Time Traveler's Wife

I originally read this about five years ago when it was a super popular best seller and absolutely loved it. I recall recommending it freely, only to be chagrined later on with the realization that the book is really not intended for the sensitive reader. With my first reading, Niffenegger managed to "smoke and mirror" her way around the book's frequent crude language and descriptive love scenes because Time Traveler's plot was so incredibly original.

After attempting a discussion with a friend who very recently read it, I realized most of my memory of the book was too faded for a legitimate conversation. I picked up the enormous hardbound copy at the library and quickly found myself escaping in the tricky time traveling romance and doomed love story once again. It really is such a fantastic idea and when I finished, I found myself still scratching my head in wonder about how Niffenegger got the idea for this book in the first place, and feeling slightly overwhelmed by its desperate ending.

The smoke and mirrors weren't as effective the second time around, however, as I felt more offended by the crude language used by both Clare and Henry. I'm not a prude who regards all language as inappropriate, and think sometimes the character's background or emotional outburst warrants the feeling such language manages to evoke. But it felt really unnecessary most of the time. Clare and Henry are both such smart characters, so capable of better verbs and adjectives. Additionally, neither seems particularly rash or impetuous - so their casual dropping of vulgar words only seemed...vulgar.

If you care about those things, you probably won't enjoy this book. If you can justify looking past it to read a story unlike anything you've ever read, you might just love this book. I did.

Thirteen Moons

Like Cold Mountain, this took me awhile to appreciate. But once I did, wow...there is so much beauty in words, landscape and life study to enjoy.

A sweeping epic of a man's life from the early 1800s to the end of the century in the American South, Frazier describes the harsh realities of a young and sometimes immature government as it expands its territory and faces its own human rights abuses. He does this through the life of Will Cooper, a bound boy on his own since his eleventh year and a man who eventually becomes a Chief, a lawyer, a senator, a Colonel and a vast land owner. His life is a lonely one, without family and without Claire, the love of his life. He compensates by devoting his life to the Cherokee and Bear, a clan Chief, who adopted him in his teenage years. While other clans are forced off their eastern mountain land to move west onto reservations, Will keeps them in their mountain home with his evasive lawyering skills which earns him much esteem but also much criticism. In the end, he ends up nearly as alone as when the book began.

Read this patiently. Enjoy its honesty and perspective. It is quietly satisfying.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

This was another book I had little knowledge of when deciding to add it to my "to-read" list. I'd heard of the title, learned it was an Oprah's Book Club choice, and saw it at Sam's Club which inspired me to put a hold on it at the library, but I didn't actually know what it was about.

For that reason, I was a little nervous when I read the foreward and the critic walked me through its rediscovery in the 60s (it was written in 1937) and subsequent controversy over its worthiness as a part of African American literature. Yikes. What's a white, middle class, northerner to do? I prepared myself to read with a sheltered caution.

Honestly, I don't understand the controversy. I don't think it white washes over the ugly aspects of the south in the 1930s, but it also doesn't dwell on every injustice or the blatant unfairness of the times. It simply tells the story as is. Perhaps the African American community fears fingers and voices pointing to the book saying, "See? It wasn't so bad? Your history isn't all oppression and misery." If that is or was the case, I think its safe to say that while the Zora Neale Hurston's portrayal of African American history doesn't attempt the heights of horror of, say, a Toni Morrison novel, it also doesn't give the reader a rosy tinted view of their history either.

The main character, Janie, is an African American teenage girl, raised by a grandmother who, while a slave, was raped and impregnated by a white man. The grandmother bore a daughter, Janie's mother, who, later, was also raped by a peer while in school, which left Janie's mother traumatized and uninterested in her baby. Left to be raised by her grandmother, Janie's childhood and rearing was old-fashioned and she was left with a limited understanding of the world, especially the male/female romantic relationship. Janie does have a vivid experience involving watching pear blossoms being pollinated by bees, which leaves her yearning for romantic love.

