Category Archives: Books

It was a hundred years ago last night at 2:20 a.m. the RMS Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. It’s humbling and shocking even now, thinking of the world’s biggest, fastest ship up to that point (deemed “unsinkable”) and more than 1,500 of its passengers disappearing on its maiden voyage into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Titanic’s story is one so visual now to our imaginations, as if it were engraved into our DNA. It’s long since taken on mythological proportions.

With its 100th anniversary, I couldn’t help but take the plunge into the massive coverage of all things Titanic. I’ve seen a few Titanic TV specials recently: one on its engine room staff that worked so hard to keep the lights on; another on the iceberg that hit it; another on James Cameron’s analysis of the underwater wreck site that was found in 1985; and finally the 1958 film “A Night to Remember,” which is taken from this book of the same name.

But there’s so much more on Titanic: new research, new books, new theories; all recently banking on the 100th anniversary. But what intrigued me was to go back to the very first book on it, Walter Lord’s classic “A Night to Remember” from 1955. After all, I had never read it before this.

Indeed it is a great source for what happened on the night of April 14-15, 1912. As Lord wrote: “This book is really about the last night of a small town.” And for sure, Titanic was that big and carried that many people. It was like a microcosm of Edwardian society, with cabins and luxuries designated by class, and women and children given first seats on the lifeboats. Never again would the world be quite like this in such circumstances.

“A Night to Remember” reads as if the action were happening right then and there, making it quite dramatic as the tragedy unfolds. From the late sighting of the iceberg, to the damage assessment, call to lifeboats, distress signals, eventual sinking and freezing rescue, Lord pieces together such a vivid picture, strengthened by the 63 survivors he spoke to in writing the book. The quotes of conversations he uses, which enliven the account, are not made up but are amazingly given as remembered by survivors.

“Night” reads a bit like a Jon Krakauer book. And indeed, Walter Lord was one of the first writers to bring journalistic narrative to history, which we are so much better for. The book’s not weighed down with a lot of documentation, speculation or background (for that there are many others), but it briskly recounts in an organized, accurate way what happened and when on that fateful night and the many colorful people involved and lost. Interesting roles are played by Captain Edward John Smith, Titanic’s builder Thomas Andrews, ocean liner president Bruce Ismay, Fifth Officer Harold Lowe (who went back to pick up survivors) and Second Officer Charles Lightoller who survived by balancing with others on an overturned collapsible lifeboat.

After the ship went down, it’s amazing that some of the passengers were able to swim to a couple of these collapsible boats in the 28-degree Fahrenheit water and somehow survive until the rescue ship picked them up a few hours later. “Night” conjures scenes like these that you won’t believe and won’t be able to forget. It makes you wish you could change all the little circumstances that led up to the disaster: if only the Titanic weren’t going so fast through an ice field on a moonless night, or if only they saw the iceberg sooner, or if only the ship the Californian 10 miles away came to their distress, or if only they loaded the lifeboats with more people — or, or, or ….

It’s a great book that can do all that. My only wish is perhaps that author Walter Lord had written an afterword on it that went into the disaster’s hearings a bit. Some of the survivors’ testimony would have been quite interesting, too. But still “A Night to Remember” is quite a night, and there’s more interesting details in Lord’s book “The Night Lives On” from 1986. Sadly he died in 2002, but not before consulting on that other Titanic movie you might have heard of. Apparently Lord once crossed the Atlantic on the RMS Olympic, the Titanic’s sister ship in 1926. So perhaps that is where he got his zest for capturing such a sea story.

If you happen to see the 1958 film of it, which you should, watch for Sean Connery, apparently he is amid the chaos as a deck crewman. Continue reading →

“The Solitude of Prime Numbers” was a pick from my book club, which I wasn’t expecting to like, though actually I didn’t know anything about. But like a moth to a flame I was completely drawn in by this sad, moving novel from 2008. Chalk it up to author Paolo Giordano’s talented storytelling, which captured my imagination and made me follow these damaged characters with such interest.

It’s a love tale of sorts between two lonely outcasts who are both haunted by childhood tragedies. The girl, Alice, lives with a crippled leg from a ski accident and a bullying father. The gifted boy, Mattia, carries the guilt of abandoning his mentally challenged twin sister who disappears and is never found. Alice and Mattia meet in high school, where they sense in each other a kindred spirit of inner pain. He deals with it by cutting himself, she by being anorexic.

To Mattia, who later becomes a mathematician, he and Alice are like twin prime numbers, “alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other.” They separate when he accepts a research job in another country and she marries a local doctor, leaving issues between them unresolved. But many years later they resurface when their paths cross again.

The ending that follows is a bit inevitable but a surprise all the same. The novel leaves quite an impact long after it is over. I found it a quick read with an underlying suspensefulness that made me keep turning the pages. Its often beautiful passages and clever use of math metaphors are quite transcendent.

