Boomerang by Michael Lewis

Generally speaking I like Michael Lewis and this book was pretty good. Mostly it was a chronicle of his visits to several countries with massive economic problems in 2011: Iceland, Greece, Germany, Ireland, and California. (OK, California is not a country but he covers San Jose and some surrounding towns with similar attention.) I think it started as a series for Vanity Fair. He covers each country in its own chapter, exploring the parts of each culture that contributed to their economic issues. Iceland's insular nature, Germany's quest for external perfection, Greece's friendly corruption - each of these qualities discussed using Lewis' personal experiences with people he meets there. Unlike many of his other books, he doesn't make any grand conclusions in this one. Rather, reading it is like getting a set of detailed emails from a really smart friend who is traveling the world to figure out what is happening in the world economy.

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

This book was excellent.

I've read a lot of Holocaust literature, starting in junior high school both as part of my Hebrew School curriculum as well as on my own.  I remember novels like When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit and Number the Stars, as well as memoirs by Frank, Frankl, and Weisel, among many others.  At some point as an adult I (guiltily) felt a little overwhelmed by how much about it I had read and stopped choosing these books. But in recent years I got a lot out of books like Sarah's Key and The Book Thief. 

When Terry recommended this a one of her top 11 books - ever- I bought it.  It had sat on my shelf until last week. And, wow - t was one of the most impactful things I've read in a long time.  It was heartbreaking and emotional and not a book I will forget for a long time.

As the book jacket explains, Trudy is a college professor who has grown up in Minnesota after surviving WWII in Germany as a child.  Her only knowledge of her father is a photo her mother Anna keeps hidden of the two of them with a man in a Nazi uniform.  I kind of thought that I could figure out what the story was going to be about, but in fact I was reasonably off-base.

Indeed some of the book takes place in Germany during the war, and the reader learns how Anna comes to have a relationship with a Nazi. But the circumstances are not what I expected.  The balance of the book, told in alternating chapters, takes place in current times, where Trudy is trying to understand her past through a research project.  She knows that she does not know the entire story...but Anna won't talk about it and Trudy has grown up knowing it is a missing piece of her history.

Part of what made this book so compelling was that the narration was unflinching.  Blum never used a metaphor, or ended a scene leaving the reader to imagine an atrocity.  It was also compelling because the characters were really good.  Neither Anna nor Trudy was expressive, but they were both characters I rooted for. 

Definitely recommended.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Like many avid readers, I was a huge fan of Eugenides' Middlesex and anxiously awaited the arrival of this novel.  I enjoyed it, although not as much as I did Middlesex. 

The story is about a young woman named Madeleine, her boyfriend Leonard, and her platonic friend Mitchell.  The story follows them from their senior year at Brown University in the early 1980's  (and some flashbacks to earlier times) through their first few years after graduation.  Madeleine and Leonard meet in a class about literary criticism; the "marriage plot" in the title is an oft-returned-to basis for the classic novel that, the class suggests, is dead. After college, Mitchell goes to India to further explore his ideas around religion, while Madeleine and Leonard navigate post-college life together. 

I didn't know the book took place in Brown when I chose it - I picked it based on author alone. I was delighted to recognize the setting and to learn that Eugenides went there too.  His descriptions of the end of college were very well-done.  I so keenly remember the parties after college ended, and the friends who struggled in ways Madeleine and Leonard and Mitchell did.  This entire book was kind of what I had hoped Emperor's Children to be. 

And even thinking about the book as if I were not a Brown grad, I would have liked it.  Madeleine was a really well-constructed character, and it was hard to believe her author was male.  All the characters were well-developed, even some of the minor ones, like Madeleine's sister and her roommates. I also enjoyed reading about Mitchell's trip abroad, and appreciated Eugenides' description of Leonard's struggles with mental illness.

I am not sure everyone would like this book, but it did capture a very specific place and time; one I remember quite vividly.

Incidentally I caught an interview with Eugenides on NPR the other night, too.

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

Along with much of the rest of America, I'm a bit obsessed with polygamy.  Both Big Love on HBO and Sister Wives on TLC hold my attention.  So when Mer A recommended this book I thought I'd like it.

The story is about a polygamist with four wives and dozens of children who goes through a mid-life crisis.  He meets a woman outside his marriage(s) and falls in love with her, causing great chagrin in a few spheres of his life. Meanwhile, each of his wives is facing her own personal crisis, as are several of his children.

I liked the way this book was very dryly humorous.  I don't think that always comes across well in novels, but the way the characters alternated who was telling the story, all from a third-person perspective, helped make it work.  Unfortunately, I didn't love the book overall.  I found the main character pathetic rather than sympathetic, and the other characters too minor to invest in. 

I could see this making a good movie.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

I am a huge fan of Ann Patchett (author of Bel Canto) and couldn't wait until this came up in my library queue.  Oh the jealousy I felt when I saw it in Thea's e-reader a few weeks ago.

