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What I’ve been reading lately

May 13, 2013
Book Review, Books, reading, Travel
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As you might expect, I’ve done a fair amount of reading in the past three weeks what with flights, train journeys, and an entire week left to my own devices in Bristol. I’m so far behind on my book reviews I thought I’d do a trio of short ones.

neverletmegoEven though I fell desperately in love with Ishiguro when I read The Remains of the Day a few years  back, for some reason Never Let Me Go never made it to the top of my TBR stack. I blame Keira.    But boy, was that my loss! It has been too long since a book broke my heart, and this one, set in an eerily familiar futuristic dystopia, did just that. The story follows three young friends who are brought up in an isolated country school, Hailsham, where children are told they are special and have a very important role to play in society. What that role is exactly, is revealed in Ishiguro’s own suspenseful, good time. Ishiguro is the master at creating empathetic narrators, generous with information, reserved in expressing emotion. Somehow this has the effect of transferring the full weight of the characters’ tragedy to the reader. It’s a gorgeous story of missed chances, betrayed friendships,  and intense love.

thestarboardseaAlthough the thought of being placed in a privileged New England boarding school in the Yuppie years of the 1980s didn’t appeal to me at the time, I’d read such rave reviews about my former professor’s recent novel that I knew I must give it a shot. I’m very glad I did. The Starboard Sea is a coming of age story reminiscent of A Separate Peace and Catcher in the Rye, and like the authors of these novels, Amber Dermont questions the very paradigm of “privilege.” Addressing contemporary themes of homosexual discovery and the dispensability of women (yes, even heiresses), it is another heartbreaking story told by an unreliable yet sympathetic anti-hero who despite having the world at his fingertips has had the one thing that he ever loved taken from him. We understand early on in the novel that Jason somehow had a part to play in driving his best friend Cal to commit suicide, but the full weight of his culpability is only understood after his doomed attempt at forging a second chance for himself. In this soulless world of yacht clubs, Manhattan pent houses and absent parents, it’s not so simple to start over. Beautifully written, The Starboard Sea is another melancholic read, but well worth it.

thebreakFinally a slightly more life-affirming novel from the young Italian novelist who has been compared to Hemingway because of his stripped-down prose that word lovers can’t get enough of. In The Break, Dino is an impassive, unambitious man whose life of laying stone roads by day and playing billiards at night is disrupted with the news that his wife is pregnant. They are older and had long since given up hope of having children. Instead they spent their lives dreaming of the places they’d travel. Now with this news that threatens to offset these theoretical plans, Dino is thrown off balance. He starts taking risks, doing surprising things, and finds he’s less certain about life but is more driven than ever to test its boundaries. Grossi’s writing is a fine wine, meant to be savored, but that goes much too quickly.

The Thousands Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

April 23, 2013
Book Review, Books, British, reading, Travel
1 Comment

thethousandautumns…which I kept calling A Thousand Splendid Suns of Jacob De Zoet, or some similar combination of those words.

So I was a big fan of Cloud Atlas. Loved the unique plots going on in each of the five sections, their subtle interwoven narratives. Loved how David Mitchell didn’t just write five different stories in one, but wrote deftly in several different genres and, extraordinarily, kept it all straight in his and my mind. In fact, that book convinced me that Mitchell is a genius. I really loved the first two stories in Cloud Atlas especially: ”The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” and “Letters from Zedelghem.” However, it appears that I was possibly the only one. At least the overwhelming majority of reviewers, bloggers and friends and family I’ve discussed the matter with found Adam Ewing’s chapter boring, written as it was in the eloquent style of the mid -9th Century.

If that was your opinion of Cloud Atlas, then I would caution you against reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. It is set in the Dutch East India outpost of Nagasaki, Japan in 1799, so nearly the same era as Adam Ewing. While Mitchell abandons the erudite language of Adam Ewing’s Pacific Journal and writes in a much more approachable style, there is still plenty of era-appropriate swindling, a familiar (if multiplied) cast of dishonest, dastardly vilains, and just as much beating up on our beloved, flawed, honest-to-a-fault hero. If that’s not your cup of tea, then my advice is to take a pass on this one.

