Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

I missed the meeting when my book club chose this book; when I heard this was what we were reading, I was not really looking forward to it.  However, I ended up liking it more than I expected.  By the same author as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this book took a serious look at Lincoln's little-known history as a vampire slayer, as documented in some secret diaries.

What was fun about this book was that historical anecdotes were interspersed with fantasy.  I enjoyed refreshing my memory on Lincoln and the Civil War.  But just when I would get absorbed in a section around Lincoln's beliefs or his relationship with Stephen Douglas, Grahame-Smith would thrown in a connection between vampires and slavery, or would "out" a famous politician as being a vampire.  It kept me chuckling.  The book was part narrative, part excerpted from diaries, letters, and telegrams.  There were illustrations of parts of the story as well. 

Only two real complaints with the book - one is that there were a few scenes dealing with violence against slaves that felt disrespectful to read as part of a fantasy book.  The other was that the book started in a modern-day "frame" and it would have been nice to have it wrap up that way.  Other than that I enjoyed the book as a light-hearted read.  It got me thinking whether this could be used as an educational tool with middle-school aged-kids, too.

Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature was just announced...congratulations to Mario Vargas Llosa.  One of my all-time favorite books is Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel.  Not your everyday book but a wonderfully fun excursion into South America's magical realism.

Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner

This book is about a woman who has built her life around her politician husband.  An early scene has her waiting at a breakfast buffet for his omelette while he catches up on the newspaper at their table.  As a young adult she had been a lawyer, but choose this path instead.  When a scandal about him hits the news, she needs to re-evaluate her life.  At the same time, her two adult daughters (one a recovering addict and the other a lifelong overachiever) are struggling with their own identity crises.  The book changes point of view among the women, each one narrating a chapter at a time. 

Relevance of the subject matter aside, I just can't get into Jennifer Weiner.  Every one of her books I read is good but not great, and this was no exception.  The characters were interesting but a little too predictable.  The writing kept my attention but was nothing sophisticated.  And the story was just ok.  It was neither a story of the road to forgiveness nor of personal transformation.  I enjoyed American Wife's treatment of similar subject matter much better.  Not sure I will read Weiner's next book. 

Surprise Book

An unexpected copy of Ken Follett's Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy) just showed up.  What a fun surprise!!  And what a lucky woman I am that there are several people in my life who might have sent it as a treat.  In the end...thanks Dad.  :)

Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

My inlaws got me this book last year for Christmas.  Referred to by some as a "prequel" to Atwood's Oryx and Crake, it takes place during the same time period as that book, with overlapping characters.  I did not like this book as much as O+C because I didn't have thrill of discovering Atwood's creepy universe for the first time.  However, I did enjoy reading it and it kept my attention.  As usual with Atwood's books, I forget between reading them how good a writer/poet she is because her plotting is so good too.

The story follows two women who are surviving after a "waterless flood" apocalypse.  One is trapped inside a high end strip club where girls wear genetically altered lizard skins, and the other is barracaded inside a spa where women would come to get genetically created treatments that help them stay young.  Prior to the flood, both women had sought refuge with God's Gardeners, a splinter eco-friendly religion, but each had reason to leave.  Much of the story takes place in flashbacks to the era leading up to the flood, characterized by violence, "Big Brother" police, and genetically altered foods and products. 

I and am hoping that Atwood decides to return to this universe again with future books.  According to one interview I read, she wrote this one because fans wanted to know what happened after the end of O+C, and because that book was told from a male point of view.  She also commented on how environmental change (even to the degree it's worsened in the past few years) has influenced her to revisit this universe as a cautionary tale.  I wonder what other alternate points of view she could explore in a third novel.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

This is one of the loveliest books I've read in a long time.  I got it from my inlaws several years ago at Christmas but just got around to reading it.  I'm glad to have waited: it was especially good to read now that I have a dog of my own. 

The story is about a family of dog breeders in Wisconsin.  The title character is born mute, but otherwise healthy, and his family includes him into the family business when he is young.  His early life is idyllic, until the untimely death of his father.  When his unstable uncle moves in to help with the business, Edgar's life becomes more difficult. 

Wroblewski created excellent characters and an expertly resolved story line.  The individual dogs even have their own characters, although he doesn't anthropomorphize them - their personalities are canine and neither he nor Edgar assign them human emotions.Where he gets lost a little in the middle of the book with too much detail, it is forgivable, as his character is lost too. 

