Category Archives: Books

Christmas is almost here, so Merry Christmas everyone! We finally made it to California to spend the holiday with my folks after our usual three hour flight turned into 24 hours of travel. We were stuck in airports awaiting the passing of a snowstorm in Salt Lake City. Holy Moly, I thought we’d never make it. But thanks to the pilot and crew who landed us at LAX at 3:15 a.m. and to a fast cab driver who hurried us into the remaining night. Thanks as well to Will Schwalbe’s engaging book “The End of Your Life Book Club,” which held my interest during a very trying long day.

Now that I’m here, I have a cold and will likely spend the rest of the week coughing and gulping down cold medicine. But man it’s great to be here. I’m undeterred and grateful at this time of year, just a little weary from this head-cold-fever-bug thing. Perhaps eggnog will lessen the effects.

Meanwhile, this week I finished the enjoyable 2012 novel “The Light Between Oceans” by M.L. Stedman. It takes place in the 1920s at an isolated lighthouse on Janus Rock, an island off the coast of Western Australia.There, the lighthouse keeper (Tom) and his young wife (Isabel) come to find a baby that washes up in a rowboat with a body. But instead of reporting it, they decide to raise the child as their own, which ends up having tough consequences down the line for everyone involved.

The book, you could say, is a morality play about a couple that makes a choice that is ethically wrong but they do it for sympathetic reasons, namely that they are unable to have children and they believe the baby’s parents are deceased. They so want a baby, too! The wife believes the baby is a gift from God. Both have suffered so much — the husband through WWI and the wife through three miscarriages. You truly feel for them, but you feel queasy at the same time. And the more you read “The Light Between Oceans,” the queasier things get.

The heart-rending novel is cleverly done, and the descriptions of living at the isolated lighthouse and the characters are vividly portrayed. Who can resist a good lighthouse story? (Not I). It was hard to believe that this is M.L. Stedman’s first novel; it’s very well imagined and constructed. You don’t know for a long while how things will play out. I was quite consumed by “The Light Between Oceans” and will look for what the author writes next. My only criticism perhaps is that the ending got a wee bit crazy with the drama and went on a bit too much. But still I throughly enjoyed the novel, especially the lighthouse parts and living on Janus Rock. It very slightly reminded me of Stephen King’s “The Shining” and what happens when a troubled person goes to a very isolated place for too long a time. As a reader, you know things will likely not turn out all too well.

What about you — have you read this one? And what did you think of it? What are you reading this Christmas? I hope you enjoy it and have a very merry holiday! Continue reading →

I must say “The Art of Racing in the Rain” took me by surprise. I’m a big animal and dog lover (we have a yellow Lab) but I typically don’t read novels about them. I’m especially leery of novels with animals talking or ones narrated from their point of view. It’s just that the books are often pretty bad — totally unbelievable, or silly, or filled with saccharine. I have a lot of respect for dogs and animals in general so I sort of steer clear of novels that make them seem fake or ridiculous, or in which the animals’ owners are irresponsible as well.

So when a friend dropped “The Art of Racing in the Rain” in my lap with a little dog in a flying costume on the front cover (which is a different cover than the one I pictured here) I sort of thought “no way.” However it was a friend and I couldn’t return the book without trying.

Sure enough it’s narrated by a dog, and yet this one didn’t drive me crazy like a lot of the others have. There’s so much more to it and the story and characters stood on their own, pulling me in along the way. Here’s what it’s about:

Enzo is a Lab, terrier mix who loves his human family that lives in Seattle; he thinks when he dies he’ll be reincarnated as a person. His owner Denny works at a fancy auto shop and is an up-and-coming race car driver, Eve, is his wife, and Zoe, their young daughter. Denny and Enzo love to watch old auto racing videos together, gleaning the wisdom these races can transfer to their lives. Yet when Eve becomes ill and Zoe’s taken in by her grandparents, Enzo must back Denny in the most challenging days of his life.

It’s a heart-jerking story and reaffirms the love a dog has for his family and vice-versa. I liked Denny and could see why Enzo thought so highly of him. By the end, I was taken in by the book hook, line, and sinker. I almost lost it on the last few pages, which rarely ever happens. “The Art of Racing in the Rain” is both humorous and touching. I was impressed by author Garth Stein’s depth and commitment to Enzo and his family, a true canine appreciator no doubt. My preconceived qualms about reading this turned out to be unfounded. It’s a human story as much as it is a dog’s story and one that I’m glad not to have missed.

