A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

This is a tough review to write, because (like Liberated Bride) there were a lot of things about the book I liked but some fundamental flaws I am not sure I can get over.

The story is about a young woman named Tassie from a rural town who is attending a liberal college in the Midwest.  Looking to make some money, Tassie is hired by a couple (Sarah and Edward) to be the nanny for their not-yet-adopted baby.   Sarah and Edward (and Tassie) are white and the baby is mixed-race, mostly black. The first half of the book is mostly about her interactions with the family - who are not exactly who she thinks they are - and her bonding with the child.  I really enjoyed this section of the book because it was well-balanced between plot, characters, and internal monologue.  Sarah is quite a well-developed character and Tassie's inner monologue reminds me of myself in college - a weird combination of precocious, bright, cynical, and naive.

Then the book take a weird turn.  Something happens with Sarah and Edward, then also with Tassie and her boyfriend, and so she goes home to her parents.  Life at home, always stoic and bucolic, suddenly becomes uncertain and scary.  The remainder of the book takes a completely different trajectory, with dense descriptions of her home and farm and what feels like a different narrator.  I was so disappointed at this part of the book!  I felt really invested in the story of Tassie's interactions with Sarah and Edward, and then let down by the lack of closure.

What I've left out of this description (other than plot spoliers) is that there are several post-9/11 themes within the book.  I can only guess that Moore wanted to make some political statements through this book and that threw her off course.  I would have really enjoyed reading a book about Tassie's interaction with Sarah and Edward and the baby.  These other parts took a coherent story and engaging plot and made it a disjointed book.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

This book had been knocking around the house for a while.  It's a memoir of Bill Bryson's attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail.  He sets out with a set of expensive gear and an eccentric friend and begins hiking in Georgia with hopes of making it up to Maine.  While he does not finish the Trail (at least not as a 'through hiker') the book is interesting and funny.

I had hiked a few miles of the Long Trail in Vermont which is part of the AP, but I had no idea before reading this how intense a process it is for people to hike the entire thing.

The funny part of the book relates to his adventures with his friend. His friend is an admittedly overweight recovering alcoholic.  Together, they subsist on ramen noodles and Snickers, meeting unusual traveling companions along the way and both encouraging and annoying each other.

Interspersed with their adventures is a lot of other information about the Appalachain Trail: the genesis of it, its famous hikers, encounters with bears and murderers, its current status, and plenty of pleasant folklore.  Bryson did have some scathing criticism of the National Forest Service, who maintain much of the Trail - he talks about logging and conservation in several places.  I enjoyed reading these information sections as much as I did his individual adventures.  Bryson did a good job of balancing the personal with the broader perspective. 

I enjoyed this and think this would be a good read for anyone who likes the outdoors.

The Liberated Bride by A. B. Yehoshua

I started this book at my parents' house because I had finished Next sooner than I expected.  Though Mom hadn't liked this very much, I remember seeing poetry books by Yehoshua in Jenne's bookcase in college so I decided to give it a try.

There are a lot of layers to this book and I believe I missed some of Yehoshua's point of view.  On the surface, the story is about a father who is obsessed with finding out what happened to his son's marriage after an abrupt divorce.  There are also several storylines and characters representing different parts of the Arab-Israeli conflict.  Finally, there is a significant portion of the book devoted to the relationship between the man and his wife.

I enjoyed reading this book most of the time.  There are a few sections where Yehoshua incorporates folk tales and poetry into the story and I was a little bored by those.  Perhaps if I had discussed this book with other people who had read it at the same time I would have been able to understand the symbolism - because I do believe that I did not "get" the book in its entirety, not that Yehoshua missed the mark.

I did enjoy reading the descriptions of modern-day Israel.  Particularly, the characters visit parts of the Middle East near Israel that are Arab several times in the book and I was fascinated by the descriptions of those visits.  I also enjoyed reading the sections about the main character and his wife because I thought they represented a realistic marriage although what do I know about what it feels like to be 30+ years in??  The main story about the son and his divorce was well-crafted.

Overall I think this was a good book but that I would have benefited from reading it with a group or at least with someone to talk to about it.

Next by Michael Crichton

This book had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while; I think I bought it at Costco a few years back.  The book is about several storylines all relating to genetics.  On major plotline was about the legality of patenting genes, another was about hybrid humans and animals, and another was about using DNA testing to assess someone's propensity towards certain diseases.


Like most Michael Crichton books, this was a quick and easy read.  Crichton moved among the storylines often (and there were a lot of them) which I did find a little hard to follow in some places.  But overall I liked the stories and was invested in most of the characters.

This was obviously a political book for Crichton - after the story he spent about 10 pages suggesting a set of policies and laws that were necessary to ensure that genes and DNA weren't misused.  Fine airport read.

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