The Painted Veil

Kitty is a beautiful young woman, raised by her shallow and socially aggressive mother to be equally shallow and ambitious. In spite of her beauty, Kitty finds herself unmarried at the age of 25 and losing her place as her mother's beloved when her much younger and less attractive sister, Doris, becomes engaged to a baron. Embarrassed by her sister's superior match, desperate to leave the disappointed glare of her mother and panicked that another decent offer won't come her way, she says "yes" to Walter Fane, a bacteriologist working in Hong Kong, whom she barely knows.

They marry and she accompanies him to Hong Kong where she finds herself bored, ambivalent and unmoved by her husband's love for her. Quickly, she falls in love and begins an affair with Charles Townsend, a handsome, suave politician who, like her, views life as a shallow thing to be lived as selfishly as possible. When Walter discovers their relationship, he coldly gives her an ultimatum: accompany him to inland China where there is a cholera outbreak or he will cause a scandal and divorce her (this was written in 1925 when an affair such as this would, indeed, be an actual scandal) unless Townsend will agree to divorce his own wife and marry her within the week.

Predictably, to all except Kitty, Townsend's true colors appear and he disappoints her. Disillusioned and actually afraid of her husband who she believes only wants to kill her, she travels inland and her deeper, more understanding, more aware life begins.

The title comes from the English poet, Shelly's, sonnet, "Lift Not The Painted Veil Which Those Who Live/Call Life." I love the multiple layers found throughout the book that stem from its title. There are several descriptions of reflections on water, camouflaging the death and disease of the village condemned by cholera with scenes of light and beauty. As Kitty is a front-row witness to death, she observes the veil that lifts when life leaves a body several times. Most poetically is her own veil, lifted to experience a life so different from the superficial one she had expected.

I hate that I wanted the Hollywood ending (apparently...there actually IS a Hollywood ending. The book was made into a movie and I hear it gave the story the satisfying ending I didn't even know I wanted until it didn't happen). Seriously, why do I feel disappointed? Maugham writes a fantastic portrayal of a shallow woman developing into something more. I suppose I wanted her progress to have an effect beyond her own awareness. I wanted it to fix her marriage, alter her relationship with her sister and parents, and finish the relationship with her adulterous lover for the right reasons. Eventually, Maugham allows those things to happen but not at a pace which allows Kitty to avoid loss, pain and humility. Once again...why do I feel disappointed? Those consequences are truths and I appreciate and respect truth. Maugham unflinchingly writes Kitty's growth as a woman as it would have realistically happened.

But, it's a gritty reality.

Recovering Charles

If ever a book was to get a "meh" rating, this would be it. Not bad but not necessarily good, Recovering Charles tells the story of a son who finds a way to forgive his alcoholic father by searching for him throughout the wake of Hurricane Katrina's devastation. Like most "meh" books, it has some highs and lows.

The highs would be the description of New Orleans. For the first time, I felt a deep sense of horror and urgency about saving that great city. Blame it on the over-saturation we get from the media, the almost non-stop global disasters whose images stream through our T.V.s and computers through-out the years, but I admit that I was not personally affected with New Orleans flooding. Reading this book didn't give me a complete turn around, but I do think it allowed me to feel how much was lost for the individual citizens there - albeit the people I was mourning for were completely fictional.

The lows included an unnecessary love story, a completely unnecessary love triangle, and a weak protagonist.

If you're interested in a story involving New Orleans and its recovery, you might enjoy this book. For anyone else...all I can say is...."meh."

The Art of Racing in the Rain

I'm shocked...shocked, by how much I loved this book.

The narrator is a dog.

There is much mentioning of racing - Formula One, NASCAR, Indy....

and the narrator is a dog. But I think I mentioned that already.

I liked this book so much that it made me want a dog. No, it made me want this dog. And I don't even like dogs.

Enzo, a terrier/lab mutt, believes in his next life he will be human. As he feels practically human already, just limited to grand gestures due to his loose-muscled tongue and lack of opposable thumbs, he spends his dog years closely watching his ownder, Denny Swift, to learn the art of being human so that when it's his turn, he'll have a head start.

Denny, a race car driver/mechanic/down on his luck dad is a kind owner who loves his dog and uses racing philosophies in his own life. There are many to choose from, but my favorite is, "No race has ever been won in the first corner; many have been lost there." Denny's own story is one of work, patience, courage, endurance, hope, and love. It's not an easy story to read. There are times I felt like throwing the book I was so mad at Denny's in-laws, but (kind of embarrassing to admit here), Enzo kept me sane. I just loved that dog. Just when I'd about had it, he'd make me laugh and I could manage another chapter.

Enzo dies in the end. It's not a secret. From the opening pages, you are reading the words of a dying dog. But that didn't take away my sadness in the end. I bawled when Denny held his beloved friend in his arms and says, "It's okay. You can go." Think Where The Red Fern Grows and Old Yeller only for adults. There is some mentioning of "mounting" (it's a dog's perspective, remember) and language.

