Wildfire by Nelson DeMille

I bought this book (and Michael Crichton's Next) at Costco a few months ago before several business trips, thinking they would be good airport reads. Something about the cover art turned me off and I just got around to reading it now.

This is a very typical DeMille John Corey book. In case you are not familiar with this series, the John Corey books feature a very sarcastic protagonist who retires as a New York City detective but works for the FBI. He is always getting himself into trouble and uses very unusual tactics to solve crimes. Incredibly, he has a beautiful and talented girlfriend / wife who plays his straight man (woman?)

This particular story was about an elite group of business people and government officials who hatch a plan post-9/11 to address the growing terrorist threat. Problem is, their plan is itself terrorism and Corey rightfully disapproves and figures it out just as it is being executed. He throws himself into trying to stop the events from taking motion.

I liked it. Completely what I wanted from this type of book.

Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

I first read about this book where most people did, referenced in Freakonomics. Freakanomics talks about a young sociologist who did extensive research in the economics of gangs, seeking to understand who makes money in a gang and how the money flows. The particular question he was asking to attract attention was, "why do so many drug dealers live with their mothers?"

So when Venkatesh' book was published I was first in line (err...on the electronic library queue) to read it.

I was a little disappointed with the theme of his book at first, because I though it would be about the results of his research. Instead it was about the methods and experiences used in his research with few conclusions. It was more of a memoir of the spending several years with this particular gang.

That said, I did learn some of the material I was interested in about day-to-day economic life in a (Chicagoan) gang. I had no idea that most of the gang violence we read about in the papers is based on turf wars over drugs. I also appreciated learning about all the different below-board businesses run by gangs and how they make money. I would have enjoyed more insights like that and fewer soliloquies about Venkatesh's moral dilemmas.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

This book should be called "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar WOW." This book was incredible -- narrated by a voice stronger than nearly any other character I've ever read.

The book is about a young man named Oscar who immigrates with his mother and sister from the Dominican Republic. The book alternates between each of their stories to paint a family history that spans the D.R. and New Jersey, going back several generations. Having read several books lately that take place in an unnamed South American country, it was impressive to read such a carefully researched and executed story taking place specifically in the D.R. and the Dominican-American community.

Though the story is often tragic, Diaz masterfully injected humor and sarcasm throughout the telling of the story. The writing is great - the voice of the narrator is strong and particular from the first page. This books makes me want to read Diaz' earlier book (Flood) as well as a couple strong-voiced books I've skipped in the past. Beloved comes to mind.

The Assist by Neil Swidey

I heard Neil Swidey interviewed on NPR when this book was published, and I think I had also read a few excerpts in the Boston Globe Magazine several months earlier.

This book started as a series of articles in the Globe about the coach of the Charlestown, MA high school basketball team. This coach took high-risk kids from all over Boston and made a state champion team several years in a row. While this was hardly a Michael Lewis level of writing, it was an interesting story about a dedicated coach and some inspirational students. The author painted a vivid picture including racial, educational, and class-based angles.

I was left dissatisfied with the end of the book, though. The book seemed to end at a certain date, rather than at a natural end of a story.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

I had liked Brooks' other books (Nine Parts of Desire and Year of Wonder) so I was excited to see that she had written another. This book was probably my favorite by her and one of the most engaging book I've read in a long time.

The book is about a famous illustrated manuscript known as the Sarajevo Hagaddah. (Interestingly, the Sarajevo Hagaddah really does exist, although the rest of the book is fictionalized.) The book opens with a well-known ancient book restoration expert being called to Sarajevo to look at a Hagaddah that is rumored to be a particular ancient illustrated Hagaddah. Brooks uses her journalistic background and skill in storytelling to imagine a history of the Hagaddah reaching back to the 1400s. Each time the main character learns something new about the Hagaddah, the books goes back 100 years further into the past to learn where the Hagaddah started.

I really enjoyed the stories and main character's personality. It was also fun to read this book with Passover coming up.

