Book Awards Reading Challenge

Nobody "Bod" Owens is the protagonist of Neil Gaiman's newest story, The Graveyard Book. The book starts with the murder of Bod's family, and his unknowing escape as an 18-month old toddler. Bod climbs out of his crib and down the stairs, and, finding the front door open, takes the opportunity to explore, unaware that his parents and sister are being ruthlessly stabbed inside. He ends up at a nearby graveyard, where he is taken in by the dead (and undead) residents.

His story is told in a series of episodes, some seeming more like short stories than part of a larger tale. He grows from a toddler to a teen under the watchful eyes of his ghostly parents, the ghost of a witch, a werewolf, and a vampire. The 'man named Jack' who murdered his family is still out to get Bod, and brings continuity to the main story of the book. But mostly, this is the story of how a young human child makes his way in a world populated by those who are so very different than he, much like Kipling's The Jungle Book, which Gaiman said was his inspiration.

The Graveyard Book is emotionally honest, and serves as a wonderful allegory of childhood. Bod's adventures into ancient burial chambers guarded by jealous spirits and the trip he takes into full on danger by entering a ghoul gate juxtapose nicely with his adventures amongst the living, dealing with middle school bullies and greedy antique dealers.

I enjoyed The Graveyard Book quite a bit, and I'm looking forward to reading more of Gaiman's work. This is primarily a children's book, most appropriate for readers aged 9-12, but I suspect young teens might enjoy it as well. The Graveyard Book was this years winner of the Newbery Medal.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is the story of a ten-year-old Irish boy in 1968. The book is told in Paddy's voice, and Roddy Doyle captures the confusion and attempts to make sense of the world that go along with being 10, suppositions and extrapolations that children make. Paddy on death and religion:

When Indians died - Red ones - they went to the happy hunting ground. Vikings went to Valhalla when they died or they got killed. We went to heaven, unless we went to hell. You went to hell if you had a mortal sin on your soul when you died, even if you were on your way to confession when the lorry hit you. Before you got into heaven you usually had to go to Purgatory for a bit, to get rid of the sins on your soul, usually for a few million years. Purgatory was like hell but it didn't go on forever.

It was about a million years for every venial sin, depending on the sin and if you'd done it before and promised that you wouldn't do it again. Telling lies to your parents, cursing, taking the Lord's name in vain - they were all a million years.
-Jesus
-A million
-Jesus
-Two million
-Jesus
-Three million
-Jesus

Robbing stuff out of shops was worse: magazines were more serious than sweets. Four million years for Football Monthly, two million for Goal and Football Weekly. If you made a good confession right before you died you didn't have to go to Purgatory at all; you went straight up to heaven.

Most of the book is little bits like this, short vignettes about Paddy's adventures with his friends. Paddy's perspective seems spot on to me, though I've never been a small boy.

Interspersed amongst Paddy's adventures and fights is a more serious story line, that of the crumbling marriage of his parents. They fight, increasingly often, increasingly loudly. At the beginning of the book, Paddy's little brother, Sinbad, is able to pretend that there's nothing wrong, but by the end, there's no pretending anymore. In my mind, the section of the book that is dedicated to this storyline was stronger than the somewhat rambling nature of the rest.

But it took two to tango. He must have had his reasons. Sometimes Da didn't need reasons; he had his mood already. But not all the time. Usually he was fair, and he listened when we were in trouble. He listened to me more than Sinbad. There must have been a reason why he hated Ma. There must have been something wrong with her, at least one thing. I couldn't see it. I wanted to. I wanted to understand. I wanted to be on both sides. He was my da.

The poignancy and sadness of this last section made the rest of the book worthwhile to me. Getting into Paddy's head first did help to give weight and depth to the more serious part. But I will admit that I had some trouble getting through the majority of the book, because I kept waiting for something to happen beyond random tellings of steeplechases through the neighborhood and kids beating each other up.

Criss Cross is Lynne Rae Perkins' Newbery Award winning story of Debbie, a girl waiting for something good to happen in her life, and Hector, a boy who decides to take up the guitar. Through the course of the story, both make decisions, some significant, some not, which decide the course that their lives will take.

I felt like the story started of fairly slowly...I wasn't sure where it was going, or if it was going anywhere at all. It was more of a slice of life type story, which is, of course, how life mostly feels, especially at 14. Criss Cross seems to be the antithesis of the type of story where houses burn down, siblings and friends die from cancer, parents divorce or suffer from alcoholism. This is more of an average story, more the kind of story things that happen in reality than so many young adult stories. About half way through, I felt like the story really hit its stride...not that a lot more happened (though some things did), but just that the slices of life that sometimes intersect, sometimes miss, are more poignant in the second half.

I would recommend Criss Cross to teens and tweens, and to any adults who enjoy young adult fiction. I very much enjoyed it.

"He was not what you'd call a lovable man, my grandad. It wasn't that he was cold, exactly. It was more as though he had a huge distance inside himself. There's a game I used to play with my friends. One of us had to think of someone we all knew, and the others had to work out who it was by asking questions like "If this person was a musical instrument, what would it be?" I used to think that if Grandad were a place, it would be one of those great empty landscapes you sometimes see in American movies: flat, an endless road, tumbleweed blown by a moaning wind, a vast blank sky. And after Dad disappeared, he withdrew even further into this remote space."

Tamar is the name of a winding river in England, between Devon and Cornwall. It is also the code name of a resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied Holland during the Second World War. It is also the name given to this resistance fighter's granddaughter. When her grandfather commits suicide, several years after the disappearance of her father, he leaves behind a box of clues for Tamar, a box that takes her on an adventure of discovery, where she learns the answers to questions she hadn't even known to ask.