However, fans of Master and Commander, Memoirs of a Geisha and Yukio Mishima take note. A Thousand Autumns delivers adventure (in both the European naval and Japanese samurai varieties), forbidden cross-cultural romance, tragedy as only real life accounts from the Age of Empire can inspire, and some sad but realistic truths.

Reading back on my notes from A Thousand Autumns, I’m remembering how contemplative and tragic it all felt, especially the ending. Yes, there are moments of grace when, after all the double-dealing and selling each other out, finally a vilain’s heart wins out. Yes, there is justice and vengeance. But there is, at the end, the pervasive suggestion that Mitchell seems to make that no one is in control of his own destiny. They are all flotsam and jetsam tossed about on the capricious seas of 19th Century politics, class warfare and social sparing.

Isn’t that bleak? Also, the implication that one brief encounter, a promise made and unwittingly broken, essentially an attempt to ensnare one’s own future happiness, can backfire and have unimaginable repercussions, back from which even an honest man can never climb.

Mitchell poses the question: Can a person ever successfully seek out happiness when that particular form of it is deemed untouchable by the powers that be? Can you reach your hands into a fire and not get burnt?

I’ve made it sound awfully bleak, which it is and isn’t. It is also a rollicking good page turner, more evidence of Mitchell’s unquestionable genius (though The Thousand Autumns it is not always as cohesive as Cloud Atlas), and a journey to another world in another time and place that would make a fantastic summer read on a plane or, better yet, a boat. (Can you tell I still have travel reading on the brain?)

Readers, I’d love to know your honest opinion: are you a fan of David Mitchell or not so much? Have you read Cloud Atlas or The Thousand Autumns? Will you?

 

Travel Reading

April 22, 2013
Books, reading, Travel
2 Comments

readingplaneSo… we leave for our trip on Wednesday, which means there have been a million things to do before we leave. All good of course. Admittedly, my most difficult task has been narrowing down a list of books to bring on the journey. The task is on-going, I’m afraid, and so I was hoping you could help me out with a few additional recommendations. Have you read any books lately that would make great plane/train reads? I’m very open to destination-themed books as well, so England, France, Netherlands and Portugal are all good settings.

So far, here’s what I’ve got:

neverletmegoNever Let Me Go by Kuzuo Ishiguro — On loan from a friend who shares my love for Ishiguro. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to read this 2005 hit. Like The Remains of the Day, I’m loving the heartbreaking, backward-looking narrative of this book, as well as Ishiguro’s ability to lift the veil on the creepy, dystopian world he’s created only a little at a time. There’s just one problem: I don’t think this one’s going to make it into my bag. I will have finished it by Wednesday! So I need your help. Do you have any recommendations along the lines of “If you liked Never Let Me Go, you’ll love _________”?

thestarboardseaThe Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont — I’ve mentioned before that Dermont is a Creative Writing professor at my alma mater, and so I’ve been delighted to see her climb into author stardom here of late, first with her 2012 novel The Starboard Sea, and most recently with her collection of short stories Damage Control. I’m starting with her novel about a privileged group of friends in a New England prep school in the 1980s. The main character is quietly dealing with the shock of his best friend and sailing partner’s suicide when the story begins, sending me immediately back to Devon preparatory school in A Separate Peace. There’s sailing, there are neglectful and disgustingly rich parents, there’s the promise of a decent protagonist dealing with grief and coming-of-age issues in a most indecent environment. I have high hopes!