Several times throughout the book, Denny or Enzo say, "Your car goes where your eyes go." Enzo knew that applied to life as well. Your life goes where your eyes go. I'm happy my eyes rested on this book.

So Brave, Young and Handsome

I love Leif Enger's writing. It's almost like he has some sort of program akin to Photoshop for writing - and manages to edit words so that they're softer...more pleasant than the picture he's describing. This whole book has a romantic, old-west feel that immediately snagged me. Even though I had already started another book, the opening chapters of So Brave, Young and Handsome swept me up and into its narrative.

It begins with a former postal worker, Monte Becket, painstakingly trying to write 1,000 words a day to produce the follow-up to his first surprisingly successful debut novel. His son and his wife patiently wait for him to finish but Monte knows, deep down, that he doesn't have what it takes to write a second book. With a need to distract himself from his failure, he befriends his mysterious neighbor, Glendon Hale, and accepts an invitation to travel to Mexico with Hale as his old neighbor rseeks forgiveness from the wife he left behind years before.

Hale turns out to be a wanted man using an alias, and much like Peace Like A River, the story - while beautiful and not in a hurry to get anywhere - turns into a bit of a hunt as Hale evades capture time and again from an old nemesis.

In the end, the book has a little bit of everything. Romance, adventure, crime, art, philosophy and a not too shabby tale of friendship. I can't say I enjoyed it as much as Peace Like a River, but it's a pleasant read.

Loving Frank

This book was brought to my attention several months ago but I didn't seriously consider reading it because I thought it was essentially a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous architect. I have a serious handicap when it comes to reading non-fiction and if I'm going to read a biography of someone, I wanted to read about someone whose life's details I had some...nay....any interest in knowing. An architect, even a really, really famous one, didn't meet that criteria.

When it was selected as a book group selection, I waved my white flag and read it anyway. Say what you will about book groups, one thing I appreciate about the forum is that they tend to throw books in my path that I wouldn't otherwise read. When I end up actually enjoying the mandated book, I appreciate the selection even more.

Loving Frank is part factual biography, part fictional novel featuring the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney's as she fell in love with Frank Lloyd Wright. Mamah, a feminist, intellectual and suffragist, was married to safe, loyal but rather boring Edwin Cheney. The married couple were financially secure enough to keep a nanny, a housekeeper and eventually hire an up and coming architect to build one of his conceptually new "Prairie Houses". Financial and marital security did not bring contentment to Mamah, however, and when Wright intimately connects with her on an intellectual and emotional level during the building of her and her husband's home, a physical affair between the two quickly follows.

What makes this story compelling and great discussion fodder isn't Frank and Mamah's relationship or their affair, it's the constant negotiating and justification the author forces Mamah to debate with herself and with the world about the honesty and integrity of romantic and self love. For Mamah, a person's own happiness super ceded that of any one else's, including one's children, although she admitted several times how incongruous that belief felt at times. When she found literature written by radical thinker, Ellen Key, her belief that she should be with Frank at the expense of everything else, because she loved him, deepened. I am left wondering when, if ever, a selfish act is the BEST act. As much as the pair wished it to be so, they did not exist in a bubble and their relationship had real and lasting consequences to the families they abandoned.

If the moral debate is the actual gift of the book (and for me, it was), then the fancy wrapping and giant bow is the holy-cow-wow! drama and historically significant events that made up the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. This should be a very interesting discussion.

Crossing To Safety

Written by Wallace Stegner, author of one of my all-time favorite books Angle of Repose, Crossing To Safety describes with beautiful prose the art and act of friendship.

Two couples, Larry and Sally Morgan and Sid and Charity Lang, are both young couples living in Madison, Wiscosin during the Great Depression. Larry and Sid both have teaching jobs in the English Department at the university and Sally and Charity are both pregnant with similar due dates. The friendship between the four of them are instant and fully requited, and, as the novel begins with the Morgans visiting the Langs in their later years, obviously life long.

The title of the book comes from a poem written by Robert Frost that goes:

“I could give all to Time except-except

What I myself have held. But why declare

The things forbidden that while the Customs slept

I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There

And what I would not part with I have kept.”

I regrettably admit that I don't usually understand poetry without someone explaining to me its meaning. I think...I think this has to do with the intangible but still very real benefits of meaningful relationships. That those benefits exist even after death. But I could be wrong.

Like many, I assume, I long for that kind of meaningful friendship. One incredible thing about this book is that it adds to my longing without particularly making me want to BE a part of the book. The characters Stegner creates are so vividly real, I know...just know, that I couldn't be great friends with Charity. She's way too controlling. Likewise, I'd walk all over Sally. I need an equal sharer! Unfortunately, like almost every other character in the book, I don't have enough respect for Sid and Larry is much too full of himself to enjoy for long periods of time.