British Author Mal Peet takes you back and forth in time in this novel, between Tamar's search for clues to her grandfather's suicide, and his adventures 50 years earlier as a resistance fighter in the Netherlands. Tamar the resistance fighter is a Dutch man, trained in England, sent to Holland to unite the many factions of rebels fighting the Nazis. Dart is the code name of his colleague, the wireless operator posing as a doctor in a local insane asylum, popping amphetamines to stay awake for transmissions back and forth to England. Marijke is the woman whose farm is the base for Tamar's missions, and both men are deeply in love with her. She is also the modern day Tamar's grandmother.

Tamar, A Novel of Espionage, Passion, and Betrayal, is a Carnegie Medal winning novel that will appeal to adults and young adults who enjoy stories of espionage, war, and historical fiction. It was a very well written book, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm not generally much of an espionage fan (I always fear I'll forget some vital clue), nor am I a fan of war stories. But this story was told in such a way as to keep me interested, as Tamar discovered hidden realities about her grandfather and his past, and about herself as well.

I read Tamar for the Book Awards Reading Challenge, though I'm pretty sure it was suggested by my late bloggy friend Dewey, so I could have read it for her reading challenge as well.

Billy Lynch, alcoholic, romantic, kind and loving man, has died. His friends and family come together to comfort his widow, and to celebrate his life. And Billy's life seems to have two stories to it. The sad story of his alcoholism, which his friends and family tried again and again to guide him away from, with no success. And the sad story of his first love, an Irish girl whom he intended to marry, but who goes back to Ireland and dies. At least, that's what Billy is told. The truth is, she took the money he sent her for her passage to America, bought a gas station in Ireland, married someone else, and built a life for herself there.

This cruel twist comes pretty early on in the book, and the rest of the story is the meandering tale of his romance with the Irish girl, his grief at her 'death', his marriage to Maeve and their life together. Her suffering through his alcoholism, her reliance on his cousin, Dennis, to help her when he comes home drunk at 3am, night after night after night.

The story is told by Dennis' daughter, sometimes as told to her by her father, sometimes as though she is telling the story to her husband. I found the point-of-view narration a bit confusing, and somewhat irritating. Sometimes the narration would change within a single paragraph from first to third person. The language is often lovely, and the author captures the way that people talk, the honestly of their voices and grief, their delight in gossip, but desire to protect Maeve from that same gossip. Mostly though, I just wanted to shake Billy and tell him to stop drinking so much, get over his youthful romance, and see if living for today, with the life he has made for himself, might actually be more rewarding than pining away for someone long gone, and trying to drink yourself into an early grave. I wish I had enjoyed this book more than I did. Has anyone else read this book? Agree or disagree with me on my summation? I'd love to hear from someone who loved it, and find out what you got out of it that I missed.

Charming Billy is a National Book Award winner.

Two years ago, I had a letter from Earnest. He was writing to tell me that he was leaving the priesthood, though he had decided to stay with his little school in the high mountains....'I have no place left to live but in my own heart,' he wrote, meaning he would conduct his life as before, but on privately different terms.

And I thought this was the stupidest stuff I had ever heard until, sitting on a stool in the Shelbourne bar, I wondered what might happen if I just carried on as usual, told no one, changed nothing, and decided not to be married after all.

And I wondered how many people around me are living with and sleeping with and laughing with their spouses on just this basis, and I wondered how sad they were. Not very, by the looks of it. Not sad at all.

The Gathering, by Anne Enright, is the story of Veronica, and her coming to terms with the suicide of her favorite brother, Liam. It is her unenviable task to travel from Ireland to England to recover his body, and bring it home for the funeral.

Veronica is falling apart following her brother's death. In addition to her grief, she harbors a secret, or at least, she thinks she does. She is hazy on her memory of an incident during their childhood, and fears that perhaps it may have been the first step toward Liam's eventual death. Her struggle with this memory, with trying to remember what did and what did not happen, and to whom, unravels her happiness and further strains her marriage. You get the feeling that she has never been a joyous person, she is too cold and critical for that, but she did have love and happiness, which are currently overwhelmed by her sadness and her memories. She is a woman in the process of falling apart.

Veronica tells the story of her family, going back to the day her grandparents first met, coming forward to her mother's passive life, and then to that of her many brothers and sisters. She harbors both love and disdain for her mother, whose 17 pregnancies, resulting in 12 children and 5 painful miscarriages, Veronica sees as proof of her mother being unwilling to refuse her father's carnal desires. That her mother might have shared these desires never seems to cross her mind.

Already a cold person, Veronica shuts down emotionally in the period following her brother's death. She resents her husband for wanting sex so soon after the death, resents him trying to prove to her that she is still alive. After that first encounter, she refuses to come to bed any more, instead staying awake all night, every night, drinking wine and waiting for him to get up for work before she herself collapses into bed.

The title of the book, The Gathering, made me think this was going to be the story of a family coming together, and of the joys and recriminations that might come to light at such a gathering. But at least 3/4 of the book is told in her meandering way, as she travels through memories and stories, while on the way to and from England on her sad task. Only at the end do we meet her siblings, and find ourselves at a surprisingly muted event.

If I were to read this review up until this point, I would think that The Gathering isn't really worth reading, and that Veronica is a character that I would not like. But Enright's writing is so beautiful, and she is able to bring you into Veronica's mind so well that you feel sympathy for her, for what she's been through, for her upbringing. You hope for her to find peace with her family again, and joy within her marriage. The end is too ambiguous for that, and I walked away feeling someone dissatisfied.

I have seen The Gathering compared to The Dubliners, by James Joyce. One big difference is that The Gathering is a novel, while The Dubliners is a book of short stories. I've only read the most famous story in that book, The Dead, which is a story that touched me very deeply. The Gathering is similar in its prose and imagery, and in that the book seems to meander along until finally you get to the end, and it turns out that the end is what you were waiting for all along. In The Dead, however, that end is a beautiful respite, and a glimpse into love that is not jealous or unkind, despite the jealousy and unkind thoughts that were there moments before...a love that transcends this mortal world, however mortal the players. The Gathering offers no such great reward.

I would recommend this book to people who love beautiful, evocative writing. Enright is a gifted writer in this aspect. I would not recommend this book for anyone seeking an easy, quick read, as the twists and turns and dark subject matter make this a somewhat difficult read.

