The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, a review

I just finished reading Julian Barnes's novel, The Sense of an Ending, and I loved how it kept me guessing. I love Barnes's writing, and here he really impressed me with his craftsmanship. It's the story of how a man, Tony Webster looks at his youth through the lens of late middle age, confronting his past, and changeable and unreliable memory, in the process. So as Tony examines his memories, and truths that he never knew about are revealed, the story, in Barnes's somewhat restrained style, becomes a bit of a mysterious page-turner. It was a nice combination of thought-provoking, subtle, and entertaining.

As a woman in middle age, I loved that the book made me really think about aging, regret, and remorse. It also made me ponder the idea that we are, at best, unreliable narrators of our own lives. And the book was disturbing in that it made me think about self-delusion, and how easy it is to think you are one kind of person, when maybe you are not. Ah, human frailty, how universal you are.

I did have one strange thing happen while reading it. I read it as an e-book, and because I was powering through it, I never checked how far I was actually getting in the book, and the ending took me by surprise. It felt a little abrupt, but I don't think I would have felt that way had I been reading a paper edition, and anticipating the ending as it got physically closer. And it was a book that I didn't want to end. Barnes left me there, wondering what effect the knowledge Tony gained would have on the rest of his life. The ending was elegant, and satisfying in that it left me sitting there, staring off into space, putting all the little pieces of the story back together in my head, armed as I now was with more knowledge. But it also left me wanting just a little bit more. And isn't that how the best books are?

Spring Break Reading

On spring break, my son is madly reading The Hunger Games trilogy before going to see the movie. He finished the first book in a day, and is now chugging through the second. The third is waiting on his nightstand.

I've got a few things picked out for spring break reading, as well.

Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese has been on my radar screen for awhile now, and I finally picked up a copy.

My cousin recommended the memoir Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, about a 30-something woman with no direction who hikes part of the Pacific Crest Trail. I've always been intrigued by the Pacific Crest Trail, ever since visiting Yosemite as a child and learning about John Muir and his hiking the Sierras. The 211-mile John Muir Trail overlaps the Pacific Crest Trail for most of its length, but the Pacific Crest Trail stretches 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada, along the mountainous crest of the Cascade mountain range and the Sierra Nevada range, and then through the Mojave Desert. Someday I'd like to take on at least a portion of the trail!

And the lovely Ti at Book Chatter reviewed a novel called Heft, by Liz Moore, that I'm now dying to read. It's about an unlikely family formed by an overweight professor, his past female student, and her troubled son. Ti mentioned that it might be a good follow-up to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, which my son and I both enjoyed. It's just about to come out in paperback, fortunately. Ti, I'm on it!

What I've read over the last few months

Here's a list of the books I've read recently:

The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta--I really enjoyed Perrotta's writing, and the idea was really original. I liked that he doesn't present easy answers to the dilemma he poses, just lets his characters experience the aftermath of his crazy set-up: that there has been a "rapture", and some of us have been left behind...

The Dovekeepers, by Alice Hoffman--I liked this better than I thought I would. It's the story of several women who experience the siege of Masada, in the first century CE. I was impressed with Hoffman's evocation of the historical period, and loved her depictions of the practices of women at this time.

Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck--I had read this years ago, and did not remember how good it was. Steinbeck was an amazing creator of characters, and portrays with humor and empathy the wonderfully flawed human beings who live on Cannery Row.

The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka--Haunting and poetic, this book was a surprise to me. Otsuka somehow makes the plural voice work, and though the reader doesn't get to know the characters individually, it somehow comes together as a sad, intimate portrait of the Japanese picture brides who came to California in the 1920s.

Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons--I had seen and enjoyed this movie years ago, so I wanted to read the book. A comic nod to Victorian novels, the adventures of Flora Poste as she sets about to better the lives of her shockingly backward distant cousins are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.

The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides--A book group read the group was mixed on. Some beautifully written passages, some complaints about the plot. I liked the ending because it was a nod to Jane Austen, but no fairy tale.

The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson--Another arresting premise, about two kids who grew up in a family of performance artists, where they had to participate in their parents' sometimes disturbing stunts. I liked reading it as a giant metaphor for dysfunctional families, and I liked where the plot took me.

