Category Archives: Books

Yep, I finally took the plunge and read last year’s top-selling suspense novel “Gone Girl.” About time, right? I sort of had been saving it for an island retreat or something, where I pictured devouring it while lounging on a beach chair under a palm tree. But “Gone Girl” never made it to spring break, which for me is in April, it got picked up by my book club and we discussed it this week.

For sure, most people know what it’s about by now. It’s about a marriage gone terribly wrong and a fifth year wedding anniversary that comes and goes with the wife found missing under suspicious circumstances. What more do you need to know? The couple (Nick and Amy) had been magazine writers in New York City before losing their jobs and having to move back to Nick’s hometown in Missouri. Using Amy’s money (her parents are successful authors of an “Amazing Amy” book series), Nick has bought a bar with his twin sister where he works while Amy remains at home unemployed. That’s about when the wheels come unglued for these two.

It’s told in alternating chapters between Nick, who’s a suspect in his wife’s disappearance, and Amy who fills in the history of their relationship from the beginning. The author weaves the web of it all very well, suspensefully propelling one through it almost like a bat out of hell. I can’t say the characters are really likable, there’s no real good guys in this. I’m sure you’d be ready to hypothetically strangle either Amy, Nick or the cops, sister, or parents at times for what they’re like. And don’t forget Desi.

I mean the novel is done well, but it’s pretty crazy. It reminded me slightly of a combination of “Fatal Attraction,” “Presumed Innocent” and perhaps a touch of “Psycho” thrown in. There’s plenty of twists, with the characters trying to outmaneuver each other at each step of the way. Suffice it to say you’ll be fairly spent by the time you get done. I think my book club liked it quite a bit but I’m not sure I’d recommend it to everyone. But for the suspense genre, it sure has made waves.

“Gone Girl” recently made the longlist for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize. Stay tuned to see if it will make the shortlist, which will be announced on April 16. It also apparently has been picked up to be made into a movie, which begs the question: who should be in it? My book club suggested possibly: Josh Lucas as Nick and Charlize Theron as Amy. hmm. Your suggestions?

ps. This summer my husband and I will have our third year wedding anniversary; if “Gone Girl” is any example just think what we have to look forward to at the fifth year anniversary!@!?<@#! LOL. Continue reading →

I read “When God Was a Rabbit” for my book club. I hadn’t heard of it before perhaps because it’s a 2011 debut novel from a British author. I definitely would’ve remembered a title like that, which is different enough and made me not sure what to expect. But if you’re wondering, it’s not really a religious or supernatural novel per se.

It’s sort of a novel that’s hard to pinpoint, but it’s primarily about a brother (Joe) and his close, younger sister (Elly) who grow up in Cornwall, England with their parents. Elly tells their story, which spans from her birth in 1968 to 9/11, and from England to New York, where Joe moves as an adult. The narrative includes a colorful cast of Elly’s down-home parents, an aunt that’s gay, her quirky life-long friend Jenny Penny, her brother’s first love Charlie, family friends Arthur and Ginger, and of course a pet rabbit from childhood that her family refers to as God.

Along the way, each of the cast, who are all a bit quirky, seems to suffer a tragedy or hardship that marks their life, yet they persevere with the help of their strong bonds to each other. Elly and her brother are particularly close; she believes he’s the only one who truly understands her. But when a terrible event happens toward the end, their life-long bond is threatened.

In many ways, the novel is very readable and engaging, particularly in the first half when Elly is young and impressionable and telling of her life growing up. She is funny in places despite the bad things that happen, and the cast is interesting.

But later on, the second half of the novel gets a bit disjointed and meandering as if the author didn’t know where she was going with it. Some of the transitions get abrupt, making it hard to discern if the characters are in England or New York. Other details like Elly’s home-schooling are mentioned then dropped; years fly by. More bad things happen, and the narrative turns a bit maudlin. Elly seems to be yearning for her childhood days “when God was a rabbit” and her innocence wasn’t lost.

The novel has endearing qualities, but it just didn’t execute all the way through for me. My book club seemed to have a similar impression of it. What about you? Have you read this one? What did you think? Continue reading →

I recently finished these two slim novels that are pictured here, and though they were stories about different topics, they did share some similarities. Both are quite dark and are told by flawed narrators who are working their way psychologically through difficult circumstances (one after divorce, the other war). Both use landscape to lend to the plot’s mood (one in New Mexico, the other Iraq), and both forebodingly lead up to an event at the end of the book that makes a shattering impact.