Maud shivered, as she always shivered, on reading this document. What had Christabel thought, when she read it? Where had Christabel been, and why had she gone, and where had Randolph Ash been, between July 1859 and the summer of 1860? There was no record, Roland said, of Ash not being at home. He had published nothing during 1860 and had written few letters - those there were, were dated from Bloomsbury, as usual. LaMotte scholars had never found any satisfactory explanation for Christabel's apparent absence at the time of Blanche's death, and had worked on the supposition of a quarrel between the two women. This quarrel now looked quite different, Maude thought, without becoming clearer.

I finally finished reading Possession: A Romance, by A.S. Byatt. I'm sorry to say that I never felt truly drawn into the story. It reminded me of something my mom once said when I was working on my Masters Degree in Comparative Literature. She said, "I'm not a huge fan of 'capital L Literature'. What I want to read is a good story." Not that the two are mutually exclusive, and I would argue that the best of 'capital L Literature' is great because of the story, not because of the genius of the author. Reading Possession, I never got sucked in, I was always waiting for the story to have some passion, some caring for the characters, some real drama. I found it had tenderness toward its characters, and there is real skill in the way that Byatt interweaves diaries, letters, and narrative to tell her story. But again, I couldn't make myself care about any of it.

The book starts with a young, frustrated academic, Roland Michell, doing some research on his subject, (fictional) Victorian poet Randolph Ash. He comes across some unfinished letters in Ash's handwriting, tucked amongst the pages of a book in the library. Impulsively, he tucks the letters into his wallet, rather than alerting the librarian of their existence, or at least tucking them back where they belong. The letters appear to be to a woman that Ash has just met, and feels a connection to. He wants to see more of her. But who is she? Scholarship on Ash is that he was a faithful husband, happily married to the same woman for over 40 years. Roland asks around, and ends up entering into a partnership with Maud Bailey, a scholar who studies the life and works of a contemporary of Ash, Christabel LaMotte, the woman for whom Ash's letter was meant.

Roland and Maud go on a search for the truth, which they are hiding from their contemporaries in LaMotte and Ash studies, hoping to be the ones to break the story to the academic world, which would be a huge feather in their caps, and a great help in their careers as well. The rest of the book travels between their story and that of LaMotte and Ash, which is told mainly through their letters to one another, through their respective poems, and through diaries written by Ash's wife and LaMotte's cousin. It's intriguing enough, with plenty of twists and turns and surprises to keep the reader interested. Unfortunately, for me, Byatt kept her characters at an emotional distance, so while I was slightly interested in finding out what had happened between these Victorian poets 150 years ago, I sort of resented the amount of time and effort that I had to put into the discovery.

Because I read mainly novels, the identity and experience of the author is usually immaterial to me. Of course, who they are and where they are from shape their words and the stories they tell, but seldom do I pay attention to these things. My belief is that the authors would want it to be so - that they would wish for their stories and characters to stand on their own, and to be authentic without our knowing anything about the artist who brought them to life.

Sometimes, however, this isn't possible. Having looked at the copyright of The Grapes of Wrath, for example, I know going in that John Steinbeck is writing in the here and now. He is writing a story about events that are going on around him, and he doesn't yet know what the future holds for the Joads, or for anyone else entrenched in the Depression.

I remember feeling this way when I read The Diary of Anne Frank. That I knew her tragic fate going in, but when she put her words, her hopes and dreams, to paper, she still clung to the hope of a future ahead, outside of the Secret Annex.

Which brings me to Suite Française, a novel divided into two parts, by Irene Némirovsky. The knowledge that while she was writing these words, the war was raging around her, and she did not know whether she would live or die, permeates and perfumes every page of this novel. That she intended it to be a novel in five parts, but died in Auschwitz with only two parts complete, makes it even more poignant.

The first part of the book, Storm in June, tells the stories of several families and individuals fleeing Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion. The stories told are from very different points of view, from the wealthy woman trying to keep her family heirlooms together, along with her ailing father-in-law, her children, and her servants, to the married couple who work at a bank, and fear mainly for their son, who is a prisoner of war, but also for their jobs, their security, and their lives. There is a priest, trying to transport a group of teen-agers from what can only be described as a correctional facility, to safety, while deep in his heart, he wishes to be far away from them, as he sees no evidence of God within them. There is the aesthete, proud of his figurine collection, and of the good luck (and smarts!) that conspired to leave him single and childless at a time when so much worry would be wasted on caring about another human being.

Some of his friends had gone, but he was neither Jewish nor a Mason, thank God, he thought with a scornful smile. He had never been involved in politics and didn't see why he wouldn't be left alone, a poor man like him, very quiet, very harmless, who never hurt anybody and who loved nothing in this world but his porcelain collection. He thought, on a more serious note, that this was the secret of his happiness amid so much upheaval. He loved nothing, at least nothing that time could distort, that death could carry away; he'd been right not to have married, not to have had children...My God, everyone else had been taken in. He'd been the only clever one.

The second story is Dolce, and takes place two years later, in a small village during the occupation. The families of the village are required to take soldiers into their homes, to live with them and adjust to their presence. The glimpse of both sides of this situation, and of a young (married) French woman who falls in love with a young (married) German soldier who comes to live with her, and the events that ultimately pull them apart, are gripping.

"He asked my permission to go into the garden to pick some strawberries. I couldn't exactly refuse. You're forgetting he's in charge here now, unfortunately...He's being polite, but he could take whatever he wants, go wherever he pleases and even throw us out into the street. He wears kid gloves to claim his rights as a conqueror. I can't hold that against him. I think he's right. We're not on a battlefield. We can keep all our feelings deep inside. Superficially at least, why not be polite and considerate? Ther'e something inhuman about our situation. Why make it worse? It isn't...it isn't reasonable, Mother." Lucile spoke so passionately that she surprised even herself.

