Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Jo recommended this to me as one of her recent favorites. They story is set in the future where we earthlings are fighting an intergalactic enemy. The army on Earth recruits the best and brightest children to try and build its forces. This book follows the story of a young boy named Ender as he goes through the army training regiment.

Ender is a sympathetic and pleasant character to follow. Occasionally, his behaviors and thoughts seem unusually advanced for his age. Initially, he struggles with homesickness, and as he gets older, he also finds ethical dilemmas and challenges in being an effective leader.

While I didn't think this book was exceptionally unique, perhaps it was in 1977 when it was first released. Social commentary, common to most good science fiction, presented in the book, but I didn't find anything unusual about it. Mostly, he comments on how we perceive war as both serious and as a game. He also had some strong comments on advanced situations we put children in. Amusingly, Card makes reference to several futuristic technologies that today we would consider "email" and "IM".

Overall the book kept my attention and I would read more by Card.

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown

Just in time for the long Thanksgiving weekend, this was a great "beach read." It wasn't strictly chick-lit in that it was more complex than Shopaholic or Devil Wears Prada, but it wasn't literature either.

The story starts on what should be a victorious moment for Janice whose husband's company IPOs for billions of dollars. Instead, she is served divorce papers the same morning. Her younger daughter, Lizzie, is struggling with adolescence and her older daughter, Margaret, is finding her fledgling magazine career suddenly overwhelming. The three women spend the summer together coping with their respective problems.

This book could have been a significant examination of women's lives when they fall apart. It could have been a hilarious story of plotted vindication. Instead it was somewhere in between - more colorful romp than serious analysis, but complex nonetheless. Certain scenes seemed intentionally pulpy in a satiric way, but they came across to me as surreal and vivid, not as social commentary.

One major disappointment I had reading this book was that the men were poorly created characters - nearly all of them were one-dimensional and completely villainous. While there was a "girl power" theme to the book, having positive men in the story wouldn't have threatened that theme and would have made it more realistic. The women were better developed, in some ways daring and in other ways dreadfully predictable. Certainly character development was not the best part of the book.

Still, I was interested to read through to the end. At the book's conclusion, Janice seems to find her stride, but still has tactical problems in her life to address. Margaret has a few major issues to work out, but has a lot of opportunity in front of her too. Fittingly, young Lizzie seems to be at the precipice of starting completely fresh - which is what the reader wants for her.

Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg

I like to think that is compassion and not a macabre desire to watch personal car wrecks that brings me to read so many books on mental illness. Unlike books by Caroline Knapp and Elizabeth Wurtzel, Hurry Down Sunshine chronicles the onset of mental illness from the point of view of the patient's father. I expected this to be similarly enlightening as The Addict, which was told from the doctor's point of view, but instead found it to be more complex. In retrospect, that makes sense - Dr. Stein's book is about his career, about experience and treatment. Greenberg's story is no more personal than Stein's, but it is the first time he is going through any of this so it is raw in a way The Addict is not.

Simply, Greenberg's daughter Sally has her first manic episode as a teenager with few warning signs. One day she is a creative, offbeat kid, and the next she is hurriedly brought to the ER and then hospitalized for what is later diagnosed as bipolar disorder. He chronicles Sally's fight back to health over her summer vacation from school. He touches on his relationship with both his wife and his ex-wife, both of whom play prominent roles in her recovery. Also in his narrative are interactions with his brother, also suffering from mental illness.

I was surprised by what seemed like an unsophisticated approach toward his daughter's healthcare. Perhaps it was the combination of the author's last name coupled with the New York setting, but I expected the neurotic Jewish approach to illness that I grew up with: find the best doctor possible, then agonize endlessly about his credentials and treatment, culminating in aggressive doubt and hushed second and third opinions. Instead, Greenberg entrusts Sally to an inpatient facility he knows nothing about, then enrolls her in an outpatient program he knows nothing about. I empathize with Greenberg's being grateful for whatever he can find with immediacy that helps her. In every way, he clearly desired the best path towards healing for Sally - I was just caught off-guard by an aspect of the narrative I expected to read about just not existing in his experience.

In other places, I was frustrated by parts of the story I wanted to know more about that he left out. For example, there was a short section on his lack of healthcare but he does not return to discuss the particulars of how he addresses Sally's illness financially. I suppose there is a relationship between the author and the reader where he balances what he wants to tell me with what I want to read. But typically with memoirs I am more aligned with the author than I was here. Perhaps that is indicative of this being a (generous and brave!) therapeutic activity for Greenberg. Or perhaps it is my expectation of a familiar narrative not being fulfilled.

