Cafe Hazelthyme

NOW READING #7: The Red Garden

2012-02-07T09:26:00.000-08:00

The Red Garden, by Alice Hoffman (New York: Crown Publishers, 2011)

Summary:
"The Red Garden introduces us to the luminous and haunting world of Blackwell, Massachusetts, capturing the unexpected turns in history in our own lives.

"In exquisite prose, Hoffman offers a transforming glimpse of small-town America, presenting us with some three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales where characters' lives are intertwined by fate and their own actions.

"From the town's founder, a brave young woman from England who has no fear of blizzards or bears, to the young man who runs away to New York City with only his dog for company, the characters in The Red Garden are extraordinary and vivid: a young wounded Civil War soldier who is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman who meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet who falls in love with a blind man, a mysterious traveler who comes to town in the year when summer never arrives.

"At the center of everyone's life is a mysterious garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look."

Opening Lines:
"The town of Blackwell, Massachusetts changed its name in 1786. It had been called Bearsville when it was founded in 1750, but it quickly became apparent that a name such as that did little to encourage new settlers."

My Take:
Read the first 2 chapters last night and so far, it looks like this will be a good Alice book. We shall see.

#6: The Post-American World, Release 2.0

2012-02-07T09:11:00.000-08:00

The Post-American World, Release 2.0, by Fareed Zakaria (New York: Norton, 2011)

Summary:
"Fareed Zakaria's international bestseller The Post-American World pointed to the 'rise of the rest' -- the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, and others -- as the great story of our time, the story that will undoubtedly shape the future of global power. Since its publication, the trends he identified have proceeded faster than anyone could have anticipated. The 2008 financial crisis turned the world upside down, stalling the United States and other advanced economies. Meanwhile, emerging markets have surged ahead, coupling their economic growth with pride, nationalism, and a determination to shape their own future.

"In this new edition, Zakaria makes sense of this rapidly changing landscape. With his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination, he draws on lessons from the two great power shifts of the past five hundred years -- the rise of the Western world and the rise of the United States -- to tell us what we can expect from the third shift, the 'rise of the rest.' The great challenge for Britain was economic decline. The challenge for America now is political decline, for as others have grown in importance, the central role of the United States -- especially in the ascendant emerging markets -- has already begun to shrink. As Zakaria eloquently argues, Washington needs to begin a serious transformation of its global strategy, moving from its traditional role of dominating hegemon to that of a more pragmatic, honest broker. It must seek to share power, create coalitions, build legitimacy, and define the global agenda -- all formidable tasks.

"None of this will be easy for the greatest power the world has ever known -- the only power that for so long has really mattered. America stands at a crossroads: In a new global era where the United States no longer dominates the worldwide economy, orchestrates geopolitics, or overwhelms cultures, can the nation continue to thrive?"

Table of Contents:

The Rise of the Rest
The Cup Runneth Over
A Non-Western World?
The Challenger
The Ally
American Power
American Purpose

My Take:
An enjoyable read, especially if you're interested in international relations and sick to death of all the political finger-pointing and "America in decline" frothing at the mouth we seem to hear in an election year. Not quite as detailed and substantive as Thomas Friedman's books, but not quite as dense to get through, either.

#5: The Tiger's Wife

2012-01-27T14:37:00.000-08:00

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?

#4: The Story of Beautiful Girl

2012-01-25T20:09:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-25T19:10:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-25T19:01:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-25T18:48:00.001-08:00

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

2012-01-25T18:34:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-25T18:24:00.000-08:00

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.

#110: Summer Rental

2011-12-16T19:28:00.001-08:00

Summer Rental, by Mary Kay Andrews (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2011)

Summary:
"Ellis, Julia, and Dorie. Best friends since Catholic grade school, they now find themselves in their mid-thirties, at the crossroads of life and love. Ellis, recently fired from a job she gave everything to, is beginning to question the choices she's made over the past decade of her life. Julia -- whose caustic wit covers up her wounds -- has a man who loves her and is offering her the world, but she can't hide how deeply insecure she feels about her looks, her brains, and her life. And Dorie has just been shockingly betrayed by the man she loved and trusted most in the world ... though this is just the tip of the iceberg of her problems and secrets. A month in North Carolina's Outer Banks is just what each of them needs.

"Ty Bazemore is their landlord, though he's hanging on to the rambling old beach house by a thin thread. After an inauspicious first meeting with Ellis, the two find themselves disturbingly attracted to each other, even as Ty is about to lose everything he's ever cared about.

"Maryn Shackleford is a stranger, and a woman on the run. Maryn just needs a few things in life: no questions, a good hiding place, and a new identity. Ellis, Julia, and Dorie can provide what Maryn wants, but can they also provide what she needs?

"Five people questioning everything they ever thought they knew about life. Five people on a journey that will uncover their secrets and point them on the path to forgiveness. Five people who need a sea change, and one month in a summer rental that might just give it to them."

Opening Line:
"It was not an auspicious beginning for a vacation, let alone for a new life."

My Take:
Halfway entertaining, but forgettable.

#109: Damned

2011-12-16T19:18:00.000-08:00

Damned, by Chuck Palahniuk (New York: Doubleday, 2011)

Opening Lines and Summary:
"Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. I'm just now arrived here, in Hell, but it's not my fault except for maybe dying from an overdose of marijuana."

"'Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison,' declares the whip-tongued thirteen-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk's subversive new work of fiction. The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a marijuana overdose -- and the next thing she knows, she's in Hell. Madison shares her cell with a motley crew of young sinners that is almost too good to be true: a cheerleader, a jock, a nerd, and a punk rocker, united by fate to form the six-feet-under version of everyone's favorite detention movie. Madison and her pals must trek across the Dandruff Desert and cross the Valley of Used Disposable Diapers to confront Satan in his citadel, and all the popcorn balls and wax lips that serve as the currency of Hell won't buy them off.

"This is the afterlife as only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine it: a twisted inferno where The English Patient plays on endless repeat, roaming demons devour sinners limb by limb, and the damned interrupt your dinner from their sweltering call center to hard-sell you Hell ... He makes eternal torment, well, simply divine."

My Take:
What a pleasant surprise. I picked this one up despite knowing Palahniuk's books leave me feeling in desperate need of a shower, because the premise just seemed too damned funny (excuse the pun) to pass up. It was, and grody as the descriptions of the underworld were, Damned made me laugh more than it left me with that visceral ickiness I had after Pygmy and Choke. It's hilarious.

#108: Falling Together

2011-12-16T19:08:00.000-08:00

Falling Together, by Marisa de los Santos (New York: William Morrow, 2011)

Summary:
"Following Love Walked In and Belong to Me, de los Santos's third novel embraces the draw of college friendships. Catalina, Will, and Pen (short for Penelope) meet on a drama-filled night their freshman year and from that moment are completely inseparable, a solid trio whose bonds seem unbreakable. But something serious does come between them, and after college the friends stop speaking to one another. Yet each one feels the others' absence deeply. Until one day when Pen and Will receive a curt email from Cat: 'Please come to the ten-year reunion, I need you.' It's a mystery that neither Pen nor Will can ignore. What they find at the reunion is unexpected. This novel is partly a deep look into a friendship and what strengthened it as well as what ruined it, and partly a mystery that sends Pen and Will halfway around the world to the Philippines. The story unfolds in pieces-why the friendships fell apart and what reunites the friends in ways they would not have thought possible are slowly unveiled. While the characters are lovely and the writing is heartfelt, the pacing can be slow. VERDICT: The author's fans will enjoy this nostalgic mystery with romantic elements." -Beth Gibbs, from Library Journals

Opening Line:
"Pen would not use the word summoned when she told Jamie about the e-mail later that night."

My Take:
A solid B to B-minus. Not awful but not especially original or memorable either. Either it was never made convincingly clear why such epically wonderful friends just plain stopped speaking, or I'd half lost interest by then and missed something important. Wanted to like it and care about the characters more than I did, but didn't quite get there.

#107: An Object of Beauty

2011-12-08T18:57:00.001-08:00

An Object of Beauty, by Steve Martin (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010)

Opening Line and Summary:
"I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, and see it bound and tidy on my bookshelf, I will be unable to ever write about anything else."

"So writes Daniel Franks, the narrator of a story about the woman he's been unable to let go of for years in the latest novel by bestselling author and acclaimed entertainer Steve Martin.

"Lacey Yeager is young, captivating, and ambitious enough to take on the notoriously demanding art world of New York City. Groomed at Sotheby's and hungry to keep climbing the social and career ladders put before her, Lacey charms men and women, old and young, rich and even richer with her charisma and liveliness. Her career sends her zipping all over Manhattan, the east coast, and even St. Petersburg, and her self-manufactured allure makes the reader wonder if it is not she who is the object of beauty. Her ascension to the highest tiers of New York parallels the soaring heights -- and, at times, the darkest lows -- of the art world and the country from the late 1990s through today.

"With twenty-two lush, four-color art reproductions throughout, An Object of Beauty is both a primer on the business of fine art collecting and a close study of the personalities that make it run. With his latest novel Steve Martin once again displays his compassion and keen skills of observation and understanding."

My Take:
OK -- certainly better than most of the tripe I've been filling my head and my time with of late -- but didn't quite live up to its promise. Perhaps if I had more experience in the art sales and collecting world, but as it was, parts of the book seemed to get bogged down in just so much name dropping. It was also tough to really get to know or care about Lacey (who reminded me a lot of much contemporary pop music -- all glossy auto-tunes, with no substance beneath it) or our narrator, Daniel. Was there really never a crack in Lacey's veneer? No glimpse of what it was that made Daniel so fascinated with her (as it's established early on that they'd slept together only once, some time before the story began, and that this interest isn't primarily sexual)? Or who Daniel is, other than a shadowy art writer without much of a personal life? And I may have missed clues, but if indeed Lacey's success was largely ill-gotten, it would have been nice to see a bit more directly how that unfolded. Even Janet Maslin's New York Times review, which is mostly positive and praises Object of Beauty's "moral complexity," "ambiguity," and "heart," notes that the book lacks "a living, breathing Lacey," that the protagonist "serves this book more as a convenient abstraction, a way of illustrating its tutorial lessons, than a flesh-and-blood heroine," and that narrator Daniel Franks is "only minimally necessary ... watchful but bland."

While both Martin and Maslin may be familiar with the art collecting world, I'm not ... and I do prefer a bit more familiarity and intimacy with my characters. Not sorry I read it, but won't be too quick to recommend or reread it, either.

#106: Call Me Irresistible

2011-12-08T17:40:00.000-08:00

Call Me Irresistible, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips (New York: William Morrow, 2011)

Summary:
"Lucy Jorik is the daughter of a former president of the United States.

"Meg Koranda is the offspring of legends.

"One of them is about to marry Mr. Irresistible -- Ted Beaudine -- the favorite son of Wynette, Texas. The other is not happy about it and is determined to save her friend from a mess of heartache.

"But even though Meg knows that breaking up her best friend's wedding is the right thing to do, no one else seems to agree. Faster than Lucy can say "I don't," Meg becomes the most hated woman in town -- a town she's stuck in with a dead car, an empty wallet, and a very angry bridegroom. Broke, stranded, and without her famous parents at her back, Meg is sure she can survive on her own wits. What's the worst that can happen? Lose her heart to the one and only Mr. Irresistible? Not likely. Not likely at all.

"Call Me Irresistible is the book Susan Elizabeth Phillips's readers have long awaited. Ted, better known as 'little Teddy,' the nine-year-old heartbreak kid from Phillips's first bestseller, Fancy Pants, and as 'young Teddy,' the hunky new college graduate in Lady Be Good, is all grown up now -- along with Lucy from First Lady and Meg from What I Did for Love. They're ready to take center stage in a saucy, funny, and highly addictive tale fans will love."

Opening Line:
"More than a few residents of Wynette, Texas, thought Ted Beaudine was marrying beneath himself."

My Take:
Maybe long-time faithful fans of the author would love and anticipate this book, but I'm not among them. My cardinal rule of sequels, or any books set in a universe the author's previously established, is that they need to work just as well as stand-alones for those who haven't read the others in the series. This one fails. Lots of stock, two-dimensional cardboard characters and ridiculous plot contrivances. Perhaps I've just read one chick lit book too many of late, but I feel a little like I just ate a full not-quite-half-gallon carton of ice cream by myself. The kind with rich but heavy little mix-ins in it.

#105: Wife-in-Law

2011-12-08T17:32:00.000-08:00

Wife-in-Law, by Haywood Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2011)

Summary:
"Neighbors Betsy Callison and Kat Ellis were oil and water when they met thirty-five years ago. Betsy was a prim, neat-freak, Republican wife, and Kat was a wild, irreverent hippie liberal. But they soon discovered common ground that created a bond that has lasted for decades. Until Betsy's husband, Greg, leaves her for his secretary, then comes back sniffing around two years later and convinces newly widowed Kat to marry him!

"Not that Betsy wants him back, but it's hard to move on when the newlyweds are flaunting their love right across the street. But there's trouble brewing in paradise, and no one knows philandering Greg better than his ex-wife, Betsy. Can Betsy get involved in her best friend's marriage -- even if it means helping her wife-in-law figure out the same man she shared a bed with for thirty years?"

Opening Line:
"Somebody once asked me how I pick my friends, and I just laughed, because God usually does the picking for me, and believe me, He has a wicked sense of humor."

My Take:
Fluffy, corn-battered and Southern-fried fun, if not especially literary or memorable.

#104: Joy for Beginners

2011-12-08T17:24:00.000-08:00

Joy for Beginners, by Erica Bauermeister (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2011)

Summary:
"At an intimate, festive dinner party in Seattle, six women gather to celebrate their friend Kate's recovery from cancer. Wineglass in hand, Kate strikes a bargain with them: to celebrate her new lease on life, she'll do the one thing that's always terrified her: whitewater rafting down the Grand Canyon. But if she goes, each of them must promise to do one thing in the next year that is new, or difficult, or scary -- and Kate gets to choose their challenges.

"Shimmering with warmth, wit, and insight, Joy for Beginners is a celebration of life: unexpected, lyrical, and deeply satisfying."

Opening Line:
"Life came back slowly, Kate realized."

My Take:
Decent but not awesome. Not really enough time to get to know the characters well, or to understand the challenges Kate chose for them: best friend Ava's training for a three-day cancer walk (her own mother's death when she was ten left her absolutely paralyzed around death, to the extent of not being able to be around Kate during her illness) makes sense, but why demand that free spirited potter Dalia learn to bake bread?

Well written, though not quite to the extent oversold by the jacket blurb. What else is new?

#103: Take It Like a Mom

2011-12-08T17:18:00.000-08:00

Take It Like a Mom, by Stephanie Stiles (New York: New American Library, 2011).

Summary:
"One thing sets her apart from other modern-day superheroes: mom genes. Annie Fingardt Forster used to be a lawyer who wore dry-clean only and shaved both legs. But things have changed. Now a stay-at-home mom, she wears cargo pants and ponytails and harbors a nearly pathological hatred towards hipster parents. With a three-year-old and a baby on the way, Annie knows what to expect...at least, she thought she did. Faced with her husband's job loss, pre-school politics, and a playground throwdown with her arch nemesis, Annie realizes that even with her husband and friends by her side, what she really needs is to learn to suck it up-and take it like a mom."

Opening Line:
"Since it's always kind of awkward getting started -- like a blind date, or a first date with a guy you only saw late one night in a bar -- I guess I should tell you right away that my name is Annie."

My Take:
More a sitcom than a real novel. A series of fairly entertaining chapters, but there's no real central conflict here. Ah well, it was a vacation read.

#102: Black and Blue

2011-12-08T17:06:00.000-08:00

After wading through about a third of Emotional Intelligence and finally giving up, I read this and the next one while away for Thanksgiving.

Black and Blue, by Anna Quindlen (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2010)

Summary:
"For eighteen years, Fran Benedetto kept her secret. And hid her bruises. And stayed with Bobby because she wanted her son to have a father. And because, in spite of everything, she loved him. Then one night, when she saw the look on her ten-year-old son's face, Fran finally made a choice -- and ran for both their lives ...

"Now she is starting over in a city far from home, far from Bobby. And in this place she uses a name that isn't hers, and cradles her son in her arms, and tries to forget. For the woman who now calls herself Beth, every day is a chance to heal, to put together the pieces of her shattered self. And every day she waits for Bobby to catch up to her. Because Bobby always said he would never let her go. And despite the flawlessness of her escape, Fran Benedetto is certain of one thing: it is only a matter of time ..."

Opening Line:
"The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old."

My Take:
Pretty good, and bonus points for a not-so-tidy, vaguely unsatisfying ending. Never really thought to wonder before about what life must be like for those battered women who do escape.

#101: Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later

2011-12-08T15:41:00.000-08:00

And speaking of not being ashamed of who you are ...

Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later, by Francine Pascal (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2011)

Summary:
"Anyone who grew up reading the Sweet Valley High series (that would be basically every girl born in the late 70s/early 80s) has been waiting for this -- Sweet Valley Confidential: 10 Years Later came out on Friday.

Make any mention of SVH to a 20 or 30-something woman and you’re likely to be bombarded with stories of childhood obsession, followed by a ranking of said woman’s favorite characters–for some reason most people liked goody-two-shoes Elizabeth, which is mystifying; c’mon, without saucy Jessica there never would have been any action! So really it’s no surprise that people have been eagerly waiting for this book. But how does it stack up to the originals?

Well, let’s just say this book wasn’t written to attract new fans. Even before the book was released it was apparent that it wasn’t meant for young readers the way the series was, but was instead written for fans of the original books. Readers who are now, like Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, adults. Readers who are thrilled by the fact that Sweet Valley-ites now drink! And use Facebook! And have sex!

Which is lucky, because honestly, without the emotional attachment to the characters (I’m emotionally attached to the Wakefields–that doesn’t sound weird, right? Right?) there isn’t much draw to Sweet Valley Confidential.

The story reads like a bad romance novel (and not the so-bad-it’s-good kind), starting with the plot: Jessica, who now works in public relations, has broken the cardinal rule of friendship and shattered her relationship with her beloved twin sister, who is now a writer in New York. The book centers on what Jessica’s offense was (I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s quite obvious) and whether or not Elizabeth will forgive her (I won’t spoil that one either). Then there’s the dialogue and first person narration, which is pretty laughable–especially Jessica’s habit of adding “so” and “like” to every sentence. In fact, even the third-person narration (the book swings between both) is questionable at times, as it’s occasionally peppered with profanity that comes out of nowhere.

The thing is, it doesn’t really matter how bad the book is. If you were a fan back then, you’re going to appreciate it. How can you not? It’s Sweet Valley! It’s the Wakefields and Lila Fowler and Bruce Patman and Caroline Pierce all grown up! It’s almost like going to your own high school reunion and being able to judge everyone’s life choices (Seriously, girl? You married that guy?) without having to worry about anyone questioning your own decisions.

Maybe that’s a stretch, but still — this book is a good time, as long as you can tap into your girlhood fandom." -Megan Gibson, from Time Magazine

Opening Line:

"Elizabeth had turned the key in the Fox lock, releasing a heavy metal bar that scraped across the inside of the front door with an impressive prison-gate sound, and was about to attack the Segal lock when the phone in the apartment started to ring."

My Take:

Yes, it was as dopey as you'd expect. Next.

#100: Introvert Power

2011-12-08T15:20:00.000-08:00

I've fallen way behind in keeping track of the books I've read lately, so this barrage of posts will be even more cursory than usual.

Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength, by Laurie A. Helgoe (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2008)

Summary:
"This book describes the power of introversion and how to take advantage of it. Helgoe addresses common beliefs about introversion, such as connections to mental illness, and societal taboos against solitude; the importance of private space, thinking, and observation; and how to bring aspects of introversion to the extroverted world. Helgoe, an introvert herself, is a writer and psychologist."

Table of Contents:
Part I: Antisocial, Weird, or Displaced?

Chapter 1: The Mistaken Identity
Chapter 2: Alone Is Not a Four-Letter Word
Chapter 3: Becoming an Alien
Chapter 4: "Anyone Else IN?"
Chapter 5: Meditating with the Majority: The Introverted Society

Part II: The Introvert's Wish List

Chapter 6: A Room of Your Own
Chapter 7: The Time to Think
Chapter 8: The Right to Retreat
Chapter 9: The Freedom of a Flaneur
Chapter 10: Inroads to Intimacy

Part III: Standing Still in a Loud World

Chapter 11: The Conversation Conundrum
Chapter 12: The Anti-Party Guide
Chapter 13: Why Did I Want to Work with People?
Chapter 14: The Downside to Self-Containment
Chapter 15: Showing Up for Relationships

Part IV: Outing the Introvert

Chapter 16: From Apology to Acceptance -- and Beyond
Chapter 17: Celebrating Introversion
Chapter 18: Expressing What's in There
Chapter 19: Moshing on Your Own Terms
Chapter 20: Introvert Power

My Take:

A bit extreme, though maybe that's because I always test out just this side of the E/I continuum, and the book may be written for folks further in the "I" direction than I am. Appreciated Helgoe's pointing out that introverts are slightly over 50% of the population; I'd always heard a much smaller figure myself. I also enjoyed the recommendations about not apologizing for one's introversion -- just plain up and admitting that you don't care for big, loud cocktail parties if that's the case, rather than making up some excuse and claiming that you really wish you could go. I do think she spends a bit too much time disparaging the extroverts, and paints them with a brush just about as broad as she claims they've pigeonholed introverts in the past. Another book called The Introvert Advantage (I think) which I recall reading a few years back was better, IMO.

#99: Heads You Lose

2011-11-16T13:10:00.000-08:00

Heads You Lose, by Lisa Lutz and David Hayward (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2011)

Summary:
"From New York Times-bestselling author Lisa Lutz and David Hayward, a hilarious and original tag-team novel that reads like Weeds crossed with Adaptation.

"Meet Paul and Lacey Hansen: orphaned, pot-growing, twentysomething siblings eking out a living in rural Northern California. When a headless corpse appears on their property, they can't exactly dial 911, so they move the body and wait for the police to find it. Instead, the corpse reappears, a few days riper ... and an amateur sleuth is born. Make that two.