Blue Nights, by Joan Didion--Joan Didion's follow-up to her memoir of the year after her husband's sudden death, The Year of Magical Thinking, this raw memoir is about the death of her daughter, which she had to endure only two years later. I had to get over the idea that this would be a profoundly depressing read, but Didion's language overcomes the grimness of the subject matter, and her meditations on aging, motherhood, life and death are poetic.

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach--Not really about baseball, thank goodness. More about college life, love and friendship. Another book group pick, which everyone liked.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky--(inspired by my 15-year-old son, who read it all in one day) A modern classic of troubled teendom and outsiderhood. This reminds me how much I hated being a teenager. That said, I'm glad my son read it and related to it.

St. Patrick's Day read

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I'm beginning John Banville's novel The Sea. It's something I've wanted to read forever, not just because it won the Man Booker, but because so many people say Banville's writing is strange and beautiful.

Also, it's a stormy day here, and I think the book will fit my mood. Maybe I'll bake some soda bread and have some tea while I read.

The first line is pretty good: "They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide."

Hello again, and the 100 Best First Lines of Novels

So I quit blogging for the last six months or so, not for any terrible reason, but out of inertia. I guess I needed a break, and seem to have lost the urgency previously driving me to write about books. I've certainly still been reading books, and thinking about books--just not writing about them. But I miss my blogging friends, which are really the best thing to come out of blogging, for me, so I thought I would check back in and see everyone.

My wonderful book group just finished The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach, which we all enjoyed--much to the surprise of those who thought the novel was actually going to be about baseball. Unfortunately, at our meeting we did not pick a book to read next. If we don't pick right away, it tends to stymie us, and we send several hundred emails back and forth debating the potential pros and cons of many options. I think we have finally settled on Swamplandia, by Karen Russell. I hope so, as it's looking like an interesting novel.

I ran across this article about the 100 Best First Lines of Novels. There is nothing better than a clever or memorable first line in a novel, and this collection was fun to look through.

Number 2 on the list is probably my favorite: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813).

Five and six are favorites as well:

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

There are many other first lines I love on the list, as well as a bunch I didn't remember, or had never even heard of. Tell me some of your favorite first lines! Do you know any by heart?

Back To School

The end of our summer was a little nuts. We sailed past Lady Liberty on our way out of New York Harbor on a cruise to Nova Scotia. It was a lovely trip, but...

...the last night of our cruise was a race with a hurricane into port. With the airports closed by the storm and Mayor Bloomberg, we were unable to return home to California on schedule. Stuck at my father-in-law's house, which is a lovely place to be, was still stuck.

Evacuated to a hotel because of the hurricane, but never in any danger, we returned to find a very large tree had fallen onto my father-in-law's garage roof.

We were on generator power for about a day while power was restored in the neighborhood, but other neighborhoods nearby lacked power for days, and others had flooded.

Four days later, we finally left for the west coast. By then the boys had missed almost the whole first week of school.

But now we're back in the swing of things, the rhythm of the school year reestablished.

I found I didn't read as much as I would have liked while cruising. But to be honest, I didn't really expect to finish all the books I downloaded onto the Kindle.

There was just too much to eat.

Now I'm back to reading. I've gotten about 100 pages into Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall, and I'm enjoying the voice. I love me a historical novel, and I'm liking the new angle on what I already know about Henry VIII and his cronies.

Just picked up Tom Perrotta's new one, The Leftovers, on the recommendation of a well-read cousin. It's about suburbia after the rapture, and what happens to those who are left behind. Sounds quirky and entertaining--I'll let you know.

Vacation Travel Reading: The East Coast

Well, I'm finally back to blogging after a summer off. It was unplanned, but it turned out that my kids were so busy this summer, I spent my time driving them around Los Angeles (even during "Carmageddon"!) instead of blogging.

My summer reading this summer has suffered from a general lack of time to laze at the beach or by the pool, but next week my family is taking it's first-ever cruise, and I'm loading up the suitcase with books! We are sailing out of Brooklyn, New York (who knew?) up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then down the east coast, stopping in St. John, Bar Harbor, Portland, Boston, and Newport before heading back to New York. When I travel, I like to immerse myself in the literature of the place, so I have found some New England literature to read while sailing down its coast.