While I don't want to be their friends, in particular, I still envy their friendship. I want something similar. Only I want that one great friendship to be with people that don't bug me.

This book contains no great drama - no affairs or divorces, deaths or mysterious crimes - the journey of their friendship is compelling enough. He describes with such detail the universal jealousies, the generosity and benevolence of close friends, as well as the inevitable judgment that we make about others' relationships.

It's more than just a story about friendship and marriage, however. The characters themselves are literary looking glasses, exposing our own ambitions, priorities, tolerance, vices, pride, loyalty and egos. If you enjoy literature, and don't need an exotic story but find satisfaction in honest reality, you'll probably enjoy this quiet gem.

Ellen Foster

When I was eleven years old, and in sixth grade, I remember getting a bloody nose during school. While I was holding the tissue to my hemorrhaging nostril, a mean-spirited girl, whose mom had already picked a fight with my mom because I didn't invite her daughter to my birthday party that summer, commented loudly to the rest of the class, "I bet she was picking her nose!"

I still remember the humiliation I felt as several people started chanting "nose picker! nose picker!" Humiliation remembered, 22 years later, even though mixed with that memory is a sixth grade full of good friends, a wonderful home to go home to, and eleven, equally drama-free years preceding it.

This memory of mine was triggered last night after reading this short book (only 144 pages) and I was left wondering what Ellen Foster would categorize as "humiliating" from her eleventh year, twenty-two years later.

Eleven year-old Ellen's entire family existence is the very definition of dysfunctional. Alcoholic and mean spirited father. Helpless, sad and sick mother. Cruel, angry and spiteful grandmother. Ellen finds a way to survive in each and every situation she unwillingly finds herself in, without any friends to lean on for support except a young black girl named Starletta.

Confused by the racial segregation and stereotypes that, while no longer enforced by law, are still enforced by popular belief in the South, Ellen observes a loving family in action while spending time with Starletta's family, her hippie art teacher and husband and later with the woman she calls her "new mama" - a foster parent.

Even though it created some frustration for me when normal details, like the names of the story's supporting characters, were left out, the author, Kaye Gibbons, never veers from her narrator's eleven year-old perspective. We readers are never privy to the background story of her parent's eroded marriage, the subsequent abuse and health problems, or what Ellen's world looked outside of Ellen's own view. It is Ellen's story, and she tells what matters to her - holes and all.

We stand by and watch Ellen going to more than her fair share of funerals, being made of fun of for her dirty clothes, uncombed hair, and crazy father who shows up for school drunk, holding money and shouting, "I'll pay you for it!", being forced by the court to go live with her grandmother who makes her go work the fields picking rows of cotton alongside her other "niggers" and then, finally cheer for her as she learns what it means to be loved and safe.

Honest, tragic, triumphant and heartbreaking - if only Ellen knew that she was supposed to be heartbroken, this is a fantastic glimpse into a young girl's horrifying world and how she fights to find a better one.

I Am The Messenger

Excellent writing. Superb. So superb that if this story were to be turned into a film, the movie would be awful. Dull. Banal. In fact, I think the film's interpretation would be a commercial and critical flop because people would think it was so cheesy and predictable.

But...when read, the characters are so real, so satisfyingly flawed that I didn't care about Ed, Marv, Ritchie and Audrey's mediocre lives and stunted emotional maturity. Zusak writes Ed so convincingly and with enough h...more Excellent writing. Superb. So superb that if this story were to be turned into a film, the movie would be awful. Dull. Banal. In fact, I think the film's interpretation would be a commercial and critical flop because people would think it was so cheesy and predictable.

But...when read, the characters are so real, so satisfyingly flawed that I didn't care about Ed, Marv, Ritchie and Audrey's mediocre lives and stunted emotional maturity. Zusak writes Ed so convincingly and with enough honesty that I hurt when Ed hurt and felt a little giddy with each of his successes. I don't know any actor that could "emote" Ed's depth, especially when he seems so simple upon first glance. Sometimes (o.k....most of the time in my perfect world), you need words and an author that knows how to use them, to really know a character.

The book begins with Ed, Marv, Ritchie and Audrey, four hapless young 19 to 20 year old friends, lying flat on the floor of a bank while it is being robbed. Following some rather entertaining bantering, Ed becomes a very unlikely hero after he uncharacteristically foils the bank robbers escape.

The chapter is perfect. The setting is vivid and with limited prose, the personalities and relationship between the four friends is immediately drawn. Following Ed's heroics and subsequent attention in the press, Ed receives a mysterious playing card, an Ace of clubs, with three addresses and different times of day next to each. Ed realizes, with a little help from two thugs who break into his apartment and threaten him, that someone is watching and waiting for each message to be delivered. After he figures out what to do at each address, the ace of diamonds is delivered, with an even more mysterious message. Because Ed has to figure out what the messages are and who to deliver them to each time, the story has a suspense/mystery feel to it, even though most of Ed's missions aren't scary or dangerous (notice I say most. Some of the messages are downright "Aw, shucks"ish, but he also has to figure out how to stop a drunk who rapes his wife every night and eventually does it with a gun. Not exactly Hallmark material).