"But that's only half the story. When collaborators Lutz and Hayward -- former romantic partners -- start to disagree about how the story should unfold, the body count rises, victims and suspects alike develop surprising characteristics (meet Brandy Chester, the stripper with the Mensa IQ) and sibling rivalry reaches homicidal intensity. Will the authors solve the mystery without killing each other first?"

Opening Line:
"Dave, I just finished the first chapter of a new novel -- a real crime novel with a dead body and all -- and I thought of you."

My Take:
Maybe I've just fallen for the gimmick, but this was an OK (slightly muddled, as you'd expect) novel made much funnier and more interesting because of the meta-story. As noted above, the authors took turns writing alternating chapters -- without having agreed on a plot line or details in the beginning. Neither knew till they saw each chapter what his/ her cowriter would have done, and as you'd expect with exes, they don't always see eye to eye. They did establish a rule that neither could undo plot development established by the other, but they also have a good bit of fun seeing just how far they can push this rule. (Without spoiling too much, I had "He's really most sincerely dead" running through my head more than once.)

Other than that, the less said about the plot, the better ... but if it sounds funny, give it a read.

#98: The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

2011-11-16T12:52:00.000-08:00

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, by Heidi W. Durrow (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010)

Summary:
"Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on a Chicago rooftop.

"Forced to move to a new and strange city, with her strict African American grandmother as her new guardian, Rachel is thrust for the first time into a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, startling blue eyes, and beauty bring a constant stream of attention her way. It's there, as she grows up and tries to swallow her grief, that she comes to understand how the mystery and tragedy of her mother might be connected to her own uncertain identity. Raised by her mother to think of herself as white, Rachel is now expected to 'act black.' And all the while, she keeps asking herself why she has to be defined by her skin, and whether labels say more about who she is, or more about a world that attempts to brand her as black or white."

Opening Line:
"You my lucky piece," Grandma says.

My Take:
Not quite as clear and gripping all the way through as the first few chapters start out, but nonetheless an outstanding book. It opens in 1982, at which point the not-quite-teenaged Rachel has recently moved to Portland with her grandmother and much younger and warmer Aunt Loretta, and is still stung with fresh grief compounded by her new guardians' refusal to even mention her mother's name. We learn, in fairly short order, that Nella (Rachel's mother) had left not just her abusive husband, but the unique insularity of military base life ... only to find that Chicago @ 1980 couldn't quite wrap its brain around a white mother with three seemingly black children. Eventually, her inability to raise and guide them properly under the circumstances led her to jump (or perhaps be pushed) off a rooftop; only Rachel survived.

While the story centers primarily on Rachel, we do get to know other characters to some degree, including Brick, the young man who was fascinated with birds as a child until he saw Rachel's brother Robbie fall to his death, and Drew, Aunt Loretta's mover-and-shaker boyfriend whose influence in Rachel's life far outlasts his relationship with her aunt.

This may be one I'll want to buy and reread; I think there are probably layers of meaning I didn't quite get the first time around. Even so, I still enjoyed it.

#97: Authentic Happiness

2011-11-16T12:30:00.000-08:00

Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, by Martin E. P. Seligman (New York: Free Press, 2002)

Summary:
"Over a decade ago, Martin Seligman charted a new approach to living with 'flexible optimism.' Now, in his most stimulating and persuasive book to date, the bestselling author of Learned Optimism introduces the revolutionary, scientifically-based idea of 'Positive Psychology.' Positive Psychology focuses on strengths rather than weaknesses, asserting that happiness is not the result of good genes or luck. Seligman teaches readers that happiness can be cultivated by identifying and using many of the strengths and traits that they already possess -- including kindness, originality, humor, optimism, and generosity. By frequently calling upon their 'signature strengths' in all the crucial realms of life, readers will not only develop natural buffers against misfortune and the experience of negative emotion, they will move their lives up to a new, more positive plane.

"Drawing on groundbreaking psychological research, Seligman shows how Positive Psychology is shifting the profession's paradigm away from its narrow-minded focus on pathology, victimology, and mental illness to positive emotion, virtue, and strength, and positive institutions. Our signature strengths can be nurtured throughout our lives, with benefits to our health, relationships, and careers.

"Seligman provides the Signature Strengths Survey along with a variety of brief tests that can be used to measure how much positive emotion readers experience, in order to help determine what their highest strengths are. The life-changing lesson of Authentic Happiness is that by identifying the very best in ourselves, we can improve the world around us and achieve new and sustainable levels of authentic contentment, gratification, and meaning."

Table of Contents:

Part I: Positive Emotion

1. Positive Feeling and Positive Character
2. How Psychology Lost Its Way and I Found Mine
3. Why Bother to Be Happy?
4. Can You Make Yourself Lastingly Happier?
5. Satisfaction about the Past
6. Optimism about the Future
7. Happiness in the Present

Part II: Strength and Virtue

8. Renewing Strength and Virtue
9. Your Signature Strengths

Part III: In the Mansions of Life

10. Work and Personal Satisfaction
11. Love
12. Raising Children
13. Reprise and Summary
14. Meaning and Purpose

My Take:
Another book that can't quite decide what it wants to be. The overview of positive psychology -- what it is, what the underlying research shows, and so on -- was interesting and informative, even if I find Seligman's dismissal of that branch of psychology that deals with the causes and treatment of mental illness glib and offensive. (Is there a role for psychology in bettering so-called normal, healthy individuals' lives and productivity? Sure. But does that mean it's not important to study or treat, say, schizophrenia, or depression, or alcoholism? Certainly not, though it almost sounds like this is what he's suggesting in places.) And I'll capitalize positive psychology about the time I start capitalizing realtor. Is that really a way to get yourself taken seriously? Why doesn't it seem necessary for, say, doctors and teachers and ministers -- or for molecular biology and child development and economics?

But Seligman's also given to excessive musings about his career and his family (second, presumably much younger wife, four perfectly cherubic home-schooled kids), which comes off as more smug and self-congratulatory than as illustrating important points. Additionally, he can't seem to decide if he wants the book to be an overview of positive psychology or a self-help book ... and the many self-tests and checklists tend to distract from the flow. Perhaps he should have taken a lesson from his one-time mentor, Aaron Beck, in this regard.

#96: The Night Strangers

2011-11-16T12:07:00.000-08:00

The Night Strangers, by Chris Bohjalian (New York: Crown Publishing, 2011)

Summary:
"From the bestselling author of The Double Bind, Skeletons at the Feast, and Secrets of Eden, comes a riveting and dramatic ghost story.

"In a dusty corner of a basement in a rambling Victorian house in northern New Hampshire, a door has long been sealed shut with 39 six-inch-long carriage bolts.

"The home's new owners are Chip and Emily Linton and their twin ten-year-old daughters. Together they hope to rebuild their lives there after Chip, an airline pilot, has to ditch his 70-seat regional jet in Lake Champlain after double engine failure. Unlike the Miracle on the Hudson, however, most of the passengers aboard Flight 1611 die on impact or drown. The body count? Thirty-nine – a coincidence not lost on Chip when he discovers the number of bolts in that basement door. Meanwhile, Emily finds herself wondering about the women in this sparsely populated White Mountain village –- self-proclaimed herbalists –- and their interest in her fifth-grade daughters. Are the women mad? Or is it her husband, in the wake of the tragedy, whose grip on sanity has become desperately tenuous?

"The result is a poignant and powerful ghost story with all the hallmarks readers have come to expect from bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian: a palpable sense of place, an unerring sense of the demons that drive us, and characters we care about deeply.

"The difference this time? Some of those characters are dead."

Opening Line:
"You see the long, wide, perfectly straight strip of asphalt before you, the hangar to your right with the words GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS painted in billboard-size letters along the side."

My Take:
I've had pretty mixed reactions to the last few Bohjalian books I've read. The Double Bind, my first, was a tremendous punch in the gut (yes, in a good way); Midwives was awesome. Skeletons at the Feast and Secrets of Eden, not so much.

Night Strangers was somewhere in between -- probably because Bohjalian tries to weave two stories together here, and one's a lot more compelling than the other. The real ghost story -- Chip struggling with his visions of those of his dead passengers who haven't yet been able to let go of their lives on earth -- is fascinating, poignant, sad, and sweet. The whole herbalists thing, though? Not very interesting. First of all, the ladies of Bethel -- who seem to have a WAY higher number of greenhouses per capita than the national average, and who all have odd floral names like Anise, Reseda, and Clary -- just come off as too weird and even nasty from the get-go, which makes it hard to get drawn into their story line. More importantly, even Emily notices this ... and it's just plain too much to believe that this lawyer/ mother, already torn up over uprooting her daughters' lives for the sake of her husband's recovery, would ignore every initial suspicious/ hinky feeling she has about the plant ladies and move so quickly from, "Hmm, why are these old biddies so unnaturally interested in my tween girls?" to "Oh, well, let's just have the girls stay with them after school every day." And I really didn't like the ending -- not because it was particularly upsetting (which was probably the effect the author was going for), but just because it's not well set-up and not very believable.

Oh well.

#95: Drive

2011-11-04T07:28:00.000-07:00

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel H. Pink (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009)

Summary:
"Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money -- the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, Daniel H. Pink says in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, his provocative and persuasive new book. The secret to high performance and satisfaction -- at work, at school, and at home -- is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

"Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does -- and how that affects every aspect of life. He demonstrates that while carrots and sticks worked successfully in the twentieth century, that's precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today's challenges. In Drive, he examines the three elements of true motivation -- autonomy, mastery, and purpose -- and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action. Along the way, he takes us to companies that are enlisting new approaches to motivation and introduces us to the scientists and entrepreneurs who are pointing a bold way forward.

"Drive is bursting with big ideas -- the rare book that will change how you look and transform how you live."

Table of Contents:

Introduction: The Puzzling Puzzles of Harry Harlow and Edward Deci

Part I: A New Operating System

Chapter 1: The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0
Chapter 2: Seven Reasons Carrots and Sticks (Often) Don't Work ...
Chapter 2A: ... and the Special Circumstances When They Do
Chapter 3: Type I and Type X

Part II: The Three Elements

Chapter 4: Autonomy
Chapter 5: Mastery
Chapter 6: Purpose

Part III: The Type I Toolkit

Type I for Individuals: Nine Strategies for Awakening Your Motivation
Type I for Organizations: Nine Ways to Improve Your Company, Office, or Group
The Zen of Compensation: Paying People the Type I Way
Type I for Parents and Educators: Nine Ideas for Helping Our Kids
The Type I Reading List: Fifteen Essential Books
Listen to the Gurus: Six Business Thinkers Who Get It
The Type I Fitness Plan: Four Tips for Getting (and Staying) Motivated to Exercise
Drive: The Recap
Drive: The Glossary
The Drive Discussion Guide: Twenty Conversation Starters to Keep You Thinking and Talking
Find Out More -- About Yourself and This Topic

My Take:
Will this be more akin to Who Killed Change? or to Employees First, Customers Second? We shall see.

OK, a few weeks later and I've fallen dreadfully behind in my book blogging, so these next few entries will be short. Drive made sense and definitely had some ideas I'll plan to use once I'm reemployed, but got a bit repetitive midway through. Next.

#94: The Weekend

2011-11-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

The Weekend, by Bernhard Schlink, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside (New York: Pantheon, 2010)

Summary:
"Old friends and lovers reunite for a weekend in a secluded country home after spending decades apart. They excavate old memories and pass clandestine judgments on the wildly divergent paths they've taken since their youth. But this isn't just any reunion, and their conversations about the old days aren't your typical reminiscences: After twenty-four years, Jorg, a convicted murderer and terrorist, has been released from prison. The announcement of his pardon will send shock waves through the country, but before the announcement, his friends -- some of whom were Baader-Meinhof sympathizers or those who clung to them -- gather for his first weekend of freedom. They have been summoned by Jorg's devoted sister, Christiane, whose concern for her brother's safety is matched only by the unrelenting zeal of Marko, a young man intent on having Jorg continue to fight for the cause.

"Bernhard Schlink is at his finest as The Weekend unfolds. Passions are pitted against pragmatism, ideas against actions, and hopes against heartbreaking realities."

Opening Lines:
"She got there just before seven. She'd expected to make more headway and arrive sooner by traveling in the early morning."

My Take:
No pithy or snarky comments to offer here, but this was a pretty good book. Compact, good use of language (even in translation). Interesting characters, all of whom clearly have way more going on in their stories than we get to see, but this makes sense for a story that takes place pretty much in the course of a single weekend (though with lots of discussion and memories of past events, obviously). Almost has the feel of a stage play, which wasn't a bad thing -- just an interesting one. Characters include Christiane, who questions the degree to which she's put Jorg at the center of her life (too much? not enough) and whether she's done right by him; Ulrich, who seems intent on drawing some explanation from Jorg about just how it felt to kill someone; Ulrich's daughter Dorle, who's intent on seducing someone important this weekend if it kills her; Karin, the vicar whose constant peacemaking attempts belie her own secret doubts; Ilsa, the single teacher suddenly compelled to spend her time chronicling the adventures of terrorists/ freedom fighters like Jorg; Christiane's housemate Margarete, who helps keep the weekend flowing smoothly despite not having met the other guests before; and Henner, who may or may not have been the one who tipped the police off as to Jorg's whereabouts all those years ago. This is not a warm, fuzzy, chick-lit sort of reunion story, where everything's neatly wrapped up by the last page; rather, it's an intriguing meditation on what becomes of our dreams and ideals as we grow older.

#93: Committed

2011-11-01T12:32:00.000-07:00

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, by Elizabeth Gilbert (New York: Viking, 2010)

Summary:
"At the end of her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who had been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but they also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances, get married. (Both were survivors of previous bad divorces. Enough said.) But providence intervened one day in the form of the U.S. government, which -- after detaining Felipe at an American border crossing -- gave the couple a choice: they could either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again.

"Having been effectively 'sentenced to wed,' Gilbert decided to tackle her fears of matrimony by becoming a student of the institution. Over the next ten months, as she and Felipe wandered haphazardly across Southeast Asia, waiting for the U.S. government to permit them to return to America and get married, the only thing she talked about, read about, or thought about was this perplexing subject.

Committed tells the story of one woman's efforts -- through contemplation, historical study, and extensive conversation with every soul she encountered along the way -- to make peace with marriage before she entered its estate once more. Told with Gilbert's trademark wit, intelligence, and compassion, the book attempts to 'turn on all the lights' when it comes to matrimony, frankly examining questions of compatibility, infatuation, fidelity, family tradition, social expectations, divorce risks, and humbling responsibilities. Myths are debunked; fears are unthreaded; historical perspective is sought; and romantic fantasies are ultimately exchanged for vital emotional compromises. In the end, the book becomes a kind of celebration of love -- with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, will always entail."

Table of Contents:

Marriage and Surprises
Marriage and Expectation
Marriage and History
Marriage and Infatuation
Marriage and Women
Marriage and Autonomy
Marriage and Subversion
Marriage and Ceremony

My Take:
Well-written and reasonably enjoyable, but not nearly so much so as Eat, Pray, Love. With that book, I was in a somewhat-skeptical camp; on one hand, it's hard to feel sympathy for someone so devastated by a bad divorce that she has to travel around the world for a year to find herself again, but on the other, Gilbert does write well, and as I'm not likely to have an extended sojourn in Bali or Italy any time in my own foreseeable future, reading someone else's travel memoir seemed like the next best thing.

Here, again, I enjoy the subject matter, as well as Gilbert's narrative style. Early on in the book, she visits with a houseful of Hmong women in rural Vietnam, and while she does a pretty good job of not romanticizing their poverty and isolation, she does capture something about the prevailing Western view of marriage that Pamela Haag, in Marriage Confidential, tries but never quite manages to nail down:

"But surely something has been lost, as well, in our modern and intensely private, closed-off homes. Watching the Hmong women interact with each other, I got to wondering whether the evolution of the ever smaller and ever more nuclear Western family has put a particular strain on modern marriages. In Hmong society, for instance, men and women don't spend all that much time together. Yes, you have a spouse. Yes, you have sex with that spouse. Yes, your fortunes are tied together. Yes, there might well be love. But aside from that, men's and women's lives are quite firmly separated into the divided realms of their gender-specific tasks. Men work and socialize with other men; women work and socialize with other women. ...

"If you are a Hmong woman, then, you don't necessarily expect your husband to be your best friend, your most intimate confidant, your emotional advisor, your intellectual equal, your comfort in times of sorrow. Hmong women, instead, get a lot of that emotional nourishment and support from other women -- from sisters, aunties, mothers, grandmothers. A Hmong woman has many voices in her life, many opinions and emotional buttresses surrounding her at all times. Kinship is to be found within arm's reach in any direction, and many female hands make light work, or at least lighter work, of the serious burdens of living."

I also found myself nodding in agreement at the clarity with which Gilbert describes the delicate dance of negotiation and compromise that happens in a marriage. Contemplating a solo trip to Cambodia, she muses,

"[H]e belongs to me now. And I belong to him, in exactly the same measure. Which does not mean that I cannot go to Cambodia by myself. It does mean, however, that I need to discuss my plans with Felipe before I leave -- as he would do with me were our situations reversed. If he objects to my desire to travel alone, I can argue my point with him, but I am obliged to at least listen to his objections. If he strenuously objects, I can just as strenuously overrule him, but I must select my battles -- as must he. If he protests my wishes too often, our marriage will surely break apart. On the other hand, if I constantly demand to live my life away from him, our marriage will just as surely break apart. It's delicate, then, this operation of mutual, quiet, almost velvety oppression, Out of respect, we must learn how to release and confine each other with the most exquisite care, but we should never -- not even for a moment -- pretend that we are not confined."

Well-turned phrases and personal anecdotes aside, though, there's really not a lot of new material here for anyone who's read some of Stephanie Coontz's work on the history of marriage (which Gilbert cites and acknowledges heavily). Decent narrative non-fiction, but not life-changing.

#92: Absurdistan

2011-10-28T11:15:00.001-07:00

Absurdistan, by Gary Shteyngart (New York: Random House, 2006)

Summary:
"From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook comes the uproarious and poignant story of one very fat man and one very small country.

"Open Absurdistan and meet outsize Misha Vainberg, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, lover of large portions of food and drink, lover and inept performer of rap music, and lover of a South Bronx Latina whom he longs to rejoin in New York City, if only the American INS will grant him a visa. But it won't, because Misha's late Beloved Papa whacked an Oklahoma businessman of some prominence. Misha is paying the price of exile from his adopted American homeland. He's stuck in Russia, dreaming of his beloved Rouenna and the Oz of NYC.

"Salvation may lie in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan, where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as Minister of Multicultural Affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century.

"Populated by curvaceous brown-eyed beauties, circumcision-happy Hasidic Jews, a loyal manservant who never stops serving, and scheming oil execs from a certain American company whose name rhymes with Maliburton, Absurdistan is a strange, oddly true-to-life look at how we live now, from a writer who should know.

"With the enormous success of The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Gary Shteyngart established himself as a central figure in today's literary world -- 'one of the most talented and entertaining writers of his generation,' according to The New York Observer. In Absurdistan, he gives an even funnier and wiser literary performance. In Misha Vainberg, he has invented a hero for the new century, a glimmer of humanity in a world of lost hope."

Opening Lines:
"This is a book about love. The next 338 pages are dedicated with that cloying Russian affection that passes for real warmth to my Beloved Papa, to the city of New York, to my sweet impoverished girlfriend in the South Bronx, and to the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)."

My Take:
Very funny, but drags a bit in the middle once Vainberg gets stuck in the title republic.

I can't really overstate the first part. Absurdistan is crammed with wry, sometimes irreverent, usually hilarious observations about the United States, Russia, the former Soviet republics, and contemporary western culture. The reader gets an early taste of what she's in for in the first chapter, as Misha and college roommate Alyosha-Bob dine out in St. Petersburg with Misha's girlfriend Rouenna (visiting all too briefly from the South Bronx) and his very young stepmother, Lyuba. Observes Rouenna, on learning that Lyuba, too, was poor before marrying Misha's infamous, soon-to-be-murdered father Boris:

"[A]s far as I can tell, all of you Russians are just a bunch of n----z. ... All I'm saying is, you know ... your men don't got no jobs, everyone's always doing drive-bys whenever they got beefs, the childrens got asthma, and y'all live in public housing."

After this dinner is interrupted by police who've come to tell Misha of his father's assassination, Misha reflects on his first trip to New York and how he met Rouenna (after an unfortunate encounter with the circumcision-happy Hasidic Jews mentioned on the dust jacket, which leaves the otherwise-unapologetic Misha with at least one thing to feel self-conscious about).

Rouenna remains in St. Petersburg for Boris's funeral, but returns to New York and Hunter College soon thereafter ... where Misha fears that she's getting a little too close with her writing professor (and his own former college classmate) Jerry Shteynfarb, a lothario of a "perfectly Americanized Russian emigre (he came to the States as a seven-year-old) who managed to use his dubious Russian credentials to rise through the ranks of the Accidental creative writing department and to sleep with half the campus in the process" and who's still enjoying some degree of fame from his novel, The Russian Arriviste's Hand Job. (I never stopped chuckling at Shteyngart's dig at himself here.) His fears do indeed prove founded, though the rich and perhaps overly big-hearted Misha continues to pay Rouenna's tuition anyway.

Eventually, Misha comes to realize there's no way in heck he's going to get a U.S. travel visa through legitimate means. Even with his father dead, the whole murder thing's apparently still on his records, and the authorities aren't going to let Boris's son into the country, no way, no how. The only solution is to visit Absurdistan, where a crooked official at the Belgian consulate is reportedly selling Belgian passports for the asking (well, that and a goodly sum of cash).

Unfortunately, his timing couldn't be worse. Misha arrives in Svani City, and bribes his way through just about every airport and customs official he can find (in an eventually-tedious ritual where the Absurdi welcomes him with a speech like this:

"The Jewish people have a long and peaceful history in our land. They are our brothers, and whoever is their enemy is our enemy also. When you are in Absurdisvani, my mother will be your mother, my wife your sister, and you will always find water in my well to drink."

