A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch

My book club chose this book as this month's read.  I wasn't crazy about it and I guess the group wasn't either because only two of us showed up to discuss it.


The book takes place in the 1800's in London and follows a detective named Lenox who is asked to help solve the mystery of a woman's murder.  He works with several assistants, including his brother, his neighbor Lady Jane, his butler, and some other associates. While they are trying to solve the case, a second murder occurs and Lenox then solves both related cases.

The most unique thing about this book was that while it was written in the past decade, it was written in the style of Victorian England.  Lenox and Lady Jane have some very proper flirtation and everyone has tea every day.  While this made the book drag in some places, it was delightful in others.  Lenox was charming and even progressive for his time.  There were, however, some references to the "new technology" of fingerprints that I found was too deliberate in setting the time and place.

Overall I thought the solution to the mystery was clever but not something I could have figured out myself by reading carefully.  Despite how well the setting and style were done, I wouldn't be too interested to read another book from this series any time soon.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

This book came up in my library queue. It had been in a lot of end-of-year lists in December. The story follows three intertwined stories: one is about a high school senior who runs away with her teacher, one is about a man who didn't know his dad wasn't his biological father until college, and one is about a guy searching for his mentally ill twin brother.

The writing in this book is pretty good. I didn't really notice it which it think is a good thing - not too deliberate but not sloppy either. The characters were well-developed although the ways in which their stories intertwined left me with different opinions of them at the end than when I was reading the book. And the twists in the book - the way the stories come together -was definitely worth the read. While it wasn't one of my favorite books ever, it was well-done, unique, and certainly a modern take on identity.

Worth the read.

A Country Called Home by Kim Barnes

This was a delightful book.

I first heard about it from the NextReads email list. It was described as being about a young couple who leave everything they know to move to a small town in Idaho in the 1960's and buy a farm.

The book certainly starts there and details their difficulty in adapting to the new surroundings and some of the people in the town whom they meet and employ. Through a series of flashbacks, the couple's meeting and courtship is described as well. The second half of the book is the story of their daughter who grows up on the farm too.

I enjoyed reading this book for several reasons. First, the writing was spectacular. It was descriptive but not boring; the characters were complex and dynamic; the plot was at times surprising but never far-fetched. Another reason I found this book so good was that there were several incidents and family secrets that held significance throughout the length of the book. I liked how the author illustrated how a few events and choices made when the characters were young haunted/impacted them throughout their lives. Finally, I appreciated the story itself - one of sadness and of redemption for different characters in different ways.

Definitely recommended.

The Weight of Heaven by Thrity Umrigar

I received this book from Harper Collins as part of their online book club. I recognized Umrigar's name as the author of The Space Between Us, which I read last year.

The story is about two Americans who lose their young son to a sudden illness. In an effort to repair their marriage, they move to India for the husband's job. There, they meet the young son of their home's caretakers and form a relationship with him. While the theme and initial plot are familiar, even trite, the execution is excellent. And because as a reader I knew the father would try to take this boy on as a confusing replacement to his son, and because I knew that could not end well, reading this book was about how a marriage breaks and how a person deals with grief, without having to be as focused on a complex plot.

Umrigar also captures a few periods of time in the novel - the present, when the couple is living in India, as well as the past, both when they met and when their son got sick. I was rooting for the couple to work things out throughout the story, and found them both to be likable and fallible. I could really feel both the desperation and the hope they each feel throughout the book.

The climax could be ruined with too much commentary on it, so I will just say that this book in its entirety was incredibly well written and well plotted. Recommended.

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

This book had been on my list for a while. It's about how most of our interpretation of events is wrong: we read meaning into things that are statistically explainable. Like Freakonomics and The Monty Hall Problem, this book sought to dispel myths about randomness. I didn't find it as eye-opening as someone might who thinks about this stuff less often, but I did enjoy the anecdotes and experiments that Mlodinow references.

While this was not a "math book" it did give a lot of historical background around the science of probability and statistics. With references to Galileo, LaPlace, and Bayes (to name a few) it did a good job of showing how long we have been thinking about these things and how unintuitive they are. Like The Monty Hall Problem, this book illustrated over and over how basic probability ideas are not native to how our brains work - which in my case is both true and infuriating.

He spends a reasonable amount of time on ideas around conditional probability (the chance that B will happen given that A has happened); I find this discussion key to understanding statistics I see in newspapers and magazines. He also discusses the idea of independent events quite extensively - explaining that a string of 10 heads in a coin-flipping series is not a freak event and does not necessarily mean that the coin is 'rigged'. This is a hard idea to understand and he does a good job explaining it. I particularly enjoyed his sections on the difficulty in creating a good random number generator, and what was or wasn't wrong with Ipod's original 'shuffle" feature.