These are unfinished stories, not polished or edited as Ms. Némirovsky would surely have wanted them to be. She had long term plans for some of these characters, as evidenced in her notes, included in an appendix at the back of the book. Some of them were to spill over into the remaining three stories. One was to be titled Captivity, and it sounds like it would have been the story of characters in a concentration camp. For the final two stories, she was waiting to see what would happen, wanted them to be based upon real events, and to have them talk to readers well into the future. I only wish she had been able to finish her book.

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (author of The Virgin Suicides), is first and foremost the story of Calliope, a young Greek girl growing up in the suburbs of Michigan, and how at puberty, she becomes Cal, a young Greek boy.

The story spans three generations, starting with Desdemona and Lefty, a brother and sister fleeing Greece during the war with Turkey in 1922. Unfortunately, Desdemona and Lefty are in love with each other, and the anonymity of fleeing their homeland for America gives them the opportunity to start over, as husband and wife. Their story is a sad one, because as Desdemona discovers the dangers of birth defects involved if they have children, she becomes a distant and frustrated wife.

Their son, Milton, is a successful entrepreneur who marries his second cousin, Tessie, sealing Calliope's fate. Calliope is born with a birth defect, 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphordites, which means that though she appears to be a girl, she has both girl parts and boy parts, though the boy parts are more difficult to see if you're not looking. It takes a bit of a stretch of the imagination to believe that her doctor wouldn't notice, that her mother wouldn't notice while changing her diaper, but since the story isn't graphic in its detail of the physical abnormality, you can give them a pass. Genetically, though, he's a boy, with XY chromosomes and a desire for women.

The story travels back and forth across time, as the narrator, 41 year old Cal, tells the story from the beginning, from his grandparents' love affair and sad marriage, to the success of his father's hot dog franchise and the race riots of 1967 Detroit, and on to Cal's own coming of age, his fear of not knowing exactly what was wrong with him, but trying desperately to hide the fact that clearly, something was.

Did I love this book? No. I thought it could have been about 150 pages shorter (it weighed in at 529 pages). Some of the details went on too long for me, and I found myself a little bit bored. It took me quite awhile to read this book, though the second half sucked me in, and I read the last 300 pages in just the last few days. I'm not sure I can recommend this book...like I said, it just didn't suck me in enough. But anyone interested in trans-gender issues, or in the experience of three generations of a recent immigrant family, might enjoy the book more than I did.

In addition to this wonderful challenge, I also joined the Graphic Novels Reading Challenge. I didn't officially read this book for that challenge, or for this one, but I've been sucked in enough by the genre that I decided I would try a few more. From other reviews I've read on the Graphic Novel Challenge's blog, I decided to try American Born Chinese. It is a tale of learning to accept oneself, ignoring the disparaging attitudes of those around us. Although American Born Chinese deals with the slings and arrows of racism, I would argue that the themes of acceptance and self-awareness translate well to all of us, and that anyone who has ever felt self-hatred in the face of society and its harsh criticisms can find something to identify with in this story.

The book is told in three tales. First, the ancient story of The Monkey King, who bears a strong resemblance to my personal favorite monkey, Mojo Jojo (minus the huge brain, of course). The monkey king works very hard to gain all of the attributes necessary to become a god, and attend the parties of the other gods. But he is turned away and humiliated, because underneath it all, he is fundamentally a monkey.

The second story is that of Jin Wang, an American Born Chinese boy growing up in the suburbs, attempting to distance himself from his Asian roots. He falls in love with a white girl, and wishes to be part of the popular Caucasian clique in school.

The third story is about Danny and his cousin Chin-Kee. Danny is blonde haired, blue eyed, and for some unknown reason has a Chinese cousin who comes to visit him once a year, humiliating him and making his life miserable by his hyper-stereotypical behavior, until Danny has to change schools, over and over again.

The three stories come together in an unsuspected way, and the lessons learned are lessons that are pretty much universal to the human condition.

American Born Chinese won the 2007 Michael L. Printz award.

I'm writing this review a bit differently than I have in the past, in that I'm not quite half-way through the book, and I've got a lot of thoughts swimming around in my head that I want to get out and on 'paper', so I can just get back to the book without them clouding my brain. They're not big, important, deep thoughts. Just thoughts.

First, this book makes me want to smoke. It just seems like the kind of book that a person should read in a big chair or something, smoking a cigarette ala' Out of Africa, sort of to show how serious I am while reading it. Not in a way that is connected in any way whatsoever to smoking in real life.

Next, and most importantly at this point, I'm having a heck of a time getting into this novel. Thus far, the tale is told mainly in the voice of a young girl, 11-year old Briony, who witnesses several incidents one scorching hot day in 1935. She witnesses a scene between her 21-year old sister (Cecilia) and their neighbor (Robbie), who is about the same age, which she completely misunderstands. He sends a note through Briony, apologizing to Cecilia for the scene, which Briony reads and finds repugnant and somewhat threatening. Lastly, she happens upon a violent crime, her 13-year old cousin being raped by a man, in the dark, whom Briony identifies as Robbie. OK, this is bugging me, because it so clearly wasn't Robbie committing the crime, and there are clues leading in that give that fact away. It bugs me that Briony ignores these clues, as does everyone around her. Her insistence that she knows beyond any doubt that Robbie committed the crime is frustrating.

That's all for now, I'll write more when I finish the book.
------------------------------------------------------------

OK, I finished the book, and I'm happy to say that I enjoyed the second half much more than the first. Of course, the repercussions of Briony's insistence of Robbie's guilt are immediate and dire. That he is so quickly shut out of the family, and that obvious clues are ignored speaks to the fact that he is lower class, the son of a servant, whereas the girl, and the actual rapist, are both upper class, and therefore the blame easily goes to the poor man, rather than the rich one.