In spite of my love affair with Zusak's writing, which truly has me gushing, the plot is flawed. Preceding the book's lame-before-I-understood-and-even-lamer-after-I-understood ending, I couldn't help but think while reading, "who would do this?" Who would act on coded messages on a playing card, without contacting the police, without knowing how or why or when or who? It wasn't as if Ed was some super sleuth. His James Bond/Ethan Hunt make-over seemed a bit of a stretch. I simply didn't believe that Ed, in his 19 years of living without confidence or ambition, would even act on the first card. How did Ed, who cannot tell the girl he loves how he feels, or his mother to be nice, suddenly have the nerve to hang out with an elderly woman pretending to be Jimmy, her husband who had died in the war? The leap seemed too great. Buying an ice cream cone for a poor single mother, yes....I could believe that (although I have to admit that each time the message was this simple and and easy to deliver, I wondered, "who is bothering with this elaborate ploy?" Kind of a lot of brou-ha-ha for icecream/lights/telling your friend to get a job.

From it's ending, I get it. Zusak is. He is the messenger and the book is his message. He created Ed and Ed's story because he wanted us to know, whether great or small, we should help each other. More than that, we should be the kind of person who is willing and available to help each other. Because by doing so, we help ourselves.

Fine and great, but by inserting himself into the story, after writing in such a typical, fiction-like manner, the whole book became kind of space age. I guess I felt duped. The strength of the book came from Ed being so real, but the author took that away from me by the end. I felt...manipulated. I mean, I didn't realize I was reading the Wizard of Oz. At least that book had flying monkeys and talking lions.

Bad ending. Great book.

Consequences

This book tried to be deeper than it was. It's theme of "one small decision can change the future for generations" isn't the mind boggling concept the literary world thinks it is. Of course our decisions change the future. Duh.

The author, Penelope Lively, attempts to connect three generations of women, grandmother to granddaughter, through art. The art mentioned was significant to Lorna, a woman raised in a pre World War II upper middle class family, because she chose a completely different life than her parents by marrying an artist and choosing to live a simple, old fashioned way of life in a humble cottage in the country. Matt and Lorna's are simplistically happy, in spite of their poverty, until Matt is tragically killed in the war, leaving behind a young daughter, Molly. While Matt's pieces of work become quite valuable later on and periodically appear in the lives of his daughter and granddaughter, the appearances seem to be nothing more than a prop gimmick and not as consequential to the life decisions Molly and Molly's daughter, Ruth, as Lively leads her readers to think. These "twists of fate" she often produced for her characters instead seemed to me to be much more likely the result of their unorthodox childhoods.

Consequences is a decent book with very good descriptive writing, but even that doesn't make up for its weak plot. Individually, the women's stories were interesting and had some great development, but the overall effect of including all three in one story produces a rushed and thin result.

Interpreter of Maladies

A book comprising multiple short stories all containing Lahiri's haunting mix of Indian/American blend. If it's true that an author can only write what she knows, the Lahiri must know loneliness, because she writes it so beautifully.

While you might not be up for a party after reading this, you will be in the mood for some quiet reflection. She really captures human emotion in her words.

Bound On Earth

When I finished the first chapter, I loved this book. Beth is struggling through Thanksgiving with her family after just leaving her husband who suffers from Bipolar disorder and quit taking his medication. By its middle, I had changed my mind. Tina seemed to be every character in a Jack Weyland novel. She does bad things and bad things happen to her. As I turned the last page, I loved it again. Wait a minute. This is it. These are the stories of families trying. Some of their tales are quite extraordinary.

I don't generally read much LDS fiction. I find the stories usually a bit too tidy and my most important qualifier for really good literature is that it be honest. A lot of time, LDS fiction can be fluffy. Yes, there is usually some necessary conflict that involves the bad character doing bad things. By its end, however, the punishment usually fits the crime and when a miracle is in order, it rarely fails to show up.

I saw a recommendation for this book on Blog Segullah and it got such rave reviews from some seemingly picky readers that I requested it from my library. It's brand new and I was the very first person to check it out. If you consider where I live and what kind of book it is, you'll agree that it was a special moment.

At just under 200 pages, this is the kind of book you can easily read in a day or two. I started it last night and have had a hard time putting it down. Bound on Earth follows the Palmer family through many generations, though not chronologically. The chapters bounce around in time and between family members, a writing technique I'm not always super fond of. Part of me thinks it's a shortcut, to eliminate the tricky transitions that progress a plot. But I also admit that as a reader, it can work well to experience multiple first hand narratives; it makes it much easier to get the "BIG" picture. And this is a book that is all about the big picture.