Another book I finished recently was “Dear Life” by Alice Munro. It’s a collection of 14 short stories my book club chose to read and I was pleasantly surprised it offered quite a bit of discussion at our meeting. For a while I couldn’t get my head into the stories. Whether the characters didn’t really speak to me or my thoughts were focused elsewhere, I blame my own distracted reading rather than the clever writing of Alice Munro, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I had read and liked her previous collection of stories called “Too Much Happiness,” and I did appreciate many stories in this collection as well though I felt perhaps a bit detached. They’re all a bit dark or unsettling in various ways: in “Amundsen” a girl goes to teach at a tuberculosis sanitarium where she enters into a dismal relationship with the head doctor; in “Corrie” a woman believes she’s being blackmailed for an affair with a married man; in “Gravel” a girl feels guilty for the drowning of her sister; and in “In the Sight of the Lake” a woman with Alzheimer’s dreams about when she got lost on her way to the doctor’s.

Women are often getting the bad end of the stick in these stories. At the end, the collection includes four stories that are “autobiographical in feeling,” Munro says. I’m not sure they’re too revealing but they give a slice of life or impressions of what Munro’s upbringing was like in rural Ontario, where her father was a fox farmer and her mother, a school teacher, before she developed Parkinson’s disease.

I plan to read more of Alice Munro’s short story collections in the future. Eventually I’ll work my way backward through her works from most recent to the past and will get to “The View From Castle Rock” (2006) and “Runaway” (2004) in due time. Hopefully I’ll learn some more from reading from the short story master.

What about you — have you read either “Dear Life” or “The Art of Racing in the Rain”? And if so, what did you think of them? Continue reading →

I just finished Suzanne Collins’s young adult, post-apocalyptic novel “Catching Fire,” the second in the trilogy of “The Hunger Games,” and now I’m officially ready for the movie’s release on Nov. 22. Maybe I should do calisthenics to limber up for it or at least to battle the box office lines. You might recall the first movie raked in $152.5 million on its opening weekend in 2012 (I saw it then), and the second movie should surely smoke at the box office as well.

But what about the second novel? I must admit I thought “Catching Fire” matched up equally well to “The Hunger Games.” Of course there’s a lot of lead-up to what eventually takes place in the novel. You have to wait patiently at points to get to the action, but it all comes down in due time. And of course, at the book’s beginning, the author goes to lengths to remind readers of where things left off at the end of the first one. So there’s a bit of positioning with Book 2 but still it’s a compelling read.

You might recall Peeta and Katniss were co-winners of the very griesly 74th Hunger Games; you would have thought this would have given them a break in “Catching Fire,” but unfortunately not. While on the Hunger Games victory tour, they soon learn they’re targets of President Snow’s Capitol that views their victory as defiant and a symbol of rebellion across the twelve districts.

Snow is determined to make them pay, so he changes the rules announcing that the winners of the past Hunger Games have to face off against each other at the next Games, which is a terrible blow to Katniss and Peeta.

Without giving anything away, the final 100 pages of the book finds Katniss and Peeta back in the arena struggling to be the last ones standing. They have allies and enemies and each has pledged to save the other’s life, but odds are both of them can’t survive this time. So what on Earth is going to happen? You’ll have to check it out yourself if you’re one of the few alive who haven’t already.

Compared to the first book, Book 2 plays out more behind the scenes and involves underlying resistance against the autocratic Capitol’s control, whereas Book 1 was more focused on surviving the Hunger Games competition, which plays out longer and more brutally than in Book 2. Yet “Catching Fire” is just about as suspenseful and it ends with quite a humdinger. It’ll be interesting to see if the movie does it justice; the cast looks to be fantastic and I plan to see it opening weekend. When all is said and done, I’m sure there’ll be a dark shadow cast over Panem, which you won’t want to miss. Continue reading →

Jennifer Haigh’s 2011 novel “Faith” turned out to be a good pick for our book club this month as it concerns various issues that made for an interesting discussion: notably those having to do with religion, morality, loyalty, family and the secrecy and silence that often dwell within. It’s about an Irish-American family and what happens when a sibling is accused of a horrendous crime.

The story’s narrator, Sheila McGann, is trying to get to the truth surrounding accusations against her brother (Art), a Catholic priest, who’s been charged with molesting a child. In doing so, she uncovers the history of her family and the roles it played in her brother’s ultimate undoing.