That aside, this book was fascinatingly honest. I am appreciative of Greenberg's openness in sharing his story.

In a Perfect World by Laura Kasischke

I received this book from Book Club Girl's Blog, and read it in preparation for an online book club discussion scheduled for next week. It was OK, not great. I read it quickly and was interested in the story the entire time. What was disappointing was that it relied heavily on familiar archetypes for characters: a widowed pilot with three children who marries a flight attendant anxious for a family. She has a snarky mother, he has a bratty teenage daughter and a cute 6-year-old son. You could probably write the general narrative of the book just based on that description.

There was, thankfully, a large component of the book that was not predictable. In the backdrop early in the book, an epidemic of "Phoenix Flu" spreads across America. Initially, it seems to have the severity of an H1N1-like disease, then starts to impact America sharply. As it becomes more serious, Americans are banned from most other countries, complicating the pilot's ability to fly commerically. Then parts of the healthcare system and infrastructure begin to break down; certain celebrities die from Phoenix Flu. And it continues to debilitate the country.

This twist was fascinating because it was a woman's point of view on the anarchic demise of a society. Most stories like this, classically A Canticle for Leibowitz and modernly The Road or Oryx and Crake, take a masculine point of view with fighting, violence, and anger. While the protagonist in this book certainly fights for survival with her family, she also fights for emotional stability. She describes her reaction to the increasingly desperate situations she faces practically and introspectively, but also shares moments of grief and pain and sadness that I don't see in the other pieces. Her desire for connection and satisfaction of spitirual needs is much more present than in the masculine equivalents.

I was appreciative of this alternate point of view, but it didn't overcome my objections to the book: the cliches were too prominent and the plot too predictable. A decent airplane read, though if the guy next to you starts to cough, you'll want to switch to Sky Mall.

Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner

I really enjoyed reading this book. It was a fictional account of an enclave of Americans living in Cuba in the late 1950's. Leading up to Castro's rise to power, the book followed several families' stories as they came to Cuba as employees of United Fruit and Nicaro Nickel Mine.

Large sections of this book were narrated by two adolescents whose parents worked for these companies. Precocious and observant, they provided a candid view into the double standards around race and class between the Americans and the Cubans. The reader also sees how ignorant the Americans are around the magnitude of the political situation, both nationally and locally. There are descriptions of cocktail parties right out of "Desperate Housewives", and of Parisian-style ice cream parlors, representing a lifestyle that is a sharp contrast to what is happening in most of the country at the time.

There are other narrators who take smaller parts of the story, most notably a dancer at a cabaret who is active in the political underground and her lover, an international drifter. Their sections of the story evoke very strong atmospheres also, in the steamy cabaret, the ill-run rebel camps, and the increasingly dangerous city. Notably, the cabaret dancer is named "Rachel Z" in the book, perhaps a tip of the author's hat to her place in her own family's Cuban story.

What I liked most about this book was that it was not told in strict chronological order. As each narrator took over, time shifted, sometimes back and sometimes forward. At several points, their stories overlapped and the same moment was described from different vantage points, sometimes to my surprise. This kept several of my fingers in different chapters of the book as I was reading, eager to compare these fragments to each other to understand better what Kushner was trying to say about each character.

I have not read much set in Cuba and this was a delightful introduction and a well-preserved place and time.

TBR

Every reader has a TBR - to be read - pile. The other night, I assembled mine. Ouch.

These are just the books that I own (or have borrowed) and actively want to read. Here's what my pile looks like for now:

Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Seeing by Jose Saramago
The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry
Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut
Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
The Theory of Everything by Stephen Hawking
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
The Fourth Hand by John Irving
World Without End by Ken Follett
The Unforgiving Minute by Craig Mullaney
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Here's what I did not pull down from my bookshelves:

1. Books I've started and mean to go back to (e.g., The Millennium Problems by Keith Devlin, A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel and Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman)
2. Books that are technically Webster's but sounded interesting enough for me to want to read (e.g., Nonzero by Robert Wright, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burough and John Heltar)

3. Most of the books on the "On Deck" list at the right that have been recommended to me but I haven't purchased.

I was far too overwhelmed to look at all those books in a single list at once!

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Last time I was in Florida, Mom and I went shopping at Pembroke Pines, a beautiful outdoor mall with a huge Barnes and Noble. While browsing, I noticed that Adichie, whose Half a Yellow Sun I had enjoyed earlier this year, had released a new collection of short stories.