Senator's Wife by Sue Miller

Sue Miller is typically one of my go-to authors when I don't know what to get at the library or when I haven't read anything I liked recently. I noticed she had a new book out so I decided to try it. Unfortunately, I was disappointed with this one.

The story follows a young newlywed couple (Nathan and Meri) who moves into a two-family home. Their neighbors are a well-known, well-liked senator and his wife (Tom and Delia). While the Nathan is impressed by their famous neighbor, Meri (suddenly pregnant and lonely) gets to know Delia and learns that their marriage is not as happy as it would seem. Delia continues to support Tom publicly, but their private relationship is far more complicated.

I think the story is supposed to contrast an old marriage with a young one, and to humanize the "stand by your man" strategy practiced by political wives today. Instead, I thought the book was preachy, slow-moving, and the characters one-dimensional. While there is a stunning climax, it did not make up for the entire book's dull pace.

Eye Wide Shut

When I get really tired but I'm reading a good book in bed at night, I start to read with one eye closed at a time. I close one eye to rest it, read with the other eye, then close the second eye and read with the first one.

I did not realize that was unusual until recently. I also have my 14-digit library card number memorized but I knew that was weird from the start.

What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman

This was on one of the booklists recently and I am glad I took it out of the library. It is a good old fashioned mystery, well-wrtten and well-constructed.

The story is about elementary-aged sisters who are abducted from a suburban mall. Decades later, a woman shows up in their hometown claiming to be one of the girls. As the story of their abduction is told through flashbacks, questions about the woman's identity emerge. The story is further enhanced by excellent characters, including her mother and several members of law enforcement and social services.

What I liked about this book was that it was straightforward and easy to read, like a simple novel. However, it was also deceptive in its complexity, as the climax demostrates. I'd definitely like to read other books by Lippman in the future.

Challenging Book Swap

So this weekend we were supposed to get together with three other couples for an annual holiday dinner. (Yeah, scheduling is tough.) Each year, we usually assign one recipient to each attendee to keep the gift exchange simple.

This year I proposed that we each give a paperback book to our recipient. The book had to tell the recipient something about the giver that they didn't know. I thought it would be fun because we know each other - to differing degrees - reasonably well.

Web and I headed over to Barnes and Noble to find gifts and realized I had given out a difficult assignment! There are not that many things about me that people don't know. I have been cooking a lot more lately, but since I was planning to pull off dinner for eight from scratch, I didn't think that fact was surprising enough. I've had a massive obsession with all things football this season, but we host a Superbowl party each year, so I didn't think that would be that interesting. Webster had similarly difficult time. He found that most of the interesting tidbits about him don't make for great books. For example, he has a secret passion for ping-pong. And he likes to eat all the items on his plate at dinner each time he chews on a forkfull.

I think we chose good books in the end but I left feeling a little disappointed that I wasn't more interesting. Webster said he thinks I'm plenty interesting and just open with my friends about what I'm into.

Our dinner was postponed due to several attendees' kids getting sick, but I'll post all the books and their explanations once we reschedule and celebrate.

Rigged by Ben Mezrich

I think I have officially fallen out of love with Ben Mezrich. I was a huge fan of Bringing Down the House, his book about students at MIT who figure out a scheme to win millions in Vegas. (It's being made into a movie now.) However, I was disappointed with both Ugly Americans and Busting Vegas, the two books that followed. I had no particular criticism of either one, other than that neither was the fun ride that Bringing Down the House was.

When I heard Mezrich interviewed on NPR recently, I thought his new book, Rigged, sounded interesting. It was about David Russo, a recent Harvard MBA graduate who goes to work at the New York Mercentile Exchange. The "Merc" is an exchange that is otherwise filled with Brooklyn-born Jews and Italians who were traders because their fathers had been traders. Originally for potatoes, then butter and eggs, today the Merc is where oil futures are traded. Russo quickly becomes central to the management of the Merc, then attempts the impossible - to bring a sister trading floor to Dubai.