Convinced by her grandmother that love can develop after marriage, Janie marries an older farmer who is looking for a hard working wife to help take care of his land. After a short amount of time, Janie realizes there are no pear blossoms there, and that this life does not make her happy. One day, while doing a chore, she comes upon a charismatic man named Jody, who dresses and acts like a free white man, much different than the other men she has been exposed to, and is on his way to live in an all-black community, Eatonville.

Jody smooth talks Janie into going with him and she leaves the farm and her husband in search of her pear blossom. Unfortunately for Janie, this new opportunity doesn't present happiness either and after 20 years or so of marriage and being a trophy to her powerful husband who became Mayor of Eatonville, she finally becomes a widow and experiences independence for the first time. With that independence, she meets and marries the much younger Tea Cake, her pear blossom, and begins to understand and enjoy the inner person she always knew she was.

The power of this novel comes from the phonetic dialogue which transports you to the black south, and the honest expose of the attitudes and expectations of blacks during this period of our country's history. I feel that Janie went through a great deal of growth and discovery and is an excellent example of the silent and dignified power women have and have always had, even when its ability to express itself is limited.

Those Who Save Us

I've been on a sort of "girl-power" kick lately. Not overtly, but the last few books I've finished, I can't help but think of the independent, but limited-to-express, spirit of women throughout the ages. O-lan, in The Good Earth, felt all the things we modern women feel (anger, jealousy, humiliation, yearning, pride) but wasn't allowed to change her circumstance because of the culture and time she lived in. But her womanhood was there. God of Animals had a female protaganist, Still Summer was about the courage and will of females, albeit not my favorite characters, and Christabel LaMotte broke the mold of a victorian spinster with her intelligence and will.

The order of these books have been chosen purely on chance and yet the theme of a strong woman dominated my latest read as well.

Those Who Save Us, written by Jenna Blum, is an historical fiction novel set in Germany during World War II. Anna is an eighteen year old girl who falls in love with a Jewish doctor and finds the courage to finally stand up to her domineering father, a Nazi sympathizer and altogether unkind man, and hide her lover in her own home. When her father turns him over to the Gestapo, Anna leaves and lives and works with a woman who works with the Resistance Movement. Anna, pregnant and alone, is ultimately left with her own resources and determination to survive and protect her infant daughter. She does this by becoming the mistress of an SS officer after the woman she lives with and works for is executed for being a traitor.

My favorite thing about this was the recurring weaving of the title/theme throughout the many different story lines. The young daughter and her father. The Aryan and the Jew. The resistence worker and a pregnant woman. The SS and his mistress. The mother and her daughter. The Germans and the Americans. The daughter and her step father and ultimately her own adult lover, a Jew. What is the price of survival? What are the faces of those that save us? Our parents, our friends, our lovers, our enemies? This is a complicated story about the difficult and sometimes ugly choices a woman makes to survive, and the shame she endures for her choices.

The Tenth Circle

I know I am supposed to be reading The Hiding Place. But first Harry Potter distracted me and then on a whim I bought this at Sam's Club looking for a less emotional read.

But, if you've ever read Jodi Piccoult, she is all about the emotional. In fact, this being the third book I've read of hers, I'm beginning to think she's overly emotional.

The Tenth Circle is cleverly written. The main narrator is Daniel Stone, a comic book writer and artist who is working on a new series based on his life and his wife's life study of Dante's Inferno. In Dante's Inferno, there are nine circles of hell. In this story, and in the comic book pages that begins each chapter as a parallel story to Daniel's real life, the hero (or heroes) discover that there is actually a tenth circle of hell. I'll let you discover what the tenth circle is if you are so inclined to read this.

The book is well written and the characters adequately developed. Daniel is a reformed troubled youth with a mysterious history he doesn't talk about with his wife and daughter, who completely turned his life around to be a stay-at-home father to Trixie. His fatherhood is his alter ego. His wife fell in love with the bad boy and then gets bored after years of his cleaned-up act and has an affair with one of her students taking her Dante class. And Trixie, their teenage daughter, somehow becomes one messed up chica over a boy who breaks up with her.