I was lucky to come across the author (an Italian physicist) in 2010 at a book festival where he read aloud the chapter in which the twin sister goes missing. I remember it being quite disturbing and yet visual. I thought what is this? And now I know. “The Solitude of Prime Numbers” is a small tour de force on the weight of childhood trauma, love, and loneliness. Apparently it was made into a movie in Italy in September 2010. Continue reading →

I typically don’t read spy novels or thrillers, but I was looking for a quick read while on a trip that would be entertaining. Chris Pavone’s debut novel “Expats” was so highly recommended on its book jacket (in retrospect don’t trust these) by Patricia Cornwell, John Grisham and others that I thought surely this would be it. Grisham even compared it to the early works of Ken Follet, Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum; oh, but if only this were true.

At the beginning, “Expats” is quite promising and the idea of it intriguing. A husband (Dexter) gets a new job overseas as a computer security analyst for a high-paying client, which leads his wife (Kate) to decide to quit her secret life as a CIA spy and come clean living as an expat with him in Luxembourg. She seeks to end the duplicity in their marriage from her CIA days and to become a stay-at-home mom to their two sons learning the ways of a foreign country. But life gets too boring for Kate, sitting around dreading the laundry and vacant other moms! And soon suspicions lead her back to undercover work, first in regards to a couple she senses aren’t whom they say are, and ultimately to her husband who apparently has secrets of his own. (Quite a marriage.)

The whole expat atmosphere and deceit within the marriage propel the novel and make the plot interesting. But intermixed flashbacks of Kate’s CIA past confuse and distract from the main storytelling. Also the slew of twists at the end are a turn off, as the tireless scheming (I agree here with the Times’ Janet Maslin) “exceeds all sane expectations.” And I mean that in a uncomplimentary way. It turns pretty nuts. I had to fight my way through to finish it, as it no longer seemed plausible or interesting to me. What starts out promising, spins off the rails in rapid form towards the end. Continue reading →

“The Cat’s Table” received considerable hype and good press when it came out this past October. Author Michael Ondaatje had won the Booker Prize for “The English Patient” in 1992 and his writing has long been revered. This novel seemed especially interesting in its premise about a 11-year-old boy’s unaccompanied three-week voyage on a ship from Sri Lanka to England in the early 1950’s. How adventurous and romantic a notion! I was definitely game for such a journey, particularly if it was based on Ondaatje’s own sea excursion when he was a boy. The book cover, too, of a large ship drew me to it like a chain hooked to an anchor. I would devour this story in no time!

Only trouble was, it didn’t exactly happen like that. In fact, I struggled in parts to stay with it and found the book took a considerable time to get through. Here I wanted to love it, and yet my mind, especially at the beginning was wandering off thinking about other things. Apparently, most readers liked the beginning of “Cat’s Table,” but some found it too disjointed toward the end. I was the opposite; I found the beginning rather hard to get into (despite the relatively easy style) but became more into it toward the end.

The start of the novel entails descriptions of various characters on the ship in short two to three page chapters. There’s the main character, Michael, and his boy pals, Cassius and Ramadhin who he runs around the ship getting into mischief with; then there’s the mishmash group of insignificants assigned with the boys to dine at the “cat’s table,” the one farthest away from the Captain’s. The details onboard are all quite charming, yet more than 100 pages into the book, I found myself grasping to find any semblance of a story. For heaven sakes move this ship along; will anything (ever) come of it?! Luckily, not long after that the waters start to churn so to speak and things become more interesting and resonant.

Thanks in part to Michael’s 17-year-old cousin Emily onboard who spicens things up and might be involved in a prisoner’s escape plans on the ship. The novel, too, opens up more in its storytelling and begins to intersperse Michael’s time on the ship with his life many years later, looking back on the trip. His nostalgia for the journey and how it affected him is quite poignant and pivotal to his coming of age. Years later, he ends up marrying Ramadhin’s sister and reconnects to other passengers, including the semi-mysterious Emily.

The novel is quite a subtle and intimate read, if you’re looking for a lot of action and adventure, this might not be your cup of tea. Yet it snuck up on me in due time. By the end, I could feel the weight of its voyage and how it altered Michael and others sitting at the ship’s cat’s table. For more info, check out author Michael Ondaatje being interviewed about the book on PBS. Continue reading →

My book club recently picked “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” because it seemed a more uplifting, lighter story than the dark, heavy reads we usually get to. And it turned out to fill that niche quite nicely. It’s a satirical, different kind of novel that builds on the theme that having faith in the impossible can be quite a good thing.