What is marriage? What is family? How do they survive? Do our trials break us apart or bind us together? Hallstrom doesn't cut corners with heartache. The situations she puts her characters in are vividly real, so real that I felt like I knew these people. I do know them. They just have different names.

If you're wary of LDS literature, give this a try. If you are looking for a great book to read with your ward bookgroup, this is your book. Or if you simply want to discover some great characters that you feel sad to part with at the end...read it. It's legitimately good.

The Maytrees

For a book about love, it's kind of a downer. There are too many exquisite lines to put this into a "waste of time" category, but as a whole, I can't claim this to be a favorite.

What I enjoyed was Dillard's ability to put a unique feel to common experiences. For instance, when Maytree looked at his wife, she wrote, "After their first year or so, Lou's beauty no longer surprised him. He never stopped looking, because her face was his eyes' home."

Or.
"That he did not possess her childhood drove him wild. Who was this impostor she sang with in college -- how dare he?"

Here's a good one:
"A woman's forgiveness weakened a man's arms and back. So did its sob sister, pity. It would not stand up to fight. Who could prevail against it?"

This one is my favorite:
"Often she missed infant Petie now gone -- his random gapes, his bizarre buttocks. How besotted they gazed at each other nose-on-nose. He fit her arms as if they two had invented how to carry a baby.....She imagined joining picnic tables outside by the beach and setting them for 22 Peties and Petes, or 122, or however greedy she was that day and however divisible Pete. Together the sons at every age and size -- scented with diaper, formula on rubber nipples, bike grease, wax crayon...waited for dinner. Who else knew what each liked? It was a hell of a long table. She gave herself a minute to watch them -- Petie after Petie barefoot near his future self and past. They pinched and teased or shoved one another. What mother would not want to see her kids again?"

Now normally I do not give a lot of quotes for a book review. I can't really explain why I did with this particular book, other than I liked these individual lines better than the book as a whole. I confess that I've always had a slight prejudice against east coasters. I don't know exactly why. Again, I like almost all of the individuals I've met, but as a whole, there is a superiority they perceive in themselves in regards to their intellect, experience and perspective that I find irritating. These characters and their beachfront way of life irritated me. Their attitudes towards marriage, parenting, etc. frustrated me. I don't know if it was the author's own bias that tainted them, or if it really was isolated to these particular characters, but the choices they made did not match the consequences I felt each choice deserved.

But who am I to say what should befall the fallen? All I can say is I felt unsatisfied at the end. And a little bit like none of it mattered.

Wow. This was a really bad book review. Sorry.

A Lantern In Her Hand

I need to get this book out of my head. I think it's partly to blame for this heavy blanket of melancholy I've been feeling since Friday.

Originally published in 1928, Beth Streeter Aldrich uses this novel to create a fantastic female character, Abbie Deal. Abbie's story begins in 1854, when she is eight years old and at the start of a three week journey, traveling with her family by wagon from Illinois to Iowa. The fact that I grew up listening to pioneer stories from this era made her voyage very vivid in my mind. I could see the sacks of flour falling out of the wagon and floating in the river and the oxen slowly pulling all the families' possessions along a bumpy buffalo trail. The story ends in 1926 with Abbie's death at the age of 80. The face of America changed dramatically between those years, and Abbie's life changed alongside it.

Part pioneer story, part pride of Nebraska lesson, part farming tutorial, part commentary about marriage - Aldrich ultimately uses Abbie Deal to explain the choices and sacrifices that faced a 19th century woman, or more specifically, a mother.

Perhaps Abbie Deal's selfless mothering is the source of my distress. I've always felt I've lacked in this arena and while I've tried really hard not to compare myself to my friends' and siblings' styles of mothering, I found myself forlorn with the realization that I was no Abbie Deal. Abbie was a natural mother. She postponed her dreams of becoming a singer and learning how to paint the prairie's sunset to follow her husband, Will, to Nebraska at the end of the Civil War.

Originally, she postponed these dreams for the sake of her husband, who needed to carve his own way in life away from his father. Later she postponed them because there was no money or opportunity and every ounce of her energy went into building their home and farm and caring for her young children. Later yet, she postponed them because her children grew and had dreams of their own that required any extra time or money she had saved. Finally, she abandoned them altogether because her talents had left her. Her voice had faded from non-use and her fingers were gnarled and knobby from years of work. In the end, all she was left with was her good name and the pride she had in her children's accomplishments.

Thus started the deep, stabbing pain in my chest. This kind of story, really...the universal story of motherhood, always leaves me feeling a little "damned if you do, damned if you don't". Abbie gave up everything of her own...her talents, her time, her figure (I can really relate to this), her life...for her children. The feminist in me resists....even feels slightly miserable that we women are expected and praised for being noble and altruistic, but void of personal achievement. The mother in me, however, wipes away a tear as I watch life from back stage instead of front and center, but wholly gets that my family is THE point. I get to clap and cheer and know that my efforts made this grand production possible.