As my mother said, "not that much happens for more than 300 pages."  I can't say I disagree, except the joy in reading this book is not about a thickly plotted narrative - its about the description of how dogs are raised, how children are raised, and how people and dogs can form exceptional bonds.  It was the dog book I was hoping to find.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

This is not a book to take lightly.  At 900+ pages, it has intimidated me from my bookcase for years.  As a techie, I've always known that I should read it for "street cred" but it seemed overwhelming, even for a voracious reader like me.  However, on the way out the door on the way to Iceland, I stuck it in my suitcase, figuring maybe on vacation I could plow through it. 

The copy that I have is one I swiped off my dad's desk during a trip home a couple years back.  He says its from his friend Stu, but there is an inscription in the front to "B-squared" thanking said recipient for all his help with math tutoring.  I have no idea who that is but it was nice to read a book that someone had received as a gift.

I started to read The Book of Dave: A Novel in Iceland and knew by page 30 that I was not going to finish it.  It's still sitting in a hotel room in Reykjavik.  With a deep breath and high hopes, I turned to Cryptonomicon.  Cryptonomicon was published in May of 1999, right around when I graduated college.  It's a wild book - alternating between WWII, where a group of Americans have broken the German Enigma code but have to pretend they haven't, and the current day, where a small group of entrepenuers are trying to build a "data safe haven" in the Philipines as the Internet is becoming more relevant to globalization.

I am not sure what is more impressive, Stephanson's attention to detail in his character development (which can be pages long just to make a small point) or his prescience in technology.  He describes several technologies that I don't remember from 1999, including cameras in laptops and handheld Internet devices.  He also predicts Internet currency which hasn't come to pass but I wouldn't bet against.

Another fun part of reading the book is his depiction of famous people - a tactic I am not always a fan of in fiction.  However, I could hardly dislike his rendering of Alan Turing or General McArthur as they came alive on the page.  Also notable was his collection of codes and mathematics in the text.  Most memorable is a particular code that was created for the book by a favorite techie of mine, Bruce Schneier.

And all of these components of a book come together in something that reads like a Tom Clancy novel with a little didactic Jostein Gaarder thrown in.  I'd say reading this is a rite of passage for geeks and for WWII buffs.  For everyone else it may not be worth the effort.

Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

I have been adding a lot of dog books to my list recently since getting a dog of my own.  Becoming a dog owner has been a much bigger life change than I expected - with the help of my husband, the logistics and scheduling haven't been nearly as difficult as I expected.  However, the emotional parts of having a dog have been much greater than I expected.

So I chose to read this memoir to continue my quest to understand what I am feeling about owning a dog.  Granted the author's situation is worlds away from mine - her husband is in a serious accident and loses certain types of his memory.  Her relationship with her dogs is central to her maintaining her own mental health while also maintaining her relationship with her husband.

I liked this book and I think that Thomas was brave to write it.  That said, I didn't think it was really about her dogs very much.  Certainly she talked about each of her dogs and their personalities - also about how she acquired each one and what it was like when the each joined her family.  But she spent more of the book detailing her husband's condition (hallucinations, short term memory loss, long term memory loss, great anger and fear).  She talks about her decision to stay married to him, and her interactions with other family members and friends.  Reading it felt like walking into a stranger's kitchen and sitting down and spending some time there.

I'll read something else by Thomas in the future.  For now, still looking for some canine-themed books.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

This was a wonderful book. 

I had seen this book on the bestseller list but until Jim across the street mentioned it had been on his reading list, I didn't know it was a dog-book.  The story is about a man who is a struggling race car driver, and his relationship with his dog.  Uniquely, it is told through the dog's point of view. 

Right away, I will tell you that unless you are a "dog person" this is a book you probably want to skip.  I envision myself reading it a year ago and I'm not sure I would have made it past the first few chapters.  But now that I have Lucy and spend hours wondering what she is thinking and how much she understands, this book was a joy to read.

Enzo (the dog) is loyal, well-behaved, and well-educated from the TV his owner leaves on for him during the day.  He sees his owner through love, loss, job success and job failure, and develops a strong appreciation for watching races on TV.  He has strong feelings about the humans around him, resenting someone putting his favorite toy in the washing machine, for example, or thinking that "get busy" is a ridiculous cue to urinate at.  He also grasps a complex court case his owner is involved in, and catches many subtle interactions between humans.  In fact, he is the ultimate narrator, present for most of the story but invisible as pets can be during human interaction with each other.