... only to inform him, moments later, that "our mother is in the hospital with a collapsed liver and a keloid scar on the left ear" and a few generous U.S. dollars would be much appreciated, and by the way, let me now introduce you to my colleague in the visa application line. Shortly after he settles into the penthouse suite at the Park Hyatt and gets his shiny new Belgian passport in hand, the Absurdi leader's plane is shot down, and the national borders sealed. Aside from seeing a decent young activist shot to death before his eyes, this doesn't make much difference in Misha's day-to-day life; the high-end food and drink seem to keep flowing at the Park Hyatt (and pretty much anywhere there are Haliburton staff), and his new (ahem) friendship with Nana Nanabragovna, daughter of a local warlord-cum-businessman ensures that he'll always have the best of whatever there is for the taking ... but, well, he still can't leave.

From here on, as noted above, the book seems to drag a bit. There are still plenty of apt and humorous observations, which keeps it readable, but not much happens, either in terms of visible action or in Misha's state of mind. Sure, I chuckled at the apparent feud between the two
ethnic groups in Absurdistan, the Sevo and the Svani, which seems to center on which direction the footrest should tilt on their version of the cross, and at the ridiculous but spot-on rap lyrics Misha's so fond of quoting, but that only takes you so far. I'll probably still read The Russian Debutante's Handbook if I can get my hands on it, but would have liked a stronger wrap-up to the story line here.

#90: The Heights

2011-10-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

The Heights, by Peter Hedges (New York: Dutton, 2010)

Summary:
"Tim Welch is a popular history teacher at the Montague Academy, an exclusive private school in Brooklyn Heights, New York: 'I was an odd-looking, gawky kid, but I like to think my rocky start forced me to develop empathy, kindness, and a tendency to be enthusiastic. All of this, I'm now convinced, helped me in my quest to be worth of Kate Oliver.' Kate is not ordinary, but she aspires to be. She stays at home with their two young sons in a modest apartment, trying desperately to become the parent she never had. Tim and Kate are seemingly the last middle-class family in the Heights, happily getting by, until one day their neat and tidy world is turned upside down by Anna Brody, the new neighbor who moves into the most expensive brownstone in Brooklyn.

"Anna is not only beautiful and wealthy; she's also impulsive. And for reasons Kate doesn't quite understand, even as all of the Range Rover-driving moms jockey for access into Anna's circle, Anna sets her sights on Kate and Tim and brings them into her world. It's fun -- dizzyingly fun, in fact -- to pretend for a while that they belong to her life of privilege and excess. Then a secret invitation comes in a plain white envelope from an unlikely messenger, and the games Tim and Kate have been playing become a lot more complicated."

Opening Line:
"That morning we woke to find our street buried in snow."

My Take:
Yawn. An OK book as these things go, but I really think I'm over this upper-middle-class chick lit phase for a while. Kate gets an offer she can't refuse to go back to work for an old boss, and Tim decides to take a sabbatical from teaching to care for the boys and finally finish his long-overdue dissertation. In the course of the year, both become besotted with Anna in different ways. An erotic frisson builds between Tim and Anna, under the guise of play dates between Tim and Kate's boys, Teddy and Sam, and Anna's cherubic daughter Sophie. Meanwhile, Kate becomes star-struck as Anna seems to choose her as her new best friend, going so far as to give Kate an evening gown with a 5-figure price tag that later turns out to have been Anna's wedding dress.

Again, decent story, but the climax and resolution seem pretty half-hearted. Glad today is librart day.

#89: Marriage Confidential

2011-10-27T07:10:00.001-07:00

Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses & Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules, by Pamela Haag (New York: Harper, 2011)

Summary:
"Pamela Haag has written the generational 'big book' on modern marriage, a mesmerizing, sometimes salacious look at the semi-happy ambivalence lurking just below the surface of many marriages today. The spouses may rarely fight -- they may maintain a sincere affection for each other -- but one or both may harbor a melancholy sense that something important is missing.

"Remarkably, this side of the marriage story hasn't been told or analyzed -- until now.

"Meticulously researched and injected with insightful firsthand accounts and welcome doses of humor, Marriage Confidential articulates for a generation that grew up believing they would 'have it all' why they have ended up disenchanted. Haag introduces us to contemporary marriages where spouses act more like life partners than lovers; children occupy an uncontested position at the center of the marital relationship; and even the romantic staples of sexual fidelity and passion are assailed from all sides -- so much so that spouses can end up having affairs online almost by accident.

"Blending tales from the front lines of matrimony with cultural history, surveys, and research covert-ops (such as joining an online affair-finding site and posting a personal ad in the New York Review of Books), Haag paints a detailed picture of the state of marriage today. And to show what's possible as well as what's melancholy in our post-romantic age, Haag seeks out marriages with a twist -- rebels who are quietly brainstorming and evolving the scripts around career, money, social life, child rearing, and sex.

"Provocative but sympathetic, forward-thinking and bold, here, at last, is a manifesto for living large in marriage."

Table of Contents:

Introduction - Marriage on the Edge

Chapter 1 - The Dilemmas of a Semi-Happy Marriage: Why We Settle for Ambivalence

Part I: The New Normals of Career and Marriage

Chapter 2 - 'Life Partners': How Too Much Intimacy Killed Intimacy
Chapter 3 - 'I Can Bring Home the Bacon': How Having It All Became Sort of Having Two Things Halfway
Chapter 4 - The Tom Sawyer Marriage: The Plight of the New Workhorse Wife
Chapter 5 - The Joy of Falling: Downwardly Mobile and Mutually Liberated

Part II: Parenting Marriages

Chapter 6 - The Have Children - Will Divorce Paradox: How Parenthood Inspires Marriage and Then Steals It
Chapter 7 - Children: The New Spouses: How the Strength of Family Values Became the Weakness of Family
Chapter 8 - Man-Cave in the Promised Land: How Spouses Reclaim Their Adulthood by Acting Like Children
Chapter 9 - Marital Habitats: Being Married with Children in Public Again

Part III: New Twists on Old Infidelities, or the Way We Stray Today

Chapter 10 - Stories of the 'AFFAIRS' Folder: The Underwhelming Crisis of Infidelity
Chapter 11 - 'I Call It Married Dating': The Accidental Cheater in the Age of Facebook and Google
Chapter 12 - ISO (In Search Of): A Bubble: The Philanderer's Defense

Part IV: The New Monogamy

Chapter 13 - 'The Fifty-Mile Rule': Affair Tolerators, Then and Now, or the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Marriage
Chapter 14 - 'We're Making It Up as We Go Along': Sexual Libertarianism and the Case Against Marital Monogamy
Chapter 15 - 'A Place Where a Sick Marriage Goes to Die?': The Hidden World of 'Ethical Nonmonogamy'
Chapter 16 - 'Free Love 2.0': The New Open Marriage

Epilogue - 'Why Can't We Have Our Cake and Eat It, Too?'

My Take:
Interesting, but a bit heavy on the anecdotes and light on actual data in some places. The author's basic premise is that a large number of Americans (I don't think she ever offers exact numbers or fractions) today are in what she calls low-conflict, low-stress marriages:

"[S]ecretly they are troubled by a feeling that there is something in their marriage that doesn't work, possibly cannot be made to work, and that it is not going to get any better. As far as their marriages are concerned, they fear that this is, indeed, it. These spouses are sad more than miserable, disappointed rather than chronically unhappy. As psychiatrists would say, their marriages are 'melancholy': They have a brooding sadness about them that often lacks an obvious, tangible cause.

"These melancholy spouses may not remember the dream they once had for marriage, but the dream remembers them. It tugs at them hauntingly. They know it's not their spouse's fault, per se, or even their own. After several years, a Marriage is more like a third character, with its own personality and life. It's not reducible to the sum of its all-too-human creators, any more than a child would be.

"... You shadowbox with yourself. In quiet moments when you ask yourself, 'Is this all it is?,' you simultaneously beat up on yourself for asking the question at all. You accuse yourself of being selfish to want more than you already have. You feel guilty thinking about lost or deferred dreams, and you wonder whether it is noble or useful to demand more from a marriage than the good things you have. You might even question your desires. Perhaps the longing for more out of marriage is just the vestige of a callow, self-defeating romantic ideal that you don't even entirely trust anymore, but can't entirely purge from your mind."

While I don't disagree, and think Haag offers some intriguing examples of marriages that seem to get around this problem by making some of their own rules, she largely ignores the explanation I believe Stephanie Coontz offered some years ago: now that we marry primarily for love and most women don't really need a husband to support them financially, our expectations of marriage and our spouse -- as best friend, lover, co-parent, etc. -- have become such a tall order that reality is bound to fall short. Haag argues that more and more people marry spouses not just with similar levels of education, but from the same or similar schools, and that this coupled with the Internet-era ability to pre-screen potential dates' hobbies, backgrounds, etc. to a degree unthinkable a generation ago means we're marrying people who are essentially just like us, rather than who complement us. At the same time, we're developing collegial, affectionate relationships at work that are increasingly indistinguishable from those we have with our spouses. I'm not sure I buy this latter point, nor do I get quite what the two trends have in common.

My biggest critique, though, is with Haag's "workhorse wife" chapter, where I think she makes far too big a leap. The hard facts are comparable to others I've encountered before: the percentage of men out of the labor force has increase from 5% in the 1960s to 13% today, and the percentage of married women who out-earn their husbands has increase from 24% in 1987 to 33% today. OK, fair enough. However, I'm not sure it automatically follows from this that the anecdote Haag offers -- a woman who's worked for years in lucrative but exhausting and soul-sucking jobs while her husband pursues a series of exciting but low-paying "big dream" careers, but still shoulders the bulk of the housework and child care -- is really a trend. I don't dispute the second shift (women do most of the housework and child care even when both partners work full time), but again, this isn't new news; Arlie Hochschild identified the issue more than 20 years ago. And I don't doubt that there are some couples in situations similar to Beth and Rich's (wife makes the big bucks, husband follows his dream) -- but I can think of plenty where the roles are reversed, and mom/ wife works an interesting/ flexible but poorly paid job while dad/ husband does the bulk of the earning. Also, thinking back to my grad school days, I believe the increased percentage of men not in the labor force is a function of a) increased availability of disability benefits and b) people living longer in retirement, and makes itself felt (especially at the lower end of the economic spectrum, which isn't very well-represented among Haag's anecdotes) less in wives supporting their selfish, underemployed husbands than in more men with lower levels of education and grimmer occupational prospects just not getting married at all.

Likewise, the section about how children impact a marriage has some interesting points (I'm all for anyone who points out that the over-the-top extremes to which some families take attachment parenting isn't good for either children or parents), but it's not exactly news that having children is stressful, and (particularly when the kids are young and demand a seemingly endless supply of parental time and energy) can weaken or even destroy a marriage.

Probably the most ground-breaking section of Marriage Confidential is its last, where Haag dares to question the assumption that marriage must equal monogamy, and anyone who thinks or practices otherwise is immoral/ a perv. Once again, she's not the first to voice the idea; sex columnist Dan Savage has been a proponent of what he calls "monogamish" relationships for years, i.e., provided you're honest with your partner and agree on parameters for what is and isn't OK (Are certain sex acts off-limits? Any not in our house/ not in our circle of friends rules? How much do you tell each other before and afterwards?), then hey -- some extra-marital recreation can be A Good Thing. However, as with the attachment parenting issue, questioning the monogamy assumption is still pretty bold, and in my book, any intimate arrangement that reduces the frequency of sordid revelations on the Spitzer/ John Edwards/ Ah-nuld continuum is a) fine by me, and b) unless it's my marriage, none of my beeswax anyway.

Overall, Haag has some interesting ideas, but the overall book reads more like a somewhat-disjointed outline or rough draft, rather than advancing a single cohesive thesis. Would make for some interesting discussions if you were to read it with friends, but definitely more of a starting point than a definitive treatment of the issues.

#88: Dune Road

2011-10-25T08:13:00.000-07:00

Dune Road, by Jane Green (New York: Viking, 2009)

Summary:
"Set in Connecticut's tony Gold Coast town of Highfield, Dune Road tells the story of Kit Hargrove, whose divorce has granted her a new lease on life. No longer a Wall Street widow with the requisite diamond studs and Persian rugs, Kit revels in her clapboard Cape with the sea green shutters and sprawling impatiens. Her kids are content, her ex cooperative, her friends steadfast, and each morning she wakes up unable to believe how lucky she is to have landed the job of her dreams: assisting the blockbuster novelist Robert McClore.

"A mysterious tragedy drove this famous writer into seclusion decades ago, and few besides Kit are granted access to his house at the top of Dune Road, with its breathtaking views of Long Island Sound. But that is all about to change. At a rare appearance at the local bookstore, McClore meets Kit's new friends Tracy, whose weakness for older men rivals her powers of self-reinvention. Are the secret visits of her boss's new muse as innocent as Kit would like to believe? When a figure from her mother's past emerges with equally cryptic intentions just as the bear financial market is upending her best friend's life, Kit discovers that her blissfully constructed idyll -- and the gorgeous man who has walked into it with creamy white roses -- isn't as perfect as she'd thought. Ties to friends and family are further reaching than she had realized -- and more crucial than ever before."

Opening Line:
"One of the unexpected bonuses of divorce, Kit Hargrove realizes, as she settles onto the porch swing, curling her feet up under her and placing a glass of chilled wine on the wicker table, is having weekends without the children, weekends when she gets to enjoy this extraordinary peace and quiet, remembers who she was before she became defined by motherhood, by the constant noise and motion that come with having a thirteen-year-old and an eight-year-old."

My Take:
First off, it's been fun, but I really need to take a break from the chick lit, summer beach read genre for a while. The last few story lines are all starting to blend together.

Another solid read that may not be great literature but was engaging enough for the day or so it took to read it. Dune Road is another Great Recession-themed novel in the tradition of Hedge Fund Wives, though the richest character here (Kit's best friend Charlie) still wouldn't qualify to socialize or even shop with the obscenely wealthy HFWs in that book. While Kit herself isn't really affected by the recession (rock star writers actually do better when times are tough, the book suggests, as books and movies are one of the few luxuries people can still afford), Charlie is in a big way; husband Kevin loses his big Wall Street job with nearly everyone else in the company, and the family's long-standing habit of living way beyond their means catches up with them with a vengeance (i.e., losing the house and moving in with the in-laws).

That's not, however, the main plot of the book, which centers first and foremost around Kit. While she gets on unusually well with ex-husband Adam, who still lives in town, the divorce still feels like the right decision; Adam's a Wall St. whiz himself and was rarely around anyway, and if it weren't for the divorce and move, she'd never have met Edie, the 80-something neighbor who's become the mom she always wanted and even ended up getting Kit her job. To top it off, things are looking up on the romantic front, since new gal pal/ yoga instructor Tracy managed to set her up with the hunky, new-in-town Steve. Edie's suspicious, but Kit is utterly charmed by the roses and perfume.

Unfortunately, their first big dinner date is postponed when Steve arrives at Kit's and finds a mysterious letter on her doorstep ... which turns out to be an introduction from Annabel, the English half-sister she never knew she had, who's conveniently visiting in Highfield in hopes of finally meeting her. Annabel, too, manages to charm not only Kit but her whole family -- particularly ex-husband Adam. The only skepticism comes from Kit's mother, Ginny -- who's never been much the maternal sort anyway, and hasn't even seen Annabel since her birth (all her info comes from Annabel's father, John).

The big questions: Why is Tracy being so secretive lately, both about her budding relationship with Robert and her big business expansion/ investment plan? Is Steve really as good as he seems, or is Edie on to something? What's going to happen to Charlie and her family if they lose everything? And, of course, will Kit and Adam get back together in the end? Some of the answers are predictable, and others less so. If you're at all intrigued, this one's worth a read.

#87: Secrets to Happiness

2011-10-23T05:26:00.000-07:00

Secrets to Happiness, by Sarah Dunn (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009)

Summary:
"Holly Frick has just endured the worst kind of breakup: the kind where you're still in love with the person leaving you. While Holly's wounds are still dangerously close to the surface, her happily married best friend confesses over a bottle of wine that she is this close to having an affair. And another woman asks Holly for advice about her love life -- with one of Holly's exes!

"Holly decides that if everyone around her can take pleasure wherever they find it, so will she. As any self-respecting thirtyish New York woman would do, she brings two males into her life: a flawed but endearing dog and a good-natured, much younger lover. She's soon entangled in a web of emails, chance meetings, and misguided good intentions and must forge an entirely new path to Nirvana."

Opening Lines:
"Do you want to know the secret to a happy marriage?"
"Tell me."
"Put your wife on Paxil."

My Take:
Reasonably entertaining and well-written, but as the story line doesn't really go anywhere, it reads more like someone's journal or a sitcom script than like a proper plot-driven novel. The jacket summary above pretty much summarizes everything that happens, except that Holly's BFF Amanda does eventually do the deed and have an affair with Jack, regrets it and sets him up with Holly to put an extra roadblock between her and temptation ... only to have her realize she loves Jack more than husband Mark after all, and oh well, sorry we dragged Holly into the middle of our embarrassing little affair. Did I mention that Chester, the dog Holly adopts after the original owners couldn't deal with his brain tumor and grim prognosis, makes a full recovery ... only to have their young son recognize the dog in the park, and Holly eventually decide to do the right thing and give him back? Well, that's pretty much all there is here. Fun for an afternoon or so, but not outstanding or particularly memorable.

#86: The Gap Year

2011-10-22T16:19:00.000-07:00

The Gap Year, by Sarah Bird (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011)

Summary:
"From the widely-praised author of The Yokota Officers Club and The Flamenco Academy, a novel as hilarious as it is heartbreaking about a single mom and her seventeen-year-old daughter learning how to let go in that precious moment before college empties the nest.

"In The Gap Year, told with perfect pitch from both points of view, we meet Cam Lightsey, lactation consultant extraordinaire, a divorcee still secretly carrying a torch for the ex who dumped her, a suburban misfit who's given up her rebel dreams so her only child can get a good education.

"We also learn the secrets of Aubrey Lightsey, tired of being the dutiful, grade-grubbing band geek, ready to explode from wanting her 'real' life to begin, trying to figure out love with boys weaned on Internet porn.

"When Aubrey meets Tyler Moldenhauer, football idol-sex god with a dangerous past, the fuse is lit. Late bloomer Aubrey metastasizes into Cam's worst silent, sullen teen nightmare, a girl with zero interest in college. Worse, on the sly Aubrey's in touch with her father, who left when she was two to join a celebrity-ridden nutball cult.

"As the novel unfolds -- with humor, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and penetrating insights about love in the twenty-first century -- the dreams of daughter, mother, and father chart an inevitable, but perhaps not fatal, collision ... "

Opening Line:
"I once believed that I was physiologically incapable of being unhappy while submerged in water."

My Take:
This one was pretty darned good. As the jacket indicates, the story alternates between Cam's and Aubrey's perspectives, but also between different times; Cam's story begins in August 2010, on the eve of Aubrey's scheduled departure for far-away Peninsula College, while Aubrey's starts a year earlier, on the cusp of her senior year when heat exhaustion at band practice leads her to puke on local football star Tyler Moldenhauer.

Both characters are very well-rendered, with a realistic dose of faults. On one hand, Aubrey's so dazzled by the initial scraps of attention Tyler offers that she thinks little about what she herself wants, both in terms of friendships/ Relationships and life in general. On the other, she's seventeen, so this is probably understandable thanks to youth and hormones. It's the little touches here that make the story: Aubrey's being surprised by Tyler's "country teeth" (anyone else in Parkhaven would've had that remedied by orthodontia years ago) and touched by his calling an interviewer for the in-school TV show "son" even though they're presumably only 2 or 3 years apart.

Cam, on the other hand, is both sympathetic and infuriating, in that half-nervous, too-close-for-comfort way. She's always prided herself on the close, open relationship she has with Aubrey -- at least, till a year ago -- but now finds herself agonizing regretfully over all the things they haven't done, from reading The Secret Garden together to staying in the hipper but educationally dodgier Sycamore Heights instead of moving to well-off, uber-conformist Parkhaven where neither of them really fits in. I'm with her here, but on the other hand, her contempt for Tyler is way excessive and off-putting. She can't seem to mention or even think of him without affixing "redneck" or "hillbilly" before his name, and appears to have spent the whole summer disparaging a job that seems pretty darned enterprising for a barely-literate high school grad; Tyler and Aubrey have been raking in the bucks operating a mobile food service van, which Cam can't stop calling a "roach coach."

Put the two together, add in Aubrey's unexpected Facebook friendship and regular online chats with her father, Martin ... and it's clear that something, somewhere is eventually gonna blow. When her part of the story opens, Cam's spent the whole summer laying in enough towels, sheets, and other dorm supplies for a whole floor of freshmen, but Aubrey won't even say two words about her college plans. Cam nags incessantly about how the two of them need to go to the bank together to withdraw her first year's tuition from her trust, but Aubrey constantly insists she's too busy with customers. Did I mention that Cam still carries a torch for Martin, even though he left her for the Next! cult and cut off all contact 16 years ago? Or that her own best friend, bad-a$$, rebel-without-a-cause Dori, serves as both comfort and warning (since Twyla, her own daughter and Aubrey's former best friend, ran off to live with her dad a year ago and hasn't been in touch since)?

A balanced, highly readable novel.

#85: 7 Things Your Teenager Won't Tell You

2011-10-22T15:02:00.001-07:00

7 Things Your Teenager Won't Tell You and How to Talk About Them Anyway, by Jennifer Marshall Lippincott and Robin M. Deutsch, Ph.D. (New York: Ballantine, 2005)

Summary:
"Every teenager keeps secrets. If you're like most parents, you worry about what your kids don't tell you. In this guide to keeping pace -- and peace -- with teens, authors Jennifer Lippincott and Robin Deutsch offer a deceptively simple plan for talking to your kids that's based on a simple set of rules: Teens need to stay safe, show respect, and keep in touch."