The story caught my attention right away.  It's about a young woman named Marina who works at a drug company.  Her colleague Anders goes to the Amazon to check up on a researcher (Dr. Swenson, a former professor of Marina's) who has been incommunicado.  When Anders dies under mysterious circumstances, Marina is sent down there by CEO Mr. Fox (also her boyfriend) to find out more.

This book was great. It was a mystery, although not in a traditional way.  The characters were well-developed, and there were several secondary characters, each of whom was multi-faceted. Marina's journey - first to Anders' family's home, then to South America, and finally a village deep in the Amazon, was very thoroughly described.  What I liked best, though, was that the story was surprising. There were several parts of the story that were completely unexpected, some plot twists, and some of the characters' choices. 

Highly recommended.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

After reading this short profile of Dan Fogelman (the screenwriter for, among other things you'd know, "Cars"), this book caught my attention.  I have enjoyed post-apocalyptic novels for a long time, insofar as you can "enjoy" them, and this one sounded great.

It starts out with several seemingly unrelated storylines - a prisoner on death row, a young girl, and mysterious medical excursion in South America.  Slowly, these stories combine into a story of a medical experiment gone bad - so bad, in fact, that it brings on the end of the recognizable world.  The book continues many years on, where some survivors are living in a fortress and follows their life for a while.  After that, it follows a few survivors who leave the fortress in search of some necessary supplies - and after that, it would be a shame to tell you what happens rather than suggest you read the book yourself.

The thing about this book is that it is an epic.  It's 1,000 pages of pretty small print, and I just got lost in it.  In a good way.  The characters were compelling, the story engaged me, and the author created decades or even centuries of history.  (It was not until I finished that I found out that this is the first of a planned series of three.)  I also liked the varied devices the author used - narrative mixed with some episolatory and diary entries.

Reviews of this book compare it to Stephen King's The Stand. It certainly felt like a similarly monumental read.  And, in fact, King was quoted on the back of the edition I read.  If you like this kind of book, this is an excellent execution.

WWW: Wake by Robert Sawyer

LOVE LOVE LOVE Robert Sawyer and his great science fiction.  Starting with Rollback, I've enjoyed several of his books, so I jumped in and bought all three in this series.

Well this one was really strange.  Not that his other books weren't strange - following the Neanderthal branch of evolution for example - but this one was really unique.  The story follows a teenage girl who is blind.  She's well-adjusted and settled into her life with a loyal best friend and plenty of technology to enable her to be connected to blogs, friends, and other resources online.  However, when she is offered the chance to try a new medical procedure to restore her sight, she takes it.

After this procedure, she can't see our world, but she can see some organized sets of images in her head.  Through the help of her physicist father and her doctor, she figures out that the most immediate effect of her operation is that she can "see" the structure of the Internet.  Not the EM fields in the space we live in, but the logical connections between sites and pages.  To tell you anything else about the book would ruin it, but it gets a lot weirder after that.

Reading this book was pretty quick - I get the idea that this book was written as Young Adult sci-fi.  That didn't bother me because the concept was cool, but it did make for a slightly less sophisticated book with less social commentary than his other novels.  If you haven't read Sawyer in the past, I'd suggest Rollback, Flash Forward, or Hominids as better places to start. 

I am interested to see where Sawyer takes this story in the two sequels. 

Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carre

Picked this book up in the Toronto Pearson Airport.  I had enjoyed The Spy who Came in from the Cold, and after a long week of business travel it was time for something easy. 

The book is about a young British couple who meet a Russian mobster while on vacation in Antigua.  Unsuccessful in extricating themselves from his friendly overtures, they find themselves in the middle of a dangerous negotiation. 

What I liked most about this book was that the point of view the story was told from was very unique.  Most of the spy novels I have read follow a career spy into a new situation, or follow a new spy into his or her first escapade.  This, delightfully, did neither. While a quick plot-driven airport read, the book also paid great attention to building the characters. 

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

I associate Dennis Lehane with good thrillers, like Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone.  In this book, however, he takes a historical topic and turns it into a page-turning novel.

This book follows two men: Danny and Luther.  Danny is a white police office in Boston who father is the Chief of Police.  Seeking a detective badge, he agrees to go undercover to infiltrate several organizations accused of being anarchists.  However, he finds the labor union organized by the police in no way anti-government and begins to believe in what they are doing.  Meanwhile, Luther is a black man who falls in love with a woman and follows her to Ohio where she has family.  When he runs into some trouble down there, he ends up moving to Boston and working for Danny's family.
 
The book follows both of their lives and their decisions in Boston around 1917-1920, and gives a very colorful depiction of the city in those days.  The story's climax is during the multi-day Boston policeman's strike, which throws the city into chaos.  Intermixed throughout the entire book are short vignettes about Babe Ruth, during the height of his baseball fame. 

Lehane's great writing really kept my attention.  I was hoping for the characters to have things work out and I was interested in the politics in Boston.  The Ruth stories also helped describe the time and place outside of the two main characters.

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

I had noticed this book, the first in a series of seven, in Barnes and Noble a few months ago.  I go back and forth on historical fiction, so I wasn't sure if I'd like it.  Given its length (850 pages) I decided it'd be a good vacation read.