The story takes place outside Boston in 2002 at the height of the priest-pedophile scandals that were rocking the country then. It’s not a topic I ever thought I’d seek to read a novel about, but it’s not a story so wrapped up in Catholicism or the priesthood that those with different or more secular views wouldn’t enjoy it. It happens to be about an Irish-Catholic family but also could be true for so many other kinds of families who keep quiet about unseemly or unredeemable things among themselves.

The story flows along speedily and is suspenseful. You wonder what the sister will find out about her brother, Art, and whether he is guilty, and if not, why someone would make such an accusation. Sheila, the narrator, seems convinced Art’s not guilty and sets out to redeem him until she finds out something about his past that casts some doubt in her mind. Her other brother, Mike, thinks Art is guilty and needs evidence to prove otherwise. He can’t take Art’s innocence on “faith” but goes to dubious lengths to get to the truth. The parents, too, are an interesting mix (the mother a diehard Catholic, the stepfather a non-believer) that lend complexity to the plot — not to mention Art’s accuser who seems to have a lot of issues herself.

I hadn’t read author Jennifer Haigh before, but found her a compelling and natural storyteller. It surprised me taking to such a book about the priesthood scandal. But it’s a story with characters who aren’t just black and white, or good and bad, but are morally more nuanced facing a very difficult situation. The narrator is self-effacing, and it’s interesting how she comes to grips with uncovering what she finds out. I think the narrator’s voice makes it quite a worthwhile journey into discovery.

I’d read Haigh again and have heard her latest book, a short-story collection called “News From Heaven,” is good as well. Let me know if you have read “Faith” and what you thought of it, or other books from this author. Continue reading →

The novel “Serena” received such critical acclaim when it came out in 2008 that I had always wanted to read it. Authors such as Lee Smith called it a “flat-out masterpiece – mythic, terrifying and beautiful.” Anna Quindlen said that it’s “a new classic in the category of love gone terribly wrong.” And Pat Conroy wrote that “Serena” catapults Ron Rash “to the front ranks of the best American novelists.”

Those are some pretty strong statements, which caught my attention, including the fact that it’s being made into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper among others. (The movie’s U.S. release date remains to be determined apparently, but if you’re overseas in Russia it looks to be coming out in time for Halloween — or so says IMDB.com.)

So I finally pounced on the novel “Serena,” but it’s not really meant as a fast read. I had to absorb its Appalachian story and atmosphere slowly like fine wine. It’s set in 1929 at the dawn of the Great Depression, about newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton who are determined to make a timber empire in the North Carolina mountains and wilderness. Their greed and lust for power will lead them to stop at nothing to get their way, including killing or vanquishing all those who fall out of their favor, and standing in the way of governmental plans for a national park. Together they make a formidable duo, inseparable in word and deed, resolute in their intense marriage and plans for an empire.

But the pair starts to unravel when Serena learns she will never be able to bear a child and begins to suspect that George is trying to protect an illegitimate child he fathered before he met her. The ending is a reckoning that’s both hard to believe and not hard to believe — with such nefarious characters. Still, you can’t turn away.

Ron Rash’s writing is exquisitely vivid and visual in its depiction of the mountainous landscape, the timber camp, and the characters that inhabit it. Serena is an anti-hero you wouldn’t want to cross paths with. It’s amazing that Jennifer Lawrence will go from playing Katniss in “The Hunger Games” to the cruelness of Serena in this. But both become very powerful.

I can see why the novel garnered such acclaim. Rash’s writing reminded me a bit of Charles Frazier’s — (“Cold Mountain”) because of its Appalachian landscape — mixed perhaps with a dose of Cormac McCarthy’s because of its darkness and impending violence. I would read Rash again, perhaps I will pick up his more recent novel “The Cove.” He’s definitely an immense talent, an expert on all things Appalachia, who I’ll plan to keep tabs on in the future.

Whenever the movie “Serena” comes out, you’ll need to check the wooded landscape, because according to IMDB a portion of it was filmed in the Czech Republic; so much for Appalachia! Also look for its stars, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, to team up once again (for their third time), in “American Hustle” due out around Christmas. Continue reading →

“The Girl With No Name” is a nonfiction book I saw on display at a local bookstore that I ended up buying and reading. The subtitle caught my eye: “The True Story of a Girl Who Lived With Monkeys” – Come on, I couldn’t walk away from that! I hadn’t heard about it before, but I was curious whether the book, which came out this past spring, was some kind of modern-day Tarzan story, albeit a true one.