There_Is_No_Me_Without_YouThere is No Me Without You by Melissa Fay Greene — I’m a firm believer in allowing vacation to be a time of intense discernment and inspiration. After all, it’s a gift to have all that time to think and reflect, hopefully on the things that matter most in our lives. And so, I’m excited to finally get around to reading this book by Melissa Fay Greene that a friend loaned me literally years ago. Actually, I’m returning her copy (because, come on, that’s not cool), but I’ve bought the ebook and will be reading it on my iPad (a first for me). The book is about a middle class Ethiopian woman who made it her mission to shelter and care for the AIDs orphans in her country, before quickly becoming overwhelmed by the many children needing her care. It’s been lauded as a powerful book about Ethiopia’s own Mother Theresa.

But three books is not nearly enough. So please, what have you been reading lately? I’d love to hear your recommendations. Thank you!

(Top photo from Thoughts in Transit)

Do you listen to audiobooks?

March 20, 2013
Books, reading, Technology, Travel
3 Comments

Cat Watercolour PRINT, Music Art, Headphones, Orange Tabby, Watercolor Cat, 8x10 print

I’ve been doing this new thing where I check out audiobooks from the library. My New Year’s resolution to ride the subway at least a couple days a week  has fallen *ahem* by the wayside. For many reasons. My laziness being just one of them. In place of that precious extra 1.5 hours reading time that my subway commute affords, I figured I’d let someone else read to me. It has certainly made even Atlanta driving — dare I say it? — something of a pleasure.

Right now I’m listening to The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Have you read it? Do you ever listen to audiobooks? What are some of your favorites (books and narrators)? I can see how you could become loyal to certain narrators, seeing as you’re entrusting them with bringing the characters to life. I wonder if Ira Glass has narrated any books. ;)

(Cat watercolor by WaterInMyPaint)

A trunk full of old letters

February 7, 2013
Authors, Books, reading
3 Comments

Old-letters_large

It’s official. Nina Sankovitch, author of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, announced her next big thing: a nonfiction book about letter writing. The author who famously read a book every day for a year got the idea for her second book when she moved into her New England home and uncovered a trunk of letters hidden in her back yard. (Doesn’t that sound like the preface to some Victorian sensational novel?)

Sankovitch explains: “The trunk was filled with hundreds of letters written by a boy to his mother from when he was about four years old, through his four years at Princeton from 1908 – 1912, and up until the death of his mother in 1937. I’ve always loved reading letters, and the discovery set me on a quest of understanding the unique qualities of letters that make them such forces for connection and remembrance.”

A trunk full of old letters? Just hiding out in your back yard? How lucky can you get! That is the sort of thing my sister and I used to dream of finding on our many excursions through the woods of our back yard and into the cluttered treasure trove of our attic. No such luck.

I suppose I’ll just have to live vicariously through Nina, for the second time.

Do you still write letters by hand? I’d love to get into it!

 

Books that get better with age

January 31, 2013
Book Review, Books, reading
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theimperfectionistsSometimes you don’t fully understand the extent to which a book makes an impression on you  until some time has passed. This was my realization the other day, sitting on big pank and contemplating my bookshelf.  The book that caught my eye and that inspired this theory was The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. I read The Imperfectionists close to a year ago and enjoyed it very much, but now, almost a year later, I feel I could give it a still more glowing review. It has benefited from months of positive (rarely acknowledged) reflection. The characters, all connected with a failing English newspaper based in Rome, never really left me when I closed the book for the final time and I find that I think of them often, like old friends long since dispersed by the winds of life who are still conjured up from time to time in the form of “I wonder what happened to Sue.”

The themes, too, I continue to contemplate. It was a timely novel, published in 2008 I believe, revolving around the drama of one newspaper in its final death throws. Rachman is a seasoned journalist, and so you’d expect him to have a thing or two to say on the subject. But despite this very topical subject matter, the novel is very much about people, individual lives all touched by this pipe dream of a newspaper. Like any good journalist, Rachman knows that even the most fact-based news story should have a human heartbeat, and The Imperfectionists has many. We discover in the novel’s final story (it is, in fact, a novel of interconnected short stories) that the newspaper itself, the non-human focus of the book, was not built upon some business-minded vision of disseminating good (English) news to expats in Europe, but upon the unreliable and shifting sands of human emotion, namely, love. Is Rachman making a more general statement about the demise of print news? That it was too human, too imperfect a dream to ever survive the inhuman age of computers?