The story lost me with all three character's extreme behavior. It just wasn't believable. Trixie is date raped by her ex-boyfriend. This part of the story was unbelievably real and I thought had the makings of a great, complicated debate on teenage sex. But the author didn't follow through. Her absolute defense of Trixie (who didn't want to have sex, but didn't say no because she was drunk and high but she tried to push him off - he didn't get the message because he was drunk and high and used to having sex with her because they had been active for several months beforehand) of accusing her ex-boyfriend of rape and the rage and upset it cost him, their friends, his family, the school, the community and ultimately her own family, was never questioned.

I thought a more appropriate argument could be made for the emotional and psychological repercussions of teenage sex. It's not just that they can, or do, but if they should. Trixie, a fourteen year old who become obsessed by her "love" for her first boyfriend, becomes almost suicidal after their break-up. She makes really poor decisions afterwards, including dressing provocatively in an effort to win him back, and some dangerous, reckless behavior at a party that ultimately broke her. Her parents made equally bad decisions in their handling of their daughter before and after. But again, that wasn't really Piccoult's point. Ultimately, she didn't really have one except that Trixie's father would go to whatever depths of hell to avenge his daughter. Kind of over-the-top, I think. I'm not belittling the devastating effects of date-rape. But the line was so, so blurry here, that there had to be a discussion of that very line. I think Piccoult got caught up in her clever idea of weaving in a comic strip and her Dante angle and missed the bigger picture.

She's done it before. I enjoyed My Sister's Keeper but thought Vanishing Acts missed the point by a long shot. It's as if she does all of this research (sister's keeper is about Genetic tampering and Vanishing Acts is about the prison system) and writes the research no matter where the story takes her. She worked it out with My Sister's Keeper but didn't do justice for Dante, comic books or the paramount subject of date-rape in this story.

It's a shame because she's a good writer. But, I'm ready for her to write about something other than a teenage girl's drama.

The Thirteenth Tale

Several weeks ago, I searched Amazon.com's best books of 2006 trying to find something interesting to read. Pretty high on the list was this book by Diane Setterfield and Miracle in the Andes, so I reserved a copy of both from the local library, along with several others, and these were the first two to become available. For some reason, I choose to read Miracle in the Andes first.

I've tried to read it. I am not a lover of non-fiction. Occasionally, I surprise myself by liking some of it. I appreciate when someone chooses non-fiction for book group because it forces the issue and, like kids with vegetables, sometimes a little nudge is necessary for me.

I read the first 50 pages of Miracle in the Andes. From what I can tell so far, it's well written, intense...kind of exciting. But, it sits on my nightstand, night after night, untouched. I'm tired tonight. I'd rather watch T.V. I just don't feel like reading. But I was wrong. I just don't feel like reading that book!

Finally acknowledging my mental block with reading, I picked up the other book I reserved from the library. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. I think it was ranked by Amazon's editors #3 from their Best Books of 2006 list. I knew it was kind of a mystery but that was it. So, how fun when I picked up the book and read this on the back of it:

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring lke a bear in the chimney? what you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. - Vida Winter

How appropriate! Yes...I don't want a true story. I want a great big ol' lie! And a good one too!

I don't really consider fiction a lie. I mean, it's entertainment for me. I don't read because I'm a lover of words or sentences or grammar. I notice when those things are lacking, because of course, they contribute to a well-written story, but it's the story itself that attaches me to a book. And this is a great story.