Written in the form of emails, letters, reports and diary entries, the novel is about a British fisheries scientist (Dr. Alfred Jones) who is called upon to somehow introduce salmon and fly-fishing into the country of Yemen. It’s all part of a dream of a visionary sheikh who loves fishing and believes it will have a beneficial effect on his country. The British prime minister’s office latches on to the idea as well, in its search for a positive, feel-good story about the U.K. coming out of the Middle East instead of war.

Yet to Alfred the idea is totally absurd as salmon aren’t suited to the Yemen’s desert conditions. Regardless he’s pressured into the project, coordinating it with help of the sheikh’s U.K. agent Harriet Chetwode-Talbot. The two make a dynamic team (one nerdy, the other sharp and elegant) along with the sheikh who inspires them to reach beyond what seems possible to reach their goal. Along the way they face various obstacles, including self-serving bosses and politicians, who are spoofed in the book as pompous asses, as well as Dr. Jones’s unhelpful, unloving wife who provides no encouragement and takes off to another country for work.

Will the project succeed? Will Harriet get together with Alfred? You won’t know until the very end. But the nice thing is it inspires you to believe in salmon in the Yemen, as it does Alfred, whose life is transformed by the project. In that way, it’s all quite uplifting. My only qualms with the whimsical book is that the narrative is a bit uneven with its various dispatches from different characters; some of which you want to read, others not so much. And the ending seemed perhaps as whimsical to believe as its salmon-in-the-desert premise, continuing its fairy tale-like quality.

Regardless I’m looking forward to it being released as a movie on March 9 with Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt. I suspect it will be a bit different than the book version, with more comedy, romance and perhaps a brighter ending. Continue reading →

I heard this was the “It” book of last summer, enthusiastically backed by the legion of Ann Patchett fans that now seem to be everywhere. I was just a tad leery because I didn’t care for her last novel called “Run,” but alas, “State of Wonder” is a whole different can of worms and much better. Like the Amazon world it conjures, “State of Wonder” is teeming with a wide range of issues, layers and characters.

It’s about a pharmacologist in Minnesota, Marina Singh, who is sent to the Amazon to find out the circumstances surrounding her work colleague’s death and the scientist he went to meet, the eccentric Annick Swenson. Swenson is Marina’s former medical school mentor whose research on a new fertility drug in the jungle has been shrouded in mystery. Marina is sent to find her and investigate the progress on the new drug. But once she gets there, her world is turned upside down by the tribulations she faces and the miracle drug she witnesses.

Part “Heart of Darkness” mixed with a little “Island of Dr. Moreau,” “State of Wonder” is influenced by various works, including “Orpheus and Eurydice” and the Werner Herzog film “Fitzcarraldo,” according to Patchett. (In light of this, I’m curious to rent the 1982 Herzog film, which I haven’t seen.) I found the novel to be an adventurous, engaging read; it definitely keeps you going and places your feet firmly in the heat of the Amazon. But I thought the surprise ending a bit abrupt, flung together and sort of dropping off after its initial jolt, leaving one like a wet rag to wonder about the loose ends it leaves.

After wading through its dense jungle and contemplating malaria and the fertility of women over a certain age, I’m sort of Ann Patchett’d out at the moment but will definitely return to her books in the future. For more on her and “State of Wonder” check out her recent appearance on the Colbert Report, the independent bookstore Parnassus she co-owns in Nashville, and her hour on the Diane Rehm show. Continue reading →

“Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” was a perfect novel to end 2011 on. It’s a witty, entertaining read about a retired British army officer who’s a widdower living in a small English village. Sixty-eight-year-old Major Pettigrew is old-fashioned and set in his ways (definitely a character! he calls them like he sees them), but then at the start his brother dies and he meets Mrs. Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper, also a widdower who shares his love of literature and begins to broaden his perspective. In due time, the Major is smitten with her, but prejudices of the snobby village residents (a bit harsher versions of Hyacinth in PBS’s “Keeping Up Appearances”) and their families come between, threatening to end their chance at romance.

The novel hums along on the happenstances of the retired Major, who like it or not, is apart of the village mileau, out golfing, duck hunting and attending family functions and parties. His son, Roger, is an obnoxious social climber who doesn’t exactly share his father’s polite charm. How the Major placates him and the brash villagers while his affections for Mrs. Ali grow is quite a hoot — not to be missed. Nor is the ending of this adorable story, in which the Major dashes into action in the nick of time. Hip hip hooray for the Major! An unlikely but lovable hero.