At it’s core, The Imperfectionists is a book about people in all their volatile, emotional glory. Which is why, all these months later, I still remember the tragic Arthur Gopal, Obituary Writer turned Culture Editor, stunted life-long reader Ornella de Monterecchi, stuck in 1994 because she refuses to miss a single paper, and “Accounts Payable” Abbey Pinnola, who gets a piece of her own medicine when she falls for copydesk Dave, who she’s just fired.

Have you noticed that certain books just stick with you longer than others? Surprising ones, too! Which ones have stuck with you? What were the most memorable books of 2012 for you? I’d love to hear!

What are you reading this weekend?

January 4, 2013
Books, Independent Bookstore, literature, reading
2 Comments

theblackcountI’m enjoying reading a book I got for Christmas, The Black Count by Tom Reiss. It’s a biography about Alexander Dumas Sr., the father of Alexander Dumas author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Apparently, Dumas Sr. achieved just as much fame as his son for his military exploits during the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars, and infamy for the fact that he was, get this…black. His father was a French aristocrat, his mother a black slave from Haiti. Reiss explains, for a brief period in history, between the French Revolution and 1815, slaves and black people were given unprecedented rights for the time. For example, slaves could take their masters to court and win lawsuits against them, they could marry white partners, and they could rise to the position of General in the army. This period of open mindedness actually ended after Napoleon was defeated, so that Alexander Dumas Jr. was the victim of more overt racism (for being one quarter Haitian) than his father. Pretty extraordinary, isn’t it?

Luke and I so enjoyed reading The Count of Monte Cristo earlier this year (fainting women and all), that I was over the moon when I saw this book on the shelf of my local indie.

What are you reading this weekend? I’d love to hear your recommendations!

Have a great day!

Subway Reading

January 3, 2013
Books, reading, To Do
7 Comments

One of my New Year’s Resolutions this year is to take the train more often to work. Aside from being better for the planet and my health, I’m realizing that my reading life depends on it, too. Seriously, if I took the train to work twice a week, that’s two hours (and more, some days) of extra reading. Not surprising, I always feel better on days I take the train, probably because I’ve started my day with two healthy activities: exercise and reading. To encourage myself in this goal I’ve put together a Can’t Fail list of must-haves for subway reading. Of course, at the end of the day, all you really need is a book, but the other items will help to get me excited about waking up that little bit earlier on train days.

julianbarnes

A book, preferably a paperback (it’s lighter and can be held in one hand when you’re forced to stand and read). I contend that subway reading is the perfect time to tackle that ‘serious’ book you’ve not been able to get into so far. There’s nothing like sitting (or standing) for 30-45 minutes with nothing to do and no signal on your phone to give you that extra push into a tricky novel. Plus, 30 minutes (heck, 10 minutes) of steady reading is usually all it takes to get drawn into a book. Sure it’s a good time to get sucked into a mystery, too, but I say, go literary. messengerbagA good bag: Not a necessity, but when you travel on the train enough times with inappropriate baggage (canvas market bag, I’m looking at you), you appreciate the ease that comes from having a well-made, perfectly proportioned, compartmentalized, and comfortable-for-carrying bag. I like a sturdy (but not heavy), squarish messenger bag or large satchel, myself. It’s the perfect size to fit a book, a notepad and an iPad, if you carry one, not to mention all the other bits and bobs.

featherbookmarkAgain, not a necessity, but a bookmark makes life a little easier when you’re reading right up until the second the door opens to your stop. Sure, you can jam a finger in there and pick up where you left off once you’ve found your next train platform. Or you can look like a pro with a gorgeous, handmade feather bookmark. Plus, since these little guys are often given as gifts, I love being reminded of the person who gave it to me whenever I open my book. It’s the small things.