On my very first visit to Maine, I'm planning to read Sarah Orne Jewett’s classic novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs, first published in 1896, for a look at what life in coastal Maine was like at the turn of the twentieth century. People praise Jewett as one of the great American writers that nobody reads any more, and I'm eager to take in her characters and the atmosphere of the rocky coast of Maine.

One of my favorite books in recent years, Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, is also set in Maine, but the Maine of the present, not the past. A set of interconnected stories that make up a novel, it's about ornery Maine woman Olive who looks back on her life and relationships in her small town, and it has an amazing sense of place.

There's so much good writing set in Boston that it's hard to choose one book. For non-fiction, I'd like to read David Hackett Fischer's book Paul Revere's Ride, which I've heard is an amazing piece of narrative history, and a compelling read.

I've also had a Boston novel, John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley, which won the author a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1938, on my to-read list for a long time. It is supposed to be another hidden gem by an author who fell out of favor in the 1960s, which satirizes the life and manners of the "Boston Brahmins" in pre-World War II Beacon Hill.

But when we round Cape Cod, I'm going to get out my old copy of Henry David Thoreau's book Cape Cod, an account of his meditative, beach-combing walking trips to Cape Cod in the 1850s, told with his trademark reverence for nature. The Cape is a wondrous place, and Thoreau's travelogue is satisfying a mixture of its folklore and natural history.

Another of my favorite books of all time is set on Cape Cod, Annie Dillard's The Maytrees. It is the chronicle of the ups and downs of a marriage over many years, set in the parabolic dunes of the very tip of the Cape, at Provincetown. I read it while sitting on a Cape beach one summer, and was captivated by Dillard's lyrical language and quirky characters.

We won't be visiting Providence, Rhode Island, this year, but it's a great city, and I was intrigued when I heard that its former mayor wrote a book about his exploits there. Politics and Pasta: How I Prosecuted Mobsters, Rebuilt a Dying City, Dined with Sinatra, Spent Five Years in a Federally Funded Gated Community, and Lived to Tell the Tale is a memoir by former Providence mayor Vincent “Buddy’’ Cianci, and I hear it's as colorful and controversial as the man himself.

When we hit the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, I plan to pick up Thornton Wilder’s fictionalized memoir, Theophilus North. It tells the tale of a young man who spends the summer of 1926 in Newport, teaching tennis to the rich, and getting caught up in their travails, narrated by the elderly North from a distance of 50 years.

I've heard good things about John Casey’s book Spartina, winner of the National Book Award in 1989. It's about Rhode Island fisherman and boat-builder Dick Pierce, his difficult family problems, and his life among the salt marshes and crab fishermen of South County, RI.

What vacation reading have you done this summer? Has any of it reflected the places you visited? What was your favorite summer read?

Super Sad I Won't Be Able To Go To This...

I love our public library here in Los Angeles. The downtown branch is huge, historic, and really lovely. It's only a ten-minute drive from my house (sans traffic, of course), and the parking is easy. Plus they have ALOUD, a great lecture series that gets really good writers and other cultural figures to speak, and they're often interviewed by other really good writers and cultural figures. Plus the lectures are usually free.

On May 12, Gary Shteyngart is speaking, but the event was already full by the time I got the email. Somehow that always seems to happen to me--I'm not sure how these things fill up before I even hear about them. Clearly I'm getting some sort of second-class email notification.

It's too bad, because I just finished Shteyngart's book Super Sad True Love Story, and I'd love to hear him speak about it. If anyone goes, you'll have to let me know how it is.

Spring Break Is Almost Over

Blogging has gone by the wayside again around here. It's springtime, and I've been gardening, traveling and keeping my kids entertained through two back-to-back, two-week-long spring breaks instead. So happy school starts up again Monday!

Spring comes mighty early in the southland. Strawberries are almost ripe already.

I've managed to fit some reading in. For my book group, I finished The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht. I wanted to dislike this book merely because the writer is young, good-looking and accomplished. But I'm bigger than that, really. So I allowed myself to enjoy it quite a bit.