I also liked how Mdolinow used great everyday examples to illustrate his points - from how statistics were manipulated in the OJ Simpson trial to how wine tasting is less of a science than you would think, these sorts of stories delightfully fill much of his narrative.

Mdolinow has a lot to say about psychology as well, which was both a highlight and lowlight of the book. In places, his visits to the social sciences are interesting and well-placed. In other places his family's history, which he seeks to tell through the lens of randomness, comes across as clumsily located. I got the sense he had a bigger, more serious point to make around randomness causing pain and joy with no rhyme or reason ... but I would have liked to see him either make that point more strongly here, or take it all out and write a memoir about how randomness has impacted his life.

That said, I would recommend this book as a good introduction or refresher to understanding how randomness plays into our everyday lives.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

I was excited when my book club chose this as our monthly pick. It had been on my list for a while and was dauntingly long. As it turns out, it reads more like a quick spy or action novel than literature. Great read.

The story is about a few things - one is a newspaper publisher who is being sued for libel. It's also about a mystery involving a prominent family. And it also features an awkward and talented private investigator. The stories are all inextricably linked and all the plot lines kept me interested in what was going to happen. There was financial intrigue, corporate espionage, blood and gore, and an unusually high amount introspection and internal conflict for an action book like this.

The author is a Swedish journalist who died before his books became famous. It was interesting to read the story set in Sweden and see how some of the social morays were different from ours. There seemed to be a more relaxed attitude towards sex and infidelity. There also seemed to be an extensive amount of coffee served and ingested.

I definitely enjoyed reading this and am already looking forward to the two sequels, one of which is published and the other of which is due out any day. Word on the street is also that the author's partner has another half-finished manuscript that she is hanging onto until his family settles the estate with her.

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

Many people recommended this book to me, most memorably Ruth in Florida and Ellen at my company holiday party. It seemed to be a darling of book clubs and the fiction table at Barnes and Noble. I found it to be familiar in some ways but unique in others - overall, I really enjoyed it.

It used to be that having two alternating character narrate a story between two time periods was unique in construction. Now it seems to be a fashionable way to write. I can see the appeal; it can serve as a contrast and as a way to keep the audience's attention. This book followed that format and while I didn't find it tired, I did find it familiar.

One of the stories is about Sarah, a young girl whose family is taken in a deportation of Jews from Paris by French policemen during 1942. The other story is about Julia, a modern-day news reporter who is covering the 60th anniversary of this event. While Sarah's narration ends about two-thirds of the way through the book, Julia follows several stories related to the deportation, one of which intertwines with her own family's history.

The scenes where Sarah is in captivity are heartbreaking but not as graphic as other Holocaust novels I've read. Not to say that her experiences aren't devastating - they are - but de Rosnay's depiction of Sarah's despair is subtle and through 9-year-old eyes, without the knowledge we have of what actually happened to deported Jews in the Holocaust. I thought this book was really well-written and well-thought out. Both Sarah and Julia's characters were carefully developed characters and I couldn't wait to read more about each of their stories.

I also enjoyed reading this story after finishing Little Bee, because they both shared the theme of a middle-aged woman forming a relationship with a younger girl who had been through horrible trauma. It was interesting to compare with Five Quarters of the Orange as well, since that focused on German occupation in a small French town during WWII.

Definitely recommended.

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

I first heard about this book in the Washington Post's top books of 2009. When it arrived from the library, I had all but forgotten about it and when I opened the front cover to read the description, I found this:

WE DON'T WANT TO TELL YOU TOO MUCH ABOUT THIS BOOK.

It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it.

Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this:

It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific.

The story starts there, but the book doesn't.

And it's what happens afterward that is most important.

Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

Far be it from me to ruin a book for anyone so I'll adhere to these guidelines. What I can tell is what I liked about the book - and there was a lot to like. The writing was superb - really nearly perfect. There are two bright women whose lives become entangled and each of their voices is very well defined and executed. The book jumps around in the timeline of the story, but not in a way that was confusing or made me impatient. And the major plot points in the story are revealed early enough that the reader is forced past "what happened" and into an ethical and emotional reaction to the story's events. Unlike some books that provide very little denouement, this one is as much about the reaction and the aftermath as it is about the action.

I would definitely recommend this book.

Under the Dome by Stephen King

I had been excited to read this book for months. I won it on a bet with Webster and saved it for vacation. It did not disappoint.