I really enjoyed this book. I don't read many short story collections and didn't connect with Olive Kitteridge. But this was really a spectacular effort and probably a better book than Half a Yellow Sun. Adichie writes very crisply - in roughly ten pages each, she creates a set of independent stories about both modern-day Nigeria and Nigerians living in America. I thought she created characters with more depth and emotion than in her HaYS, despite having less real estate per character.


I also liked how the stories were not connected - I didn't notice any characters or situations even subtly referring to each other. Some stories were told in first person, some in third person, and one is even told in second-person narrative, which is quite unique. She represents both men and women, of all age groups. And she represents people who are satisfied and those are unhappy, on both sides of the ocean. But those differences in tone and style didn't leave with me feeling like I had read a carelessly thrown-together collection of unrelated stories. On the contrary, Adiche used this wide variety of situations and characters to provide a single worldview of Nigeria as a country with a rich history and a complex set of interactions with the 'Western' world.

Great read.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

This book, the second mainstream novel by Time Traveler's Wife author Audrey Niffenegger, is probably the book I was most looking forward to reading this year. This book did not immediately strike me as strongly as TTW did - I was a third of the way through the book before I actually cared about what was happening. But after finishing the book I wonder if it actually is more of a masterpiece than TTW - the premise is equally enchanting and there were more characters to care about. I don't think TTW was a great book purely because of its unusual premise but that certainly was the most notable and creative aspect of the book. Her Fearful Symmetry is different - a more subtle achievement.

The story is about a set of twins who inherit a flat in London from their aunt, who is their mother's estranged twin. The condition upon their living there is that they must stay for a year and their parents cannot visit them there. They decide to go and this book chronicles their time there.

The twins meet their aunt's boyfriend who lives in the flat below them and works at a nearby cemetery, as well as her hermit neighbor who lives in the flat above. They live in her apartment with all her books and clothes and other possessions, and begin to get used to London. Telling you any more would be unfair - suffice it to say, the girls and the reader have a lot to learn about their aunt and their mother.

If I have a criticism of the book, it's around the slow start. Niffenegger spent a little too much time building up the mysteries and questions without moving the plot along enough - from the book jacket we already know about the will and the flat, but it's page 64 when something interesting finally happens and nearly page 150 until things get moving. The structure reminded me a bit of TTW - I remember that book requiring 50-60 pages until I had a grasp of what was going on. Here, nothing is that is difficult to follow, but I was similarly frustrated waiting for the book to 'start'.

That aside, the book was still one of my favorites this year. The story, once it got started, was very unusual and kept my attention. I had that "can't put it down/want to savor it" conflict for the entire second half. The writing was great; the cast, both the twins and the other major characters, was compelling. And both the climax and denouement were well worth it. I remember that about TTW too - Niffenegger takes care to make every last word of the book count, not just tie up loose ends in the last few pages.

I will definitely be recommending this one for a while.

A Guide to the Birds of East Africa by Nicholas Drayson

This was a delightful read. I had heard about this book in a few different reviews and it seemed like it would be similar to Alexander McCall Smith's Ladies' Detective Agency books.
I was pleasantly surprised to find it accessible and quick, like Smith's books, but less like a fable.

The story follows a group of birdwatchers in Kenya. One man in the birdwatching group falls in love with the group leader and tries to muster up the courage to ask her out. As he is preparing, a nemesis of his from high school returns to the city and sets his sights on the same woman. To determine who should get to date her, their friends design a hilarious contest around birds.

I really like how Drayson made the drama of the contest something that I could relate to and get invested in, despite my complete lack of knowledge of birdwatching. I also liked how funny the book was - there were several parts of the story where I chuckled out loud. Finally, I appreciated how multi-dimensional his characters seemed, even when he used just a paragraph or short anecdote to describe them.

Was it an accurate representation of modern-day Kenya? It was hard to say. Like Smith, Drayson created a set of situations that seemed timeless - there were cars and telephones, and mention of AIDS, but no other markers that indicated the decade in which the story was set.

As to who wins the contest? You'll have to read it to find out.

Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All by Christina Thompson

This book catches everyone's attention with its title, taken from Darwin's exaggerated account of Captain's Cook's first interaction with the Maori people. The book tells two stories: one is of the author falling in love with a Maori man while doing post-graduate research in New Zealand, and the other is of the explorers of the 17th and 18th centuries and their interactions with the indigenous people of New Zealand. The parallel is well-done.