I agree with the New York Times’ Janet Maslin who wrote: “It’s about intelligence, heart, dignity and backbone. “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” has them all.” For sure, it does. Amazing, too, that it’s such an assured debut novel. The English-born author Helen Simonson gives plenty of insight into the small-town life of her home country. But it’s her gifted storytelling that makes it such a delightful and easy read. Continue reading →

Ten years after Sept. 11, 2001, the new novel “The Submission” is a powerful reminder of the charged atmosphere that emerged in the wake of the terrorist attacks. It’s a clever premise that revolves around a ground zero-like memorial competition in 2003 that gets mired in turmoil when the jury selects a design it later discovers is by Mohammad Khan, a Muslim-American. As the jury waivers in what to do, the winner’s design becomes leaked to the media and soon a huge uproar erupts over the choice. The victims’ memorial design stalls as a battle ensues over anti-Islamic sentiments vs. the rights of Muslim-Americans. (Can anyone forget the real-life furor that arose over the “ground zero mosque”?)

The novel convincingly captures the intensity of the aftermath in New York through various characters: namely, through the talented architect who’s never been much of a practicing Muslim and believes his winning design should move forward and through victims’ family members whose emotions run the gamut but whose majority are against a Muslim’s design. There’s also a tabloid journalist who apparently will stop at next to nothing to get a scoop even as it fans the fire and crushes lives.

“The Submission” is heady stuff but immensely readable and reminded me a bit of “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987) but with more feeling and less satire. It’s so thorough one feels the heavy weight of the decision of the memorial design from both sides and the affecting culmination at the book’s end. It’s not surprising the author reported on 9/11 back then for the New York Times, but to come up with a debut novel of this scope and depth is quite remarkable. Even the insights into architecture and the atmosphere of the Bangladeshi neighborhood in Brooklyn were impressive.

There have been so few good novels about 9/11 or its aftermath that it’s quite refreshing that this one has defied the odds and proved it could be done. Continue reading →

I recently joined a small book club, which had picked this bestselling French novel to discuss, but unfortunately none of the others really liked it. I liked it in parts though. The novel doesn’t seem too easy at first because it reads a bit more like a series of philosophical essays by two narrators who swap chapters throughout the book than a real story.

First, there’s Renee, a 54-year-old, short, ugly plump widow, who works as a concierge at a luxury apartment building, where the residents are all rich. For 27 years, she’s promoted herself as a lazy, low-level, uneducated servant to her employers, while in reality behind the scenes, she’s a cultured autodidact who immerses herself in the world of art, philosophy, music and Japanese culture. As for the novel’s title, Renee is said to resemble a hedgehog, covered in quills on the outside, but with the same simple refinement on the inside as the hedgehog.

Then, there’s Paloma, the 12-year-old little genius who lives in the building with her family and wants to end her life before her 13th birthday so that she doesn’t end up like the rest of society in life’s “goldfish bowl.” She too is an intellect, like Renee, who disdains the vacuous, rich folks in the building, and adores the beauty in music, nature and Japanese culture.

Renee and Paloma are two peas in a pod, outcasts by their own accord who meet and become friends in the second half of the book, thanks in part to a wealthy Japanese man (Ozu), who moves into their building. This is where the novel begins to pick up and move a bit beyond a walking philosophical exercise. Ozu comes to save both Renee and Paloma, earning their trust and seeing through their fronts in a heartwarming, though tragic last section. I found Paloma’s passages particularly amusing, and the book’s heart and messages on finding happiness in small things, worth the work of plowing through the dense or redundant parts.

Apparently, “The Hedgehog” is now a movie, and came to the U.S. in August (in French with subtitles), though I haven’t seen it playing anywhere. Keep your eyes peeled if you’re curious about this adaptation. Continue reading →

I consumed “The Hunger Games,” whose fans by now are legion, over Labor Day weekend pretty lickety-split. No matter if it’s meant for young adults or not, the novel is an action-filled, post-apocalyptic survival test that’s hard to put down.

The first in a trilogy, it’s set in the future, where the country Panem rules what was once North America. Every year, its capital forces the country’s 12 districts to send two young people to fight to the death in the popularly televised and watched Hunger Games, somewhat reminiscent of gladiator events in Roman times.

The protagonist is 16-year-old Katniss, who takes the place of her younger sister when she’s picked to compete. Along with the baker’s son, Peeta, from District 12, Katniss goes up against stronger tributes of other districts who have been training for the Games their whole lives. It’s a battle to the death, that makes for quick page-turning, and also sets up Peeta’s and her friend, Gale’s vying affections for the tough, independent Katniss. Does this sound a tad Twilight-ish?

The novel is well done and very visual. Perfect for a movie adaptation — so hopes Lions Gate, which is launching the film due out March 23, 2012, and betting its pennies that it will take off like “Harry Potter” or “Twilight”; see the L.A. Times story. Filmed in North Carolina, time will tell if actress Jennifer Lawrence can live up to the character of Katniss in the book. Admittedly, I fell for the fantasy-action novel pretty much hook, line and sinker but am just a little concerned the two follow-up books, “Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay,” won’t live up to it now that these Games are over. Am I wrong? Continue reading →