The book is about a small town in Maine that is mysteriously encapsulated in an invisible impermeable dome one fall day. Slowly, a series of logistical problems faces the town - what are the boundaries of the dome, how to distribute or conserve food and fuel, how to communicate with the outside world - and then they begin to face larger problems of power and order.

I expected the book to explore some of the same themes as Blindness and City of Refuge: the dissolution of society upon an apocalyptic event. That having been a pet interest of mine recently in literature, I was looking forward to King's take on this. While he did employ these themes, most obviously in the form of a power-hungry Town Selectman, his damaged son, and his rogue police force, he didn't make that the only focus of the story.

There was also social commentary on drug abuse, families, religion, sex, food, and love. There was a huge cast of characters to portray all of the archetypes found in a small town. And there was a small highly-likable band of citizens determined to break through the dome. I think that's what separated it most from these other stories - there was a palpable, visible, "before" surrounding the town that gave some people a desire to persevere and escape, not just survive.


While I didn't find this as complex as King's other epics, it was a 'work', not just a book. At 1000+ pages, Under the Dome was clearly representing an important point of view to King, and one that he attempted to write several times in the past before succeeding this time. Perhaps one of the things I liked most about this book was that it was subtle and pointed and had a quiet point to make, without all of the epic battles and reliance on the supernatural that we come to expect from King. (If you are a King fan, though, rest assured - there is plenty of blood.) For certain, the climax and the 'reveal' at the end is not a loud crescendo - and that has kept me thinking all week - why write a thousand pages that ends with a bit of a whimper - what is the greater point King wants me to know?

Recently I read somewhere (and I would credit it but I can't find the quote) that when we look back on the late 20th and early 21st century fiction, Stephen King will be prominent in the canon. I believe it.

Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo

I read this book because it was my book club's choice for January. I was not that excited to read it but got into it once I started reading. Quick read, good for vacation, didn't change my life.


The book is a novel, following a middle-class average guy who drives cross-country to his deceased parents' farm to deal with the estate. Oddly, he ends up driving with a spiritual guru who is a friend of his sister's. Prior to the trip, he lives a 'normal' life, with a wife, traditional job, and two appropriately-sullen teenage children. Upon meeting the guru, he begins to see life in a different light, ultimately ending the trip perhaps as a different person. During the trip, he and the guru make several stops along the way that appreciatively portray Americana.

There have been a few "journey" books that I've read as an adult that make we wish I had paid more attention to Huck Finn in high school. My English teacher was trying to get us to see the parallels between the physical journey and the emotional one. This book make me think of that.

Though both the overall theme and several passages were trite for my taste, the book was pleasant to read. There were certain parts that were laugh-out-loud funny which I always appreciate in a book. Finally, I liked finding out in the afterword that it was based on a cross-country drive the author had made sans guru.

NYT Magazine article on James Patteson

Fascinating article from a few weeks back on James Patterson, one of our most prolific bestselling authors. I had no idea the machine that operates his empire!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/magazine/24patterson-t.html?scp=2&sq=james%20patterson&st=cse

I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass

I saw this book everywhere so I put it on my reading list. I enjoyed Glass’ previous book, Three Junes, a few years ago. This book definitely held my attention too.

The book is about a pair of sisters over many years of adulthood. It was very well-written and well-constructed. In structure, it demonstrated what Olive Kittridge could have been: each chapter could stand alone as a short story, and the story is not continuous - the chapters are separated from each other by several years. Within each chapter the sisters switch off telling the story in small pieces. This meant that Glass had to write in two voices very clearly (which she did) and the reader had to pay attention (which I did).

The sisters face very different partners, careers, and parts of the country throughout the book. There’s no single story arc, rather an examination of a sisterhood that survives through oscillating intimacy and anger.

The best part of this book was its scope – Glass was courageous to try and capture such a large and complex relationship without a continuous time scale without the reader feeling like it was choppy.

Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris

This book is one of Mom’s favorites and I am always curious to read books that are important to people I am close to. It is about an elderly woman who returns to the small French town she grew up in. The story alternates between two time periods. Part of the book takes place in her childhood, particularly focusing on German occupation during WWII. The balance of the narrative takes place in the present, where she returns to this town and lives under an assumed name for reasons revealed through the book.

The book got off to a slow start, probably 60 pages or so of background and stage-setting. However, the rest of the book was very exciting to read; there were mysteries from her childhood that slowly unraveled, and a crisis (and love story) in the present that were quite captivating. Through a family
cookbook that doubled as a journal, the main character (and the reader) learns about secrets her mother had when she was growing up. Other members of the main character’s family are after ownership of the cookbook which they want for selfish reasons.