I've never read anything set in the Balkans before, and I found the setting rich and the novel an interesting mix of modern life and folklore. I was a little disappointed that the modern tale wasn't more filled out, but enjoyed the writer's weaving together of mythic elements and modern ones, and would happily read her next book.

Blackberries are getting there, too.

I'm almost finished reading Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, which I'm enjoying as a romp through a dystopian America in the near future. I'm entertained but not mesmerized; however, I'm a tough audience for dystopia, as it almost never grabs me emotionally.


And here are some future lemons. I have no idea when these guys will be ripe. But it's my first fruit from this young tree, so I can't wait!

Sunday Salon--Donating, and reading

Living here in earthquake country, we've all been following the story of last week's horrific earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Here's a link to the Red Cross donation page, to donate directly to Japanese earthquake and tsunami relief, if you're so inclined. And here's a link to the Red Cross web page about disaster preparedness for your home and family. If it's not earthquakes, there's always some sort of natural disaster lurking, so best to be prepared!

I'm definitely reading up on this, and we are replenishing what we call our "earthquake supplies." One of the hard things is to store the one gallon of water per person, for three days, that is recommended to keep handy. The Red Cross list is a good one, and reminds me of the things we're missing in our family's personal disaster preparedness.

This weekend, when not glued to the internet looking at news out of Japan, I've read some of The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman, and I made a batch of blood orange marmalade. Yum. The Imperfectionists has been a roller-coaster ride of characters, some that I like and others I dislike, some I respect and others I don't, some I want to give a good talking-to, and others I'd like to hug. Another book made up of linked stories, each from a different character's point of view, I'm finding it a pretty compelling read.

Hope you have a peaceful, disaster-free weekend, and that you find some time to read.

Next Up In Group

My book group is reading Frederick Reiken's novel Day for Night for our next meeting. I hadn't heard of the book before the group picked it, but reviews call Reiken's prose "elegant"--always a plus--and mentions that the novel is like a group of linked stories. Our last book, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, was also a group of linked stories, each featuring a different character. Thinking about it, I realize I like this construction. Olive Kitteridge was also linked stories, and I liked it very much. And Joan Silber's Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories was (obviously, from the subtitle) constructed that way, and I enjoyed that, too.

Reviews of Day For Night also mention the underwater imagery employed by the writer. Makes sense, looking at the cover. One of the great things about belonging to a book group is the exposure to books you might not have found otherwise. This wasn't on my radar, but reading about it, I'm happy I've been pushed to pick it up.

What is your book group reading now? Did your book group ever find a gem you might not have found otherwise?

Post Valentine's Day Reading Update

We don't really celebrate Valentine's Day much around here. I gave my husband a funny card, and he brought me a beautiful bunch of tulips. I gave the kids chocolate, and forced them to share.

I finished the anti-Valentine book on Valentine's day. I bought The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, by Brian Moore, because I was looking through the recent releases of NYRB classics and the description was intriguing--and the NYRB Classics catalogue is a great resource for interesting books. This is a novel about a spinster in 1950 Belfast, and her sad and steady decline, and while I enjoyed the writing, the book was a little depressing for the traditional day of love. So I ate some chocolate.

I also recently finished Jennifer Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, for my book group, which meets next week. This is the first of Egan's work that I've read, though I've been meaning to read The Keep forever. I really enjoyed her writing. This book is a linked group of short stories that make up a novel, centered around two characters, record producer Benny Salazar, and his assistant Sasha. The book skips around in time and place, among loosely-linked characters, and the writer deftly switches up styles and voices. The big theme here is growing up, getting old, facing mortality--as time is the goon mentioned in the title. I wish I liked the characters better, or rather, was more able to immerse myself in their lives, but I found the book to be an enjoyable read. I'm looking forward to discussing this one with my book group. And eating more chocolate.

Did you read anything special for Valentine's Day? Did you eat any chocolate?

Room, by Emma Donoghue--a review

Room, by Emma Donoghue, was one of those books I was afraid to pick up because I had heard just a tidbit about it: the book was about a five-year-old boy locked up in a single room, and it was from the boy's point of view. I have a rule about not reading books or seeing movies that feature children in peril. The subject is just too disturbing for me, so that's my rule.