The story starts with Claire, a young combat nurse, in 1945 - right after the war.  She has just reunited with her husband and they are enjoying a holiday in Scotland.  One day, while sightseeing in the area, she stumbles into a mysterious formation and suddenly finds herself in 18th century Scotland.  Landing in the middle of a set of kingdoms that is at war, she is suspected of being a British spy.  The balance of the book follows Claire's story as she figures out how to survive there, and if there's a way to get back home. 

I loved this book and could not put it down.  I am so looking forward to reading the next several books in this series.  This was not a serious book, though.  It was a quick read and had less historical content than I expected, although I believe the extensive details about her surroundings were accurate.  I would also comment that the lascivious nature of some of the scenes made it perfect beach reading!

Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

When Greg heard I was headed to Barcelona, he heartily recommended this book.  Cindy had also recommended it a while back, but I skipped it because I had not enjoyed the other novel by Ruiz that I read earlier this year (The Angel's Game).  However, once I planned on traveling to Spain, I decided to give him another shot.

This book was much better.  It was about a young boy who works in his father's bookshop.  He comes into possession of a rare book (also called Shadow of the Wind) by a mysterious author, and the balance of the novel is his unraveling the story of this author.  Many people are anxious to get their hands on this book, and he runs into all sorts of characters, both savory and not.  The book spans many years, and during that time the boy grows up and as he is consumed by this author, he is also consumed by love for a particular woman.  Another present theme is the relationship he has with his father, which changes as he grows up. 

The book takes place in Barcelona - but not the one I visited.  The Barcelona in this book is dark and mysterious and Gothic.  I liked reading this and really enjoyed doing so while in Spain.  The story kept my attention and the main character was worth rooting for. 

Another book spree

Bought a whole pile of books, some for my upcoming vacation and some for when I get back:

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Outlander: with Bonus Content
The Given Day: A Novel
I Am a Strange Loop
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
The Distant Hours: A Novel
WWW: Wonder
WWW: Watch
WWW: Wake

The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk

This was another choice from the top 2011 British book list.  Excellently written but I had some major problems with this book.

The novel mostly follows Thomas and Toni, who are unhappily married - well, maybe not unhappy, but not happy.  He decides to stay home with their daughter when Toni gets a new opportunity at work.  Thomas' brother is an energetic entrepreneur whose wife is a struggling artist.  Cusk does a fabulous job describing each of these characters (as well as their parents, children, and even their houseguests and tenants) and their dissatisfaction with their lives.  The writing was superb, with many characters each given a unique voice and a unique burden to carry.  But she makes them so dissatisfied and so disinterested in improving their situations that I didn't get invested in any of them.

Cusk also writes this book as a characters study of middle-class people, rather than as a story. There's little to no plot and fairly little change in the characters' outlooks.  I kept waiting for something to happen.  Their lack of interest in interacting with each other was pervasive even in light of a few major events towards the end of the book.  Not only was this book not uplifting, it was dissatisfying.  I'd try Cusk again, but hope for more next time.

The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead has remained one of my most memorable reads, so I was happy to see he had a new one out. 

The Illumination is speculative fiction, and refers to a phenomenon that strikes society unexpectedly.  Suddenly, people's pain is visible as colored lights.  If you have a cut on your finger, your finger glows.  If you have a kidney stone, it is lit up for everyone else to see.  The implications of knowing who is in pain and in what way becomes a new factor in interpersonal interactions.  Something about this book kept making me think of Saramago's Blindness - the use of a physical ailment to make a societal point. 

This novel follows six people as they navigate in this strange new world - starting with a patient at a hospital when this all starts. Five other major characters emerge, each of them coming into possession of a set of love-letters written by the husband of the patient's hospital roommate.  These love letters form the basis of the connection among the rest of the characters, who are otherwise reasonably unrelated.

I like Brockmeier and I liked this book because it was interesting, but I'm not sure I "get" it in the end.  The two devices - the illumination of pain and the love letters - didn't mesh enough for me.  I did enjoy the characters and their stories, but wished for more out of this book.

The Upright Piano Player by David Abbott

Somewhere I saw a British list of top 2011 books (so far), and I added a few to my library queue. 

This novel is about Henry, who is divorced from Nessa (who cheated on him), recently retired (forced out of his own company), and estranged from his family (including his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson).  While the story starts with a tragedy in the current day, the rest of the book takes place in the past.  That sets up a strange dynamic for the reader - I knew throughout reading the entire book how the story was going to end, but now how the characters got to that point.  That technique reminded me of Vonnegut's in Galapagos: the author forced you to focus on something other than the storyline by telling you the ending. 

There is nothing else about the book that reminded me of Vonnegut.  But Abbott is a good writer: concise and clear.  He's the type of writer who can define a character with just a few sentences.  Most of the story is Henry's although there are a few chapters told from other characters' points of view. 

It's a very ironic book - the reader knows that Henry's efforts to be more self-actualized are futile, but he doesn't.  The real tragedy in Henry's life was not just the event that ends the story, but the depth of pain and growth that he goes through beforehand, believing he has found redemption.