Table of Contents:

Part I: Our Jobs Redefined

Introduction

Job Description

The Rules of Play

Our Own Adolescence -- A Look Back
Today's Adolescents -- What's Changed?
The Case for the Rules of Play
Selling the Rules of Play to Our Adolescents
Rule #1: Stay Safe
Rule #2: Show Respect
Rule #3: Keep in Touch

Part II: The Seven Things

1. Their Brains Are To Blame

The New News About the Adolescent Brain
The Adolescent Brain's Control Mechanisms
What We Need to Know About the Limbic System
What We Need to Know About the Prefrontal Cortex
The Great Brain Drain
Substance Abuse and the Adolescent Brain
Sleep and the Adolescent Brain
How to Deal

2. Truth Is As Malleable As Their Friday Night Plans

The Anatomy of an Adolescent Lie
Categories of Lies
Getting at the Truth
How to Deal

3. Controlling Them Is Not the Point

The Control Conundrum
A New Regime
Taking Their Tempraments
Playing with Our Adolescents
Games It's Okay to Play
How to Deal
Command of Control

4. The Adolescent Mirror Distorts

What We See Is Not What We Get
What They See Is Not What We See
The Only Adolescent Perspective -- Their Own
Time Is on Their Side
The Art of the Adolescent Conversation
How to Deal

5. Friends Don't Matter As Much As We May Think

Friends Versus Companions
Their Reality Shows
Is a Friend of Our Adolescent's a Friend of Our?
The Seven Myths of Peer Influence
Friendship Formations
How to Deal

6. When We Say No, They Hear Maybe

Reality Bytes
Values Clarification
The Great Adolescent (Parenting) Inhibitors
Our Moral Addresses
Gender Balancing
How to Deal

7. Taking Risks Gives Them Power

The Nature of Risk
The Power of Risk
Balancing the Power Scales
Risks Past and Present
Degrees of Risk
How to Deal

My Take:
The very short jacket blurb above (it's a paperback and most of the back cover is excerpts from reviews) seems appropriate, as there didn't really seem to be all that much to this book. Yes, the point the authors make about the adolescent brain not being fully developed bears repeating (and may well have still fallen into the category of hot this-just-in news when the book as published in 2005). And truth be told, I'll admit to reading about the first half pretty closely and then, well, doing a lot of skimming from there on.

But that aside, unless I missed something major, there just isn't enough substance there for a full book. Most of the communication tips seem pretty self-evident, and certainly have been published elsewhere before this, i.e., you get more info from your teen if you ask non-judgmental, impersonal questions (i.e., "Do many kids drink at parties?" "Hey, I read this article about ... ") than if you start right out accusing and blaming. And the authors' much-touted Rules of Play (stay safe, show respect, keep in touch) are good ideas in theory, but so vague ad to cover pretty much everything and nothing at once. They're also a bit light on the consequences part of parenting.

All in all -- meh. Not awful but not particularly impressive or memorable, either.

#91: Employees First, Customers Second

2011-10-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down, by Vineet Nayar (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2010)

Summary:
"When Vineet Nayar took the helm of HCL Technologies (HCLT) in 2005, the company's legacy of success was threatened by global shifts in the IT services market that left HCLT struggling to keep up with its bigger rivals. Five years later, the company had become one of the fastest growing IT services partners on the planet, world renowned for its radical management practices.

"What did HCLT do to effect such a transformation? As Nayar describes it in this refreshing first-person narrative, the secret to the company's success was to put employees first -- especially those working in the 'value zone,' described as the interface between the customer and HCLT. To do so, the company did not institute any employee-satisfaction programs, undertake any massive restructurings, or pursue any major technology initiatives. Instead, it employed a number of relatively simple catalysts that produced big (and often unexpected) results. The transformation advanced through four phases:

Mirror Mirror: Nayar traveled around the world, bluntly speaking the truth about the company's situation and turning employees' eyes away from the past and toward a better future.
Trust Through Transparency: A culture of trust was created by opening the books, sharing information that would make other companies cringe, and enabling employees and managers (including the CEO) to ask questions of each other.
Inverting the Pyramid: The company redefined processes to make the supporting functions and the management accountable to the employees -- who, as a result, both improved their effectiveness and built new passion for their work.
Recasting the Role of the CEO: Nayar sought to transform the company into a self-governing organization by transferring the responsibility for change from the office of the CEO to the employees in the value zone.

Nayar candidly admits that he did not have a grand plan when he started out, and that these phases became clear to him only after the transformation, but argues that any of these ideas and practices -- 'the world's most modern management,' according to Fortune -- may be successfully adopted by any company in any industry anywhere in the world, with similar results."

Table of Contents:

Introduction
1. Mirror Mirror: Creating the Need for Change
2. Trust Through Transparency: Creating a Culture of Change
3. Inverting the Organizational Pyramid: Building a Structure for Change
4. Recasting the Role of the CEO: Transferring the Responsibility for Change
5. Find Understanding in Misunderstanding: Renewing the Cycle of Change

My Take:
Wow. While this isn't my favorite genre, I've certainly read enough in the leadership and management section to have a sense of what to expect, and honestly, my expectations aren't usually all that high. A valuable reminder or two, perhaps even some point I hadn't thought of before, but usually nothing earth-shattering.

Employees First, Customers Second was different, probably in large part because its author isn't some ill-defined management guru but an actual CEO who (if the book can be believed) transformed his company by implementing four simple but revolutionary steps, all of which flow from the premise that a business's true value in the 21st century derives not from the R&D or manufacturing divisions, but from the front-line employees who interact most directly with the customers:

"The conventional wisdom, of course, says that companies must always put the customer first. In any service business, however, the true value is created in the interface between the customer and the employee. So, by putting employees first, you can bring about fundamental change in the way a company creates and delivers unique value for its customers and differentiates itself from its competitors. Through a combination of engaged employees and accountable management, a company can create extraordinary value for itself, its customer, and the individuals involved in both companies."

The Mirror, Mirror section is pretty straightforward and, while it may not be common among new CEOs, it's certainly not unheard of. Remember the old MBWA (Management By Walking Around) fad from 20-some-odd years ago? Well, essentially, this is what Nayar did on becoming CEO: traveled around the world, met with employees at most or all of HCLT's many locations, and told them the truth as he saw it about where the company currently stood. In his case, this meant admitting that the firm that had previously been an industry leader in India had fallen in the early 2000s to the middle of the pack, and continued to lose market share by resting on its laurels. This chapter concludes with an insightful and humorous observation on what it really means to be a great leader:

"I thought about my three heroes -- Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr. -- and how they had created transformation in their societies. ... These great leaders did not formulate strategy by retreating with their top people to a private place and then emerging to make a pronouncement to the masses. No, they walked the roads of their countries, met their people, and talked with them ceaselessly. During that process, they held up the mirror to their societies and helped their people see and articulate what was wrong. The leaders were able to make people intrinsically unhappy with the current state of affairs without demeaning their accomplishments or dishonoring their past in anyway. ... They also worked with their people to create an idea of the future, the point B that made people aspire to change. The resulting combination of dissatisfaction, continued pride, and excitement was a very, very heady potion and difficult to reject."

It's in the next section where things start to really get radical, though. Believing that in order to successfully implement major changes and innovations, all ideas, no matter where they come from within the company, need to be aired and debated, he opened up HCLT's financial information to everyone in the organization. (Exactly what was and wasn't made public wasn't specified, but I'm enough of a privacy-mad American to assume individual salaries weren't published. Hey, who knows?) He also initiated an online Q & A forum different from many others in that questions weren't censored; all questions were visible to everyone, along with all the responses. Interestingly, while the deluge of questions and comments initially made Nayar feel like the company must be in serious trouble, his direct reports indicated that they were seeing a very different picture; now that the company seemed to be acknowledging and addressing its problems, employees were spending much less time gossiping and more time talking about what was being posted, offering one another different ways of looking at situations, working on potential solutions, etc.

From here, he went on to do what the book calls inverting the pyramid: making such "enabling functions" as HR and finance, and even the CEO's office, accountable to the front-line employees. Specifically, they instituted an internal service ticket function that works like this:

"An employee can open a ticket for one of three categories of issues -- a problem, a query, or a work request -- and the ticket can be directed to any one of the enabling functions, including HR, finance, administration, training and development, IT/IS teams, transport, and others. Employees can also open a ticket on most members of senior management, including me.

"Once the employee has filled out the ticket, the system automatically assigns it to a support executive in the appropriate department. He or she will investigate the issue and take any action necessary to resolve it. The support executive commits to a set of accountability measures for each ticket, including how long it should take to complete. The metrics are based on a number of factors, including the complexity and urgency of the request. If the support executive does not resolve the issue within the specified time, the ticket is automatically sent to the executive's manager, and so on up the line.

"The entire SSD process is transparent so that an employee can check the status of his or her ticket at any time. Once the issue is resolved, the support executive closes the ticket. If, however, the employee is not satisfied with the resolution, he or she can refuse the closed status of the ticket. It will remain open and the clock will keep ticking. The employee can also rate the quality of service provided by the support executive."

In addition, the company extended the 360-degree feedback process many companies use to allow not just a manager's direct reports, but anyone whose job might be influenced by a manager's actions, to offer feedback on that manager.

The final action step -- recasting the role of the CEO -- was a bit unclear to me, but essentially, Nayar envisioned HCLT as a leaderless organization, as described in Brafman and Beckstrom's The Starfish and the Spider:

"Cut off the leg of a spider, and you have a seven-legged creature on your hands; cut off its head and you have a dead spider. But cut off the arm of a starfish and it will grow a new one. Not only that, but the severed arm can grow an entirely new body."

Perhaps the best summary of the leadership model for which Nayar strives is this one, from the end of Chapter 5:

"The CEO can no longer be the one who scribbles strategy on a paper napkin over dinner. He or she cannot be the one who stands in front of a crowd to motivate it with fabulous oratory. The CEO will not be the one who thinks of the best and the brightest ideas. The role of the CEO is to enable people to excel, help them discover their own wisdom, engage themselves entirely in their work, and accept responsibility for making change."

The book's final chapter addresses some of the more common objections one might have to the EFCS philosophy; namely, that it won't work when times are hard and isn't necessary when times are good; that customers won't see any value as a result; that large-scale changes are needed; or that EFCS has no impact on the company's bottom line. (Needless to say, he suggests that all 5 comments are untrue.)

If it's not already obvious, I really enjoyed this book; it was a quick, easy read with a lot to chew on for a manager or aspiring manager of pretty much any organization.

#84: Hedge Fund Wives

2011-10-20T12:11:00.000-07:00

Hedge Fund Wives, by Tatiana Boncompagni (New York: Avon, 2009)

Summary:
"When her husband, John, is recruited to be a big-time hedge fund manager, Marcy Emerson gives up her job, uproots her life, and moves from Chicago to New York City. But try as she might, March is never going to fit into one of the supposed seven categories of Hedge Fund Wives -- the Accidental, the Westminster, the Stephanie Seymour, the Former Secretary, the Socialite, the Workaholic, or the Breeder -- especially when behind every smile may lurk a stab in the back.

"In a perfect world John would have been there to help her navigate the waters, but in this volatile financial market, relationships have a way of nosediving faster than the Dow, and March quickly finds herself tossed aside for a thinner, blonder model. But while living out of suitcases and drowning her sorrows in cocktails, Marcy realizes it's time to get back up on her own two feet again ... and fight for those things in life that are far more important than money."

Opening Line:
"When I first opened the invitation to Caroline Reinhardt's baby shower, I thought I'd received it by mistake."

My Take:
Polished this off in half a day, and I feel as though I just had a big bowl of popcorn for supper. It's fun and tasty in the short term, partly because you feel like you're getting away with something, but doesn't do much to nourish or sustain you over the long haul.

The back-of-the-jacket blurb pretty much sums up the story line. Marcy, our heroine and narrator, is established as a fish out of water from the get-go, starting with the first-chapter sequence in which her pink parka stands out like a sore thumb amid a coat closet full of furs, and Caroline Reinhardt decides she's not worth talking to because she doesn't hire an interior decorator. At John's insistence, she'd given up her own banking career in anticipation of one day staying at home with their children, but after a recent miscarriage and the move to Manhattan, she's still reeling. It doesn't help that the other hedge fund wives, whether employed in their own right or not, seem interested primarily in extreme competitive shopping.

She does meet the glamorous but warm, if a little high-strung, Jill at the aforementioned baby shower, and through her, eventually meets Gigi, a caterer and cookbook author who (despite her marriage to yet another Wall St. VIP) becomes her closest friend and confidante. She and John also begin to socialize with Ainsley and Peter, despite that couple's precarious finances. As is telegraphed early on, this is where the trouble begins; Ainsley, panicked at Peter's fortune and aware of John's rising-star status, decides to trade up, and when Marcy spontaneously flies to Miami to visit John at a conference, she catches the pair in flagrante. With the help of a tough divorce lawyer Gina recommends, Marcy resists John's early settlement offers and ultimately walks away with a cool $15 million ... just in time to see Ainsley's pregnancy in the society pages, and realize how long her affair with John had been going on.

Marcy eventually comes out on top, and John does get a comeuppance of sorts, but this is no First Wives Club. It's far shorter on humor, and rather excessive in the descriptions of conspicuous consumption. (The excess is the point, I know, but it still makes for tedious reading after yet another over-the-top baby shower or dinner party.) All in all, an OK read, but I'd have liked a bit less of the bling, and more exploration of the edge-of-recession era in which the story is set.

#83: Original Sins

2011-10-17T10:46:00.000-07:00

Original Sins, by Peg Kingman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010)

Summary:
"Why would a runaway Virginia slave -- having built a rewarding life in the East Indies as a silk merchant -- risk her own freedom and that of her two sons by returning to America in 1840, eighteen years after taking her freedom? Annie -- now Anibaddh Lyngdoh -- claims that she intends to introduce a new kind of silk to the floundering American silk industry. But her true reason, as discovered by her old friend Grace MacDonald Pollocke, is far more personal -- to find the child she abandoned when she ran away.

"Grace, orphaned in early childhood, has grown up in India and China with her stepmother. She is now married, has a young son of her own, and is a portrait painter living in Philadelphia. Anibaddh cannot safely travel south, and so Grace goes in her place. The investigation leads her to the Virginia plantation where Annie was raised in slavery and where Grace's own cousins live. There old sins are discovered, and new ones committed. What crimes may be justified, Grace wonders, in the service of a higher justice? Deceit, forgery, fraud, perjury ... even murder?

"This novel thrillingly evokes a nineteenth-century America not so different from the present_ a time of stunning new technologies and financial collapse, and when religious and racial views collide with avowed principles of morality and law."

Opening Line:
"Grace had imagined Daniel's homecoming hundreds of times; repeatedly she had painted the scene in her mind's eye."

My Take:
A bit of a slow starter, but surprisingly engaging once it got going.

As the opening line above suggests, the story opens with Grace eagerly awaiting her husband's arrival from Canton, where they met and married. A few chapters in, he arrives, with a surprise guest: Anibaddh Lyngdoh, who hasn't set foot on American soil since escaping from slavery and preventing eight-year-old Grace from being kidnapped by her mother's relatives in Scotland 18 years earlier. While Anibaddh claims to be here only briefly, to introduce her silks to the American market before delivering her sons to school in Europe, the astute Grace quickly notices that she seems to be making plans for a much longer stay ... and deduces, based on Anibaddh's hints and her own devotion to her baby son Jamie, that she's really come back to find and free Diana, the daughter she left behind in Virginia almost two decades ago.

The plot thickens considerably when Anibaddh recognizes one of Grace's "sitters" (portrait-painting customers), Mrs. Ambler, and the sister who accompanies her, Mrs. MacFarlane, as none other than the Grants, her own former owners and Grace's cousins. This revelation leads Grace to accept the sisters' invitation to come home to Virginia with them; under the guise of painting portraits of the whole family and attending a much-anticipated religious camp meeting, Grace will try to find Diana and send word back to Anibaddh. She keeps her maiden name a secret, and for the most part, finds the sisters and their mutual aunt, Bella Johnstone, to be insufferable pieces of work -- though she does find an unexpected ally in the youngest, unmarried Grant sister, aspiring chemist Julia, and is surprised to find herself coming to love their father (and her uncle), Judge Grant, an old man suffering from severe kidney stones. More surprising still, she discovers at the camp meeting that the elder Mr. MacFarlane, father of Mrs. MacFarlane's abusive husband, is also a kindred spirit ... at least when it comes to religious views, or lack thereof.

Then all hell breaks loose. On the same night, Diana runs away, and Judge Grant dies. The family is in an uproar when it's revealed that the Judge had been trustee for his late sister's estate, of which that ungrateful Scottish niece who refused to come to Virgina all those years ago is the sole beneficiary. Some debate ensures as to whether it's worth trying to find her or not, though the question is of little practical consequences; over the last few years, it seems the trust just happened to be invested in the horses that died and the slaves who'd run away or become too old to work, so what should have been worth $2,000 is only about $25. Enraged by the direction the conversation has taken, Grace fesses up and admits that she herself is the former Grace MacDonald, and the beneficiary of the trust. Not surprisingly, this does not go over well, and she ends up walking the 20-odd miles to Alexandria to catch a train home. The story doesn't end here, however, and the legal maneuvers that ensue have enormous repercussions not just for Grace, but for Anibaddh and her family.

At first, I had some reservations about telling a story about slavery from the point of view of a white, Scottish woman. I eventually got over them; by the end of the book, it seems that Kingman may have done this to make Grace (and through her, the average white reader) question our own complicity in maintaining slavery for so long, even if we might believe we're innocent. I also give the author props for setting the story not during the Civil War, which seems more typical for this subject, but 20 years earlier, when there wasn't really any question of ending slavery throughout the whole country.

Probably my biggest complaint about the book is twofold: too many unnecessary details, and too many red herrings. Kingman spends way too much time on Anibaddh's silkworms, describing their appearance and how they're raised for pages on end sometimes. Brief background and texture I understand, but it's taken to an extent that makes you think it will end up significant to the plot (which it never really does). Likewise, there are a handful of clues dropped early on that never amount to anything. Have the disgruntled slaves actually been poisoning their employers with castor oil beans? Is the senior MacFarlane really playing bagpipes in his moonlit field just for the heck of it, or is he secretly signaling to someone on the Underground Railroad? The story would still work perfectly well without either plot line, but to have them introduced and then inexplicably abandoned is perplexing.

Still a book I'd recommend, if you enjoy historical fiction set in the 19th century US.

#82: Dead or Alive

2011-10-17T10:03:00.001-07:00

Dead or Alive, by Tom Clancy with Grant Blackwood (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2010)

Summary:
"After almost a decade, Tom Clancy -- the acknowledged master of international intrigue and nonstop military action -- returns to the world he knows better than anyone: a world of chaos, caught in the crossfire of politics and power, placed on the edge of annihilation by evil men.

"But there are other men who are honor-bound to stop the bloodshed and protect their homeland-- by any means necessary ...

"It is called the Campus. It was secretly created under the administration of President Jack Ryan, its sole purpose to hunt down, locate, and eliminate terrorists and those who protect them, at will, without sanction or oversight. A self-sufficient entity, it has no official connection to the American government -- a necessity in a time when those in power consider themselves above such arcane concepts as loyalty, justice, and right or wrong.

"Covert intelligence expert Jack Ryan Jr. and his compatriots at the campus have waged this silent war in every corner of the world. Now joined by two of his father's closest allies, black ops warriors John Clark and 'Ding' Chavez, as well as Brian and Dominic Caruso and Mary Pat Foley, the campus has come up against its greatest foe: a sadistic killer known as the Emir.

"The mastermind of countless horrific attacks, the Emir has eluded capture by every law enforcement agency in the world -- a fact that the Campus is determined to change. But his greatest devastation is yet to be unleashed, as he plans a monumental single strike that will destroy the heart of America, unless the Campus can take him, dead or alive.

"On the trail of the emir, Jack Ryan Jr. will find himself following in his legendary father's footsteps on a deadly manhunt that will take him and his allies around the globe, into the shadowy arenas of political gamesmanship, and back onto U.S. soil -- in a battle to prevent the fall of the West ...

"Together for the first time, an all-star cast of Tom Clancy's characters races to ensure the nation's survival and to complete their mission, the desperate search for a madman who may be hiding in plain sight."

Opening Line:
"Light troops -- an Eleven-Bravo light infantryman, according to the United States Army's MOS (military occupational specialty) system -- are supposed to be 'pretty' spit-and-polish troops with spotless uniforms and clean-shaven faces, but First Sergeant Sam Driscoll wasn't one of those anymore, and hadn't been for some time."

My Take:
See, not all my light, entertaining reading is gender-specific!

Sigh. Yeah, it's a Clancy novel ... much like the Danielle Steel fluff I read a few weeks back, you pretty much know what you're getting into when you pick it up (though the specifics are quite a bit different). I could never get that into Jack Ryan's character, and his son doesn't interest me all that much, either, but I have had a big old book-character crush on John Clark ever since I read Without Remorse and Clear and Present Danger way back in the day, and couldn't resist the chance to read about how he and colleague/ son-in-law Domingo Chavez captured Osama bin Laden. (OK, Clancy calls his uber-bad guy Saif Rahman Yasin, dba the Emir, but he's obviously based on bin Laden -- right down to the responsibility for 9/11 and the ties to the Saudi royal family.)

As I'd expected, the complaints I've had about previous Clancy novels still hold for this one. I can never tell if Clancy himself doesn't like women or he's just giving his predominantly male readers what they want, but his stories take place in an almost exclusively masculine universe. With the exception of the no-nonsense, CIA veteran Mary Pat Foley, who plays a bit part here that would land her name just above the stunt doubles if this were made into a movie, only three female characters grace Dead or Alive's 950 pages -- two call girls, and one teenaged Indonesian terrorist. (Clark and Chavez's wives and the way-in-over-her-head National Security Advisor, none of whom actually say anything, don't count.) I'm not looking for a 50/50 split, but come on, now.