I expected this book to explain the technical details of how an exchange works, how oil prices are negotiated, and what it means to have two exchanges for the same commodity on opposite sides of the world. Instead, Mezrich spends the pages detailing Russo's encounters with alcohol, women, and ego-driven traders. Some of the book's most dramatic moments are when Russo cheats on his girlfriend and when he is forced to jump out a hotel window. While some of this detail is necessary to describe both the traders in New York and the different but equally-raucous environment in Dubai, Mezrich robs us of the actual financial details of the story. He trivializes some of the most interesting issues in favor of the glamorous, glitzy details that sell books. Ugh.

Now I have to go find another book on the New York Mercantile Exchange just to understand what the heck David Russo did, how, and why. And I'm annoyed with Mezrich because he obviously knows all these things and just left it out of the final published product.

More on Brockmeier

I Googled Brockmeier since I liked his book so much. He says the coolest thing in an interview on his Random House website:

"I'm a list-maker---I always have been---and over the past few years I've been keeping and regularly reconsidering a list of my fifty favorite books."

I am so incredibly jealous! I should do one of those each year - maybe on my birthday - and see how my tastes change over time.

From the top of his list:

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
All the Days and Nights by William Maxwell
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Death in the Family by James Agee
Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
The His DarkMaterials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
The Complete Short Stories by J.G. Ballard

A Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

This was a very unusual book.

Half of the story takes place in "The City," a limbo-esque location where people go when they die. In the book, they live there until there is nobody left alive who remembers them, at which point they actually go to a more final resting place. The author based this concept on a belief in certain African societies that such a place exists. The other half of the story is about a woman trapped in a research post in Antarctica who trying to figure out how to communicate with the outside world since her satellites are damaged and power sources are quickly draining. Brockmeier skillfully weaves these two stories together in an incredible way.

This was not one of those books with two stories where one of them was more interesting to the other and I thus spent half the book trying to get to the good parts. Both stories were compelling and I wanted to know what would happen.

One thing I loved about Brockmeier's writing was his use of small anecdotes throughout the book to quickly get the reader more background on a particular character or environment. I have not seen this technique used as successfully as this in anything I can remember.

I ought to put his first novel on my reading list.

Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

Unlike much of what I've been reading lately, this book was one I plucked off the new fiction shelf in the library with no review. I liked it a lot.

The story is about a woman who hosts a radio show in an unnamed Latin American country. The country has been ravaged by war and her radio show is a chance for people who have lost friends and relatives to say their names and hopefully find each other. In parallel, the woman has lost her husband to the war and she meets someone in the book who may be able to help her find him.

One reviewer compared the world Alarcon creates to that of Orwell or Huxley. I did not find it to be nearly as dystopic as that. Surely it was not a country I'd want to visit, but it was far more realistic and 'possible' than those other portrayals of the future. I found it to be more similar to Didion's Book of Common Prayer or Saramago's All the Names. Like those books, its being in a created country forced Alarcon to provide the historical backdrop, not just the plot. While I didn't think the history he created was entirely original (he seemed to rely on a composite of Latin American histories), it was well-developed and complete.

Considering this was a first novel, I thought it was excellent.

National Book Critic Award Finalists Announced

Joyce Carol Oates is having a VH1-style 'Best Week Ever.'

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/01/2007-national-book-critics-circle-award.html

Run by Ann Patchett

I love love loved this book. Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors, so when it came up on the library's hold queue, I was very excited - "like your birthday or something," said Jo. I didn't even realize until I brought it home that it was set in Boston, a block from my house.

The story is about an affluent white family who adopts two black boys. The main story takes place within two or three days surrounding a car accident, but Patchett spans several decades of the story by taking us back into the history of the adoptive family and of the boys' mother. She experiments with ideas around family, success, and identity, all with a cast of characters that I couldn't help but root for. The writing, too, was superb.

I tried to explain the entire plot to Webster on a walk to brunch the other day. In doing so, I realized how complex the story was, and how much I liked that about the book, although I didn't notice that while I was reading it. I did get a kick out of reading a well-researched story set in my own neighborhood.