“The Boy” by Lara Santoro, which came out last month, is about a 42-year-old woman (Anna), who’s a single mother trying to put her life back together after a bitter divorce. She crosses paths with a 20-year-old male neighbor, who seems to get under her skin and infatuate her. Though she tries to resist the temptation, she soon finds herself involved in a reckless relationship with the boy. His carefree nature seems to make her happy and she pursues her lust for him despite admonitions from his father and her daughter. Ultimately the consequences of their affair turn devastating for all in its wake.

I found the narrator Anna to be pretty harsh. She’s obviously a damaged soul (apparently from her divorce) who looks at the world in a dark or seemingly uncaring way. Her judgement about her sexual relationship with the boy is pretty screwed up and awful, and the one person she truly seems to love, her young daughter, she puts at risk.

It’s hard to find a lot redeemable about Anna, which marred some of my ability to like the novel. She loves her daughter, but can she really be trusted to raise her? That’s one thing the book puts forth to struggle with, along with the “ick factor” of Anna being sexually involved with a 20 year old. The author writes effectively in casting Anna as both flawed and not totally beyond redemption; her daughter still loves and wants to be with her. But after what happens, you’ll be struggling with Anna’s ability as a mother for long after the book’s climax crashes down.

I can’t say I thoroughly liked “The Boy” but it did raise some disturbing questions.

The same perhaps can be said of my feelings towards “The Yellow Birds” by Kevin Powers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2012.

This novel is about a 21-year-old boy, Private Bartle, who with a buddy he meets in basic training, 18-year-old Private Murphy, tries to stay alive while their platoon wages a bloody battle in Al Tafar, Iraq. Before leaving the States, Bartle promises Murphy’s mother that he’ll bring him back unharmed, but after a year or so into the war, Murphy begins to become unhinged. Yet Bartle still feels responsible for him. The actions that follow by both soldiers lead to devastating consequences at the end.

“The Yellow Birds” is told through Bartle’s narration, and alternates chapters of life during the war and then after the war when Bartle is back home in Virginia, trying to piece together his experience in Iraq.

The novel paints a bleak picture of what war is like: the constant stress of danger, the ambivalence toward dead bodies, the fatigue, the body counts, the psychological toll. The author effectively captures it all quite vividly with his descriptive images and account of life among the platoon. Undoubtedly, this is why the book was chosen as a finalist for the National Book Award.

But it’s not an easy read. At times, I grew impatient with Bartle and his malaise and damaged self. I wanted to relate and understand his take on war but found him and the tangents he goes on at times out of reach. My mind started to wander during some of the storytelling and I wanted Bartle to get to the point of what happened. It reads a bit like a gradual march, or a look back on something bad that’s happened but it takes till the end of the book to get there, dangling you along like a wet rag.

While I appreciated some of the writing and insight into war in “The Yellow Birds,” it’s sort of an agonizing place to remain too long, marching. Continue reading →

I read “The Marriage Plot” for my book club this month, and I found it a great read. It’s the first book I’ve read by Jeffrey Eugenides and now I’m eager to go out and get his two other novels. I’m not sure why I never read his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Middlesex,” maybe I wasn’t sure of the subject matter, but I do want to get to it in the near future. Eugenides seems to really inhabit his characters, making you feel you know them, and “The Marriage Plot” was so easy sink into, so readable, the story and pages just flew by.

It’s about the lives of three senior college students at Brown University in the early 1980s. Madeleine is an English major who’s honors thesis is on the traditional “marriage plot” — the suitors, proposals, and misunderstandings in such novels as those by Jane Austen, George Eliot and Henry James. Leonard is a smart, biology student from Oregon who comes to suffer manic depression. And Mitchell is a religious studies major who like Eugenides is from Detroit.

The book is a take on a modern marriage plot with Leonard and Mitchell both vying for the affections of Madeleine, who soon enough falls hard for Leonard. After graduation, Madeleine goes to live with him while he’s working an internship at a genetics lab, but all is not well. Madeleine spends most of her time helping Leonard cope with his mental illness. Meanwhile Mitchell is traveling around Europe and India, becoming more interested in religion and volunteering with Mother Theresa’s organization in Calcutta, all the while still dreaming of marrying Madeleine.

Later, all three lives intersect again in New York, where events transpire that lead to more uncertainty of whom Madeleine will end up with. Will she stay with Leonard, the manic depressive, or Mitchell, who’s trying to find himself through religion? Or will either one be the one for Madeleine as she pursues her graduate studies in the Victorian novel?

It’s a love triangle that’s up in the air till the very end. I found the lives of these idealistic young graduates to be quite engaging as they pursued their studies, passions, hardships and loves. It’s a book that delves deep and comes out on top. Continue reading →

I started out my reading year in 2013 by rereading the old classic Jack Kerouac novel “On the Road.” I had first read it in my 20s but now in my 40s I was curious to read it again because the film of it just came out with Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund and Kristen Stewart among others. I guess I’m still a bit curious to see the film although some reviewers say it is “oddly lifeless” compared to the energy and craziness of the book.