As early as the week that followed, the glazed surface of conviction was not without its blemishes and hairline cracks. Whenever she was conscious of them, which was not often, she was driven back, with a little swooping sensation in her stomach, to the understanding that what she knew was not literally, or not only, based on the visible. It was not simply her eyes that told her the truth. It was too dark for that. Even Lola's face at eighteen inches was an empty oval, and this figure was many feet away, and turned from her as it moved back around the clearing. But nor was this figure invisible, and its size and manner of moving were familiar to her. Her eyes confirmed the sum of all she knew adn had recently experienced. The truth was in the symmetry, which was to say, it was founded in common sense. The truth instructed her eyes. So when she said, over and over again, I saw him, she meant it, and was perfectly honest, as well as passionate. What she meant was rather more complex than what everyone else so eagerly understood, and her moments of unease came when she felt that she could not explain these nuances. She did not even seriously try. There were no opportunities, no time, no permission. Within a couple of days, no, within a matter of hours, a process was moving fast and well beyond her control.

The second segment in the book is told from Robbie's point of view. A few years have gone by, and he is in France, retreating from the German army, from Dunkirk to the ocean, where they await a squadron to remove them from France. This segment was the most compelling to me. Robbie's internal world is much less convoluted than Briony's, his motives much more straightforward. His shame at leaving is palpable, as is his desire to get home in one piece to Cecilia. The nuance of his desire to get home, his confusion over his feelings, and his understanding that war removes the labls of guilty and innocent, are very moving.

Through the material of his coat he felt for the bundle of her letters. I'll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn't touch him now. It was clear enough - one person waiting for another like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word. He felt it pressing down, heavy as a greatcoat. Everyone in the cellar was waiting, everyone on the beach. She was waiting, yes, but then what? He tried to make her voice say the words, but it was his own he heard, just below the tread of his heart. He could not even form her face.

..what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there weren't enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts. The witnesses were guilty too. All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die? Down here in the cellar we'll keep quiet about it.

The third segment of the book is mainly Briony's point of view again. It is 1940, and she is working as a nurse in a military hospital in London. She has been changed in ways she could not have imagined, both by the war, and by the outfall of her accusation of Robbie in the rape of her cousin. She has grown up a lot, and is faced with the task of seeking Robbie and Cecilia's forgiveness. She is looking for atonement for her insistance at that earlier time, when she now knows the truth of what happened that day, even more than Cecilia and Robbie do.

I very much liked the book, at least the second half. The writing was beautiful, and painted a picture that was at the same time bleak and lush. Not an easy feat.

I finally finished The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai. I was so looking forward to reading this book, as I had heard nothing but good things about it. I even asked a woman on BART if she were enjoying, as she was reading it while on the way into the city, and she said that she was engrossed, and couldn't pull herself away. I started this book almost a month ago, and I'm sad to say that I had a really difficult time getting into it. It's sad, because the book is beautifully written. It's the congruent story of a retired judge in Northern India, his granddaughter, his cook, and the cook's son, who has left to find his fortune in New York. All of this during the Kalimpong uprising in the mid 1980s. From Widipedia, about Kalimpong, which gives a bit of background to the story:

Kalimpong is a hill town nestled in the Shiwalik Hills (or Lower Himalaya) in the Indian state of West Bengal.

Between 1986 and 1988, the demand for a separate state of Gorkhaland and Kamtapur based on ethnic lines grew strong. Riots between the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), led by C K Pradhan, and the West Bengal government reached a standoff after a forty-day strike. The town was virtually under a siege, leading the state government to call in the Indian army to maintain law and order. This led to the formation of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, a body that was given semi-autonomous powers to govern the district. Though Kalimpong is now peaceful, the issue of a separate state still lingers. In July 2004, the generally tranquil town was catapulted into national and international headlines after Maninder Pal Singh Kohli, a murderer wanted by Scotland Yard, was traced and found to be residing in Kalimpong.

The Inheritance of Loss shifts between the third world of this town and its surrounding area and the first world of New York, where Biju, the son of the cook, has illegally immigrated to try for a better life. But there he finds mostly humiliation, hard work, and very little pay. The book concentrates on the pain of exile and the arrows still slung and festering from the colonialist era.

He could not talk to his father; there was nothing left between them but emergency sentences, clipped telegram lines shouted out as if in the midst of a war. They were no longer relevant to each other's lives except for the hope that they would be relevant. He stood with his head still in the phone booth studded with bits of stiff chewing gum and the usual FuckShitCockDickPussyLoveWar, swastikas, and hearts shot with arrows mingling in a dense graffiti garden, too sugary too angry too perverse-the sick sweet rotting mulch of the human heart.

If he continued his life in New York, he might never see his pitaji again. It happened all the time; ten years passed, fifteen, the telegram arrived, or the phone call, the parent was gone and the child was too late. Or they returned and found they'd missed the entire last quarter of a lifetime, their parents like photograph negatives. And there were worse tragedies. After the initial excitement was over, it often became obvious that the love was gone; for affection was only a habit after all, and people, they forget, or they become accustomed to its absence. They returned and found just the facade; it had been eaten from inside, like Cho Oyu being gouged by termites from within.

So, why couldn't I get sucked into this story? Why was it that the TV, the internet, cooking, and even cleaning pulled me away from the story? I'm not sure. I found much of the writing to be hauntingly beautiful, but the story ultimately unsatisfying. When I finished it the other night, I'm sorry to say that I was relieved, and ready to move on to my next book.

The Inheritance of Loss won the Man Booker Prize in 2006.

Because I read mainly novels, the identity and experience of the author is usually immaterial to me. Of course, who they are and where they are from shape their words and the stories they tell, but seldom do I pay attention to these things. My belief is that the authors would want it to be so - that they would wish for their stories and characters to stand on their own, and to be authentic without our knowing anything about the artist who brought them to life.

Sometimes, however, this isn't possible. Having looked at the copyright of The Grapes of Wrath, for example, I know going in that John Steinbeck is writing in the here and now. He is writing a story about events that are going on around him, and he doesn't yet know what the future holds for the Joads, or for anyone else entrenched in the Depression.

