Loss by Kirin Desai

This book had been on my list for a while and I thought it was one of those classics that I would love once I got into it. I wouldn't say I loved but I can see why it is so well-respected.

The book follows the lives of a small village of people living in India, near the Nepali border. As the politics around them heat up into unrest and war, the lives of these people begin to unravel in parallel. One of them has a son who has immigrated to the U.S., and his life there is no better.

Well-written with intriguing characters, this book kept my attention. I thought it was a great "time and place" book, with excellent descriptions of both people and settings.

The Groom to Have Been by Saher Alam

This was the first of five books I bought for our trip to Aruba. I bought it from the 2-for-1 table at Borders, and I think I had heard about it on NPR. I finished this on our first day of vacation. It was pretty well written and kept my attention.

The book was about a Muslim Indian who grew up in Canada. He is reasonably assimilated into Canadian (and American) culture but agrees to let his parents arrange his marriage. Just when he begins all the preparations for his marriage, he begins to see a family friend in a different light and wonders if he should be with her instead.

I didn't find the book that different from other similarly-themed books I've read. About forty pages from the end, I thought to myself, "he could end up with either girl and it would not be unpredictable." But I enjoyed learning a bit more about Muslim Indians, and Alam added a tasteful backdrop of 9/11 to the story that I appreciated. A good read, but nothing unusually special.

Flash Forward by Robert Sawyer

I was unexpectedly downtown and decided to try Wagamama for dinner. Not wanting to eat alone, I popped into Borders and picked this book up for company. I still have not read the third book in Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, but Borders didn't have it.

Flash Forward was as good as Sawyer's other books. It was a quick read with interesting plot, a little romance, and compelling characters. The book is about a phenomenon that a group of scientists cause accidentally. The phenomenon brings everyone in the world forward twenty years and gives them a short view of their lives then returns them to the present. The majority of the book focuses on how each of the main character copes with knowing where they think they'll be in twenty years.

Again, Sawyer has written a fun book, sci-fi only incidentally. It was less social commentary and more commentary on controlling our own destinies. Either way, enjoyable.

Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

Webster's parents (now my inlaws!!) gave me this for Christmas last year and I just got around to it. After the baseball book I was feeling kind of uninspired about reading and thought this would get me back on track. Russo's Empire Falls had been one of my favorites.

Unfortunately this book did not hold my attention quite as well. It was about a man looking back at his life, focusing on his childhood relationships with a best friend and a girlfriend. The girlfriend becomes his wife and the best friend becomes estranged from the couple, and the book switches between past and present to detail how this threesome ends up where they are. Several marriages were explored, and the action takes place both in the U.S. as well as Italy.

Russo's writing is consistent: deeply-developed characters and great descriptions of time and place. However, the book was not as well-formed as Russo's other books and I didn't like the characters enough. Overall, not a win for me.

The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World by Joshua Prager

I liked this book, but wow, was it detailed. It took me weeks to get through (which is unusual for me) and at times I must admit to skimming some pages.

The story is about the 1951 National League pennant race where Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit a home run off Ralph Branca of the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the playoff game that brought the Giants into the World Series. Prager gives a great history of baseball in telling the story, describing well the role baseball played in America's psyche, particularly in New York.

One theme he explores is the sign-stealing that may have enabled Bobby Thomson's home run. His style was to stipulate early in the book that there was spying, then weave extensive biographical information about all the characters in the story, including the electrician who first set up the sign-stealing system and the bat boy who slapped hands with Thomson after his homer. Prager also focused on the archtypes of the "hero and goat" that Thomson and Branca took on, following their lives after the game.

Overall, I liked the book and found many of the themes very accessible. Sign-stealing brought to mind last season's Patriots. And Ralph Branca became to Brooklyn what Bill Buckner had been to Boston. I loved how well Prager described New York's attachment to baseball. I just thought the detail in some cases was a little overwhelming and I could have done without the 100+ pages of endnotes as an airport read.

Going back to the library

I guess my eyes were bigger than ... err ... my eyes or something because I have some books going back to the library today I wish I had read:

Evening is the Whole Day
Inheritence of Loss

Also, a disappointing Experiment in Love by the usually-dependable Hilary Mantel, and a book about Kevin Mitnick called The Fugitive Game that I thought would be awesome but sucked.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin

This book has inspired me to once again keep track of promising books I return to the library unread, since this book is one I have taken out three times and finally read this time 'round.

The memoir is about a white man who grew up in Zimbabwe in the 1960s and '70s. He leaves Zimbabwe as an adult, working for various news magazines and media outlets in Europe and the United States. This story picks up as his parents are getting older and require more attention as their health fails, and, in parallel, Zimbabwe under the rule of Mugabe begins to fall apart. Godwin weaves stories of his childhood and current-day life along with a history of Zimbabwe and its current state.

Incredibly well-written, poignant, and educational, this may be one of the best things I've read of late.

The Woman who Can't Forget by Jill Price

I had high hopes for this book. Jill Price is a woman with a really unusual memory - given any event, she can tell you the date of it, and given any date, she can tell you in complete detail what she did - for the past thirty years. I expected this book to be about the neuroscience experiments she was involved in at various labs, and perhaps about how she developed coping mechanisms over time. Well boo on me for wanting a scientific book. Because this is a whiny memoir.

Price spends some of the book detailing her sessions with scientists at UCal to better understand her disorder, but the majority of the book is about how difficult her life is because of her memory. Something about the tone of the book and her voice made it difficult for me to muster up any empathy towards her. I did feel like she probably had other developmental problems other than just her extreme memory, and that the people in her life should have protected her better from writing this book. I felt disgusted when she met a man online (who she later married) who called her "hun" in their first IM - so weird.

Most importantly, I didn't think that many of the issues she recounted were attributable to her disorder, and thus she was just another person wanting to self-importantly write about how hard her life is. Her social anxiety and issues with attachment were no different from other memoirists' depictions, certainly not enough to justify a book about her.

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood

I absolutely loved reading this book, so much so that I even read a couple pages one day during an incredibly boring conference call. John Wood writes a fascinating memoir of leaving his high-power job at Microsoft in favor of starting a non-profit organization. He founded the non-profit Room to Read after a visit to Nepal, and several years later it is thriving with millions of dollars of grants and programs in several countries.

Room to Read's purpose is to set up libraries and schools in underserved countries. John Wood is courageous, bright, and a great combination of dreamer and executor. Early in the book, he starts with a grass-roots effort to get books to Nepal. As time goes on, he uses all his skills and all his connections to make Room to Read a successful business, and it is as interesting to read as an entrepreneurial book as it is a humanitarian one. I finished this book feeling both ashamed and inspired.