At times, I thought it was indulgent to create a dog character who was anthropomorphized so strongly into a perfect companion.  But then I thought about how we are taught to "be a pack leader" and practice other activities the way a puppy's mother would have done it and realized that this is just another attempt to better relate to our canine friends.

Ravens by George Dawes Green

I heard about this book because the author, George Dawes Green, is one of the founders of The Moth, one of my favorite NPR shows/podcasts.  The Moth is a collection of 10-15 minute stories told live without notes to an audience about all sorts of topics.  Green said he started The Moth to preserve the art of storytelling; the name coming from moths that used to collect near his porch light growing up when his family and friends would stay up late telling stories.

Enough about The Moth - on to Ravens.  I figured someone dedicated to the art of storytelling would tell a good story himself...so the story Green tells is about a family who wins the lottery.  Two con men decide to hold the family hostage and threaten them to get half of the winnings.  The book follows the days just before and after the lottery win.

The book was ok, not great.  Stephen King really liked it which raised it on my list, but he seems to be doing a lot of reviews these days.  I thought the characters in the book were well-developed with excellent backstories justifying their actions throughout the book.  The desperate middle-America mom, the daughter anxious to spread her wings, her offbeat best friend, her loving grandmother (and the policeman in love with her) all left a mark in my head.  Both of the con men out to take their money were memorable as despicable and weak, respectively.  But something about the book just didn't come together for me: the story was slow to develop and reasonably predictable.

I'd be interested to read some non-fiction from Green to see if he is better at telling a real-life story.

Not Me by Michael Lavigne

Ruth recommended this novel to me and I was immediately intrigued by the plot.  A man discovers that his elderly father, known throughout his life as an activist and philanthropist in the Jewish community, may actually have been a Nazi.

The story held my attention - it alternated between the son's life in the present, and the father's diaries which outlined his past.  I was very interested in the story portrayed in the diaries, not just the questions around identity, but also the depiction of Israel in its infancy. 

The present story, however, was less interesting.  The narrator is a comedian, and that self-depreciating and sardonic personality that I associate with stand-up comedians was apparent.  I did not really "like" him or find his character's relationships realistic. 

One theme I came away from the book with was that family secrets always haunt the next generation, even if they are so secret they are unknown.  I got the impression that the narrator's failed and stalled relationships were inevitable based on his father's past.

Overall, this story was unusual and creative - just not sure the execution was as good as a good editor could have provided.

A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome by Alberto Angela

This was a fun book to read.  It reads as described - taking the reader through a typical day in the life across several socio-economic experiences in ancient Rome.  Stylistically, it was easy to read - translated from Italian, it read like a high school history book with a short chapter on each subject.  In that simplicity it reminded me of Sophie's Wold.  While the translation resulted in less-than-perfect grammar in a few places, most of the text was simple and clear.

The book discusses Rome around 115CE, after the Republic, once it is part of the Empire run by Trajan.  I was fascinated by how large it was geographically (Scotland to Iran, Sahara to the North Sea) and by population (proportionate to a country today having the population of the US, Russia, and China combined.)

I was amazed by how many "modern" things existed back then - toothpicks, bleach, ironing, sun umbrellas, crosswalks, even barbers and bookies!  There was glass but no prescription glasses.  There were many foods that are familiar to us (even some recipes included) but no coffee.  The author discusses how the issues in the city then are familiar to us now - rising rents in crowded apartments, traffic, safety, and pollution.

There are also several sections on parts of life different from how we live now: slaves, gladiators, bathhouses and public deaths to name a few.  It was fascinating to read a section on something familiar to our values, then have the next section be about stoning, or betting on a death for sport. 

While I got a little bored towards the end (the novelty of the book wears off) I did enjoy the experience of reading it and seeing what ancient Rome was like.  When I was a kid, my parents took us to Italy and we spent a day in Ostia Antica - today a popular tourist spot but then a little-known excavation that was fun to walk around...this book brought those memories back to life. 

Methland by Nick Reding

Crystal Methamphetamine has become a pop culture staple - Law and Order episodes are based on it, Third Eye Blind sings about it, and it often makes the evening news.  Last year I watched an HBO documentary on how badly meth had hurt the town of Brocton, MA, just 20 miles from where I live.  So when I noticed Reding's book on meth and its impact on a small town in Iowa, I was interested to read it.