I remember feeling this way when I read The Diary of Anne Frank. That I knew her tragic fate going in, but when she put her words, her hopes and dreams, to paper, she still clung to the hope of a future ahead, outside of the Secret Annex.

Which brings me to Suite Française, a novel divided into two parts, by Irene Némirovsky. The knowledge that while she was writing these words, the war was raging around her, and she did not know whether she would live or die, permeates and perfumes every page of this novel. That she intended it to be a novel in five parts, but died in Auschwitz with only two parts complete, makes it even more poignant.

The first part of the book, Storm in June, tells the stories of several families and individuals fleeing Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion. The stories told are from very different points of view, from the wealthy woman trying to keep her family heirlooms together, along with her ailing father-in-law, her children, and her servants, to the married couple who work at a bank, and fear mainly for their son, who is a prisoner of war, but also for their jobs, their security, and their lives. There is a priest, trying to transport a group of teen-agers from what can only be described as a correctional facility, to safety, while deep in his heart, he wishes to be far away from them, as he sees no evidence of God within them. There is the aesthete, proud of his figuring collection, and of the good luck (and smarts!) that conspired to leave him single and childless at a time when so much worry would be wasted on caring about another human being.

Some of his friends had gone, but he was neither Jewish nor a Mason, thank God, he thought with a scornful smile. He had never been involved in politics and didn't see why he wouldn't be left alone, a poor man like him, very quiet, very harmless, who never hurt anybody and who loved nothing in this world but his porcelain collection. He thought, on a more serious note, that this was the secret of his happiness amid so much upheaval. He loved nothing, at least nothing that time could distort, that death could carry away; he'd been right not to have married, not to have had children...My God, everyone else had been taken in. He'd been the only clever one.

The second story is Dolce, and takes place two years later, in a small village during the occupation. The families of the village are required to take soldiers into their homes, to live with them and adjust to their presence. The glimpse of both sides of this situation, and of a young (married) French woman who falls in love with a young (married) German soldier who comes to live with her, and the events that ultimately pull them apart, are gripping.

"He asked my permission to go into the garden to pick some strawberries. I couldn't exactly refuse. You're forgetting he's in charge here now, unfortunately...He's being polite, but he could take whatever he wants, go wherever he pleases and even throw us out into the street. He wears kid gloves to claim his rights as a conqueror. I can't hold that against him. I think he's right. We're not on a battlefield. We can keep all our feelings deep inside. Superficially at least, why not be polite and considerate? Ther'e something inhuman about our situation. Why make it worse? It isn't...it isn't reasonable, Mother." Lucile spoke so passionately that she surprised even herself.

These are unfinished stories, not polished or edited as Ms. Némirovsky would surely have wanted them to be. She had long term plans for some of these characters, as evidenced in her notes, included in an appendix at the back of the book. Some of them were to spill over into the remaining three stories. One was to be titled Captivity, and it sounds like it would have been the story of characters in a concentration camp. For the final two stories, she was waiting to see what would happen, wanted them to be based upon real events, and to have them talk to readers well into the future. I only wish she had been able to finish her book.
~ I'm not sure if this book is eligible or not, as the Prix Renadout isn't listed, but I've seen a few other folks cover it, so I thought I would as well.

I loved this book. Again, it was a quick read, which I seem to be getting a lot of lately, so I polished it off in 2 sittings.
The first thing I noticed when I started this book was that the first chapter appeared to be chapter 2. Hmmm. Did I get a bum copy? Doesn't look like a bum copy. The next chapter is 3, then 5, then 7. Oh, OK, prime numbers. Christopher Boone is writing a murder mystery, and he is an autistic savant living in Swindon, England, and loves 'maths'. He finds great comfort in numbers and the way they work...it helps him to cope with the rest of the world, which he definitely doesn't understand. He doesn't understand emotions, or people's emotions and facial expressions. He likes maths and science and animals. The book starts with Christopher discovering the still-warm body of a neighbor's dog on her lawn, speared by a garden fork. Christopher liked the dog, and resolves to find out who the killer is, and to write a book detailing his quest. So he does what any good detective would do...he starts asking questions. His questions lead him on a journey where he discovers not only who killed the dog, but also some secrets that throw his world into a spiral that ends with him stretching amazingly outside of his comfort zone.

What I liked best about the book, I think, was Christopher's 'voice'. I liked how he detailed the rules that help him get through life, the rules that can help him to ground himself and make him feel safe when the world is somewhat out of control.

Mr. Jeavons, the psychologist at the school, once asked me why 4 red cars in a row made it a Good Day, and 3 red cars in a row made it a Quite Good Day, and 5 red cars in a row made it a Super Good Day, and why 4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I don't speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don't eat my lunch and Take No Risks. He said that I was clearly a very logical person, so he was surprised that I should think like this because it wasn't very logical.

I said that I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order. And that was why I had Good Days and Black Days. And I said that some people who worked in an office came out of their house in the morning and saw that the sun was shining and it make them feel happy, or they saw that it was raining and it made them feel sad, but the only difference was the weather and if they worked in an office the weather didn't have anything to do with whether they had a good day or a bad day.

About 1/3 of the way into the book, Christopher makes a discovery that throws him for a huge loop, and from that point on, I couldn't put the book down. I had to know what was going to happen, where the book was going with this, was he going to be able to cope with the new reality in which he found himself, seeing as how 4 yellow cars in a row could make him stop eating and communicating, and he was unable to stand being touched by anyone, even family.

I liked this book a lot, and I would highly recommend it to anyone. I am looking forward to future novels from this author. This book was Mark Haddon's debut novel (though he's written childrens books before), and what a debut...it won the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year, and the 2004 Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book. I read it for the Book Awards Reading Challenge.

~In an odd moment of synchronicity, Christopher likes to watch his Blue Planet video...and, the same day I read about him watching Blue Planet, and he described which episode he was watching, Maya was watching TV, and started watching that very same episode. She rarely watches Blue Planet, doesn't have the DVD or anything, so it was indeed coincidence. She was excited, because it was talking about underwater mountains and volcanoes that she has studied in her Earth Science class, and I was excited because Christopher had talked about these same mountains and volcanoes in my book. Groovy, huh?