Thompson did a good job balancing both stories. Her own life is fascinating, as she and her eventual husband adjust to life together while they are living all over the world. The historical pieces held my attention equally - Thompson uses a combination of letters, historical documents, and other books to put together a coherent and reasonably complete account of several hundreds' years worth of interactions between Europeans and Maoris. And I wasn't bored.

Earlier this year I read Paradise Lost and that was an interesting background for this book. The tragedies on Pitcairn Island detailed in Paradise Lost had their genesis in the clash between Europeans and indigenous people - a theme Thompson returns to several times in her narrative. Another point of reference I had was Hulme's The Bone People, which I had read several years ago - the fictional account of a small group of Maori. Thompson's description of her husband and his extended family didn't come right out of The Bone People but was not inharmonious with it either. Together, these three books were interesting to think of together in learning a little something about that part of the world.

Even taken alone, Thompson's book was a good read - serious scholarly work to be sure, but also personal, making a good combination.

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See

A few years ago, I enjoyed See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, so when Shanghai Girls came out I put it on my library queue. Yes, I know the cool kids have Netflix queues, but I have a library queue. In any case, I shouldn't have been in such a rush because it was not one of the best things I've read this year.

The story follows two sisters who grow up in Shanghai in the mid 1930's with every privilege. Suddenly, their father is bankrupted and he promises them to Chinese men living in the U.S. to pay off his debt. Young, naive, and reluctant, they go to America and their lives change completely.

While See's writing is very good and the story moved quickly, I didn't get that 'into' the book. The narrator, who is the older sister, had a detached style of storytelling. While this may have been an attempt to create a character who protected herself by being unemotional, it ended up creating a character who I didn't care enough about. There were also a few parts of the book where ostensibly large secrets were revealed, but they weren't surprising to me at all.

What kept me most interested in the book was the descriptions of the environs in which the sisters lived, both in Shanghai and in Los Angeles. See did a great job of describing scenes on the street, interiors of stores and restaurants, and details around everyday life that transported me to the settings she was describing. In Shanghai, it was the upper-class life the girls lived, and in Los Angeles it was the tourist-friendly Chinatown that was alien to the Chinese characters. I wish See had made the characters and story as compelling as the settings were.

Assorted Nuts by Sandy Bax

Disclosure: The author of this book is someone I know, and some of the people in her story are close friends of mine. This made it hard to be objective -- but it's fair to say that this book stands out as incredibly honest and, at times, side-splittingly funny among what I've read this year. It's not a perfect book but I am awed that someone I know could have written an entire book from scratch just because one day she sat down and decided to start doing it. I am also flattered to have received a pre-release copy which really made me feel like a serious book critic.


The book is a memoir, one that is built around the author's daughter's wedding, but told almost entirely in flashbacks. Bax covers a range of topics, including her childhood, several marriages, having a child, substance abuse, and breast cancer. Nothing is too private for Bax to share in the book, which is probably her most important characteristic as an author - her complete transparency in telling the stories with all their details. Bax's voice is clear throughout, and knowing her, I know it's authentic. I found myself laughing out loud (to the chagrin of a car full of Amtrak passengers) at several parts, and appreciating how important humor had been to Bax throughout her life.


Bax is a great storyteller which is not true of every memoirist. There are reflective parts of the book where my attention wandered a little but I was always drawn back in by the next set of anecdotes, fresh and cleverly told. From stories about her childhood with her siblings to later interactions with her ailing mother (and everything in between), she has a way of telling a story that is powerful: the story represents a particular incident but also encapsulates a stage of her life in just a few paragraphs.


If there's one thing about the book I would have wanted to be different it's that certain parts of the book (most notably Bax's childhood and first marriage) were told slowly with plenty of detail while other pieces (such as the sections on breast cancer and alcoholism) were given proportionally shorter airtime. Given the bravery of the author in sharing intimate details, perhaps it was easier to write at length about the parts of her life that had happened longer ago. Whatever the case, I was invested enough in the story and the journey she was going through that I could have read an entire book about her life through her daughter's birth, then another book about the more recent years.


That said, the structure of the book, as a series of trips into different parts of her life as she's reflecting on all of this at her daughter's wedding, is a nice way for her to cover a lot of material without needing tell a continuous narrative. Now, I happen to know that Sandy just became a grandmother - again. Hopefully she is taking some notes on the experience that will one day become a sequel - may I suggest A Little Nuts - about the grandkids.