As for the novel, I think I liked it better when I first read it in my 20s. It’s not an easy book for sure. Published in 1957, “On the Road” details the cross-country road adventures of the narrator Sal Paradise and his friends, notably Dean Moriarty, who’s one energetic “mad” dude. The novel is largely autobiographical and is based on Jack Kerouac’s road trips with Neal Cassady and others from 1947 to 1950.

I guess the first time I read it I was caught up in the spontaneous, personal writing style of it, which breathes life into the adventures but also takes a while to get used to. Kerouac claims he wrote it, typing continuously on one long 120-foot roll of paper. Back in my 20s, I also liked the buddy road trip and counter-culture aspect of it: the drinking, drugs, sex, jazz bars and driving like mad for endless thousands of miles.

But this time I didn’t seem to have as much patience with “On the Road.” The partying and irresponsibility sort of grew old (back and forth across the country three or four times), and Dean and the rest weren’t as cool or magnetic as perhaps I once remembered. The women get pregnant and left for the most part. And some of the book reads a bit like gibberish.

Still I was interested to see how Kerouac perceived the wide-open country in 1947 to 1950 and the cities of Denver, San Fran and NYC, which he writes mostly about. What it was like then, what it felt like. Some of his sentences still hold the magic of the time and of a group of friends hell-bent on seeking the marrow out of life. That’s what kept me reading despite the relentless road, the colorful details and language, and what would become of Sal, a writer, who was enamored by Dean but grew apart from him as well. It’s a telling book about a friendship that peaks and ebbs at various times over the years. Sal appears ready to settle down by the end, but Dean is still seemingly in transit after an indelible time on the road.

Have you read this Beat classic and what did you think? Continue reading →

I enjoyed the two books pictured in this post this week. You wouldn’t think they would have any similarities in common, other than their short length. Yet both include some vivid sentences and wisdom.

As for “Ru,” I was drawn to it after I heard the author Kim Thuy talking about it on NPR a couple weeks ago. Her first page, which was read on the radio, snapped me to attention:

“Ru” is an autobiographical novel that parallels Thuy and her family’s boat journey out of Saigon after the Vietnam War to a crowded Malaysian refugee camp for four months and eventually to a new life in Quebec. It’s told in a series of vignettes, the memories of which usually encompass a page each in the book and are shuffled back and forth between the various times of her life.

On the good side, the novel made me feel what it was like for the “boat people” who came over from Vietnam, their risks, fears and struggles. It also showed a glimpse into Vietnamese families and their culture, and especially expressed the feelings of living in a place of war and peace. “Ru’s” quite lyrical in the way it’s written, the passages evoke poetry in places, which I found both evocative and moving.

Just sometimes I got a bit lost in “Ru,” not knowing exactly who or what she was talking about, and maybe I couldn’t understand everything because of a cultural gap or perhaps the book’s back-and-forth structure. But still “Ru” left me with an impressionable picture of the boat people and of a survivor who seems grateful to have come through the hard sides of both war and peace.

“Good Dog. Stay.” from 2007 by Anna Quindlen was another pretty impulsive read this week. (Who knew she wrote a dog book?) It arrived in a package of dog books from my sister-in-law who was giving her collection away to us because we had recently gotten a puppy. The book is actually about Quindlen’s older dog, Beau, who is in the last stages of his life. In her usual wise and witty prose, Quindlen tells stories about Beau’s life and what she has learned from him along the way. Interspersed throughout it are lovely photos of a wide variety of dogs.

For anyone who appreciates canines or has lived through the passing of an old dog, “Good Dog. Stay.” is quite a soothing and touching quick read. It makes me want to read more dog stories, as well as other titles from Anna Quindlen. I think we can relate. Among other things, she knows the value of a dog’s life well-lived. Continue reading →

A member of my book club picked “Ender’s Game” to discuss this week, which surprised some of us. Not many of us typically read science-fiction, and this novel came out in 1985; it was expanded from a 1977 short story. Was it really something we could get into?

Still I was curious. Apparently most guys I know seem to have read “Ender’s Game,” which won the Nebula and Hugo awards when it came out, and it is being released as a movie in 2013, with Harrison Ford, Abigail Breslin, Ben Kingsley and Viola Davis among others. It’s quite a cast. So I was willing to check out the book to see if it was more than just fodder for teenage boys.

The novel is set in the future after humans have fought two conflicts in space against an insect-like alien creature referred to as “buggers.” It’s about a young, gifted boy, Ender Wiggin, who is taken away from his family on Earth to train for the next war against the buggers at the exclusive Battle School, located in Earth’s orbit. He leaves behind a malevolent brother, Peter, and his beloved sister, Valentine, who he wont see for years.