I loved this book. It was a quick read, which I seem to be getting a lot of lately, so I polished it off in 2 sittings.

The first thing I noticed when I started this book was that the first chapter appeared to be chapter 2. Hmmm. Did I get a bum copy? Doesn't look like a bum copy. The next chapter is 3, then 5, then 7. Oh, OK, prime numbers. Christopher Boone is writing a murder mystery, and he is an autistic savant, and loves 'maths'. He finds great comfort in numbers and the way they work...it helps him to cope with the rest of the world, which he definitely doesn't understand. He doesn't understand emotions, or people's emotions and facial expressions. He likes maths and science and animals. The book starts with Christopher discovering the just murdered body of a neighbor's dog on her lawn. Christopher liked the dog, and resolves to find out who the killer is, and to write a book detailing his quest. So he does what any good detective would do...he starts asking questions. His questions lead him on a journey where he discovers not only who killed the dog, but also some secrets that throw his world into a spiral that ends with him stretching amazingly outside of his comfort zone.

What I liked best about the book, I think, was Christopher's 'voice'. I liked how he detailed the rules that help him get through life, the rules that can help him to ground himself and make him feel safe when the world is somewhat out of control.

Mr. Jeavons, the psychologist at the school, once asked me why 4 red cars in a row made it a Good Day, and 3 red cars in a row made it a Quite Good Day, and 5 red cars in a row made it a Super Good Day, and why 4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I don't speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don't eat my lunch and Take No Risks. He said that I was clearly a very logical person, so he was surprised that I should think like this because it wasn't very logical.

I said that I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order. And that was why I had Good Days and Black Days. And I said that some people who worked in an office came out of their house in the morning and saw that the sun was shining and it make them feel happy, or they saw that it was raining and it made them feel sad, but the only difference was the weather and if they worked in an office the weather didn't have anything to do with whether they had a good day or a bad day.

About 1/3 of the way into the book, Christopher makes a discovery that throws him for a huge loop, and from that point on, I couldn't put the book down. I had to know what was going to happen, where the book was going with this, was he going to be able to cope with the new reality in which he found himself, seeing as how 4 yellow cars in a row could make him stop eating and communicating, and he was unable to stand being touched by anyone, even family.

I liked this book a lot, and I would highly recommend it to anyone. I am looking forward to future novels from this author. This book was Mark Haddon's debut novel, and what a debut...it won the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year, and the 2004 Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book.

Number the Stars is the story of Annemarie, a 10 year old Danish Christian girl in 1943. Denmark is occupied by the Nazis, and now they are preparing to deport all of the Jews, including Annemarie's best friend, Ellen, and her family. Annemarie's family works with Ellen's family to spirit them away, and the events occurring around Annemarie do not always make sense. But she wants her friend to be safe, desperately, and is willing to be brave to help.

While the characters in Number the Stars are fictional, the events portrayed are very much real. I had never read anything about the rescue of the Danish Jews before. What an amazing display of collective resistance. The people of Denmark worked together to save the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population, by spiriting them away to neighboring Switzerland.

I read Number the Stars for the Book Awards Reading Challenge, as it received the 1990 Newbery Medal. Number the Stars is a Children's Book, and reads like one, but it is among the best in the genre. However, sometimes truth can be even more poignant than fiction. Lois Lowry includes an afterword to the book, discussing the facts and details of the rescue, and in that afterword she included a quote which spoke to me, much like the words of Anne Frank. These are the words of a young man, Kim Malthe-Bruun, a 21-year old member of the Danish Resistance.

...and I want you all to remember - that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with pleasure feel he is a part of - something he can work and fight for.

That would be a great gift indeed, and one that is needed here and now, more than ever.

If you're familiar with Little Women, the story by Louisa May Alcott, you know it is the tale of a year in the life of the March daughters, Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth, and their mother, Marmee, and their growth and changes while their father is away at war. Mr. March is an abolitionist preacher who has gone along with the Union army in the Civil War, hoping to provide spiritual solace to the troops, and to 'walk the walk' that he has been talking for so long, about the sacrifices required to defeat the scourge of slavery. (And no, he would never say something so modern as 'walk the walk'...that was mine.) His story is told partially in the form of letters home to Marmee and the girls, partially in his remembrances of his past, and partially in his telling of his current trip with the troops. He talks of his journey into the South when he was a young man of 18, how he was seduced for a short while by the beauty and gentile life led by the plantation owners there, and how he was disabused of his perceptions of their gentility. He came back North a more fervent abolitionist, and became a preacher. He tells of his meeting and the short courtship of his wife, Marmee, a much more fervent abolitionist than he. He tells of his dealings with John Brown, and what those dealings cost him. It is an intriguing story.

Toward the end of the story, he is layed low by fever, and Marmee is called to help him, just as happens in Little Women. At this point, the story changes to Marmee's perspective for a few chapters, and we see that some of the assumptions that Mr. March has made, assumptions with repercussions deep and final, and based on his beliefs of what Marmee wanted and admired in a husband, were indeed false assumptions.

The part of the story that is told in the present tense, of his trip with the troops, and his time spent on a plantation that is being run by a northerner, with slaves who have been freed and are for the first time hoping to by paid for their labor, is heartbreaking and wonderful at the same time.

Brooks did extensive research on the period and on the Alcott family. The part of Mr. March is based upon Alcott's father, a transcendentalist who kept company with the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom play parts in March.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, both for the writing, and for the glimpse of the abolitionist movement it gave. It was also nice to return, briefly, to the world of Little Women. Actually, when I returned March to the library yesterday, I checked out Little Women, in the hopes that my daughter will enjoy it as much as I did.

What if you were a 15 year old white boy in Texas with some sort of irritable bowl condition, and your best friend were a gay Mexican boy who couldn't take the cruel teasing of his classmates, and shot and killed 16 people at high school, including himself?

