About Me

Ithaca, New York
MWF, now officially 42, loves long walks on the beach and laughing with friends ... oh, wait. By day, I'm a mid-level university administrator reluctant to be more specific on a public forum. Nights and weekends, though, I'm a homebody with strong nerdist leanings. I'm never happier than when I'm chatting around the fire, playing board games, cooking up some pasta, and/or road-tripping with my family and friends. I studied psychology and then labor economics in school, and I work in higher education. From time to time I get smug, obsessive, or just plain boring about some combination of these topics, especially when inequality, parenting, or consumer culture are involved. You have been warned.

Friday, January 27, 2012

#5: The Tiger's Wife

The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht (New York: Random House, 2011)

Summary:
"In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zora begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

"But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather's recent death. After telling her grandmother he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel.

"Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather's final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weekly trips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with 'the deathless man,' a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes even closer under cover of darkness. 'These stories,' Natalia comes to understand, 'run like secret rivers through all the other stories' of her grandfather's life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for."


Opening Line:
"In my earliest memories, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers."


My Take:
Beautifully written, yes, but either I didn't get it or there's just no "there" there. The frame story -- Natalia coping with her grandfather's death under strange circumstances -- has potential, but gets precious little airtime. Most of the novel is devoted to her recollecting stories her grandfather had passed on to her from the village in which he grew up. Perhaps there's some allegory here I'm missing, or maybe a touch of magical realism -- but unlike, say Oscar Wao, there wasn't enough supporting detail to make that clear, at least to me. Lovely use of language, but to what end?

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

#4: The Story of Beautiful Girl

The Story of Beautiful Girl, by Rachel Simon (New York: Hatchette Book Group, 2011)

Summary:
"It is 1968. Lynnie, a young white woman with a developmental disability, and Homan, an African American deaf man, are locked away in the School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, and have been left to languish in the institution. Deeply in love, they escape and find refuge in the farmhouse of Martha, a retired schoolteacher and widow. But the couple is not alone -- Lynnie has just given birth to a baby girl. When the authorities catch up to them that same night, Homan escapes into the darkness and Lynnie is caught. Before she is forced back into the institution, she whispers two words to Martha: 'Hide her.'

"And so begins the forty-year epic journey of Lynnie, Homan, Martha, and baby Julia -- lives divided by seemingly insurmountable obstacles, yet drawn together by a secret pact and extraordinary love."


Opening Line:
"At the end of the night that would change everything, the widow stood on her porch and watched as the young woman was marched down her front drive and shoved into the sedan."


My Take:
OK, this isn't saying much yet as it's not quite 4 weeks into the year, but this is certainly (sorry, Anita Diamant) my favorite book of 2012 so far. Recently, I heard someone say that what makes a book "literature" is that not everyone can read and understand it right away. If so, The Story of Beautiful Girl doesn't qualify, but it's still a beautiful book. Simon's language is lovely, and her characters endlessly fascinating. My favorite is definitely Lynnie, who's the "beautiful girl" of the title; Homan, who's not only deaf but never learned to read, and knows only an idiosyncratic sign language some deaf neighbors taught him as a child, refers to her this way for the entire story, though said references are mostly in his mind as (without spoiling too much) it takes the two, and Julia, a very long time to find one another again. Lynnie's experiences in The School are horrifying without being overly graphic or sensational, and the final chapters ... well, they made me cry. I'd have liked to see a bit more of Martha's and Julia's experiences over the years, but giving them as much time as, say, Lynnie or even Kate (one of the few, if not the only, decent staff members at the School, who remains close to Lynnie even after deinstitutionalization), would have made this a far longer and more complex book, and I suppose I can understand the author's not being quite up for that. Even so, I recommend this one highly.

#3: The Last Days of Dogtown

The Last Days of Dogtown, by Anita Diamant (New York: Scribner, 2006)

Summary:
"Set on the high ground at the heart of Cape Ann, the village of Dogtown is peopled by widows, orphans, spinsters, scoundrels, whores, free Africans, and 'witches.' Among the inhabitants of this hamlet are Black Ruth, who dresses as a man and works as a stonemason; Mrs. Stanley, an imperious madam whose grandson, Sammy, comes of age in her brothel; Oliver Younger, who survives a miserable childhood at the hands of his aunt; and Cornelius Finson, a freed slave. At the center of it all is Judy Rhines, a fiercely independent soul, deeply lonely, who nonetheless builds a life for herself against all imaginable odds. Rendered in stunning, haunting detail, with Diamant's keen ear for language and profound compassion for her characters, The Last Days of Dogtown is an extraordinary retelling of a long-forgotten chapter of early American life."


Opening Line:
"Judy Rhines decided to take the footpath through the pasture."

My Take:
Outstanding, gentle book with memorable characters.