Clancy's more recent books also seem to suffer from what I think of as the J.K. Rowling problem: a tendency of famous, successful authors to decide that they don't need no stinkin' editors and will bloat their texts as much as they darned well please, TYVM. Usually, half the fun of a Clancy novel is seeing how the umpteen seemingly disconnected threads are going to come together at the end, but here the author's given us way too much of a good thing. There's the poorly-secured, former Soviet nuclear stockpile; good soldier Driscoll's being railroaded for murder by some Washington desk jockey who has the President's ear; the Indonesia as terrorist petri dish angle; the plot to blow up a Midwestern church ... ugh, I get tired and confused just trying to remember what all the ancillary story lines are. I don't mind so much if and when I can guess at an author's politics from reading his novels, but having it simultaneously flash a neon sign in my face, club me over the head, and stuff itself down my throat is a bit much.

Meh. As with several other authors, I may well read other Clancy books I haven't yet bothered with, if they present themselves ... but I think the author's Clear and Present Danger days are behind him.

#81: Chosen

2011-10-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

Chosen, by Chandra Hoffman (New York: Harper, 2010)

Summary:
"It all begins with a fantasy: the caseworker in her 'signing paperwork' charcoal suit standing alongside beaming parents cradling their adopted newborn, set against a fluorescent-lit delivery-room backdrop. It's this blissful picture that keeps Chloe Pinter, director of the Chosen Child's domestic-adoption program, happy while juggling the high demands of her boss and the incessant needs of both adoptive and biological parents.

"But the very job that offers her refuge from her turbulent personal life and Portland's winter rains soon becomes a battleground involving three very different couples: the Novas, well-off college sweethearts who suffered fertility problems but are now expecting their own baby; the McAdoos, a wealthy husband and desperate wife for whom adoption is a last chance; and Jason and Penny, an impoverished couple who have nothing -- except the baby everyone wants. When a child goes missing, dreams dissolve into nightmares, and everyone is forced to examine what he or she really wants and where it all went wrong."

Opening Line:
"Chloe Pinter is trying to develop a taste for coffee."

My Take:
A not-too-silly fun read; no more, no less. What makes it more compelling than it might otherwise be is its subject matter; I've read plenty of chick lit about pregnancy and new parenthood, but don't remember any other fiction about the domestic adoption scene. The details here are interesting; sometimes funny, sometimes a bit sketchy if they're legit, which I suspect they are -- Hoffman's bio includes a stint as the director of a U.S. adoption program.

For the most part, the picture Chosen paints of birth parents isn't a flattering one. Jason and Penny, whose newborn son Francie and John McAdoo adopt, are not only poor, but ex-cons, and while we might forgive Penny (herself the victim of a heinous rape and assault long before the book opens) her single conviction for check fraud, Jason is a career criminal and sociopath. Most of the other birth parents Chloe and her clients reflect upon aren't quite this bad, but are nonetheless out to milk the system for all it's worth. Not long after Eva Nova gives birth to her own son, she muses about what might have become of Amber, the birth mother whose daughter she and husband Paul had hoped to adopt before Eva became pregnant:

"[A] year earlier, Amber, a pudgy thirteen-year-old birth mother, her own mother only twenty-eight, had chosen the Novas as the adoptive parents for her own baby. Chloe Pinter had arranged their first meeting at a Red Lobster, an obese pair of slow-blinking, loud-chewing women. Paul's tounge-tied comment, 'You could be sisters,' had offended them equally. They had strung the agency along for six months, huge expensive meals, dragging Chloe through the grocery store for hours. Chloe told Eva and Paul that Amber and her mother had each pushed a cart filled with Doritos, jumbo boxes of Froot Loops, doughnuts, crumb cakes."

At the same time, Paul muses silently that they're way better off without Amber's baby:

"It had surprised him how quickly he had gotten on board with the concept of adoption. ... But when adoption was presented in the specific, in the form of the gum-smacking Amber, Paul can admit to himself that he was shaken. He had felt such relief when it was over, no longer worried about their half-wit, sleepy-eyed Baby Huey of a daughter who would be knocked up at age twelve herself, nature's triumph over nurture."

Later, Chloe has an excruciating lunch meeting with Debra, a pregnant exotic dancer who boasts "two kids at home, two adopted out, and a couple I knew early enough about to take care of," admits to not just drinking alcohol but taking crystal meth during her pregnancy, and insists that she be paid enough to take her kids to Disneyland after the baby is born. If it weren't for Heather, the Good Birth Mom who happens to live near Penny and Jason, this would seem a little classist; as it is, it just kinda makes you wonder.

The adoptive parents fare a bit better in Hoffman's hands, but their portrayal isn't exactly glowing, either. The Novas are mostly decent people (sure, Eva struggles with postpartum depression after Wyeth's birth, and Paul comes this close to an affair), but the McAdoos, not so much; Francie seems way more interested in maintaining her online friendships and picking out the perfect nursery furniture than actually spending time with her new son, and John's frequent business trips to Singapore eventually prove to be a cover for other, less family-friendly hobbies.

Oddly, probably the one character who seemed least real or interesting to me was the main character, Chloe. I do appreciate that her relationship with boyfriend Dan is a complicated one, neither perfect nor across-the-board awful. Sure, they met cute/ slutty and moved in together way too soon; yes, Dan's dream of starting his own surfing business in Hawaii seems a little impulsive ... but Hoffman avoids presenting him as a complete ass, too. I'm not 100% thrilled with how their story line wraps up -- let's just say it involves some abrupt changes in personalities and priorities that didn't quite ring true to me -- but this didn't prevent me from mostly enjoying the book.

#80: The White Devil

2011-10-13T12:49:00.000-07:00

The White Devil, by Justin Evans (New York: Harper, 2011)

Summary:
"The Harrow School is home to privileged adolescents known as much for their distinctive dress and traditions as for their arrogance and schoolboy cruelty. Seventeen-year-old Andrew Taylor is enrolled in the esteemed British institution by his father, who hopes that the school's discipline will put some distance between his son and his troubled past in the States.

"But trouble -- and danger -- seem to follow Andrew. When one of his schoolmates and friends dies mysteriously of a severe pulmonary illness, Andrew is blamed and is soon an outcast, spurned by nearly all his peers. And there is the pale, strange boy who begins to visit him at night. Either Andrew is losing his mind, or the house legend about his dormitory being haunted is true.

"When the school's poet-in-residence, Piers Fawkes, is commissioned to write a play about Byron, one of Harrow's most famous alumni, he casts Andrew in the title role. Andrew begins to discover uncanny links between himself and the renowned poet. In his loneliness and isolation, Andrew becomes obsessed with Lord Byron's story and the poet's status not only as a literary genius and infamous seducer but as a student at the very different Harrow of two centuries prior -- a place rife with violence, squalor, incurable diseases, and tormented love affairs.

"When frightening and tragic events from that long-ago past start to recur in Harrow's present, and when the dark and deadly specter by whom Andrew's been haunted seems to be all too real, Andrew is forced to solve a two-hundred-year-old literary mystery that threatens the lives of his friends and his teachers -- and, most terrifyingly, his own."

Opening Lines:
"Outside a cool evening awaited. The perspiration on his back and neck turned icy."

My Take:
Halfway through and still trying to decide. Got off to a slow start -- Gothic fiction isn't usually my thing -- but I do like stories set in school settings and it is picking up a bit. TBA.

(Later) Decent as those things go, but as I said, Gothic fiction isn't really my bag, and I don't know that this book was enough to win me over to the genre. Oh well; nothing wrong with expanding one's literary horizons.

As noted above, the book's opening is fairly unremarkable, with Andrew arriving at Harrow as a brand-new sixth-former (senior) feeling like he's stepped into a wholly alien world. The sole American at a British boarding school, and a rare transfer where most students begin as shells (seventh graders), Andrew does not make friends quickly -- not to mention that the rumors about his expulsion from his last school for drug use have crossed the pond with impressive speed. Only dorm-mate Theo Ryder is at all friendly or welcoming to Andrew, and within a few days, Theo is found dead. Contrary to the jacket blurb above, Andrew isn't blamed for Theo's death at this point, and the remaining residents of the Lot (Andrew's and formerly, Theo's house, or dorm) continue their studies, shaken but not really permanently changed.

Or so they think. What Andrew can't tell anyone at first, for fear of being deemed crazy and sent home, is that he not only found Theo's body ... he saw him die, strangled by a mysterious, white-haired boy who was there one moment and (without running away) simply gone the next. When the autopsy attributes Theo's death to a rare but non-contagious lung disease, he tries to put the vision from his mind. At the same time, Harrow's poet-in-residence and Lot's housemaster, Piers Fawkes, has been commissioned to write a play about Harrow's most famous alum, Lord Byron ... to whom Andrew bears an uncanny resemblance. Andrew is cast in the lead role, and begins to forge tentative, unlikely friendships with both Fawkes and the school's sole female student, headmaster's daughter Persephone Vine.

Unfortunately, the spectral white-haired boy doesn't give up that easily. Late one night, Andrew sees him a second time, when the boy leads him to a prefect's bathroom in the Harrow of yore, where a perplexed Andrew prevents him from being raped by a gang of older, larger students. Later, he recites a bizarre verse which Andrew learns (with the help of Fawkes and the school's archivist, Judith Kahn) comes from an obscure Jacobean tragedy performed at Harrow some 200 years earlier. This coincidence convinces the skeptical Fawkes that Andrew's ghost isn't just in his head, and the two become engrossed in discovering who he is and what he wants.

Until two more students fall ill, with symptoms similar to Theo's ... but which now, on closer examination, seem to indicate TB. This ratchets up the urgency and publicity of their search, especially as one of the students is Persephone.

From here on out, the book does get considerably more gripping and hard to put down. Though I'm not typically a fan of ghost stories, I did enjoy the climax and resolution of this one. If you like boarding school novels with a touch of the supernatural, give this one a try.

#79: Sunset Park

2011-10-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

Sunset Park, by Paul Auster (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010)

(Would actually have been #77, but I left it home on my recent trip to LI and took Bonobo Handshake and The Arrivals instead.)

Summary:
Sunset Park follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse.

An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out worker in southern Florida obsessively photographing thousands of abandoned objects left behind by the evicted families.
A group of young people squatting in a house in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
The Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world.
William Wyler's 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives.
A celebrated actress preparing to return to Broadway.
An independent publisher desperately trying to save his business and his marriage.

These are just some of the elements Auster magically weaves together in this immensely moving novel about contemporary America and its ghosts. Sunset Park confirms Paul Auster as one of our greatest living writers."

Opening Line:
"For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things."

My Take:
Made an interesting discovery with this one. After noting last week that Sunset Park was "interesting from a literary point of view, but [hadn't] grabbed me from either a plot or character perspective," and getting to that point halfway into the book where it's neither so great you're tearing through the pages nor so bad you give up altogether, I tried something different: I read it out loud. Not all of it, mind you; just a chapter here and there when I was home by myself or while MrHazel and Twig were otherwise engaged (i.e., watching Doctor Who on Netflix).

Amazing the difference this made. As I initially suspected, Sunset Park is literary fiction, rather than something you read primarily for the plot. (Yeah, I know they're not mutually exclusive, but humor me for a minute.) Not much of consequence happens here; essentially, four twenty-somethings squat in an abandoned Brooklyn townhouse for a few months until they finally get evicted. The characters are realistic and multifaceted, but all incredibly self-absorbed and not particularly likeable: Miles, the college dropout who abandoned his father and stepmother seven years ago, and has returned to New York from Florida only to escape possible prosecution for his relationship with his high school girlfriend; Bing, the old school friend who runs the Hospital for Broken Things and secretly keeps Miles' father informed of his son's whereabouts; Alice, the perpetual grad student who finds her part-time job promoting writers' free speech far more compelling than her almost-but-not-quite-done dissertation; and Ellen, the artist whose erotic drawings provide perhaps her sole sexual outlet, given that her obsession with Miles seems doomed to remain unrequited.

But for all that there's not much of a plot here and the characters remind you of that annoying special snowflake co-worker or college dorm-mate we've all known now and again, Sunset Park has a lot to say. Much as I had the odd, life-imitates-art experience a few weeks ago of reading The Confession while the Troy Davis case was in the news, I couldn't help thinking that the Sunset Park squatters' lives of quiet desperation, seeking meaningful work and lives in a society that renders us anonymous and interchangeable, parallel the frustrations that, collectively, gave rise to the Occupy Wall Street protests and the earlier Arab Spring demonstrations. Alice has given up on adjuncting, which requires at least a full-time effort for a salary that works out to be something around minimum wage; Miles has worked here and there as a cook and trash-out worker before Bing gives him a make-work job out of kindness. All four principals are at once determined to make or be something of significance, and utterly in despair of ever succeeding. I don't know that I'd go so far as to say I loved this book, or that it's one of my favorites, but it definitely offered some interesting things to think about and a compelling but disturbing vision of contemporary American youth and culture.

#78: The Arrivals

2011-10-09T15:50:00.000-07:00

The Arrivals, by Meg Mitchell Moore (New York: Reagan Arthur Books, 2011)

Summary:
"What happens when an empty nest fills up again? A captivating, heartwarming debut about growing up and coming home.

"It's the start of summer when Ginny and William Owen's quiet, peaceful life in Burlington, Vermont comes to an abrupt halt.

"First, their eldest daughter, Lillian, shows up with her two children in tow, to escape her crumbling marriage. Next, Lillian's younger brother, Stephen, arrives for the weekend, accompanied by his pregnant wife, Jane, an ambitious and misunderstood Wall Street workaholic -- but their visit is extended indefinitely when Jane is put on mandatory bed rest.

"And by the time Rachel, the youngest Owen sibling, appears, fleeing the difficulties of her single life in New York City, the senior Owens are once again consumed by the chaos and stress of their early parenting days -- only this time around, their house is filled with grown-up children and their adult problems.

"Meg Mitchell Moore's absorbing debut offers acute observations on the workings of a modern family, the challenges of parenting, and the continual struggles of growing up. By summer's end, the Owen family will have new ideas about loyalty, responsibility, and how you survive the people you love most. The old adage 'once a parent, always a parent' has never rung so true."

Opening Line:
"It was eight thirty in the morning, June, a Saturday, and the sunlight was coming in the kitchen window at such an angle that William's granddaughter, Olivia, had to shield her eyes with one hand while she bent her head to sip from the straw in her glass of orange juice."

My Take:
Couldn't have picked a better book to read while visiting my own parents for the weekend. While the loving but beseiged Ginny and William are probably the most sympathetic characters, the whole lot of them are realistic and fairly likeable: Lillian, overwhelmed by the incessant demands of mothering an infant and a very-chatty 3 year old, who can't possibly imagine forgiving husband Tom's single act of infidelity; Stephen and Jane, who struggle first with how to tell William and Ginny that Stephen plans to be a stay-at-home dad, and then with bigger, darker questions about Jane's risky pregnancy and uncertain professional future; and Rachel, whose recent breakup and miscarriage have left her with an apartment she can't afford and a nagging fear that she's really not cut out for the single life in New York.

In contrast to a fairly forgettable read like Kindred Spirits, it's the small details that make this book stand out. The minor but annoying family drama around who gets which bedroom now that Jane needs to be on bed rest. William's mounting annoyance with the mess his once-orderly home has become, in one late scene where he wants only to run a load of laundry and find some breakfast. Ginny's observation that you never seem to have enough towels when you have house guests. And my personal favorite: a scene where William convinces Stephen to detour past the ice cream stand on the way home from a trip to the hardware store:

"'Sometimes I do this,' William said, licking the sprinkles off the tip of the cone.

"'Do what?'

"'Sneak out on your mother in the middle of the day and have an ice cream.'

"'Geez, Dad,' said Stephen. This knowledge, delivered though it was in a genial, conspiratorial tone, made him sad. 'Do you have to sneak out to get an ice cream, at your age?'

"'Sixty-five next month,' William said cheerfully.

"'Aren't you supposed to be sneaking out for a beer, if anything?'

"'Ah.' William licked at his ice cream. 'That's the thing. A beer tastes better at home in the summer, in front of the Red Sox, after a hard day of work. A Creemee: that's better away from home.'

"'But you have to sneak it.' Stephen watched an elderly couple toddle down to the edge of the water. The man held a cane; the woman held onto his elbow and guided him.

"'No, I don't have to sneak it.'

"'But you like to sneak it.'

"'Well, it's easier, sometimes.'

"'Easier why?'

"'Because then I don't have to see if your mother wants to go, or arrange to bring something back for her if she doesn't, or explain why I want ice cream, or feel guilty for having it, or wonder if she's thinking about my cholesterol. Which makes me think about my cholesterol. It's just easier, sometimes, to go out on my own.'

"Stephen surveyed the scrappy grass under his feet. There was a group of ants moving about. He envied them suddenly, their ignorance and industry, their incapacity for self-doubt. 'Jesus,' said Stephen. It was depressing to him, to think of his father and his surreptitious ice cream cones. 'Is that what marriage becomes, in the end?' Guilt over ice cream? Hiding on a picnic bench somewhere by yourself? And yet there was William, licking away, as happy as a little boy, so who was Stephen to begrudge him his small pleasures?

"'That's not all marriage becomes,' said William. 'And I don't consider this the end.'"

Were I writing a bona fide essay about this book, there's a lot I could pull from that single passage. A good, solid read.

#77: Bonobo Handshake

2011-10-09T15:26:00.000-07:00

Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo, by Vanessa Woods (New York: Gotham Books, 2010)

Summary:
"Imagine a relative who thinks sex is like a handshake. Who organizes orgies with their neighbors, doesn't mind if their partner sleeps around, and firmly believes females should be in charge of everything. Now imagine there was a whole tribe of these relatives -- crazy, right? But definitely a lot of fun.

"Compared to chimps, we know hardly anything about bonobos. They are an extremely endangered ape and share 98.7 percent of our DNA. But while chimpanzees live in male-dominated societies with sexual coercion, infanticide, and war, bonobos are peaceful and female dominated; there is no infanticide or war, and sex is used to resolve conflict.

"The question is, how much of us is chimpanzee, how much is bonobo?

"Bonobo Handshake is the memoir of Vanessa Woods's journey to answer these questions. In 2005, she agreed to marry a handsome primatologist who was on the hunt for the answer to the greatest question of all time: What makes us human? Her fiance, Brian Hare, freshly armed with a Ph.D. from Harvard, believed the answer was in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country with a jungle three times the size of France, and in an ongoing war. Brian was on a quest to study bonobos, and bonobos only live in the Congo.

"Vanessa goes to live with him at Lola Ya Bonobo, a sanctuary for orphan bonobos in Kinshasa, the capital of Congo. The parents of the bonobos were killed by the bushmeat trade and the orphans were sold as pets before they were rescued. Some of them were tortured, with fingers and toes cut off for use in black magic. Others were raised like children in the homes of well-meaning but deluded expatriates. The sanctuary is also full of human refugees searching for respite from a conflict that has killed more than five million people. There Vanessa finds herself -- with no job and no identity, except as Dr. Hare's wife -- trying to turn a fling into a marriage and make sense of the suffering she witnesses. As it becomes clear that the bonobos are wary of men, Vanessa runs all of the experiments, and as she develops deep bonds with the bonobos, she also finds herself deeply in love with her husband and her new surroundings.

Bonobo Handshake is a memoir of science, adventure, love, and finding inspiration where you least expect it. It's about the similarities and extraordinary courage of people and animals and their will to survive. At times heartbreaking and humorous and always intelligent, it is also about a young woman finding her own path as a writer and scientist."

Opening Line:
"It's 2:17 A.M. in a Paris hotel room and my sweat is bleeding into the sheets."

My Take:
OK, but I had pretty high expectations and don't think the book quite lived up to them. In only 26 pages, Woods touches on the usual trials of newly-married life, the plight of the trailing spouse on an overseas assignment, the social and behavioral habits of the bonobo, and the dreadfully underreported, 13-year armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Unfortunately, the end result is that none of these topics really get the in-depth attention you might want. Woods has an engaging, personal, and often very funny writing style, and I'd happily read a longer book about the bonobos or her marriage. As it was, I finished the book feeling like I'd sampled a very tasty appetizer, but it wasn't quite enough to make a meal.

#76: Kindred Spirits

2011-10-06T07:04:00.000-07:00

Kindred Spirits, by Sarah Strohmeyer (New York: Penguin Group, 2011)

Summary:
"When life gives you lemons, call your best girlfriends and whip up some lemon martinis. Such is the mantra for the Ladies Society for the Conservation of Martinis, which was established after one fateful PTA meeting when four young mothers -- Lynne, Mary Kay, Beth, and Carol -- discovered they had more in common than they ever thought possible.

"Meeting once a month, the women would share laughs and secrets and toast to their blossoming friendship with a clink of their sacred martini glasses. The Society was their salvation, their refuge, a place where they could vent about kids, work, and husbands and celebrate their mutual appreciation for a good cocktail. But when life-shattering circumstances force the group to dissolve, their friendship is never quite the same ... until two years later, when a tragic event puts the Society back in session.

"When Lynne passes away suddenly, she leaves behind one simple request: that her old friends sort through her belongings. Reluctantly, the women reunite to rummage through her closets. There's nothing remarkable -- no kinky sex toys, no embarrassing diary. But buried deep within Lynne's lingerie drawer is an envelope addressed to the Society. In it, they find a letter than reveals a stunning personal secret and a final wish that will send the woman on a life-changing journey where they will discover unexpected truths about themselves, each other, and the meaning of friendship."

Opening Line:
"A martini is the world's most sophisticated cocktail, a classic of beauty and simplicity that derives its intoxicating allure from the melding of four strikingly different sensations."

My Take:
As I suspected, Kindred Spirits was no Dreams of Joy. While it wasn't quite as formulaic as Legacy, it was certainly closer to that end of the continuum. Even as a heartwarming story about female friendship, others have done far better at capturing the complex bonds among group members and making us care what happens to the characters.