Throughout the book, Abbie does women a great service by allowing herself to wonder "what if". What if she had married that other boy who wanted her but who she didn't quite love, the one whose wife now wears all those fine clothes? What if she and Will hadn't moved to Nebraska and avoided suffering through drought and grasshoppers and blizzards? What if she had kept at her singing...developed the talent that everyone acknowledged she had? What if, what if, what if? What if I had? What then? Is the prize for the correct choice happiness?

The fun in discussing this book would be hearing the strong arguments that defend the choices made at either end of the spectrum, and all the shades in between. Today, we lucky women get to choose whatever shade we like. Do we like how we look? Does it match our souls?

Abbie Deal chose motherhood but the story did not romanticize her choice. Abbie's story included every distracted husband, every sick child, every annoying friend and every moody child. And yet, in the end, Abbie sat as an old woman and felt satisfied that her five children were a fine product of her life's work.

I recommend this book to every woman out there who enjoys tales of pioneer life or more importantly, empathizes with the difficult decisions made by women everywhere...always.

The Book Thief

Here it is, only February, and I don't know if I'll be lucky enough to read a better book this year.

I only recently heard about The Book Thief when Jill mentioned it on her blog. She and several others gave it such a strong review that I looked it up on Goodreads. I was a little dismayed when I learned it was set in Nazi Germany, because, well...I wasn't sure what else could be written about that time that hadn't already been said, and said well by many different authors.

I'm so glad I didn't let that thought stop me. This is a quirky book. The narrator is Death, and death isn't a very typical story teller. There are these abrupt bold statements centered throughout the pages when Death feels further information is necessary. They bothered me at first because I couldn't get into my normal rhythm. And, sometimes, his little side comments seemed slightly irreverent. Wait, books don't do this. Not books about the holocaust and Nazi Germany. But this book did, and once I got used to it, I loved Death's little insights.

My favorite thing about this book is it's fairness about one of the most unfair times in human history. The unbelievably complicated situation that the German people were in, their motives, their fear, even their ignorance is not necessarily defended, but explained. Their story is told through Liesel, a young girl who watches her brother die on a train as she is being taken to live with foster parents. After her brother is buried, she snatches a book left in the snow called, The Gravediggers Handbook. Unable to read, she hides the book in her bed until her gentle and loving foster father finds it and uses it to teach her how.

It isn't really about the Germans and the Jews....it's about our human instincts to survive and our race towards death. Death has a really interesting perspective, which lends itself to many quote worthy statements.. His viewpoint (and I'm just assigning gender to him, I'm not sure he actually does) is a troubling one, a compassionate one, an irreverent one and one that left me sobbing tears onto the pages at its end.

While I think this book is suitable for every reader, those easily offended might be troubled by some German profanity. However, in my opinion, not only is it necessary and relevant to the character's communication, it's in a foreign language...which doesn't really count.

I'm grateful this book crossed my path. It touched me.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

For the last two months I have been putting off reading this book. For starters, I bought the book at an airport in Taiwan, which meant it didn't have a due date which meant it took a backseat to many books that I didn't have the luxury of reading whenever.

Additionally, because I've heard so much about this book already, I almost didn't want to read it at all. I've heard that it's depressing, that it's not as good as The Kite Runner, and that it's basically a novel about the brutal treatment of women in Afghanistan.

You know when you read a book or see a film that has had great reviews and you finish feeling disappointed because it didn't live up to the hype? My experience reading this book was the complete opposite. I loved it. I didn't feel the message of the book was one of brutality or depression, but of hope and the toughness of the human spirit.

There are plenty of awful scenes to lend credence to its reputation. While the story's time frame spans thirty years, the main focus of the novel are two woman, a generation apart, whose lives cross as they become the wives of the same man, Rasheed. The elder, Mariam, was born to a servant woman out of wedlock and is raised in banishment, ignorance and eventual rejection during the years the Afghani government was controlled by the communists. She finds herself forced to marry a much older man after her mother commits suicide. Laila, fifteen years younger and raised by intellectual parents, enters the marriage under much different circumstances. Alone after a bomb destroys her home and kills her parents, and pregnant by her childhood love who has fled the country, she marries Rasheed in a desperate attempt to save her unborn child.

The writing engrossed me. Much like the Kite Runner, Hosseini magically puts the reader in the city, neighborhood and house of his characters. Much to his credit, I found myself torn between wanting to yell at Laila to hush up, so that she'd avoid another beating, and kicking Rasheed myself, because he is a despicable brute.

Mariam, one of the most tragic characters in literature, makes this book what it is; a story of love and strenghth. She, who didn't have an easy day in her life, allows herself to be touched by the love of Laila and her children. In return, she performs the ultimate act of love and saves a family.