However, I kept hearing about Room--that it was a wonderful book, that it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and that it was really original. So I broke my rule and bought it (on the iPad--the first book I've read in that format, by the way).

I'm happy I broke my rule, because I really enjoyed reading Room. The novel tells the story of 5-year-old Jack, who lives in one room with his mother, Ma. The reason they live there is that Ma was kidnapped when she was nineteen, and has been held prisoner in a specially-designed 12-foot-square back-yard shed by her captor, Old Nick.

I was wowed by Donoghue’s ability to effectively communicate the feelings, language and world of a five-year-old who was born and raised in captivity, cut off from society. I was drawn in, not just by the tension I felt about the danger Ma and Jack were in, but also by the intricacies of their world.

Spoiler alert—I’m sorry, I found I just couldn’t talk about this book without revealing some major plot points. If you really don't want to know what happens in the book, read no further. But I don't think knowing what happens spoils the book, so...

The first part of the book is about Jack and Ma’s captivity, and the tension and sense of dread builds really well as Ma realizes, and we realize, that there is no way mother and child will continue to survive in this situation as it is, and they have to attempt a daring escape plan. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a major portion of the story takes place after their dramatic escape, when they have to adjust to “Outside”.

While I was fascinated by the way Ma had created a routine that kept her sane and her son safe and healthy inside Room, I was even more interested in their life after captivity. I was so happy that Donoghue didn’t end the book when Jack and Ma escaped, but rather went on to explore what it meant for Jack to enter a huge, frenetic, bewildering world at the age of five, and how hard it was for Ma to reenter that world after seven years of being held prisoner.

Donoghue is spot on with the voices—obviously of Jack and the immensely sympathetic Ma, but also with Ma’s doctor, nurse, mother, brother, sister-in-law, father, and new stepfather. Each of these minor characters adds layers to the complexity of Jack’s adaptation to the big world outside, and to Ma’s difficulty dealing with her feelings of guilt and sadness.

I was pleasantly surprised by Room. I'm glad I got over my difficulties with the subject matter and went ahead and read it. It was an intense read, but very rewarding. It was one of those books I just couldn't put down--I know I stayed up far past my bedtime to finish it, and that's a rare thing for me these days. I'm looking forward to reading more of Emma Donoghue's work.

Virginia Woolf's birthday...

Hello again! It's been months, I know. I've been busy with...just everything, and I neglected this poor blog. I guess I needed a vacation from something, so blogging took a backseat.

But it's Virginia Woolf's birthday, so I thought I'd post a link to the 59 Things You Didn't Know About Virginia Woolf on flavorwire. I didn't know any of these facts, and many are disturbing or just plain sad. But I can relate to number 14: "Woolf delighted in the physical act of writing words on paper. From the age of 11, she was continually experimenting with different kinds of pens in hope of finding one that would provide the perfect sensation." Also, number 27 made me laugh: "After getting married, Woolf thought she should learn some domestic skills, so she enrolled in a school of cookery. Shortly after, she accidentally baked her wedding ring in a suet pudding." Poor Virginia!

I'm also rushing to finish Room, by Emma Donoghue (which is short-listed for the Booker Prize, I believe). I was scared to pick this one up, due to the subject matter, but it's not hard to read--just the opposite, in fact. It's a riveting page-turner, and I'm almost finished...

Anybody else reading any page-turners?

Summer Reading for my son and me

My eldest son enters 9th grade in the fall. That's high school, people! Ack! How did this happen so fast? I'm not old enough to have a child in high school!

In middle school, he finally started to read books for school that were exciting to me. I was thrilled to read along with old favorites (The Outsiders, To Kill a Mockingbird), and to have him experience serious books (Night, by Elie Wiesel, Romeo and Juliet).

And this summer he's required to read two books that I haven't read, but I'm interested in. For English he's reading William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and for History he's reading Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, about Thomas More and Henry VIII. My son likes history, so this should be interesting to him (I hope).

How great, I can kill two birds with one stone--I can read two things that I somehow missed along the way, and I can help my son prepare for the school year. I'm a little optimistic thinking we're going to make a cozy little book group of two, and have lovely discussions about the book. But I will force him to talk about them, if it kills me!