At Battle School, Ender excels in military tactics amid the non-gravity atmosphere and leads his squad to victory in war games against the rest. He dominates the game but struggles with how his superiors manipulate his life and tip the playing field against him to groom him to be the ultimate leader. The pressures that he is the one to lead the forces to save Earth weigh on him, and he fears he’s like his brother, capable of hurting others.

After a grueling few years, he’s promoted to Command School, where a former war hero, Mazer Rackham, trains him using a war simulator. Soon Ender is commanding fleets on the simulator, practicing all-out war against the alien buggers. The simulations ramp up until his final test, which is like no other. What follows is an abrupt twist at the novel’s end that took me a bit by surprise.

Essentially, it’s a novel that involves becoming a leader, and what makes a good one. There’s a lot of war games and practice in it. I guess that’s why the U.S. Marine Corps has required the book in the past on its reading list. But it also raises ethical and moral questions about the military and waging war or obliteration.

“Ender’s Game” took me a while to get through, but I found it a surprisingly decent read, even though it’s not something I would normally pick up. It’s reading that’s a bit geared to young adult males, but it’s also semi-thought-provoking sci-fi, which is worth picking up every once in a blue while. Continue reading →

Although the early ’80s were a time of a lot of gushy pop and new wave music, I recall relying on Springsteen, Neil Young, and the Pretenders to see me through high school. Back then, I was only able to bring a select group of treasured vinyl records off with me to boarding school. Among these were Neil Young’s 1977 three-record set “Decade,” which had 35 of his greatest songs up until that point, and “Live Rust,” his double-LP live album released in 1979, which is a fantastic concert recording of 16 of his classic songs.

Holy smokes I played these two albums into the ground in high school. They blew me away. Neil wrote and played songs with such soul and genius. As the years went on though, I didn’t follow his music as closely (he’s been so prolific with various artistic departures), but there have been a few albums I’ve liked. More recently his 2007 release of “Live at Massey Hall: 1971” awed and reminded me of the classic Neil.

I wasn’t about to miss his memoir “Waging Heavy Peace” to get a glimpse behind his trove of amazing songs and his long history in rock. Heaven knows, there’s been an explosion of rock star memoirs these past few years with books from Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and now Pete Townshend too. Admittedly, I’m a sucker for these memoirs. Oh to get a glimpse behind the lives of such musical heroes!

As far as Neil’s memoir goes, it’s got a bit of everything in it and is not in any chronological order (a passage about 1965 could well be followed by something that happened in 1995). He writes about his life seemingly as things come to him, about memories or ideas or his family and friends, or his bands and music, or what he’s currently up to. It’s all quite down to earth, conversational and seemingly earnest. He seems like an old, affable hippie who’s seen and done a lot of things and is trying to become a better person in later life, where he’d once perhaps been quite difficult or prickly. Neil’s always been known to be his own person with own artistic direction and has quit bands or fired musicians wherever he felt it necessary.

He talks a tad about this in the book, his regrets of things he’s done but mostly the memoir is filled with heartfelt gratitude towards his very close family, friends and musical collaborators. He speaks of those who’ve been with him with a lot of admiration. There’s hardly a bad word about anyone or any acrimony in the book. And his love for his wife and kids, two of whom have physical disabilities is quite touching.

What surprised me I guess is to learn that Neil had polio as a child and also has suffered from epilepsy. But despite that, he’s always been highly productive and involved in various projects. I didn’t realize he was an inventor of sorts, making parts for model trains, converting a car (the LincVolt) to use cleaner power technology, and creating a device to hear music with a higher quality of sound. Part of his book sounds a bit like an infomercial, plugging his innovations. They’re interesting ideas no doubt, and his passion for his hobbies seems real and consuming. I was a bit amazed by all of the various projects he’s involved in, and how productive he is; he doesn’t seem to be slowing down any. In fact, he’s in concert with his band Crazy Horse this week in our town. (How coincidental!)

I enjoyed his memoir quite a bit. It’s both humorous and touching at times and a bit different. In it, he sporadically touches on the various pieces of his life: from his Canadian upbringing to his start in music, his hitting it big in L.A., bands and touring, his life at his California ranch, his hobbies and film projects, and his place in Hawaii. I think Neil’s muse as an amazing songwriter comes through in it. There’s some insight into songs and albums, but I almost wish there were more of this and less of some of the other ramblings. I’m still wondering about “Heart of Gold” and “After the Gold Rush.” But apparently Neil will be writing another book or so he mentions. I guess 498 pages of “Waging Heavy Peace” was not enough for him! So stayed tuned. Continue reading →