Reding spent several years in different small town to form an opinion of exactly how lethal meth is to people, families, and communities.  This anthropological take on meth was interesting and devastating to read.  He included stories of people so desperate to get the drug or the ingredients that they would do terrible things.  He also included stories of people hallucinating on the drug who would ruin their lives during trips.  I came away from reading this book believing that meth is the most dangerous and ruinous drug in America.

In Olewin, Iowa in particular, the woman most responsible for bringing meth to the town is - oddly - comedian Tom Arnold's sister Lori.  From her story, Reding details the different ways meth has gotten into small towns, both through local labs, importing it from Mexico, or driving it from its most common source, southern California. 

What I also enjoyed about the book was the science  - how it impacts brain receptors - and history - how it was legally prescribed to mothers and soliders through the '80's - that he included also.  Reding also spends a significant section in the middle of the book detailing the politics around what could have been done to slow its distribution (limiting pseudophedrine production or distribution) and how that was not done for many years (because of the pharmaceutical lobby). 

The final theme of the book was around the connection between meth and economically depressed small towns in middle America.  One point he makes is that with economic troubles around agriculture in the Midwest, meth is a way for people to stay awake and work multiple jobs.  He also makes the case that as big agricultural conglomerates take jobs away from small-town America, the people in those towns turn to meth because there is little else to do to occupy their time or make any money.  While some of his conclusions seemed a little weak to me, the book also made me think of In Defense of Food and Pollan's conclusions around how our agricultural system was impacting small towns. 

Overall, I learned a lot reading this book.  I thought the writing could have been better edited in some places, and I also would have liked to see more focus in other areas.  But I would recommend it as an introduction to the difficulties in much of America around this devastatingly addictive drug.

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

This is definitely a book to read in the summer.  Sag Harbor is a town on Long Island known for a large African-American summer community.  This book is about one particular summer when Benji (the main character) is 14.  His twin brother and he spend the summer there among their friends and summer jobs and occassionally their parents. 

This book has very little plot.  It's a very rich description of Benji's summer on Sag Harbor - a perfect depiction of a specific time and place and point in someone's life.  During most of the book I felt like I was one of Benji's friends, just running around the town with him and his crew.  The drama of a 14-year old's minutiae was at the center of each chapter - who makes the best waffle cones at work, who is on whose BB-gunfight team, who is going to walk to the beach because the car doesn't seat the whole gang.  And some serious content around his parents' imperfect marriage and his older sister's chosen isolation from the family.  Each chapter seemed to be able to stand alone as a short story - about half-way through I figured out that there was no overarching storyline other than "what happened this summer" so I could enjoy each chapter on its own.

The other thing about the book that I liked was that it depicted life among African-American teens in the 1980's in New York very well.  The division between middle-class and "street" communities, the music, clothes, hairstyles, foods, lots of details of Benji's life both in Sag Harbor and in NYC, where he lived, were described.

I liked this book.  It transported me to Benji's world and showed me a community I didn't know anything about.  Well-written and nicely executed.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Nearly everyone I know who is in a book club or keeps up with modern fiction had read this book by the time I got to it.  Lots of people recommended it and I could see why; although it was not incredibly high-brow literature, the characters were given strong voices and the plot was fast-moving, albeit a bit predictable. 

The story is about "The Help" - that is, the full-time black housekeepers in 1960's Mississippi.  Most of the women who employ them are prejudiced and range from thoughtless to cruel towards them.  Some of the help are treated well, but only when it is convenient for their employers; other help is berated and accused of stealing and other allegations at whim; others are treated with a distance - asked to use a separate bathroom or set of dishes.  And all the while, the housekeepers are engaged in a most intimate of tasks: raising their employers' children while the ladies lunch and play bridge.  Secondarily explored are the social norms and cliques among the white women.  Things in town get interesting when one young white woman, for reasons of her own, decides to befriend the housekeeper community.  The results are both surprising and significant for both her and for the black women. 

The book held my attention because the characters were very compelling.  There were people I rooted for and people I rooted against.  The voices of the different characters were clear and well-developed.  I also found myself wanting to know what would happen to certain characters and storylines.  Stockett did a good job of keeping a lot of themes rolling at once without a lot of complexity. 

It was interesting to read this book just as To Kill A Mockingbird reached its 50th anniversary; set in 1930's Alabama, that book also explored a second class Black community and an empathic White hero.  What was shocking was how little things had changed for Blacks between 1930 and 1960.

I enjoyed this book and categorize it as one that transported me to a different place and time.