I was happy (and surprised) when he asked me the other day if he could get a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Perfect, I think, for the teenager that he is. I can't wait to hear what he thinks.

Sunday Salon--this week's reading

I've spent the week immersed in Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters. I love Tanizaki's style, and the wonderful detail about pre-war Osaka life, and how the traditional Japanese culture deteriorates as the country modernizes and prepares for war. I am fascinated by how Tanizaki crafts a plot out of countless small moments in this family's life. It is one of those books that sort of sneaks up on you, and all its layers come together to create a delicate and complete picture.

I also had time to zip through another book, a memoir called If You Knew Suzy: A Mother, a Daughter, a Reporter's Notebook, by Katherine Rosman, the sister of someone I know. It is the examination of a mother's life by her reporter daughter, after the mother has died of cancer. The daughter sets out to interview people who knew her mother, and in the process create a clearer picture of the mother, unclouded by their complicated relationship. It's an interesting idea for a memoir, and though the descriptions of the mother's illness and death were painful to read, it was thought-provoking on the subject of mother-daughter relationships, and how we as daughters see and don't see our mothers.

I've also started Laurie Colwin's book of essays, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen. I've loved Colwin's writing for twenty years--I've read all of her fiction, but this is the first time I'm reading her essays on food and cooking, which she wrote for Gourmet and other magazines. I love Colwin's easy, accessible, charming and very funny style. I'm looking forward to getting deeper into this one!

What have you been reading this week?

Sunday Salon: old favorites?

My book group is reading The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki, this month. It's a book I read probably 20 years ago, and I remember really liking it. I've kept it on my "good" book shelf, the one where I keep classics or nice hardbacks, books I connected with in some way. How strange it was to open it up again and start reading, and find that I remember virtually nothing about this book.

It's like reading it for the first time. It's very disconcerting to me, because I usually remember something about a book I've read, other than just that I liked it.

I am enjoying the book, however. As usual, I find the marker for this is how late I am willing to stay up reading the book, even though I know I have to get up at 6 the next morning as usual. I've definitely sacrificed some sleep reading this book.

It's the tale of four sisters, part of an aristocratic Japanese family that has seen better days, in the years leading up to World War II. It is one of those novels that concerns itself with the details of everyday private life, rather than the grand, sweeping events of public life. And not only do the details give a picture of a bygone life in Japan, which I find fascinating, they also accumulate slowly to create a kind of realism that is really engaging.

The result is a delicately beautiful novel, a book that transports you to another world. I love the descriptions of the natural world around them, of the women's clothing, of their daily habits, of their intricate relationships with each other. This is a great example of a novel that does not have a traditionally strong plot that nevertheless keeps me engaged, turning the pages, reading past my bedtime!

So has anyone else had that experience--re-reading a book and not remembering anything about it? Or should I be consulting a memory specialist?

Booking Through Thursday--Influence

Okay, first of all, you might be wondering where the heck I've been the last few weeks. And the answer would be, "right here." But obviously not blogging. Oh no, not that. It's just been a crazy few weeks of kid stuff, including this:


And this kind of stuff:


And yes, even this:


But there has been little blogging. Fortunately, there has still been some reading, which I will get to some time soon. But now, a little Booking Through Thursday question for you on a Friday:

Are your book choices influenced by friends and family? Do their recommendations carry weight for you? Or do you choose your books solely by what you want to read?

And my answer is that my book choices are influenced by the friends and family I know have good taste! I have a few go-to book-loving friends and family members whose taste I trust and whose recommendations I really treasure. There are a couple of family members in particular who seem to read everything before I do, and I love hearing what they have to recommend, and what they tell me I can steer clear of.

What about you?

The Surrendered, by Chang-rae Lee--a review

Chang-rae Lee's new novel The Surrendered tells the tales of the intertwined lives of several characters, all of whom are profoundly affected by their experiences during the Korean War. First of all, there is June, orphaned while fleeing the Communist army. She meets American soldier Hector on the road, and together they end up the orphanage run by Sylvie Tanner and her husband, a minister. Both June and Hector fall in love with Sylvie, who is also emotionally damaged, after watching her missionary parents murdered by the Chinese in Manchuria.