Congratulations, Sandy.

The Strand Bookstore

Web and I got to New York Saturday around 3 and headed down to Union Square. We checked out the farmer's market then went to the Strand Bookstore - famous for having "18 miles of books".

And it felt like we walked through all the 18 miles! The first floor had a great selection of tables laid out with popular books and the Strand's customers' top 80 books. (Interestingly, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Wells, which I had never heard of but Jo recently recommended was among the top 80.) It was my first look at Eggers' Wild Things with its furry cover. Also on the first floor was a huge selection of cookbooks and fiction. I could have moved in there. The basement and third floor had non-fiction, including huge sections on art and design. Each major section had a table for the top books in that section, an option I really liked. They seemed to intersperse New and Used books in all the sections.

The top floor, only accessible by elevator, had been recommended to me by Kung...it had special editions and rare books. The first thing we both noticed getting off the elevator was the delightfully musty smell of old books. It was fun to see unedited galleys and very old editions. It was obvious that serious work went on there assessing and repairing books.

Of course we bought two books from downstairs: Seeing by Jose Saramago (the sequel to Blindness), and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Web's lucky he got me to leave the store at all.

City of Refuge by Tom Piazza

I noticed this book reviewed on one of the book blogs I read and bumped it up in the queue since I had just read Eggers' Zeiton and wanted to compare the two stories about New Orleans. While Eggers' was non-fiction and this was a novel, I came out of the two books with reversed reactions - Eggers told a story while Piazza's best accomplishment with this book was a reasonably comprehensive view of New Orleans in the months after Katrina.

Surprisingly, reading this book felt much more like reading non-fiction. There were two families whose lives the book followed and certainly their stories were compelling, but it was the city of New Orleans itself that he seemed to take the most care in characterizing. The characters were reasonably predictable in their concerns and their conflicts, and he made some easy choices: for example, making one of the families affluent and white while the other was poor and black, and making one of the main characters a newspaper reporter. But I forgave Piazza his trite setup for his portrait of the pure devastation and ruin that New Orleans experienced.

During Hurricane Katrina, Web and I had been traveling in Argentina. Skillfully avoiding televisions and newspapers to fully immerse ourselves in the culture there, we had little idea what was going on at home until we got back about a week after the storm. It was hard to understand how bad things were, and completely surreal to believe it was going on in the United States. Even reading this book I had a hard time believing that our government really reacted this poorly, and I felt shame reading the descriptions of the city and how it was that so many people lost their lives.

When I chose to read the book I was hoping for more of a story with characters I cared about, but I value what I got out of the book - a sad education on the before and after of New Orleans, with a cautiously optimistic view of the rebuilding that continues today. Eggers says in his forward that he did not intend to provide a comprehensive survey of Katrina, but Piazza may have succeeded in doing this. Ironically, the line between non-fiction and fiction that has been subject to much discussion in literary circles lately (and that has historically been navigated carefully by Eggers) seems to have been toyed with by Piazza too - his characters are composites of so many of the both heartbreaking and uplifting stories that we've heard in the years since Katrina, the situations all potentially leads for stories in the New York Times or Newsweek.

I'm not sure that I would say I liked this book more or less than Zeiton - I liked both of them, and neither was what I expected. Together, they gave me a multi-dimensional view of an important chapter in our recent history.

The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos by Margaret Mascarenhas

I think this is one of the best books I've read this year. The backdrop of the story is a friendship between two girls, Lily and Irene, who are growing up in Venezuela during the revolution. Irene disappears while they are on vacation and fifteen years later, Lily finds herself on bedrest towards the end of her first pregnancy wondering what happened to her friend.

The book is told from alternating points of view, forming a complete story through several different narrators who each take one chapter. Irene's fate is revealed at the end but it was easy to forget that as the main theme because Mascarenhas weaves several other compelling stories and characters into the book. There are numerous love stories, glimpses into revolution politics, and native Venezuelan folklore all centered around this family and, tangentially, around what may have happened to Irene. Some of the narrators are unexpected - they seem to be minor characters - and it is not until pretty far into the book that certain connections between people are made.

This book also felt like a classic South American novel - some magical realism, some political statements, and at the heart of it, excellent storytelling. There was a style that made many of the chapters seem like someone telling me a story - I didn't like all the characters but I did grow to understand most of them.

I'm surprised this book did not get more exposure, but I'm glad I didn't let that dissuade me from giving it a try.