herringbone_papaya_grandeA scarf for nestling down into your reading. Maybe this is just a female thing, but I love to create a nest when I read. Nests are not all that socially acceptable in public. However, a soft colorful scarf makes a great simulation of the reading nest. Not to mention, a colorful scarf is an essential piece of anybody’s walking-to-work uniform. I love these hand-printed scarfs from the Block Shop, no less because they support an entire community in India who make them.

helicopteralarmAn effective alarm clock. This Flying Alarm Clock sounds horrible, but it would certainly do the trick. When the alarm goes off, the helicopter flies off into part of your room. The off switch is on the helicopter, so you have to get up and find the helicopter wherever it’s crashed and turn it off.

On that note, I’m off to catch a train. What is your relationship with train/bus/taxi reading? How do you incorporate reading into your daily life? I’d love to hear any of your tips!

 

Review: Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

January 2, 2013
Authors, Book Review, Books, reading
13 Comments

reading365. That’s how many books Nina Sankovitch read in one year. That’s right. 365. A book a day. Sounds like some kind of crazy New Year’s Resolution, doesn’t it? And it was, sort of, although Nina’s year started in October, not January. Since we began a new year yesterday, we’ve probably all experienced that feeling of having reached a point of crisis in our lives. A point where we resolve to end one behavior and replace it with another. For Sankovitch, the crisis was the grief she’d been running away from for three years following the death of her sister, and the realization that she couldn’t run away from it anymore. Her solution? To sit down — in a purple, wingback chair — and read. A book a day for 365 days.

Full disclosure: I was a fan of Nina’s blog Read All Day long before I came around to reading Tolstoy and the Purple Chair. I’m a fan of Nina, actually. We both like endangered things: books, independent bookstores, libraries and, as I discovered on my last visit to her site, handwritten letters. What’s more, I’m convinced Nina’s just an all ’round lovely person. I make that judgement based solely on the fact that she responds promptly and thoughtfully to readers’ comments and emails, and I’m not just talking peremptory, courteous responses. No. We’re talking paragraphs of carefully considered, elegantly crafted feedback.

I’m also convinced she’s superwoman. Consider the facts. Here is a woman who raised four sons, maintained a healthy marriage and several healthy relationships, had a strong legal career before she set out on this project, put dinner on the table most nights, kept her house functionally clean, read a book a day AND wrote a review of that book on her site each day AND took the time to respond to needy commenters like me. And then she wrote a book about that year that’s overflowing with wisdom, humour, kindness and inspiration. She is the Deepak Chopra for busy moms every Western person everywhere who feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day. This is someone who needs to be a guest on Oprah.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand her methods, but I understand her motivations. In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, Nina spends a good deal of time exploring the question of what motivates us as readers. Why do we read? Escape, she decides is definitely one reason. But another is to learn how to be human; to learn how to relate to other humans.

Often Nina relates the books she discussing back to memories of family, past lovers, life-lesson’s learned. Not surprising, her prose shines brightest at these times of storytelling. With two immigrant parents who lived through WWII Europe, Nina has plenty of astonishing stories to tell, and she does, generously, aware as she obviously is that stories, whether they feature fictional characters we’ll never meet or the lives of people closest to us, stories are what knit us together in the tapestry of life. Stories are how we come to understand one another.

Stories are also what help Nina heal, which is as good an endorsement for reading as any I’ve ever heard.

Nina sounds like an extraordinary reader, but I’m curious, could you read a book a day for a year? Have you? Would you? I honestly just don’t think I’m a fast enough reader. I’d love to try sometime, though!

Speaking of resolutions, what are yours this year? One of mine is to read a book a week all year, but I’m afraid even that will be too hard for me! Undoubtedly, It will depend on another one of my resolutions: to take the train to work more often. What about you?

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