It tells the account of a little girl, almost five, who’s abducted from her family’s home in Colombia in the 1950’s and abandoned in the jungle. She learns to survive by copying and living with a troop of monkeys, gradually becoming feral and losing her humanness over the five years she spends with them.

Eventually she’s discovered by two hunters who take her to the Colombian city of Cucuta and sell her to a brothel, where she’s beaten constantly and being groomed for prostitution. She manages to escape but winds up living on the streets for a few years till a crime family enslaves her to work in their house. Finally she gets away from them thanks to a neighbor she befriends who puts her on a path to start her life all over again at age 14.

It’s quite an incredible, harrowing childhood account and reads quite well thanks to the author’s daughter who apparently put her mother’s memories together over several years to make this book, along with the help from British ghostwriter Lynne Barrett-Lee.

I did have trouble believing the author survived alone in the jungle living with monkeys at the age of four. Seemingly there’s no way to verify it. But I read on and got caught up in her many escapes and misfortunate story nonetheless. By the end, the years she recounts in the jungle seem the least of her worries as a kid — as she went to hell and back many times over living among various humans. (No wonder she appreciates the monkeys so much!)

I’m not sure if it totally matters to me if the monkey part is totally true or not; even if the story is peripherally true it seems quite something. The book reads sincere and from what I’ve heard from interviews from the author (Marina Chapman) and her daughter (Vanessa) – the scary things that happened to her in childhood seem quite believable – it’s a glimpse of poverty and hell in South America. Marina Chapman appears real to me and one who’s overcome a lot. She and her daughter don’t seem in it for fame or money, they are donating the profits to charity. The daughter says she wrote the book to find out more about their long-lost relatives, her grandparents.

I credit Marina Chapman for her strength and perseverance to make a life for herself and her daughter for making this pretty unforgettable story of redemption known. Continue reading →

Wow this is a dynamite novel. So well done, so heartfelt, the characters so believable I thought they were real. It was sad to leave them behind at the end. So far I think “Me Before You” is my favorite read of 2013; does that make me a lightweight? I hope not. After all, British author Jojo Moyes is definitely more than a romance writer by now if ever she was categorized as only that.

This was my first Moyes read so I’m definitely behind the curve as I know she’s popular for quite a few other novels. I had heard such great things about her and this book that I had to snap it up. It was a pick for my book club, too, and I was glad it didn’t disappoint.

Most know by now, “Me Before You” is about a 35-year-old former male business executive in England who suffers an accident and becomes confined to a wheelchair as a quadriplegic. Twenty-seven year-old Louisa Clark becomes his caretaker though she has no experience working with disabled people. She’s not wealthy like he is, and they are at odds at the beginning, he is very embittered and she’s quite new to the situation. But after months they finally start to warm to each other and begin to broaden each other’s horizons. About then Louisa secretly finds out Will’s set a six-month deadline to go through with an assisted suicide. So she begins to plan adventures to take him on that hopefully will change his mind. Both meanwhile find themselves falling for the other. Will he go through with the suicide or won’t he? That is the question.

The issues behind the book seem quite topical and well researched by Moyes. You really feel a perspective of what disabled people go through and what they face on a daily basis. Despite the grim subject matter, the novel is quite uplifting and didn’t seem overly sentimental; the character of Louisa is upbeat and endearing, funny at times, and the families of Will and Louisa play interesting supporting roles. Moreover, the love story of these two from different worlds sweeps one away. I felt for both of them, and thought the ending worked okay though others might disagree.

If you read this one, let me know what you think. And if you didnt, check it out! Continue reading →

I’m usually game for science/suspense novels especially having to do with Arctic exploration, paleontology/anthropology or those of another era, including people or creatures stuck in the ice (or even sap for those “Jurassic Park” readers). Yeah let me at those books!

Stephen Kiernan’s debut “The Curiosity,” published last month, came right at a good time for such a summer read. It’s not giving anything away to say it’s about a man swept overboard into the Arctic Ocean in 1906, who’s found frozen deep in the ice by a group of modern-day scientists and is brought back to life to today’s world.

The ramifications of this are huge and the novel interestingly delves into all sorts of issues: how the frozen man views today’s technological advances in contrast to the world he left behind; what his reanimation means for the field of cryonics; and the moral, ethical and religious questions it raises about humanity and bringing back a dead person to life.