What if, because Jesus (your best friend) is dead and also a murderer, and the townspeople want answers, and blood, you suddenly find yourself in jail, not yet accused of a crime, but coming close?

What if you befriended a CNN reporter, the only semi-decent reporter in town, only to have him betray you, sleep with your mother, and then you find out that he's actually a Machiavellian opportunist who would sell his own blind mother down the river for an opportunity to make it in media, and that in actuality, he's a TV repairman with delusions of grandeur?

What if you had secrets you were trying to cover up, and evidence was starting to point to your guilt, and you wanted some time for the truth to simmer and bubble and somehow find its way to the surface?

Well, if you were Vernon Little, you'd get the heck out of dodge for awhile. And since Vernon saw the 80's film, Against All Odds, he wants to live in a hut in Mexico with his fantasy girl, Taylor. So begins the adventure in this book, and a character compared mostly with Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield. I'm not sure I loved this book, but it definitely held my interest, and I read the second half of it in one sitting. And I must admit, the over the top blood thirst of the media in this book is begging for a film adaptation.

Vernon God Little won the 2003 Man Booker Prize, and I read it for my Book Awards Challenge.

Waiting is the story of a man, Lin, who lives in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. He is a doctor in a military hospital, and is satisfied with his life there. His aging parents live in a remote village, and want to arrange a marriage for Lin, so that the wife will care for them in their illness and old age. Lin agrees, and so he is married to Shuyu, a devoted and old fashioned woman who cares very well for Lin's parents, and gives him a daughter, Min. Lin does not love Shuyu, and never has, but he is grateful to her for all that she has done for him and for his family. He is too ashamed of her to bring her to the city where he lives for most of the year, however, because she is so old fashioned and has bound feet. So Shuyu and Min continue to live in the countryside, even after the death of Lin's parents, and they are content there.

Lin finds himself falling in love with a modern woman who works with him at the hospital, Manna. Manna wants Lin to divorce Shuyu, so that he can marry her. Every summer, Lin goes home to request a divorce, and sometimes Shuyu says yes, and sometimes she says no, but when the time comes to go before the judge, she can never go through with it, so they stay married. The law says that Lin can divorce Shuyu after they have been separated (have not slept together) for 18 years, without her consent. So begins the waiting...Lin and Manna are waiting to be together, and they decide not to consummate their relationship until they are husband and wife.

This book showed some of the sad practicality that can determine a person's life. Lin would never have chosen Shuyu as a wife, had he had a choice...but he didn't have a choice. He needed someone to care for his parents. Manna has times when she is more than willing to give up on Lin, because she realizes it is going to be a long, hard journey, and might fall apart before the 18 years is up. But her other opportunities to marry are few and far between, and her reputation is pretty much destroyed by her relationship with Lin, even though they are celibate.

Shuyu, the dedicated, loyal wife, is the only one with any choice in the story...she may not have chosen to spend her best years caring for her husband's aging parents, but she loves them and sees it as her duty, and does not resent the obligation. She chooses to stay married to Lin as long as possible, even knowing that he does not want to be married to her anymore. She is the character in the story with whom I was most sympathetic, even though she didn't get a lot of time dedicated to her story.

Lin mostly irritated me. He couldn't be loyal to his wife, and yet I was never sure he was truly passionate about Minna, and just sort of went along with her idea of how things should go. He did have the decency to realize that by being her 'boyfriend' he had destroyed her opportunities elsewhere, but he wasn't aware enough ahead of time to make it easier for her.

From a western point of view, we might be willing to give Lin the benefit of the doubt...why should he stay in a loveless marriage, when he has a chance to be happy elsewhere? He is willing to continue supporting his wife and (now grown) daughter, so they will not be affected much by a divorce. But I didn't see that divorcing her made him any happier. He just went from one set of obligations to another. When faced with this realization, a voice inside of Lin tells him:

Let me tell you what really happened, the voice said. All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by others' opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace.

Overall, the book was well written, but I found it dissatisfying. The end promised no resolution to the issues at hand, and no happiness for Lin, which was frustrating. Not that he was miserable...just more of the same, sleepwalking through life.

I read this book for the Book Awards Reading Challenge. It won the PEN/Faulkner award, in 2000.

Last week, while banished from my house so that painter men could change our walls from a boring white to an inviting brown, I was thankful to live in beautiful California, and that our townhouse has a pool just outside the front door. So, I sat beside the pool and finished the next book in my Book Awards Reading Challenge, Runaway, by Alice Munro. This book won the Giller Prize, which is an award given for outstanding works of Canadian fiction.

If you're unaware of Alice Munro's work, it is almost exclusively comprised of short stories, and Runaway is no exception. There are 8 short stories in this volume, all of them about Canadian women. With so many short stories, I feel as though I am getting a glimpse of a story...like the author didn't have enough of an idea to write a novel, so they decided to keep it brief instead. With Munro's stories, however, I feel like she is giving me an entire story in a very brief period of time. There are no wasted words in the genre, and I get the feeling that Munro doesn't like to waste words.

I liked all of the stories in the book, though perhaps my favorites might be the trilogy focused on a character named Juliet. The first story in the series, Chance tells of Juliet's chance meeting with a man on a train, a meeting which changes her life forever. The second story, Soon, takes place a few years after Chance, and is about a visit that Juliet and her infant daughter, Penelope, make to her parents. The third, and saddest story in the group, Silence, tells of Juliet and Penelope's estrangement...you only see the story from Juliet's side, you don't get to find out exactly why it is that Penelope has decided to distance herself so completely from her mother.

Fans of An Affair to Remember will appreciate Tricks, the story of a young woman who escapes the obligations of her daily life, caring for her sister, who is ill, by attending a Shakespeare Festival in a neighboring village once a year.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Every story is full of well-developed, complicated characters. The motivations and actions of the characters are so rich and odd, you can't help but want to come back for more.

It was a fine day by the pool, I must say.