Maybe it's because there's no real tension here. All we know is that the four principals met and bonded at a PTA meeting several years ago, after which they started getting together once a month for girl talk and martinis. Eventually, Lynne battles cancer, and Carol has a mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore moment that leads her, inexplicably, to leave her husband and kids and start a new life as a career gal in NYC ... which causes the Society to drift apart until Lynne's death two years later. During the course of the novel, the three survivors sort through Lynne's belongings and find a top-secret letter asking them to find the baby girl she'd given up for adoption 30 years earlier. Along the way, Carol begins to wonder whether she'd been a bit too hasty in leaving her marriage, Mary Kay agonizes after how to tell fiance Drake that she can't have children, and Beth worries that the life she and her husband had always dreamed of is passing them by. Any or all this could make for a halfway decent story, except the characters and their feelings aren't really presented with enough depth or description to hook us in. They never seem to argue, and we see little of their friendship -- dialogue, memories, etc. -- to understand why they became close in the first place, what made the others stop seeing each other after Carol left, etc.

All in all, not a horrible way to spend an afternoon, but not especially memorable, either.

#75: Dreams of Joy

2011-10-04T13:03:00.001-07:00

Dreams of Joy, by Lisa See (New York: Random House, 2011)

Summary:
"In her beloved New York Times bestsellers Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, and, most recently, Shanghai Girls, Lisa See has brilliantly illuminated the potent bonds of mother love, romantic love, and love of country. Now, in her most powerful novel yet, she returns to these timeless themes, continuing the story of sisters Pearl and May from Shanghai Girls, and Pearl's strong-willed nineteen-year-old daughter, Joy.

"Reeling from newly-uncovered family secrets and anger at her mother and aunt for keeping them from her, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father -- the artist Z.G. Li, with whom both May and Pearl were once in love. Dazzled by him, and blinded by idealism and defiance, Joy throws herself into the New Society of Red China, heedless of the dangers in the Communist regime.

"Devastated by Joy's flight and terrified for her safety, Pearl is determined to save her daughter, no matter the personal cost. From the crowded city to remote villages, Pearl confronts old demons and almost insurmountable challenges as she follows Joy, hoping for reconciliation. Yet even as Joy's and Pearl's separate journeys converge, one of the most tragic episodes in China's history threatens their very lives.

"Acclaimed for her richly drawn characters and vivid storytelling, Lisa See once again renders a family challenged by tragedy and time, yet ultimately united by the resilience of love."

Opening Line:
"The wail of a police siren in the distance tears through my body."

My Take:
Now this was exactly what I wanted -- a novel with some substance to it, but with enough action that I didn't keep plodding through chapter after chapter, waiting for something to finally happen. While technically a sequel to Shanghai Girls, it works just as well as a stand-alone novel -- compelling characters who don't require you to have read the earlier book to get and care about, fascinating setting, interesting plot, and so on.

The jacket summary pretty much captures how the book starts: Joy, having overheard a vicious argument between Pearl and May, has just learned that the woman she's known all her life as Auntie May is, in fact, her birth mother; that Pearl, the mother who raised her, is really her aunt; and Sam, the late father whose recent suicide she blames herself for, was no blood relation to her at all. With typical 19-year-old recklessness, she raids Pearl's not-so-secret cash kitty and leaves home, determined to find her birth father and answer Chairman Mao's call for overseas Chinese to return to the motherland and help build a Communist utopia. If college boyfriend Joe refuses to join her, well, she'll just go on her own.

As any student of history can imagine, this doesn't ultimately go so well. Joy does reach China, and fairly quickly locates her birth father, artist Z.G. Li, in Shanghai. Eager to get to know him, she convinces him to take her along on a trip to the countryside, helping him teach the peasants to create new, realistic, Party-approved art. (She only learns much later that this is a punishment rather than an honor for Z.G., and that he chose it only as an alternative to forced factory labor.) Initially, Joy is all too happy to drink the red Kool-Aid; food is simple but plentiful, and the camaraderie is a balm to someone still smarting from the implosion of her family of origin. Her infatuation with Tao, an uneducated but artistically-promising young man in the village, doesn't hurt, either -- though she remains grounded enough to resist his initial proposals of marriage, insisting that they scarcely know one another.

Meanwhile, the newly-widowed Pearl embarks on her own trip back to China, determined to find Joy and bring her home. She finds work as a scrap paper collector, and is able to secure a room in her family's old, much-the-worse-for-wear Shanghai home, where she waits, patiently, for Z.G. and Joy to return. Eventually, they do, but it's not quite the reunion Pearl had hoped for; Joy remains committed to the Great Leap Forward and shows no inclination to forgive her mother/aunt or return to the U.S., and Z.G. is torn between knowing Red China isn't quite the idyll Joy believes and wanting more time to get to know his newly-discovered daughter. After some tense moments, Joy returns to the countryside and accepts Tao's proposal, while Pearl remains in Shanghai to be as close to her daughter as possible.

By the time the reality of marriage sets in, the commune members have begun to feel the first pangs of the Great Chinese Famine ... and Joy is pregnant. Slowly, but surely, she and Pearl begin to realize both how much more difficult it's become for her to leave, and how important it is for her to do so.

I won't spoil much beyond that, but this really combines the best of both an action/ adventure story and a family drama. Definitely worth recommending or even rereading.

#74: Legacy

2011-10-04T12:52:00.000-07:00

Legacy, by Danielle Steel (New York: Delacorte Press, 2010)

Summary:
"This compelling, centuries-spanning novel brilliantly interweaves the lives of two women -- a writer working in the heart of modern academia and a daring young Sioux Indian on an incredible journey in the eighteenth century. The result is an unforgettable story of courage in the face of the unknown.

"At the age of thirty-eight, Brigitte Nicholson has a job she likes, a man she loves, and a book on the women's suffrage movement that she will finish -- someday. Someday is Brigitte's watchword. Someday she and Ted, a rising star in the field of archaeology, will clarify their relationship. Someday she will have children. Someday she will stop playing it so safe. Then on a snowy day in Boston, Brigitte's life is jolted. Suddenly everything she counted on has changed and she finds herself questioning every choice she has made along the way.

"As she struggles to regain her balance and plot a new course, Brigitte agrees to help her mother on a family genealogy project. In Salt Lake City at the Family History Library, she makes a stunning discovery -- reaching back to the French aristocracy. How did Brigitte's mysterious ancestor Wachiwi, a Dakota Sioux, travel from the Great Plains to the French court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette -- and into the arms of a French marquis? How did she come to marry into Brigitte's family? What is the truth behind the tantalizing clues in the fragmented, centuries-old records?

"Following the threads of Wachiwi's life, Brigitte travels to South Dakota, then on to Paris, irresistibly drawn to this brave young woman who lived so long ago. And as she comes closer to solving the puzzle of Wachiwi's journey, her previously safe, quiet life becomes an adventure of its own. A chance meeting with a writer of historical fiction, a new opportunity, and a difficult choice put Brigitte at last in the forefront of her own story. With a complex and powerful family legacy coming to life around her, someday is no longer in the future. Instead, in Danielle Steel's mesmerizing new novel, someday is now."

Opening Line:
"There was a heavy snowfall that had started the night before as Brigitte Nicholson sat at her desk in the admissions office of Boston University, meticulously going over applications."

My Take:
It's a Danielle Steel novel much like any other Danielle Steel novel. What else can I say? I checked it out knowing full well what I was getting into, polished off in a few hours, and won't remember much about the characters or plot a week from now. Hey, some people watch uninspired TV when they're bored; I read chewing-gum books.

#73: The Upside of Irrationality

2011-10-04T12:27:00.001-07:00

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home, by Dan Ariely (New York: Harper, 2010).

Summary:
"Ariely (Predictably Irrational) expands his research on behavioral economics to offer a more positive and personal take on human irrationality's implications for life, business, and public policy. After a youthful accident left him badly scarred and facing grueling physical therapy, Ariely's treatment required him to accept temporary pain for long-term benefit -- a trade-off so antithetical to normal human behavior that it sparked the author's fascination with why we consistently fail to act in our own best interest. The author, professor of behavioral economics at Duke, leads us through experiments that reveal such idiosyncracies as the IKEA effect (if you build something, pride and sentimental attachment are likely to give you an inflated sense of its quality) and the Baby Jessica effect (why we respond to one person's suffering but not to the suffering of many). He concludes with prescriptions for how to make real personal and societal changes, and what behavior patterns we must identify to improve how we love, live, work, innovate, manage, and govern. Self-deprecating humor, an enthusiasm for human eccentricities, and an affable and snappy style make this read an enriching and eye-opening pleasure." -from Publishers Weekly

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Lessons from Procrastination and Medical Side Effects

Part I - The Unexpected Ways We Defy Logic at Work

Chapter 1 - Paying More for Less: Why Big Bonuses Don't Always Work
Chapter 2 - The Meaning of Labor: What Legos Can Teach Us about the Joy of Work
Chapter 3 - The IKEA Effect: Why We Overvalue What We Make
Chapter 4 - The Not-Invented-Here Bias: Why "My" Ideas Are Better than "Yours"
Chapter 5 - The Case for Revenge: What Makes Us Seek Justice?

Part II - The Unexpected Ways We Defy Logic at Home

Chapter 6 - On Adaptation: Why We Get Used to Things (but Not All Things, and Not Always)
Chapter 7 - Hot or Not? Adaptation, Assortative Mating, and the Beauty Market
Chapter 8 - When a Market Fails: An Example from Online Dating
Chapter 9 - On Empathy and Emotion: Why We Respond to One Person Who Needs Help but Not to Many
Chapter 10 - The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotion: Why We Shouldn't Act on Our Negative Feelings
Chapter 11 - Lessons from Our Irrationalities: Why We Need to Test Everything

My Take:
Solid and interesting, but I dunno -- maybe I've just read too many behavioral econ books like this one for it to seem very new any more. Sad, in a way. Good book, but ... my socks are still on.

#72: Emily, Alone

2011-10-04T12:18:00.001-07:00

Emily, Alone, by Stewart O'Nan (New York: Viking, 2011).

Summary:
"A sequel to the bestselling, much-beloved Wish You Were Here, Stewart O'Nan's intimate new novel follows Emily Maxwell, a widow whose grown children have long moved away. She dreams of visits by her grandchildren while mourning the turnover of her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood, but when her sole companion and sister-in-law Arlene faints at their favorite breakfast buffet, Emily's days change. As she grapples with her new independence, she discovers a hidden strength and realizes that life always offers new possibilities. Like most older women, Emily is a familiar yet invisible figure, one rarely portrayed so honestly. Her mingled feelings -- of pride and regret, joy and sorrow -- are gracefully rendered in wholly unexpected ways. Once again making the ordinary and overlooked not merely visible but vital to understanding our own lives, Emily, Alone confirms O'Nan as an American master."

My Take:
It was hard to sit down and start this one -- I was on a rereading crap, don't-tax-the-brain spree last week -- but once I did, wow. What a lovely, gentle, sweet book. Read the author's Songs for the Missing some time ago and enjoyed that well enough, but this one was something different altogether. First book I've ever read about aging that didn't make me absolutely dread the eventual sunset years of my own life.

RETURNED: Red Rain

2011-09-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

Red Rain, by Bruce Murkoff (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010)

Summary:
"Born near Rondout, New York, to a family steeped in wars both before and after independence, Will Harp returns home in 1864 for the first time in a decade, disconsolate over the campaigns being waged against Indians in the West even as the nation is busy tearing itself apart. His father is now buried in the Harp graveyard, surrounded by two preceding generations, and much else, too, has changed.

"For Mickey Blessing, though, these are heady times. Serving the darker needs of a prosperous businessman, Harry Grieves, he commands fear and respect as few Irish immigrants have managed to do in a society still hostile to his presence. The man he'd replaced had enlisted and is now missing in the horrors of Cold Harbor, leaving Mickey's sister, Jane, fearing the worst about her fiancee's survival.

"Coley Hinds, orphaned as a child, is fending for himself and fast growing savvy as the town around him bustles with trade and tragedy. In his stable-basement lodgings, he reads Western serials that he hopes will describe his future, but then falls under the sway of Mickey, who recognizes in him the powerless waif he once had been himself.

"All of these lives and more are intertwined when the bones of a mastodon surface on a neighboring farm that Will quickly purchases, pursuing a fervent boyhood interest. He finds an eager assistant in Coley, who suddenly needs refuge from budding criminality when Mickey suffers a hideous loss and develops an unhealthy obsession with a baby found on Jug Hill, where free black people have lived for generations. And before long, every fate is uncertain as calamity threatens to envelop them all.

"Red Rain is masterful in both its specifics -- Coley's pet squirrel, the erotic tableaux Will's photographer friend contrives, the bakery where Jane finds comfort as well as income -- and its broad historical sweep, which reaches from the settling of the Hudson River Valley to the bloodshed how ravaging the South and the West. Its characterizations are impeccable, whether of Grieves's dream of a grand hotel or Mickey's love of water, with not one gripping love story but several. And its plotting its relentless, weaving stories from various times and places that inevitably converge, right here in Rondout, with heartstopping intensity."

Opening Line:
"Will Harp stood at the bow of the Ella May and drank deeply from the medicine bottle he held in his hand, tilting his head back to enjoy the sudden warmth blossoming behind his eyes, swallowing greedily as a fledgling, not at all interested in the artificial health benefits of the syrup."

My Take:
I'm sure this was a perfectly serviceable book, but it just wasn't the one I wanted to read right now. After leaving it barely begun for days on end while I reread everything mindless I owned, I finally faced up to it and brought it back to the library -- leaving us both much happier.

#71 - How to Read the Air

2011-09-25T17:54:00.000-07:00

How to Read the Air, by Dinaw Mengestu (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010)

Summary:
"One September afternoon, Yosef and Marian, young Ethiopian immigrants who have spent all but their first year of marriage apart, set off on a road trip from their new home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, in search of a new identity as an American couple. Just months later, their son, Jonas, is born in Illinois. Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and Jonas is desperate to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. How can he envision the future without knowing what has come before? Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, he sets out to retrace his parents' trip and, in a stunning display of imagination, weaves together a family history that takes him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to a brighter vision of his life in the America of today, a story -- real or invented -- that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption."

Opening Line:
"It was four hundred eighty-four miles from my parents' home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, a distance that in a seven-year-old red Monte Carlo driving at roughly sixty miles an hour could be crossed in eight to twelve hours, depending on certain variables such as the number of road signs offering side excursions to historical landmarks, and how often my mother, Mariam, would have to go to the bathroom."

My Take:
I really, really wanted to fall in love with this book. It didn't happen -- in fact, I practically had to force myself to keep reading it -- and I closed the back cover wondering if the reviews were pretentious or I Just Didn't Get It.

Mengestu's language is, indeed, lovely, poetic, even (cliche though it is) luminous. Trouble was, there wasn't much to the story said language was telling. Yosef and Mariam are recently reunited after a three-year separation, but scarcely know each other; Yosef also happens to be brutally, inexplicably abusive. Mariam thinks about leaving and makes several false starts throughout Jonas's childhood, but doesn't until much later (perhaps not until after Jonas is grown). Yosef has died before the novel opens; Mariam lives, proudly independent, in a series of small towns on the northern Atlantic coast.

Thirty years after the road trip that represents their story, Jonas's fairly young marriage to Angela has fallen apart not with a bang, but with a whimper, and he's set out to retrace his parents' trip. Most of his story, though, recalls his crumbling marriage to Angela (he says and feels almost nothing, and their entire marriage seems to have been based on jokes and invented histories) and his growing love for his job as a part-time English teacher at a private high school -- despite the fact that after his fathers' death, he spends a week or so telling his students an imaginary story about his father's life.

It could be an interesting story, but it's all so spare and clinical. Sure, I get that Jonas's past seems to have made him an utter emotional cripple (like his parents before him), but it's hard to see enough personality or feeling under the surface anywhere to care. And other than the (interesting but totally made-up) story Jonas tells his students about his father's trip to America, Nothing. Happens. Here. His parents' trip to Nashville is aborted when they get into a fight, Yosef lashes out to strike Mariam, and Mariam grabs the steering wheel and drives the car into a ditch. Jonas and Angela decide to end their marriage (I think) because there's no real substantive connection between them. OK, and ... ?

I dunno. Maybe after a week of Jodi Picoult and John Grisham, my brain's just too atrophied for Good Literature.

#70 - Big Girl Small

2011-09-22T14:16:00.000-07:00

Big Girl Small, by Rachel DeWoskin (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2011)

Summary:
"Judy Lohden is your above-average sixteen-year-old -- sarcastic and vulnerable, talented and uncertain, full of big dreams for a big future. With a singing voice that can shake an auditorium, she should be the star of Darcy Academy, the local performing arts high school. So why is a girl this promising hiding out in a seedy motel room on the edge of town?

"The fact that the national media is on her trail after a controversy that might bring down the whole school could have something to do with it. And that scandal has something -- but not everything -- to do with the fact that Judy is three feet nine inches tall.

"Rachel DeWoskin remembers everything about high school: the auditions (painful), the parents (hovering), the dissection projects (weird but compelling), the friends (outcasts), the boys (crushable), and the girls (complicated), and she lays it all out with an unparalleled wit and wistfulness. Big Girl Small is a scathingly funny and moving book about dreams and reality, at once light on its feet and profound."

Opening Line:
"When people make you feel small, it means they shrink you down close to nothing, diminish you, make you feel like shit."

My Take:
This was a happy accident. Picked this one up at the library for who knows what reason; I guess just because the title or the cover caught my eye. And I'm glad I did. Stayed up way too late getting into it last night, and then finished up today after knocking off work (had no choice, system was down. Really.)

On one level, the jacket blurb nails it: DeWoskin does have an eye for nailing those details that make high school both memorable and excruciating. The compulsion, even though you know you shouldn't, to throw your loyal but equally-outcast friend over when a pretty, popular girl invites you to hang out. The all-but-total paralysis that can affect otherwise strong and independent young women when That Guy deigns to give you the time of day. The simultaneous love and irritation with parents and younger siblings. You get the idea.

Then on top of this, this fairly short book has a lot to say about the tension -- strongest in adolescence, but never really absent -- between our longing to fit in, and our desire to stand out. Owing to her stature and proportions, Judy can't really help doing the latter when she transfers to the local performing arts high school, and hopes less to belong then to go unnoticed. With a few exceptions -- dancer Goth Sarah, nerdy but kooky Molly, and surprisingly, gorgeous Ginger -- she sort of succeeds (despite being the only junior admitted to a prestigious senior voice class). That is, until BMOC Kyle turns out to be surprisingly friendly and candid, even offering to drive Judy home. You know early on that things between them don't turn out well -- in fact, they go badly enough to convince Judy her life is over, and send her from her loving (if occasionally overprotective) family in Ann Arbor to the dingy Motel Manor in Ypsilanti -- but I won't spoil more than that; part of the book's art lies in the way Judy and the author roll the trauma out slowly, piece by piece.

A tremendously compelling story, with a fitting ending.

#69: The Confession

2011-09-21T19:40:00.001-07:00

The Confession, by John Grisham (New York: Doubleday, 2010).

Summary:
"An innocent man is about to be executed.

"Only a guilty man can save him.

"For every innocent man sent to prison, there is a guilty one left on the outside. He doesn't understand how the police and prosecutors got the wrong man, and he certainly doesn't care. He just can't believe his good luck. Time passes and he realizes that the mistake will not be corrected: the authorities believe in their case and are determined to get a conviction. He may even watch the trial of the person wrongly accused of the crime. He is relieved when the verdict is guilty. He laughs when the police and prosecutors congratulate themselves. He is content to allow an innocent person to go to prison, to serve hard time, even to be executed.

"Travis Boyette is such a man. In 1998, in the small East Texas city of Slone, he abducted, raped, and strangled a popular high school cheerleader. He buried her body so that it would never be found, then watched in amazement as police and prosecutors arrested and convicted Donte Drumm, a local football star, and marched him off to death row.

"Now nine years have passed. Travis has just been paroled in Kansas for a different crime; Donte is four days away from his execution. Travis suffers from an inoperable brain tumor. For the first time in his miserable life, he decides to do what's right and confess.

"But how can a guilty man convince lawyers, judges, and politicians that they're about to execute an innocent man?"

Opening Line:
"The custodian at St. Mark's had just scraped three inches of snow off the sidewalks when the man with the cane appeared."

My Take:
Sometimes fiction parallels real life just a little too closely. Odd to be reading this book while the Troy Davis case has been at the forefront of the news.

John Grisham is John Grisham. You know what you're going to get -- solid legal thrillers with (usually) a Southern flair and a fairly high can't-put-it-down quotient -- and yep, you pretty much get more of the same here. Unfortunately, he and his characters can't help doing a bit too much grandstanding here, which tends to get in the way of the story line. Grisham's a big supporter of the Innocence Project, an organization devoted to exonerating those who've been wrongfully convicted. And hey -- more power to him; it's nice to see celebrities legitimately using their fame to do good for a cause they believe in. But if I want to learn about that cause, I'll look for books and articles about wrongful conviction -- not extended diatribes in what's supposed to be a fun/ junk novel. (Doesn't mean it wasn't still a fun/ junk novel, though.)

#68: The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth

2011-09-21T19:21:00.000-07:00

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School, by Alexandra Robbins (New York: Hyperion, 2011)

Summary:
"Cross Gossip Girl with Freaks and Geeks and MTV's MADE, a shocking plot twist, and Alexandra Robbins' signature investigative style -- and that only begins to describe Geeks, a smart, entertaining, reassuring book about the secrets of students who are popular and the triumph of those who are not. Robbins follows seven real people grappling with the uncertainties of high school social life, including:

Danielle, the Loner, who has withdrawn from classmates since they persuaded her to unwittingly join her own hate club
Whitney, the Popular Bitch, a cheerleading captain both seduced by and trapped within her clique's perceived prestige
Eli, the Nerd, whose differences cause students to laugh at him, and his mother to needle him for not being 'normal'
Joy, the New Girl, determined to stay positive as classmates harass her for her mannerisms and target her because of her race
Mark, the Gamer, an underachiever in danger of not graduating, despite his intellect and his yearning to connect with other students
Regan, the Weird Girl, who battles discrimination and gossipy politics in school but leads a joyous life outside of it
Noah, the Band Geek, who is alternately branded too serious and too emo, yet annually runs for class president

"In the middle of the year, Robbins surprises her subjects with a secret challenge -- experiments that force them to change how classmates see them and teach us why the things that set students apart in high school are the things that help them stand out later in life.

