American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Meredith recommended this book to me - great pick! Sittenfeld's (author Prep and Man of My Dreams) novel is loosely based on Laura Bush's life. The story follows a young woman (Alice Lindgren) from her childhood through middle age, culminating in her husband's (Charlie Blackwell) becoming president of the United States.

The first three-quarters of the book was a careful examination of relationships and marriage. Alice is a likable narrator. One of the reasons I didn't read this book immediately when Mer recommended it is that I was taking a break from everything Bush, along with the rest of the country. But Alice is a protagonist for whom I was rooting - through tragedies in her young life to a crazy weekend meeting her inlaws-to-be for the first time to her relationship with her on-again off-again best friend, she is a sympathetic character. She grows up and marries Charlie, discovering how imperfect he is but also how to keep her marriage together. Having just celebrated my 9th anniversary with Webster (only one of those married, for those of you keeping score) it made me think about how much our relationship had changed and how unrecognizable it may be thirty years from now.

Towards the end of the book, Charlie is elected president and Alice reflects first on her life in the White House and then on the 'war on terror.' Because Alice is still in love with Charlie, it was hard to tell initially if Sittenfeld was excusing or crucifying Bush. In fact, Alice is likable enough throughout the story that it was hard to dislike her with the virulence I had disliked everything Bush. But ultimately Alice's describing Charlie's time in the White House does read as an indictment of Bush - even more so than the semi-climactic ending Sittenfeld plans for the story.

My gripes with this book were structural. Most notably, Sittenfeld skips huge sections of time between the sections of her book. The first gap is understandable: we leave Alice as a high school student and find her again right after college. But later in the book, Charlie's rise from governor to national candidate is omitted completely, the last section of the book opening with the Blackwells already comfortably installed in the White House with a war going on. While election night is depicted as a flashback shortly thereafter (complete with a familiar supreme court case involving Florida), there were many parts of the timeline that were missing. She explains in the afterword that there are plenty of other books that depicted campaigns and that wasn't the point of this book; I didn't buy it - it made for a choppy transition that unraveled a lot of the great character development she had done earlier in the book. Without seeing the couple go through a campaign and adjust to life in the White House, the final section of the book reads more like a summary - almost like a busy family's annual Christmas card - than it does an active narrative.

That aside, I enjoyed reading the book. Like Prep, American Wife is a page-turner, and reflects on relationships, ethics, and our political system. Recommended.

2009 Drawing to a Close

My 'Best Books of 2009' is coming along and I'll post it shortly. I've also been updating my 'On Deck' list - taking out some books I'm not as interested in and adding some new ones I've heard about recently.

Meanwhile, check out the other 2009 booklists below - most are fiction but have links to nonfiction within. They stress me out a little because this time every year my 'On Deck' list grows to unmanageable proportions!!

New York Times Top Ten
New York Times Top Ten per daily book critics
LA Times Favorite Fiction
NPR Foreign Fiction
Times Literary Supplement
Best Bookclub Books (from Flashlight Worthy Blog)
Best Canadian Fiction (from Globe and Mail)
New York Times 100 Notables
Washington Post Top Books
Chicago Tribune Best Books

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Dad bought this for me the day it shipped and I just got around to reading it. I am on vacation from work this week so I breezed through the 450+ pages. It was recognizable as a sequel to Brown's other books starring Robert Langdon - fast-paced and written with the screenplay in mind.

The story opens with an old friend summoning Langdon to Washington DC to fill in as a guest speaker at a large conference. When he arrives there he soon finds out that there are other motives behind the invitation and he is thrust into a time-constrained treasure hunt involving Masonic secrets.

While the book kept my attention and I was interested to know what would happen next, it was frustrating because the puzzles that Langdon has to solve are not ones that the reader can "play along" with. That would have made the book more fun. I seem to remember that frustration from his other books too. Unlike his other books, this one had less of a focus on religion and more on the secrets behind the Freemasons as well as Noetic science, which is loosely the scientific study of metaphysics.

The book was fun and a good vacation read.

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Courtney and Laura recommended this book to me and when I was at Courtney's house she lent me her copy. They are usually both very reliable book recommenders but I can't say I agree with this one. I found this book so disturbing I nearly stopped reading it - more than once.

The book is a memoir about Burroughs' childhood. His mother is mentally ill and his father is absent, so, oddly, he goes to live with his mother's exceptionally eccentric psychologist. This doctor is reasonably disturbed himself and lives with his wife and several children.

The doctor's house is always a mess, there is no stability with regards to school, food, or even the house's physical nature itself. The therapist encourages Burroughs and the other children to participate in really unhealthy behaviors - for example, at one point Burroughs wants to quit school so the doctor coaches him as to how to fake a suicide attempt. And Burroughs is thrust into a sexual relationship with another member of the family. At the time, he is a young adolescent, and the incidents are graphically depicted in the book.

I don't blame Burroughs for writing the book - he is an excellent memoirist: unflinchingly honest and good at picking particular anecdotes to characterize large portions of his life. However, I do think his editor and publisher should have protected him more. Many reviews of the book describe it as 'funny' and 'hilarious' and I didn't think that was accurate at all. There were a few parts of the book where I chuckled out loud, but wished I hadn't. While I appreciate that Burroughs may have found humor in his past and uses that to cope, the story he tells is not one of his recovery, it is one of a young boy who is in a terrible situation. I don't see humor having a place there and I felt very sad for him. Reading this book I had the same feeling I had when I saw Brokeback Mountain - people in the theater were laughing and somehow only I knew it was not a comedy.


I can't recommend this book, despite how well I thought it was written, because I think it was disturbingly exploitative. I would, however, read something else by Burroughs in the future.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Jamie gave me this book over the summer after she read it. It got lost in my bookshelves until last month, when I found a local book club that was reading it. It's my first visit to this book club so I am writing this before my head is filled with other people's ideas.


The is an epistolary novel - that is, a story told through a collection of letters with no other narratives. Typically, this style frustrates me, but I enjoyed it in this case. It made me reflect on what we express these days through email and texting compared to letter-writing. I email as much as the next person but this book made me long for letters, too.

I found it unusual that it was written by two authors. Theafterward explained that one author is the niece of the other, and the younger one took over when the older one became to ill to finish the book. The niece commented that it was easy for her to take over since the story was really written in her aunt's voice.

The story is about a woman named Juliet who is an author in England in the mid 1940's. She takes an interest in Guernsey, which a quick Google showed me was a British island off the coast of France. Guernsey was occupied by Germany during WWII and Juliet becomes entranced by a small community of people who remained there during and after the war. After corresponding with them for several months, she takes a trip to meet them, in hopes of finding fodder for her next book.

Many of the the letters in the book are to or from Juliet - she corresponds with many of the Guernsians as well as her editor, a best friend, and a love interest. There are some other ancillary characters who also have letters in the book, which I think gives the book a lot more color and dimension. While Juliet and her friends are not unreliable narrators, they do take a particular point of view and it was interesting to see small glimpses of others.

Shamefully, I have not read any Bronte or Austen. This book piqued my interest in that a little bit though. Juliet recommends some of their books to her friends in her letters, and I believe there would be some parallels in her story and their characters' stories. I was also interested in how enthralled in the love story I aspect of the book I could get without there being much lasciviousness at all. I'm not dependent on racy scenes to interest me in a story, but the love story was completely G-rated and yet also completely compelling. Another feature I think I'd find in a Bronte or Austen book.

This was a surprisingly enjoyable book that I'd heartily recommend.

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.