I thought the writing in some places was a little overwrought…the author relied on foods and cooking to provide a lot of the character development but this was sometimes contrived. That said, the writing in other places was beautiful – really evoking a time and place. The main character was harsh but likable, and her mother was just harsh but an equally well-developed character. Everyone else comprised a predictable cast.

One of the aspects of reading this book that I enjoyed the most was that, like Guernsey Potato Peel Pie, it was a view of what happened during WWII in occupied European countries. Like Guernsey, it detailed the complexities of relationships between the occupiers and the occupied.

I enjoyed the mysteries in this book and the complexities in plot and character development.

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang

This book had been on my list for a while and turned out to be some of the best nonfiction I have read recently. The author, Leslie Chang, is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who is Chinese-American. She travels to the Dongguan province of China where she writes about young women who come from small villages to the city to work in large factories. While most of her interactions are with two young women in particular, she also meets many of their friends and colleagues, while provides a wide range of content for her description of the factories.

Interspersed with Chang's descriptions of these women's experiences is her own family history. Chang provides a well-constructed view of post-dynasty Chinese history by tracing her family's story. Not only does this juxtaposition provide a history necessary to understand China's economy today, but it also knowingly contrasts Chang's experiences "going home" to those of the young women she interviews.

The descriptions of the factories and the women's lives there was fascinating. The factories themselves are huge compounds that often include dormitories, shops, and social services. Workers have very little loyalty to particular factories and change jobs often. Many workers Chang interacted with came across as flaky and transient - often they would lose a cell phone and have no way of connecting with anyone ever again. They were often dishonest with their parents and dreaded the complications of visiting home, not unlike American college students away from home for the first time.

The workers also came across as desperate to improve themselves and their status, but completely unequipped to do so - often spending money on pyramid schemes and poorly-conceived English or etiquette classes. To Chang (and thus to me, too) Dongguan's various cities were identical, but the workers were eager to explain the difference in status in working in the various cities.

There were large sections of the book that covered the business side of the factories as well. It was interesting to see the implementation of the Lean Manufacturing in factories that I had learned about in grad school. It was also telling to see what the impact of what we consider "poor work conditions" were in implementation - within the narrative, the work conditions did not seem unreasonable until Chang referenced the pressure the American companies were putting on the factories to be more humane.

Chang also portrays the prevalence of counterfeiting and lax ideas around intellectual property. In one section, she writes about how the large factories are vertically integrated, in the case of a sneaker factory, making everything from the shoelaces to the soles. She follows that descriptions with that of a factory gang, also vertically integrated, who steal authentic materials then assemble them outside the factory and sell them on the black market. The sometimes-empty malls are filled with storefronts that are poorly-spelled takeoffs on American brands. And at one point, Chang is having dinner with some young people who, upon hearing what she is writing a book about, earnestly suggest she just translate some recent articles from Chinese magazine to save herself time.

By contrast, in the U.S., we spend significant time focusing our students on innovation - Clay Christensen's books are a staple in any MBA diet. How to encourage innovation in large companies (a la Google's 20% projects) and how to turn innovation into business are problems our MBAs are being trained to solve. What struck me the most about the Chinese factory system that Chang describes is that no matter how much money we put into R&D here, China can undercut us almost immediately, negating our innovation. Their system is set up to work that way with a seemingly unending supply of interchangeable workers.

I really enjoyed reading this book. China is obviously going to be an important player in the world economy and this book gave me a way to learn more about it through a very personal lens.

The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss

I read this book in preparation for a new book club I just joined. While the past books this club has read seem to match my taste, this one was not a winner in my book.

The story is about a group of teenagers and young twenty-somethings who live in Las Vegas. During the summer this takes place, one of them becomes a chauffeur for the women (girls, really), who form a prostitution ring. He struggles with the ethics of this role, as well as with his relationship with one of the prostitutes, whom he has known since childhood. He also struggles with wanting to leave Las Vegas to be with his successful career-driven girlfriend in LA, but isn't able to overcome the inertia of where he is today. Interspersed with the current-day story are flashbacks to when this group of friends were children, growing up together.

The writing was actually pretty good. One review on the back compared it to a work by Joan Didion; while that is an exaggeration in my book, the author did a good job of evoking time and place. What I disliked about the book was how graphic it was and how young the characters seemed. It was disturbing - at times I had to skim certain passages that were too hard to read. Having had that experience recently with Running with Scissors, it makes me wonder if is me who is having a harder time reading these passages as I get older rather than authors getting too graphic.

Either way, there was an air of hopelessness in this book that (spoiler alert) did not end happily. Each character became increasingly less redeemable throughout the book. If McGinniss was trying to paint a picture of despair, he was successful - I just didn't get anything out of the journey of reading the book.