The story unfolds through four rotating narrators; there’s the frozen man himself (Jeremiah) who comes back to life and slowly regains his memory of his former life as a judge, husband and father; and Dr. Kate Philo, who’s scientific team made the discovery and comes to know and love her subject albeit a bit too personally; and her boss the egotistical Erastus Carthage who’s after power, glory and money from the discovery; and lastly, Daniel Dixon the slimy journalist who ends up playing a heavy hand in the novel’s crash-down ending.

All in all, I enjoyed the novel, and thought it a good summer yarn, one that raises some interesting dilemmas, and in places was a good page-turner. The author has a good ear for writing dialog and conjuring the transformative story. Just a few problems popped up for me: the middle of the novel seemed to lose steam and lag a bit and I thought it could’ve been edited shorter than its 432 pages. It seems to get a bit redundant in the middle, and two of the narrators (Carthage and Dixon) I looked forward to much less than the two main narrators, Jeremiah and Dr. Philo. Perhaps in this respect their characters were a bit too black-and-white, between being bad guys than good guys.

I also had a few credibility issues here and there with the narrative (beyond the premise), but I guess I could possibly believe the love story theme towards the end between scientist and subject.

After all, remember Timothy Hutton in “Iceman” in 1984? It was similar in concept. Hutton plays an anthropologist whose team finds a body of a prehistoric man in ice who comes to life. And Hutton finds himself defending the man against those who want to dissect his life in the name of science. There’s a love there for another persecuted human being, am I right? And always in these tales, the scientist will go down fighting. Meanwhile the modern-day world, which ruins everything, is viewed as awful.

Interestingly author Stephen Kiernan says the idea for “The Curiosity” came from the James Taylor song “Frozen Man,” which he heard in 1992. I guess I’m not too familiar with that song, but I have to give Kiernan credit for letting his novel thaw over these many years. “The Curiosity” got me interested in the ice again, earlier eras and the primordial goo that makes up life and ties all that lives together. Way to go, an enticing debut!

PS. I like the book cover of the Canadian edition (pictured above) much better than the U.S. edition (at left), which seems with the clothes spread out almost clown-like and perhaps confusing. The Canadian edition is more fetching and dignified of the frozen man. What do you think? And are you curious to read “The Curiosity”? Continue reading →

Quite an alluring book jacket cover eh? I had not read author Robert Olmstead before but I was intrigued that “The Coldest Night” was a love story set in the 1950s at the backdrop of the Korean War. What could be more tragic than intense young love and war? And on the 60th anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean conflict, I was curious to know more and pay tribute to the Vets who fought to keep the peninsula free. “The Coldest Night” looked like a good read, so I was game.

The story is broken into three parts. The first part introduces a boy named Henry Childs, 17, who has been raised by his single mother in the hills of West Virginia on not a lot of money. He starts working at a ranch caring for horses in his spare time when he falls for a judge’s daughter named Mercy who takes riding lessons there. They end up falling passionately in love and decide to run away to New Orleans in a state of young bliss, that is until Mercy’s father and brother track her down and force them to part ways, letting Henry know he’s not on par with their kind of people.

Devastated to lose Mercy, Henry joins the Marines (in the second part of the novel) and is sent to Korea in time to fight in the brutal battle of the Chosin Reservoir. Here he experiences war atrocities and suffering that are unimaginable. His dreams of Mercy and their times together seem to pull him through in the darkest of these times.

In the final part, Henry slowly makes his way back home, though he’s changed and literally scarred by the war. He can’t seem to forget the horrendous things he’s seen and experienced in Korea, and is also shattered by his mother’s passing while there. Will he reconnect with Mercy, you wonder, or will both be too changed to be together now? What has happened to her in the meanwhile? These are questions mostly resolved in the novel’s final pages.

It may seem a straightforward love/war story with a familiar premise yet the writing in “The Coldest Night” is quite beautiful, notably the descriptions and the coming of age of the boy Henry, who’s quite sensitive to the world and his first love. I especially thought the author, Robert Olmstead, wrote the war scenes amazingly well, and the falling in love parts aren’t too shabby either. His descriptions of the Korean battles really blew me away, and were more effective to me than another war novel I read recently called “The Yellow Birds,” which I know is about a different war but on the whole didn’t grasp me like this one did. Olmstead has a beautiful command of words, which makes “The Coldest Night” a stark but moving book that’ll simmer through you long after the pages float by.

What about you, have you read this novel? What did you think? And what are the best war stories you’ve ever come across? Continue reading →