#2: Chang and Eng

Chang and Eng, by Darin Strauss (New York: Dutton, 2000)

Summary:
"In this stunning debut novel, Darin Strauss combines fiction with astonishing facts to tell the story of history's most famous twins. Born in Siam in 1811 -- on a squalid houseboat in the Mekong River -- Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities before the age of twenty. Touring the world's stages as a circus act, they settled in the American South just prior to the Civil War. They eventually married two sisters from North Carolina, fathering twenty-one children between them, and lived for more than six decades never more than seven inches apart, attached at the chest by a small band of skin and cartilage. Woven from the fabric of fact, myth, and imagination, Strauss's narrative gives poignant, articulate voice to these legendary brothers and humanizes the freakish legend that grew up around them. Sweeping from the Far East and the court of the king of Siam to the shared intimacy of their lives in America, Chang and Eng rescues one of the nineteenth century's most fabled human oddities from the sideshow of history, drawing from their extraordinary lives a novel of exceptional power and beauty."

Opening Lines:
"'Chang-Eng,' the children chanted. 'Mutant, mutant.'"


My Take:
This one was an excellent read -- novel setting (pardon the pun) with characters familiar yet new. Wish we'd heard from the perspective of both twins and not just from Eng, but still really enjoyed the book.

#1 for 2012 - Fall of Giants

Finished 2011 and started 2012 in the middle of Ken Follett's Fall of Giants (New York: Dutton, 2010).

Summary:
"Ken Follett's World Without End was a global phenomenon, a work of grand historical sweep, beloved by millions of readers and acclaimed by critics. Fall of Giants is his magnificent new historical epic. The first novel in The Century Trilogy, it follows the fates of five interrelated families -- American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh -- as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage. Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams enters a man's world in the Welsh mining pits. Gus Dewar, an American law student rejected in love, finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson's White House. Two orphaned Russian brothers, Grigori and Lev Peshkov, embark on radically different paths half a world apart when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution. Billy's sister, Ethel, a housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts, takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German embassy in London. These characters and many others find their lives inextricably entangles as, in a saga of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, Fall of Giants moves seamlessly from Washington to St. Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty. As always with Ken Follett, the historical background is brilliantly researched and rendered, the action fast-moving, the characters rich in nuance and emotion. It is destined to be a new classic. In future volumes of The Century Trilogy, subsequent generations of the same families will travel through the great events of the rest of the twentieth century, changing themselves -- and the century itself. With passion and the heart of a master, Follett brings us into a world we thought we knew, but now will never seem the same again."


Opening Line:
"On the day King George V was crowned at Westminster Abbey in London, Billy Williams went down the pit in Aberowen, South Wales."


My Take:
I do like this sort of grand, sweeping historical saga thing, and will read the next 2 volumes when they're available -- but Fall of Giants isn't quite in the Pillars of the Earth category. Too slow and dragging in places.

#112: Then Came You

Then Came You, by Jennifer Weiner (New York: Atria Books, 2011)

Summary:
"The lives of four very different women intertwine in unexpected ways in this new novel ... Each woman has a problem: Princeton senior Jules Wildgren needs money to help her dad cure his addiction; Pennsylvania housewife Annie Barrow is gasping to stay financially afloat; India Bishop yearns to have a child, an urge that her stepdaughter Bettina can only regard with deep skepticism until she finds herself in a most unexpected situation. Interlocking dramas designed to ensnare; bound to be a bestseller. ...

"Weiner has a knack for amazing dialogue and descriptions that ring true and her humor is a constant presence. There isn't a fake, forced or phony tone in any of her writing. In Then Came You, Weiner explores the sensitive issues of infertility, egg donation, and surrogacy, while also delving into the more universal issues surrounding marriage, family relationships, alcoholism, regret, and love. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character and as the story unfolds, the role that each woman will play in the life of another is revealed. Annie, a stay-at-home mom, married her high school sweetheart and is now raising her two boys. She decides to become a surrogate to help her family out of their current financial problems. Jules, a recent Princeton graduate, decides to donate her eggs to a fertility clinic hoping that the money she gets can go towards helping her sick father. India is a trophy wife. She recently married a wealthy older man and decides to have a baby. When she can't conceive naturally, she turns to surrogacy. Each individual story is woven together when Bettina, India's stepdaughter, decides to investigate India's past."


Opening Line:
"The man in the suit was watching me again."


My Take:
Hella fun vacation read. (Yeah, I'm way behind in blogging so this is all the reviewing I can do for now. Sorry.)

#111: The Little Women Letters

The Little Women Letters, by Gabrielle Donnelly (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011)

Summary:
"With her older sister planning a wedding and her younger sister preparing to launch a career on the stage, Lulu can't help but feel like the failure of the Atwater family. Lulu loves her sisters dearly and wants nothing but the best for them, but she finds herself stuck in a rut. When her mother sends her to look for some old family recipes in the attic, she stumbles across a collection of letters written by her great-great-grandmother Josephine March. Jo writes in detail about every aspect of her life: her older sister Meg's new home and family; her younger sister Amy's many admirers; the family's shared grief over losing Beth; and her own feelings towards a handsome young German. As Lulu delves deeper into the lives of the March sisters, she finds solace and guidance, but can her great-great-grandmother help Lulu find a place in a world so different from the one Jo knew?"


Opening Lines:
"Plumfield, October 1888.

Dearest Amy,

My daughter has arrived in this world, and bless the infant, she is the reddest and the squallingest baby you ever did see!"


My Take:
Middling to above-average in the grand scheme of new takes on old, beloved stories.