I appreciate Hosseini's portrayal of a part of the world that is under so much scrutiny lately. Afghanistan, and the city of Kabul where the story takes place, have a long history of wars and occupations which result in a great chasm between different ethnic tribes, Islam, economic classes and gender. Hosseini uses this novel to tell the story of Afghani women and the hardships that face them with each regime change.

As a woman, I feel blessed to have been given confidence and opportunities. I truly cannot imagine what it would be like to live under the conditions the women in this book live under. I am grateful to be born to the family I was born to and in a country which allows me to live the kind of life I choose.

Miram and Laila didn't have the opportunities or support that I have. And yet they survived. They endured and they reached out to others, despite their circumstances. In this, Hosseini redeems all of Afghanistan by showing these two women's humanity. He shows that in a place whose beauty was written about in a 17th century poem, where "One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs and the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls" is a city that can become illuminated once again.

What Came Before He Shot Her

I could write A LOT about this book. Mainly, how much I disliked it. Elizabeth George is probably my favorite crime novelist. I love her Inspector Lynley/Havers books. The first tragic flaw of this book is that neither characters are in the book.

In a nutshell, George takes her last book, With No One As A Witness, and writes a very, very long book with all the background for the criminal in that book. Yes, it humanizes the criminal. Yes, it paints a stark and awful background to the horrors of poverty and neighborhoods that breed crime. But the book becomes part of the horror as it goes on and on in its detail about the ugly.

In the end, there is no beauty to save it. I was just glad to be done with it. It was a hard book for me to read and I feel a little betrayed by George. If you like her too and haven't read this book - don't. Spare yourself the torture.

The Emporer's Children

Taken from the title of a book one of the character writes called The Emperor's Children Wear No Clothes, this book undresses three thirty-year old friends in New York. Marina Thwaite - the beautiful and well-to-do "it" girl who is once again living with her parents, Danielle Minkoff - a smart and somewhat successful TV producer who has an affair with Marina's father and Julius - a gay man with extremely complicated motives, are friends from college who have the advantages that graduating from an elite Ivy League university, as well has knowing influential and important people give them. They live the enviable life of having made it in New York.

The "emperor" seems to be the intellectual elite played by Marina's father, Murray Thwaite: a respected, liberal, and wealthy man who has spent the majority of his life writing "truth". This truth is applauded, awarded and revered by most, as he a champion to the poor, the honest and the brave. It isn't until two men come to town, his own nephew, Fred "Bootie" Tubbs, and Ludovic Seely, an ambitious Australian aiming to launch a new magazine, that his title of truth-teller is challenged.

I didn't think the book jacket's description adequately described the book. The story is complicated and at times, parts of it seem irrelevant to the whole - particularly Julius's part. In fact, as I read this immediately after Plainsong, I couldn't help but think it was the same story only in a much glitzier city with much glitzier characters. The book matters only so far as the characters matter.

At its end is New York's and America's tragic 9/11. Most of the character's trajectories are altered by this event. Except, perhaps, Murray Thwaite - the actual emperor - whose existence remains mostly unchanged.

The subject matter can be ugly, the characters pompous and infuriating, but the book still sparkles because Clare Messud writes the satire so convincingly. Claire Messud is the person in the crowd (although you have to assume this is her own crowd she's shouting at) watching the parade declaring, "But they're not wearing any clothes!"

Plainsong

The first page of this book has a definition of the word plainsong. It is:

"any simple and unadorned melody or air."

I appreciated this book more than I liked it. The author, Kent Haruf, writes with a vividly clear but simple prose about a small town in northeastern Colorado, a couple of hours from Denver, whose occupants struggle with their choices, their relationships and their opportunities.

Kind of a universal story, honestly, but in this setting - so sparse and empty - Haruf managed to develop characters that I felt like I knew. Perhaps it's growing up in Montana, where there are small towns to spare, but his book had a realness to it that felt uncomfortable to me. I had teachers like Tom Guthrie. Men who taught because it was a job, not because they were particularly suited for the profession. I was aware of girls like Victoria Roubideaux, young and troubled (in this case pregnant), misfits from the small town core.

There are many characters throughout the book, some better developed than others. Tom Guthries' sons, Bobby and Ike, who want more than either of their parents are able to give them. The McPherson brothers, old bachelors who live alone on a farm. The teenage redhead, who frightens me and makes me angry until I realize he mirrors the attitudes and behaviors of his own parents. Maggie Jones, who is the poorest developed and thus the most likable. As the book approaches its halfway point, their lives start to intersect rather than orbit. Even as the intersections begin, lives aren't drastically changed or made better. There is some growth and a hint at tenderness, particularly when the old McPherson brothers take in Victoria, who is alone and pregnant at 17.

When I finished the book, I snapped it shut and shouted, "Why do I read stuff like this?!" Days later, I still feel melancholy about Holt, Colorado and its inhabitants who seem to have so little going for them.

As frustrated as I was by the end, because there was no resolution of conflict, no great triumph or lesson learned or bridges crossed, I can quietly nod "well done" to the author for staying true to the apparent purpose of his book. This is a story of "what is" more than "what happened."