"Robbins intertwines these narratives -- often victorious, occasionally heartbreaking, and always captivating -- with essays exploring subjects like:

How do you get to be popular?
Being excluded doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you
Why outsiders succeed
How schools make the social scene worse -- and how to fix it.

"The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth is more than just a book. It's a movement. And whether you're a student or an adult, it will change the way you think about your friends, your school, and -- most of all -- yourself."

Table of Contents:

Prologue
Chapter 1: Meet the Cafeteria Fringe

Late Summer to Early Fall: The Popularity Myth

Chapter 2: Quirk Theory and the Secret of Popularity
Chapter 3: Why Are Popular People Mean?

Fall: Why Quirk Theory Works

Chapter4: In the Shadow of the Freak Tree
Chapter 5: It's Good to Be the Cafeteria Fringe

Winter: Outcast Profiling and Other Dangers

Chapter 6: Challenges
Chapter 7: Misperceptions

Late Winter to Early Spring: Being Excluded Doesn't Mean There's Anything Wrong with You

Chapter 8: A Brief Introduction to Group Psychology
Chapter 9: Why Labels Stick: The Motivations of the Normal Police

Spring: Quirk Theory's Origins: Why These Issues Are Hardest in School

Chapter 10: Changing Perceptions
Chapter 11: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Late Spring to Early Summer: Popular vs. Outcast

Chapter 12: Popularity Doesn't Lead to Happiness
Chapter 13: The Rise of the Cafeteria Fringe
Chapter 14: Cafeteria Fringe: Lucky and Free

My Take:
Brilliant, sometimes painful, but on the whole inspiring and provocative. An absolute must-read for (among others) anyone who still struggles from time to time with their own adolescent-outcast demons at the same time they're trying to help their own child start to navigate the same shark-infested waters. Not that I'd know anything about this personally, mind you.

#67: The Land of Painted Caves

2011-09-21T19:08:00.000-07:00

The Land of Painted Caves, by Jean M. Auel (New York: Crown Publishing, 2011)

Summary:
"It is summer in the land of the Zelandonii, and it is nearly time for the next Summer Meeting. Ayla finds it is time to strike a balance between being a mother to her daughter, Jonayla, and a loving mate to Jondalar, while pursuing the fascinating knowledge and power of the Zelandoni, led by the charismatic First Among Those Who Served the Mother of the Zelandoni of the Ninth Cave."

Opening Line:
"The band of travelers walked along the path between the clear sparkling water of Grass River and the black-streaked white limestone cliff, following the trail that paralleled the right bank."

My Take:
It's a good thing I read quickly, and that I'm not shy about skimming or skipping passages that don't do a lot for me. Painted Caves could have been worse, I suppose, and I fully anticipated that it would be -- largely because all the informal scuttlebutt I heard online said the book was pretty darned god-awful. And it certainly wasn't great, but I found it more predictable and often tedious than out-and-out bad. This review in the L.A. Times, by Liesel Bradner, pretty much sums it up, though I think she's a bit more complimentary than I would have been.

I went into this book thinking it was going to wrap up the series, which started out very strong (and 30+ years ago) with Clan of the Cave Bear before falling hopelessly into the boring (Valley of Horses) and silly (Shelters of Stone). It doesn't, really -- at least not cleanly, which makes me think Auel's planning to cash in yet again if Painted Caves sells reasonably well. I'll probably be enough of a sucker to read Book 7 if she does, but I'll certainly borrow it (as I did this one) rather than buy it for myself.

#66: Sing You Home

2011-09-21T18:52:00.000-07:00

Sing You Home, by Jodi Picoult (New York: Atria Books, 2011).

Summary:
"Zoe Baxter has spent ten years trying to get pregnant, and after multiple miscarriages and infertility issues, it looks like her dream is about to come true -- she is seven months pregnant. But a terrible turn of events leads to a nightmare -- one that takes away the baby she has already fallen for, and breaks apart her marriage to Max.

"In the aftermath, she throws herself into her career as a music therapist -- using music clinically to soothe burn victims in a hospital; to help Alzheimer's patients connect with the present; to provide solace for hospice patients. When Vanessa -- a guidance counselor -- asks her to work with a suicidal teen, their relationship moves from business to friendship and then, to Zoe's surprise, blossoms into love. When Zoe allows herself to start thinking of having a family, again, she remembers that there are still frozen embryos that were never used by herself and Max.

"Meanwhile, Max has found peace at the bottom of a bottle -- until he is redeemed by an evangelical church, whose charismatic pastor -- Clive Lincoln -- has vowed to fight the 'homosexual agenda' that has threatened traditional family values in America. But this mission becomes personal for Max, when Zoe and her same-sex partner say they want permission to raise his unborn child.

"Sing You Home explores what it means to be gay in today's world, and how reproductive science has outstripped the legal system. Are embryos people or property? What challenges do same-sex couples face when it comes to marriage and adoption? What happens when religion and sexual orientation -- two issues that are supposed to be justice-blind -- enter the courtoom? And most importantly, what constitutes a 'traditional family' in today's day and age?"

Opening Line:
"One sunny, crisp Saturday in September when I was seven years old, I watched my father drop dead."

My Take:
One of Picoult's better ones. The fact that she limits herself to three characters' different vantage points (Zoe's, Vanessa's, and Max's) helps, as does the remarkable lack of surprise dead children at the end. (Other Picoult veterans will understand.) As one review I came across noted, the book's treatment of the fundamentalists isn't exactly even-handed, and something about Max's brother Reid just seemed too #$%^& perfect to be true (Reid's equally perfect wife, Liddy, works a wee bit better, partly because we see more of her and learn at least something of what makes her tick), but hey -- for a light but not too light piece o' chick lit, it was about what I'd hoped for and better than I'd expected.

#65: World and Town

2011-09-05T18:32:00.000-07:00

World and Town, by Gish Jen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

Summary:
"Hattie Kong -- the spirited offspring of a descendant of Confucius and an American missionary to China -- has, in her fiftieth year, lost both her husband and her best friend to cancer. It is an utterly devastating loss, of course, and also heartbreakingly absurd: a little, she thinks, 'like having twins. She got to book the same church with the same pianist for both funerals and did think she should have gotten some sort of twofer from the crematorium.'

"But now, two years later, it is time for Hattie to start over. She moves to the town of Riverlake, where she is soon joined by an immigrant Cambodian family on the run from their inner-city troubles, as well as -- quite unexpectedly -- by a just-retired neuroscientist ex-lover named Carter Hatch. All of them are, like Hattie, looking for a new start in a town that might once have represented the rock-solid base of American life but that is itself challenged, in 2001, by cell-phone towers and chain stores, struggling family farms and fundamentalist Christians.

"What Hattie makes of this situation is at the center of a novel that asks deep and absorbing questions about religion, home, America, what neighbors are, what love is, and, in the largest sense, what 'worlds' are we make of the world.

"Moving, humorous, compassionate, and expansive, World and Town is as rich in character as it is brilliantly evocative of its time and place. This is a truly masterful novel -- enthralling, essential, and satisfying."

Opening Line:
"It's the bai shu you'd notice most -- the thousand-year-old cypresses -- some of them upright, some of them leaning."

My Take:
I've gotten backlogged again (gee, why on earth would it be hard to keep up with a list no one reads?) but this one was pretty good. How does Hattie make a life and find meaning for herself with her husband and best friend gone? How do her new neighbors, Chhung and Sophy and the rest of their family, Cambodian immigrants fleeing the trouble their kids tend to get into in the big city, build their own lives and hold on to some semblance of family when absolutely nothing in this new world makes sense? More a character study (not only of the people but the town in the story) but still pretty satisfying for that -- enough so that I'm looking forward to seeking out other Gish Jen novels in the future.

#64: The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

2011-09-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs, by Christina Hopkinson (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2011).

Summary:
"What do you hate most about the one you love? Mary Gilmour doesn't know whether it's his not quite reaching the laundry basket when he throws his dirty clothes at it (but doesn't ever walk over to finish the job) or the balled-up tissues he puts on the bedside table when he has a cold. Is it the way he never completely empties the dishwasher, leaving the 'difficult' items for her to put away, or the fact that she is responsible for all of the domestic tasks in the house just because she's only working part-time?

"Mother to two young boys, Mary knows how to get them to behave the way she wants. Now she's designing the spousal equivalent of a star chart, and every little thing her husband does wrong will go on it. Though Mary knows you're supposed to reward the good behavior rather than punish the bad, the rules for those in middle age are different than the rules for those not even in middle school . . .

"This is the novel for every woman who finds herself frustrated with something (or perhaps everything) her husband does. Harried and hilarious, Mary's trip beyond the breaking point will carry any reader through this wry, astute novel about marriage, motherhood, children, work, and above all, that ever-growing pile of clutter."

Opening Line:
"The solitary jigsaw piece sits in the corner of the living room, daring me to ignore it."

My Take:
I was about to say "add this one right under Sisterhood Everlasting on the list of 'books that turned out way better than they should have,'" but realized that wasn't quite accurate. Sisterhood was OK, even entertaining ... but this is basically just giving it the benefit of my rather low expectations. (The only prior non-young-adult novel of Brashares's I'd read was pretty darned boring, if I remember correctly, and the Sisterhood series up till now is an entertaining beach read or 2 with way too many sequels.)

Pile of Stuff ..., on the other hand, was a few cuts above your basic chick lit, mom flavor, story. This is due in large part to Hopkinson's well-honed gift for satire. When a friend-of-a-friend drops by unannounced and finds Mary's home not quite passing the white glove test, she offers to let her in on the secret, and presses a Post-It with a URL scribbled on it into Mary's palm as if it's a map to Ponce de Leon's elusive fountain. When Mary logs on, she finds a parody of the FlyLady web site that had me in stitches:

"Instead of the virtual magic I've been hoping for, I'm faced with one of the messiest looking web pages I've ever seen, with the exhortations, 'Declutter!,' 'A new program for home executives!' and 'Shiny happy sinks!' I am very confused. Is this really the life-saving secret that Alison has bestowed on me?

"I read on ... I force myself through the myriad exclamation marks to try to make sense of it all. The website tells, I finally discover, of a system by which your house will be spotless and permanently guest-ready, without you having to spend more than fifteen minutes a day on it. Florid testimonials tell of lives and homes transformed by the mere application of the 'dance of disposal,' where the home executive will put on a three-minute song and throw away as many things as she can in its duration. Others speak of the elimination of their 'toxic spot,' which sounds like something I haven't done since I had adolescent acne. All write eulogies as to the transformative powers of the creation of a 'Golden Notebook,' a ring-binder of to-do lists, menu plans and household zones. Doris Lessing, I think, must be so proud.

"I read on, hoping to discover the secret of how you can inspire those that you share your house with to take as much interest in purging household junk as you do, while at the same time wondering why the women behind this site didn't think to perhaps try to declutter some of the excessive exclamation marks littering the prose. My eyes are glazing over just thinking about these commands to enjoy the daily cleaning of my toilet bowl and to have fun while throwing out junk. ...

"But still, I concede, can all these women (and they are all women) be so wrong? ... Before I can change my mind, I sign up for email reminders of how to 'Work the System!' and resolve to give the 'Clutter NoNo!' system of home-executive efficiency a week's trial.

"Day 1. By the time I check my messages at work on Monday morning I have 39 emails from my new friends at ClutterNoNo. I'm confused before I've even read them. How am I supposed to find time to wade through the household detritus if I have to spend all my time wading through my inbox?

"I soon discover that I'm falling woefully behind. I should have set my alarm to get up half an hour before the rest of my family in order to get that toilet bowl really sparkly, as well as making sure that I have put on a 'face' -- by which I think they mean makeup, rather than just pulling one. ...

"Day 2. The house doesn't look much better than it did before. I find I am spending so much time trying to create a nice-looking Golden Notebook that I don't have time to get myself looking 'nice 'n' pretty' for the day. ...

"Day 3. What I am asked to do: fertilize the plants, write outstanding thank-you notes, buy the groceries, balance my checkbook and change dead lightbulbs in the cooker hood. I must tell each member of my family that I love them, and one thing that I think is awesome about their personalities. I must tell myself that I love me, and find five things that I think are awesome about my personality.

"What I actually do: scream.

"Stop it, stop it, stop! You stupid idiotic women! Leave me alone, stop hassling me, why are you on at me all day long? For Christ's sake, stop nagging. Does it really matter if I haven't shampooed the carpet on a Thursday? You're all flaming crazy. ...

"I find the unsubscribe button and then declutter my email inbox of every single last reminder, all 103 of them, from that source of 1950s pinny-wearing nonsense. I breathe out. They're right about one thing, those Clutter NoNo ladies, it does feel wonderful to expunge unwanted crap."

(OK, clearly someone needs to explain digest format to our heroine, but still.)

Then there's Mitzi, Mary's old college friend, now frenemy, who's probably the funniest and most over-the-top character in the book. She's the type who's married a man rich and successful enough that they have not one but two showplace homes, each furnished in oh-so-original, environmentally friendly, perfect taste. She takes great pride in being an at-home mom to four perfectly-coiffed, private-schooled children -- Molyneux, Mahalia, Merle, and Milburn -- despite having a staff of nannies et al. to swoop in whenever anything messy or unfun needs doing. Complains Mary's husband, Joel, at the prospect of a weekend at Mitzi and Michael's country home, "'[W]e'll be expected to way lyrical about ... the wonderful original features and aren't you clever to have found flagstones made from the bones of real organic orphans, and a bath hand-knitted by a thousand Hindu priests and filled with holy water from the river Ganges.'" Yes, said country home visit does finally happen, and proves to be a turning point in the book, in a manner both hilarious and sweet.

Overall, a pleasant surprise to have what initially seemed like someone's admittedly funny blog have so much insight and heart to it.

#63: When the Killing's Done

2011-08-25T13:45:00.001-07:00

When the Killing's Done, by T. Coraghessan Boyle (New York: Viking, 2011)

Summary:
"Principally set on the wild and sparsely inhabited Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara -- the Galapagos of North America -- T. C. Boyle's powerful new novel combines action-packed adventure with a socially conscious, richly humane tale regarding the dominion we attempt to exert, for better or worse, over the natural world."

Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist who is spearheading the efforts to save the islands' endangered native creatures from invasive species such as rats and feral pigs, which, in her view, must be eliminated. Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a muscular, dredlocked local businessman who, along with his inamorata, the folk singer Anise Reed, is fiercely opposed to the killing of any species whatsoever, and will go to any lengths to subvert the plans of Alma and her colleagues.

"Their confrontation plays out in a series of escalating scenes in which these characters violently confront one another, contemplate acts of sabotage, court danger and tempt the awesome destructive power of nature itself. Boyle deepens his story by going back in time to relate the harrowing tale of Alma's grandmother, Beverly, who was the sole survivor of a 1946 shipwreck in the channel, as well as the tragic story of Anise's mother, Rita, who in the late 1970s lived and worked on a sheep ranch on Santa Cruz Island.

"In dramatizing this collision between protectors of the environment and animal rights activists, Boyle is, in his characteristic fashion, examining one of the essential questions of our time: who has the right of possession of the land, the waters, the very lives and breath and souls of all the creatures who share this planet with us? When the Killing's Done offers no transparent answers, but like The Tortilla Curtain, Boyle's classic take on illegal immigration, it will touch you deeply and put you in the position to decide."

Opening Line:
"Picture her there in the pinched little galley where you could barely stand up without cracking your head, her right hand raw and stinging still from the scald of the coffee she'd dutifully -- and foolishly -- tried to make so they could have something to keep them going, a good sport, always a good sport, though she'd woken up vomiting in her berth not half an hour ago."

My Take:
Liked it a lot -- I'm usually a big Boyle fan, ever since The Tortilla Curtain, and this one didn't disappoint. Complex, interesting characters; decent story line; no pretty red bow to wrap everything up at the end.

My main critique (and perhaps this is with the dust jacket writer and not with Boyle himself) is that there wasn't quite as much conflict or tension in the plot as I might have hoped for. As this Onion A.V. Club review suggests, the author's portrayal of animal rights activist Dave LaJoy isn't exactly balanced or sympathetic; he owns a chain of high-end electronics stores he's never seen actually managing or working in, holds everyone except maybe his trophy girlfriend Anise in open contempt, and (in a recalled scene of his one and only long-ago date with Alma) has no qualms about ordering bottle after bottle of a restaurant's priciest wine, only to proclaim each one unacceptable after it's opened and send it back. Nice guy. He is fun to roll your eyes at, though, and does indeed eventually get a suitably dramatic comeuppance. (As Barbara Kingsolver's New York Times review reminds us, "Boyle has elsewhere dispatched characters by the likes of meteor strike and bear consumption.")

Alma's character is far more subtly rendered, though I still might have preferred to hear a bit more about how she herself thinks and feels rather than just who her parents and grandmother were. And while it's not really a tidy red bow, or even close, her own resolution seems a wee bit too clean -- perfunctory, perhaps.

Still, an excellent book, and one I'd highly recommend to others.

#62: Sisterhood Everlasting

2011-08-23T20:36:00.001-07:00

Sisterhood Everlasting, by Ann Brashares (New York: Random House, 2011)

Summary:
"Return to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants ... ten years later.

"From #1 New York Times bestselling author Ann Brashares comes the welcome return of the characters whose friendship became a touchstone for a generation. Now Tibby, Lena, Carmen, and Bridget have grown up, starting their lives on their own. And though the jeans they shared are long gone, the sisterhood is everlasting.

"Despite having jobs and men that they love, each knows that something is missing: the closeness that once sustained them. Carmen is a successful actress in New York, engaged to be married, but misses her friends. Lena finds solace in her art, teaching in Rhode Island, but still thinks of Kostos and the road she didn't take. Bridget lives with her longtime boyfriend, Eric, in San Francisco, and though a part of her wants to settle down, a bigger part can't seem to shed her old restlessness.

"Then Tibby reaches out to bridge the distance, sending the others plane tickets for a reunion that they all breathlessly await. And indeed, it will change their lives forever -- but in ways that none of them could ever have expected.

"As moving and live-changing as an encounter with long-lost best friends, Sisterhood Everlasting is a powerful story about growing up, losing your way, and finding the courage to create a new one."

Opening Line:
"Once upon a time, there were four pregnant women who met in an aerobics gym."

My Take:
Again, hope to write a bit more later -- it is what it is, with apologies to those of you who hate that phrase. Entertaining, better than I'd expected/ feared -- but great literature it's not. I do give the author bonus points, though, for letting her characters change in less-than-perfect or -predictable ways in a series that spans many years.

The novel opens with the four principals almost-but-not-quite having gone their separate ways. They're all still committed to the idea of the sisterhood, of course, but in terms of actually feeling the same close connection to their three besties, even though they've now headed down different paths in different places? Not so much. Carmen, as the jacket blurb indicates, has become a successful actress, a regular minor character on a Law and Order-style crime drama, with a loft apartment to die for, engaged to the somewhat-insufferable Jones, more than 10 years her senior and a (pretentious, controlling) VIP in the TV biz. Lena's barely squeaking by as an adjunct/ private art instructor, maintaining a tepid relationship with some dude who works at a sandwich shop nearby and with a social/ emotional life just this side of hermetic/ agoraphobic. Bridget's a latter-day hippie whose SF neighbors know her as That Girl Who Rides Her Bike Everywhere, who seems to have a different job every few weeks, and randomly gives this or the other of her few possessions away to a familiar homeless person in a nearby park. (It's never explicitly specified, but we presume she's being kept afloat financially by Eric, her soccer-playing almost-boyfriend from the original Sisterhood, who's now dropped the almost- and grown up to be a successful lawyer and all-around mensch.) And Tibby? Well, Tibby up and moved to Australia with her boyfriend some time ago, and the gals have heard precious little from her since.

That is, until the story's beginning, where each of the other 3 mysteriously gets a letter and plane ticket from Tibby, inviting/ summoning them to meet for a reunion at Lena's grandparents' place in Santorini. (Lena's grandparents have since passed away, although her parents haven't yet sold the house, and it's never quite clear how Tibby manages to gain access to a house in Greece when she's Down Under and the home's current owner is somewhere in the States.) Everyone accepts, or at least plans to go, each thinking maybe this is the answer to her current restlessness and loneliness. They arrive at the airport, eager as can be for Tibby to meet them ... but wait and wait as they may, she doesn't.

To tell you much more of the story beyond this point would spoil it, which I try not to do ... but I will say that for the rest of the book, each character grapples with her own, newly-launched adult dilemma and the question of how to stay connected with her old friends as their lives diverge. Is that elusive sense of purpose Bridget seeks Somewhere Out There, or is she looking in all the wrong places? Is Lena really as down with the quiet, making-do, good-enough life she's cobbed together in Rhode Island, or should she maybe go back and find that road not taken after all? Carmen's star is rising, but is it really shining where and how she wants it to? And what unimagined chain of events made Tibby up and disappear on them?

Of these four questions, only the last answer was at all surprising -- at least to me. I did, however, appreciate the book's acknowledgement that at some point, any "lifelong" friendships you've made up till, say, your early 20s will be tested by physical and experiential distance ... and while they may or may not last, it's highly unlikely they'll end with all your BFFs living next door/ across the street from you on Wisteria Lane.

#61: The Pillars of the Earth

2011-08-23T20:34:00.000-07:00

The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett (New York: New American Library, 1989).

Summary:
"Set in the turbulent times of twelfth-century England when civil war, famine, religious strife and battles over royal succession tore lives and families apart, The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of the building of a magnificent cathedral.