A hugely successful author writes a letter to an unknown, spinster woman with a commission to write her biography. The author, Vida Winter, has never told anyone her real story. Her pen name is made up and with each new novel of hers that is published, interviewers try to expunge her background. With each interview she tells a completely different, obviously made up story. It becomes a rite of passage to interview the great author and report back her latest tall tale. So, her offer, to tell the truth, is a huge deal. One that would be crazy for anyone to turn down. The trouble is, the woman she makes the offer to isn't really interested. Up to that time, she reads almost exclusively old 19th century fiction. She isn't interested at all in living fiction. She has her own reasons, and her own secrets. Mystery #1. And Vida Winter only wants this particular woman to write it. Mystery #2.

After reading the letter, Margaret, the biographer spinster, picks up one of the author's books for the first time, originally called Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, and is immediately drawn in to the story. When she finished the twelfth tale, she turned the page to discover that the book ended without the final thirteenth story. Mystery #3. What is the thirteenth tale? . Feeling drawn to the author for unknown reasons, she accepts the invitation and Vida Winter tells finally tells her story...sort of. Mystery #4.

The entire book sort of throbs with these haunting mysteries. It isn't intense. There is nothing scary about this story. But the truth becomes uncovered in a controlled, rhythmic manner and with each uncovering, a few more mysterious shadows turn up.

I loved it. I don't need to read non-fiction with books like this out there. Phew!

Twilight

My sister in law, Tara, let me know about this little gem. I had never heard of it but it is a very successful book. New York Times Bestseller. Moreover, it's written by an LDS author. The book has no ties, at all, to our beliefs. It is a love story between a high school girl and a vampire. Not exactly what last week's sunday school lesson was about:)

Still though, it's a good book. Clean. I was very surprised that I liked it as much as I did. First of all, it's young adult fiction. I keep hoping I am too mature for young adult fiction, but I'm not. I loved all the high school drama. Even more surprising, I was totally drawn into the relationship between Edward and Bella. I couldn't believe it. Hello...he's a vampire! Who am I rooting for?

I rooted for the vampire. Even more than I rooted for Bella who wasn't balancing her attraction to Edward with a desire to kill him. Edward is a good guy who controls his urge to kill humans by feasting on wild animals. I know...PETA would be appalled, but it is a moral step up. He is eternally seventeen, because that was when he was bitten and became a vampire (it was humane), but he was born in the early 1900s. Once the author, Meyer, exposed that part of his character, I felt it allowed her to write Edward as the old soul he was. He no longer seemed like a seventeen year old boy, which he kind of did at the beginning of the story. Mentally, he was an adult in my mind.

While the love story is interesting, the story really grabs the reader when it turns into a thriller. Bella is discovered by some other vampires and one in particular decides to track her. Now you have vampires fighting vampires and it's just...exciting.

Fun, fun read. And there's a sequel! Yay!

Traveling Mercies

Can you tell what I've been doing? This is the selected book group book and I read it a bit unwillingly. I have about four more books on my nightstand that I would have chosen to read instead, but with book group tomorrow and me on the mend, I wanted to be able to participate.

Parts of this book I hated, parts of it I loved. It is written by Anne Lamott, a dread-lock sporting, liberal, single-mother, recovering drug addict Christian. I think if we were in the same room, she would hate me and I would drive her crazy. We have very little in common life-wise, belief-wise, socially-wise and morally-wise. She seems kind of loud and full of herself and one prone to drama. But in the privacy of her novel, she reveals herself as she is, warts and all, and I find that I like her. I really like her humor and her writing. She is laugh out loud funny at times and her ability to find meaning in the humdrum of her life and translate them into inspirational stories is a gift.


This book reminds me of a well-written blog. If you're into that kind of thing, check this book out.:)

Tell No One

This book is part The Fugutive part The Godfather. It's definitely a book that's hard to put down. For some reason, I kept thinking the author was female...it just had that tender quality to it although it's a mystery. But it's written by Harlan Coben (and his picture was on the jacket...definitely a man) who must just be in touch with his feelings. As with most mysteries, the author seemed a little too intent on one final twist and spoiled the ending a bit for me. I was really digging it until the last page when he jumped the shark a bit. If you like suspense and reading about a man who would do anything for the woman he loves, you will like this book.