It is a plainsong.

March

I rarely buy books. This is true for several reasons, but if I'm ever missing, you'd have a much better chance at finding me by looking in library rather than a bookstore.

However, last month, for Blogger Bookclub, we had a book exchange and I found myself in a bookstore perusing the shelves. First of all, I could quickly change my borrowing ways if I were forced to walk through a bookstore every day. I loved it! So many rectangular shapes that wanted to be slid off shelves and bent open. I found myself off task and reading the jackets of many a book.

Which is precisely how I found this gem. Booksellers tend to pimp their bestsellers by displaying their front covers as opposed to the binding, making it easier to catch the buyer's eye. Right at my eye level was the book Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. I surmised that it was about the plague and while that wasn't the type of story I was looking for, placed right next to it was Brooks's second, and equally acclaimed book: March, a 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner.

It is the story of Peter March, the absent father of Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth of Little Women. Much more up my alley, I replaced Year of Wonder back on the shelf and walked around with March until, ultimately I found an altogether different book and placed March back on the shelf too (I ended up walking out with The Emporer's Children, which I have yet to read.)

Not forgetting about my interest for March, I used my old-faithful-tried-and-true method of attaining books and placed a hold for the book from the library.

I think I should have bought it. It's a great book. Clever, poignant, informative, inspiring, heartbreaking, interesting and historical, Brooks takes Louisa May Alcott's famous Little Women, and writes a parallel story about their father's experience during the same year. Little snippets are taken from Little Women, and it's as though you can see that famous play happening in the background in each scene. Sort of like Wicked and The Wizard of Oz, only more serious and important. After all, Peter March wasn't out flying on a broom, he was trying to serve the Union troops in the United States own Civil War.

Brooks bases Peter on Alcott's own father's journals, just as Alcott based her Little Women on herself and her sisters. Bronson Alcott, and his fictional representative, Peter March, are part of the intellectual elite who reside in Concord Massachusetts alongside their contemporaries, Walden, Thoreau, Hawthorn and Brown, who each make an appearance in the story. Idealistic abolutionists with Quaker leanings, March leaves his family to support the union's cause to end slavery and finds great conflict between his inner values and his outward actions.

Brooks writes exclusively in the first person and as a result, I, the reader, was able to understand Peter March as he was, as he wanted to be and as he failed to be. He is a fantastic character. My only complaint with the book is that she abandoned Peter for a few chapters and wrote as Marmee, his wife, when he lay sick with fever. She eventually returns to Peter's voice, which gives the story the resolution it needs, and while Marmees' thoughts are equally moving and necessary, it made the ending a little choppy.

Despite that lack of continuity, I enthusiastically recommend March. It will force you to examine your own viewpoints about war, education, race, marriage, courage, pride and love.

On Chesil Beach

What a disappointment! I really enjoy McEwen's writing style and 90% of this book had me reeled in. But the climax of this book is so mind-blowing retarded that it loses any recommendation points from me.

On Chesil Beach is a story about Edward and Florence. Two educated and good people, they marry as virgins due to their own personalities and also the expectations of the current times (the story takes place in 1962.) , McEwen effortlessly drifts between the thoughts and backgrounds of his two major characters. It's as if you get to be both characters for a moment.

This dance of thoughts between characters weaves between about a two-hour stretch of real time on their wedding night. All building up for The Marriage Act.

When it goes horribly wrong, the book falls apart. The book jacket exclaims, "A story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken."

Puh-leeze!

O.K...here's a spoiler alert. Do not read this if you are going to read the book and hate all pre-knowledge about a book.






I'll try to be tactful, but remember...they are married and they were both virgins. So, this isn't really a "naughty" book, only an attempt at describing an awkward situation between two people who love each other but lack the depth of communication expected and needed between most people at that level in a relationship.

Basically, right before the moment of consummation, he is so excited by her touch that he unwillingly finishes too early. Way too early. It disgusts her and she runs out of their room and onto the beach.

He is angry and heartbroken and disappointed as is she.

They finally confront each other with their own feelings and have a fight. Not an extraordinary fight. Not even an extraordinarily cruel one. But things were said in frustration and embarrassment.

And then she leaves. He goes back to their room after her and she is gone. Their marriage gets annulled and the story fast forwards about 40 years (but only for Edward. The reader gets no future knowledge of Florence except from a newspaper review that Edward reads.)

I suppose it could happen. But McEwen attempts to dramatize communication, and how what is said or unsaid can alter events (pretty much a universal rule, I think) and he ruins a perfectly good story with a highly unlikely and disappointing ending. I didn't believe it. Or, if it did happen, then it was unnecessary and ridiculous.

Sorry if I ruined it for you, but I so enjoyed Atonement and the appropriate consequences of THAT "what if", that this story, in subject matter and result, gets a big thumbs down from me.