"Against this richly imagined backdrop, filled with intrigue and treachery, Ken Follett draws the reader irresistibly into a wonderful epic of family drama, violent conflict, and unswerving ambition. From humble stonemason to imperious monarch, the dreams, labours and loves of his characters come vividly to life. The Pillars of the Earth is, without a doubt, a masterpiece -- and has proved to be one of the most popular books of our time." -from the back cover of my paperback copy

"Set during the reign of King Stephen and the Anarchy, The Pillars of the Earth hangs a rich and intricately woven tapestry of intrigue and conspiracy over a solid foundation of historical events to explore topics as diverse as medieval architecture, civil war, secular/ religious conflicts, and shifting political loyalties.

"Principal characters include Tom Builder, a stonemason; Philip, Prior of Kingsbridge; and Archdeadon Waleran Bigod. The historical King Stephen is variously abetted and attacked by characters both real and fictional, including his cousin and rival Empress Maud; Sir Percy Hamleigh and his son William Hamleigh; the prior Earl of Shiring Bartholomew's daughter Aliena and son Richard; and Ellen with her son Jack." -from Wikipedia

Opening Line:
"The small boys came early to the hanging."

My Take:
This was the second of three books I took with me on vacation, and the last one I actually read. (Anna Karenina will just have to wait, which seems to be its fate; it still has a bookmark in it from a White Mountains resort, so this clearly isn't the first trip from which it's come home unread.)

Wow. Another sweeping, engaging saga that I got way more into than I'd expected to. I mean, really -- who expects to get totally absorbed in a story about the building of a cathedral in medieval England? Darn it, though, if Follett doesn't make the characters just complicated enough to both compel you on to find out what happens to them next, and keep you guessing. Prior Philip, head of the Kingsbridge monastery where the cathedral is to be built, was a pleasant surprise, character-wise -- probably the most interesting literary cleric I've come across. (Sorry, Father Ralph de Bricassart.) In the introduction, Follett calls him his only cheerfully celibate character, but he's a long way from being saintly; while he may not mind the whole lack of sex thing, he does tend toward both rigidity (who, me? Punny?) and pride. Tom Builder is likewise a good character (fascinating how the author makes a twelfth-century mason seem accessible to twenty-first-century readers by establishing, in the first chapter, that his first wife, Agnes, is his soul mate, and that he truly cherishes not just her but their children), and deposed earl's daughter cum wool merchant Aliena (it's a long road, but hey, it's a long book), forgive the anachronism, Rocks. Out.

Follett's even gone and created one of the most despicable, love-to-hate-him villains I've seen in a while: William Hamleigh, son of the nobleman who insinuates himself into the earldom after King Stephen takes it away from Aliena's father, Bartholomew. A brutish, violent bully who's secretly terrified of the priests and his hideous mother (apparently the miniseries, which I haven't yet seen, hints at some incest here -- ew!), and can get aroused only when he's beating the woman unlucky enough to be in his company, William's definitely an exception to the nuanced-character comment above, but it's still so much fun to despise him and to wait for his inevitable comeuppance.

Full disclosure: I'm neither a builder nor an architect, and some of these details didn't really interest me much. I was happy enough to read about the revelations that come to Jack when he travels through France and Spain in search of a) his mysterious, dead father's past, and/or b) peace from his tortured, seemingly impossible love for Aliena, and sees how differently these places have approached cathedral architecture. And the build-a-defensive-wall-in-a-hurry scenes, well, those were as much adventures (with a hint of the Redwall series I used to read with Twig when she was younger) as they were about building. But some of the more nitty-gritty, how this part gets done passages read, well, like a homebuilders' manual, and I found myself skimming over them to see what happened next. Fortunately, I managed not to miss any important plot developments this way (I think).

All right, an overdue post meets an overdue bedtime. More soon.

#60: Trinity

2011-08-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

If I haven't forgotten anything (and if I have, it was probably meant to be forgotten), my 60th book of the year was Leon Uris's classic, Trinity (New York: Bantam, 1977).

I've forgotten many things in the last-minute, pre-vacation packing flurry, but I can't remember the last time I went away without a few good books. This time, the selection was a challenge; it was an unprecedented 2-week trip and we needed to take all our camping gear, so I knew space would be at a premium. Ergo, I was looking for a) really long paperbacks, so that I could cram the maximum possible number of pages/hours into each precious inch of suitcase, and b) books I already owned, as the likelihood of leaving at least something behind when you spend 14 nights in 7 different places is pretty darned high.

At 815 pages, my 50-cent non-trade paperback copy of Trinity qualified just about perfectly. I ended up finishing it in an inexpensive Louisville chain hotel on our last night away, and found it one of those books you're sorry to finish. While I went ahead and started Pillars of the Earth the same night (the rest of my family was watching a movie in our one hotel room, and it was too early to go to bed), doing so almost felt wrong ... and I know in my memory, Leon Uris's epic account of the troubles in Northern Ireland will always be linked to campfires in southern Appalachia.

Summary:
"The 'terrible beauty' that is Ireland comes alive in this mighty epic that re-creates the Emerald Isle's fierce struggle for independence. Trinity is a saga of glories and defeats, triumphs and tragedies, lived by a young Catholic rebel and the beautiful and valiant Protestant girl who defied her heritage to join him. Leon Uris has painted a masterful portrait of a beleaguered people divided by religion and wealth -- impoverished Catholic peasants pitted against a Protestant aristocracy wielding power over life and death."

Opening Line:
"I recall with utter clarity the first great shock of my life."

My Take:
I hate to call something "epic," because it feels like I'm jumping on the bandwagon. Every publisher of a book that spans more than a year wants to slap the label on, and my 12-year-old freely applies it to, oh, particularly exciting and memorable (in a good way) highlights of our recent vacation. (Whitewater rafting was epic; so were zip-lining and Mammoth Cave. For that matter, the same may have been said of horseback riding or the larger-than-life burrito she had for dinner in Kentucky one night, but I eventually lost track.)

But Trinity really is. I wasn't sure at first how well I'd like the somewhat-odd blend of plot with historical/ instructional passages woven in, but it mostly worked. The first chapter, where sometime-narrator Seamus's shock turns out to be the death of neighbor/ friend/ protagonist Conor Larkin's grandfather Kilty, is brilliant; Uris manages not only to give the reader a taste of day-to-day village life in the Catholic section of Ballyutogue, Ulster, but to really make you care about the characters and the Irish struggle for independence. I've heard off and on about the Irish potato famine ever since I can remember, but this is the first time I've felt like I had some idea what it may have been to live through it; the main story begins decades later, in 1885, but we experience the famine vividly through the memories of Conor and Seamus's fathers and those of village elder/shaman Daddo Friel.

I still can't decide whether to quibble with Conor's being too perfect a hero, but I don't think I will -- even if he is, it didn't spoil the book for me or diminish my enjoyment appreciably. Uris is definitely on my "seek out for long trips" reading list after this one.

#59: The Pact

2011-08-23T19:49:00.001-07:00

The Pact: A Love Story, by Jodi Picoult (New York: HarperCollins, 1998)

Summary:
"From Jodi Picoult, one of the most powerful writers in contemporary fiction, comes a riveting, timely, heartbreaking, and terrifying novel of families in anguish -- and friendships ripped apart by inconceivable violence. Until the phone calls came at 3:00 A.M. on a November morning, the Golds and their neighbors, the Hartes, had been inseparable. It was no surprise to anyone when their teenage children, Chris and Emily, began showing signs that their relationship was moving beyond that of lifelong friends. But now seventeen-year-old Emily has been shot to death by her beloved and devoted Chris as part of an apparent suicide pact -- leaving two devastated families stranded in the dark and dense predawn, desperate for answers about an unthinkable act and the children they never really knew."

Opening Line:
"There was nothing left to say."

My Take:
Powerful? Heartbreaking? Devastating? More than a little hyperbolic, but I knew what I was getting into. I bought the book in a "buy 2, get 1 free" sale at one of the local book chains (back when we had more than one) a while back, and kept it in the bull pen till I needed it.

That time came a few weeks ago, before our long vacation -- I won't go into the gory details but it was a rough week emotionally, and I just plain needed some reasonably-absorbing escapist fiction. (Plus, maybe it's just me, but when I'm feeling like my own life's a mess, some melodramatic fiction is often just what the doctor ordered -- even at my worst, I can look at plot lines like this and reassure myself that at least I don't have it that bad.)

So The Pact fit the bill. It's obviously one of Picoult's earlier books, which is a mixed bag. On the minus side, it lacks some of the gentle ethical-dilemma-probing I've come to expect from House Rules, Handle With Care, and Vanishing Acts. However, a strong plus in my book is that she hadn't yet stumbled on her now-predictable twist ending formula (which some article I read a while back called "just kill a kid and get it over with") -- which, frankly, gets a bit tiresome after the 3rd or 4th book.

Not high literature, definitely a WYSIWYG book -- whether you think you'll enjoy it or not, you're probably right. Speaking only for myself, I'm in the "enjoy it, but in pretty small doses" camp.

#58: Lighten Up

2011-08-23T19:26:00.000-07:00

Lighten Up: Love What You Have, Have What You Need, Be Happier With Less, by Peter Walsh (New York: Free Press, 2011).

Summary:
"It seems as though not a day goes by that we don't think about money. We cut back on spending. We chase a bargain. We try to save more. We strive to use less credit. We worry about funding our retirement and our children's education. Yet we continue to spend money on things that don't matter. The author knows that money and debt can overwhelm your life even faster than clutter, and he has a plan to help deal with that emotional and financial chaos. His previous bestselling books inspired us to successfully evict the clutter in our homes, on our bodies, and in six key areas of our lives. But for many people, clearing the clutter suddenly exposes deeper issues, financial, physical, and emotional. Sometimes our problems are not really about the physical stuff but about the emotional fabric of our lives, from our relationships with money to our relationships with people and even how we define and find happiness. In this work, the author demonstrates that this reassessment of priorities is a great opportunity to examine our lives and circumstances and to make the changes necessary to focus on the things that really matter. Exploring the real source of happiness, he offers a clear strategy for finding the delicate balance between what we have, what we need, and what we want or feel entitled to. With three unique audits that cover every aspect of our well-being, he takes us step by step through sizing up not just our possessions and financial statements but also our thoughts, goals, use of time and energy, and even our innermost sources of tension. He then shows us how to embrace the changes we've experienced, set a new path for the future, and come to accept that living on less can feel and be so much richer. This book instructs how to:

Change the way you and your family measure happiness
Face your financial situation and set realistic priorities
Create space for what really matters
Plan realistically for financial and emotional security
Be happier with less

His plan will help you achieve personal balance that brings happiness and the courage to choose a rewarding life over the mindless pursuit of more stuff."

Table of Contents:

Part I: From Living on Less to Living with More

1. The Life You Imagine for Yourself
2. What Makes You Happy?

Part II: From Audit to Action

3. The Personal Audit: Your Life
4. Create Space for What Really Matters
5. The Financial Audit: Your Money
6. Face the Financials
7. The Home Audit: Your Stuff
8. Change the Way You and Your Family Measure Happiness

Part III: From Today to Tomorrow and Beyond

9. Checkup and Maintenance
Epilogue: New Beginnings

My Take:
Yes, it's a self-help book. Yes, the above review makes it sound pretty darned cheesy. But y'know, I actually enjoyed/ got something out of this one. Maybe it's my own predilection for grand, holistic theories; maybe it's just that I stumbled across it in a rough week of trying to figure out whether I'm in a period of transition or whether this really is the new normal, and how to navigate it in either case ... but Walsh put a lot of things together that make sense and aren't too oversimplified (a little bit, sure, but that's to be expected), but which I hadn't really thought about before. Again, details are fuzzy when a month has gone by, but if I want to reread Butterfly's Child -- I think (wait for it) I may actually want to own this one, and maybe a few of Walsh's other books, too.

#57: Butterfly's Child

2011-08-23T19:16:00.000-07:00

Butterfly's Child, by Angela Davis-Gardner (New York: Dial Press, 2011).

Summary:
When three-year-old Benji is plucked from the security of his home in Nagasaki to live with his American father, Lt. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, and stepmother, Kate, on their farm in Illinois, the family conceals Benji's true identity as a child born from a liaison between an officer and a geisha. But when the truth about Benji surfaces, it will splinter this family's fragile dynamic, sending repercussions spiraling through their close-knit rural community and sending Benji on the journey of a lifetime."

Opening Line:
"It is spring in Nagasaki, and the strands of silk she has set out for the mating birds are gone from the maple tree in the garden, and the mother birds are nestled in silk, but still he has not come."

My Take:
Really enjoyed this one; I'm always a sucker for new takes on old classics (how many times have I said this before?), and was actually just thinking about this book last night, as I listened to Miss Saigon while I prepped dinner. I only wish I hadn't let a full month go by before writing about it -- some of the details have since blurred a little, plus I'm in a trying-to-catch-up-and-reinvigorate-the-book-blog hurry -- but I liked that it gave voice and agency to some of the characters who weren't really endowed with much in the original. Pinkerton himself is important, of course, but almost a secondary character in this book; far more compelling are Benji himself, the well-meaning if inconsistent Kate, and the kindly widower neighbor (whose name escapes me now) who becomes probably Benji's truest friend. Ultimately, even Cio Cio/ Butterfly herself becomes something a bit more than, well, a victim and/or a stereotype, but to say much more here would give too much away. I may even have to go back and read this one again at some point, and that's high praise.

#56: Untold Story

2011-07-04T19:04:00.000-07:00

Untold Story, by Monica Ali (New York: Scribner, 2011).

Summary:
"When Princess Diana died in Paris's Alma tunnel, she was thirty-seven years old. Had she lived, she would turn fifty on July 1, 2011. Who would the beloved icon be if she were alive today? What would she be doing? And where? ... Monica Ali has imagined a different fate for Diana in her spectacular new novel, Untold Story.

"Diana's life and marriage were both fairy tale and nightmare rolled into one. Adored by millions, she suffered rejection, heartbreak, and betrayal. Surrounded by glamour and glitz and the constant attention of the press, she fought to carve a meaningful role for herself in helping the needy and dispossessed. The contradiction and pressures of her situation fueled her increasingly reckless behavior, but her stature and her connection with her public never ceased to grow. If Diana had lived, would she ever have found peace and happiness, or would the curse of fame always have been too great?

"Fast forward a decade after the (averted) Paris tragedy, and an Englishwoman named Lydia is living in a small, nondescript town somewhere in the American Midwest. She has a circle of friends: one owns a dress shop; one is a realtor; another is a frenzied stay-at-home mom. Lydia works at an animal shelter and swims a lot. Her lover, who adores her, feels she won't let him know her. Who is she?

"Untold Story is about the cost of celebrity, the meaning of identity, and the possibility -- or impossibility -- of reinventing a life. Ali's fictional princess is beautiful, intrepid, and resourceful and has established a fragile peace. And then the past threatens to destroy her new life. Ali has created a riveting new novel inspired by the cultural icon she calls 'a gorgeous bundle of trouble.'"

Opening Lines:
"Some stories are never meant to be told. Some can only be told as fairy tales."

My Take:
This was a happy accident. Not a day after I'd first heard about this book in an NPR review -- I hadn't even gotten around to adding it to my "wanna read" list -- I went to the library and found three brand-new copies on the new fiction list. All three are checked out now, one to me -- so I guess I'm glad I got it when I did. We'll see if it's worth the bother.

(more than a month later) I've said this before, but in a word (or a grunt), meh. Intriguing concept in theory, but pretty darned boring in its implementation. Perhaps the whole point of the book is that Lydia's got the lid clamped down on her infamous past so tightly that no one can get close enough to see the person she's trying to be and life she's trying to have now, but unfortunately ... the reader really can't get close enough to care about her, either. Unless you're one of those folks -- I know there are or were scads out there, though I don't know any -- who really had a Princess Diana fetish, don't waste your time.

#55: Scarlet Nights

2011-07-04T06:41:00.001-07:00

Scarlet Nights, by Jude Deveraux (New York: Atria Books, 2010).

Summary:
"Engaged to the charming and seductive Greg Anders, Sara Shaw is happily anticipating her wedding in Edilean, Virginia. The date has been set, the flowers ordered, even her heirloom dress is ready. But just three weeks before the wedding, Greg gets a telephone call during the night and leaves without explanation. Two days later, a man climbs up through a trapdoor in the floor of Sara's apartment, claiming that he is the brother of her best friend and that he's moving in.

"While Mike Newland is indeed telling the truth about his identity, his reason for being there reaches far deeper. He's an undercover detective, and his assignment is to use Sara to track down a woman who is one of the most notorious criminals in the United States -- and also happens to be the mother of the man Sara plans to marry.

"Mike thinks the job will be easy -- if he can figure out how to make a 'good' girl like Sara trust him, that is. But Mike has no idea what this mission has in store for him. He's worked hard to keep private his connections to Edilean, which date back to his grandmother's time there in 1941. But as Mike and Sara get to know each other, he can't help but share secrets about himself that he's told no one else. And in return, Sara opens up to Mike about things she could never reveal to Greg. As the pair work together to solve two mysteries, their growing love begins to heal each of them in ways they never could have imagined."

Opening Line:
"'I think we've found her,' Captain Erickson said.

My Take:
Yes, this is shaping up to be as lightweight and silly as it sounds -- perfect for a holiday weekend beach read, which is when and why I checked it out.

Well, it was about what I expected. Long on action and purple prose, short on believability and character depth. I've passed less enjoyable afternoons but this certainly isn't a particularly interesting or memorable book. Next.

#54: Red Hook Road

2011-07-01T16:01:00.001-07:00

Red Hook Road, by Ayelet Waldman (New York: Doubleday, 2010).

Summary:
"Becca Copaken and John Tetherly are young and in love, and the future looks as bright as the day of their marriage. Becca's family is well-to-do and summers in Red Hook, Maine, where John's mother, Jane, runs a housecleaning service for clients like the Copakens. The only thing that binds the two families is the love the elated couple share, but it's enough to bring them together for the occasion.

"Until the unthinkable happens: Becca and John's limousine collides with another vehicle mere minutes after the wedding, killing them instantly. Joy gives way to grief, and the rifts between Becca's mother, Iris, and Jane grow, from the funeral arrangements to Iris's strong-willed interest in the musical career of Jane's niece to a new romance that buds between the surviving children, Ruthie and Matt. Time's healing powers prove elusive for Iris and Jane. Iris's thirty-year marriage disintegrates, while Jane's bitterness threatens to ruin her relationship with Matt. Only when a powerful, blinding storm hits Red Hook do the families begin to see what really matters most."

Opening Line:
"The flower girl had lost her basket of rose petals and could not bear to have the photograph taken without it."

My Take:
I had a few rough days this week -- let's say I was definitely in the valleys of the unemployment roller coaster -- and went to the library looking to be entertained and distracted. Don't worry if that doesn't automatically scream "couple killed on their wedding day" to you; Mr. Hazelthyme didn't get it, either. It's about catharsis, people ... that, and reading something that doesn't take too long or make you work too hard to become engaged.

So far (I'm on page 130), this fits the bill: hard to put down, but beautifully written with an excellent eye for detail and nuance. Given the subject matter, that does indeed mean it's painfully sad in parts. One example: the following early passage, where John's brother Matt reflects on whether it's more painful when others mention his late brother, or when they don't speak about him:

"At the sound of their names, Ruthie twitched. For the first couple of weeks Matt had felt the same way. Every mention of the names of the dead seemed to light a small hot fire inside him. Then one day a few weeks back he woke up and found that, suddenly, the opposite was true: it was the minutes, the hours, the entire days that went by without someone mentioning John that hurt Matt the most. He had tried to talk about John to his mother, but that went nowhere. So he had started hanging out with John's friends. Every evening he would head over to the Neptune, and stake out a stool in the middle of the bar. As people trickled in they would stop and pass a few minutes with him. Some offered no more than their condolences, some tried to buy him a beer. And that was okay. But what Matt was waiting for were the stories. About the birch bark canoe with swept-up gunwale and a squared bow that John and a friend had built for a middle school project on the Passamaquoddy tribe. About how one hunting season, when another buddy was laid up with a broken leg, John had filled his freezer with venison steaks, because he knew the guy relied on his yearly buck to feed his family. They'd retell John's jokes -- Matt must have heard the one about the robber in the sperm bank a dozen times. They'd remind one another about practical jokes John had played on them. The guys, as sad as they were, as much as they missed their friend, always ended up laughing, especially once they'd had a few. And if Matt rarely laughed out loud with them, as long as he was sitting on that barstool he felt okay. He felt like he was close to his brother. He was dreading the end of the summer, dreading the prospect of going back to college and being surrounded by people who had never known John, who had never laughed at his jokes or been the beneficiaries of his unsolicited largesse, who didn't know or care that he was dead."

(afterwards) Excellent book. It follows the surviving Copaken and Tetherly family members through the five summers that follow John and Becca's deaths, trying to move on with their lives knowing all the while there really is no such thing -- no going back to the way it was Before. As the summary suggests, Ruthie and Matt find comfort in each other, and struggle with the usual twenty-something "who am I and what am I doing with my life?" questions beneath the weight of their losses. Ruthie, who can't bear to return to London and the Fulbright her mother's always dreamed of/ expected for her, finds unexpected satisfaction working in the tiny Red Hook library ... while Matt finds a disappointing lack of the same as he endeavors to finish the work John started restoring an old wooden schooner. Jane is so committed to her stiff-upper-lipped New England stoicism that she can't even bear to talk about John, which strains her relationship with her surviving son. Iris channels her pain into overseeing the education of Samantha, Jane's niece and ward, who had been Becca and John's nine-year-old flower girl, and turns out to be a musical prodigy who's talent's gone unrecognized by her family to date. Daniel, Iris's husband and Becca and Ruthie's father, finds an outlet in the training and boxing he'd enjoyed as a young man, even if this opens a near-fatal rift in his marriage to Iris. Under the tutelage of Iris's father, renowned violinist Mr. Kimmelbrod, Samantha blossoms as a violinist, and teaching her gives him something positive to cling to even as his body grows increasingly frail. The ending is a little too dramatic for my tastes (thought it would probably translate quite well to film, and seeing this happen wouldn't surprise me much), but overall, this one's a keeper and a recommend-to-others book.