I was fascinated to read that Chang-rae Lee got the idea for this novel more than twenty years ago, after interviewing his father about his experiences during the Korean War. Lee writes that his father had only spoken about the war years in the vaguest way before Lee interviewed him for a college project. The traumatic details of Lee's father's brother's death came out in the interview, and the story became the inspiration for one of the most powerful scenes in The Surrendered.

The anecdote Lee relates reminds me of many stories I have heard from the children of Holocaust survivors, of parents who shelter their children from the horrors of their pasts, and then at some point, maybe when the children are adults, finally tell them their stories--and it is shocking for the children on many levels. Lee explores this theme in the novel, too--he creates a character in June who has hidden some part of herself from her son, and that separation, that hiding, has colored their whole relationship, and made it dysfunctional.

This relationship—or rather, non-relationship—between June and her son leads to their estrangement, and then to June’s dying quest to find him in Europe. Lee is sparing in the details he provides about the characters’ motivations and inner emotional lives, and here it was sometimes maddening and sometimes haunting, as I watched June in her self-delusion, hoping for a reconciliation with a son who cannot acknowledge her, perhaps because he never knew her. There’s a twist at the end that makes the story even more poignant, but I won’t spoil it here.

I felt I understood Hector better than I understood June. Hector, like his namesake in Greek mythology, is a talented warrior and, because of the myths his hard-drinking Irish father spins, believes he may be physically invincible. But while bodily strong (and beautiful, which turns out to be a curse), Hector is emotionally damaged, and feels that he is a curse to others if they get involved with him. While June is more of a cipher, because she is so emotionally self-contained and defended, Hector is more openly wounded, and therefore easier to see into.

But overall, while Lee’s characters were very compelling, there were times when I felt I didn’t truly understand them. The writing is clean, steady, and often beautiful. I really enjoyed Lee’s prose style. However, the story is relentlessly tragic, and just about everything bad that you can imagine happening to these characters does happen. So while I recommend Lee’s writing, I feel this book is definitely for the stout of heart.

Sunday Salon--Book Group Reading

At our last meeting, my book group discussed Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids. I was planning to write a review, but after my group's discussion of the book, I must admit my thoughts grew muddled. I really enjoyed the book for several reasons. I liked Smith's voice, and I liked the way she was able to tell the story of her youth without judging herself in hindsight. I also liked the window she made for me into the New York art scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Smith lived at the Chelsea Hotel and frequented Max's Kansas City, and she got to know William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Allen Ginsberg, among others. It was a colorful time, to say the least, and I enjoyed the anecdotes about the city and the scene at this time.

But I also came away with more questions than answers after reading this. It's clear that there was much that Smith didn't want to say. The book is a labor of love, a eulogy and love letter to her lover and best friend, Robert Mapplethorpe. At the beginning of the story, Smith is a naive girl who comes to the city to live a life about art. Some of my book group found her naivete surprising, if not suspect, but maybe it was this naivete, mixed with a certain kind of fearlessness, that allowed Smith to become an artist after all. Mapplethorpe seemed even more devoted than Smith to the idea of art for art's sake, and Smith makes it clear that they both truly believed in each other as artists, even when neither was entirely sure what direction their art might take. Again, Smith chronicles their development as artists, and people, without judging with the benefit of hindsight, and she has a lyrical, impressionistic storytelling style, so there isn't a lot of self-reflection here.

Maybe because as a society we are used to post-Freudian, post-Oprah gut-spilling self-reflection to the point of narcissism, this book seems unusual to me. It feels like, perhaps because she is being respectful of her dead friend's secrets, Smith doesn't tell the whole story about Mapplethorpe and her relationship with him. She does, however, treat him and her younger self with an admirable empathy. I go back and forth, both wanting to know more about how Smith felt (for example, upon learning her lover and trusted friend was homosexual, and having their relationship necessarily change because of it), and recognizing that maybe there are no words for much of what was going on, and because it was a different time (and only nascently feminist) place, and because Smith and Mapplethorpe were making up their own rules as they went along.

Smith has an appealing sense of humor and self-deprecation. One of the best anecdotes in the book is about how Allen Ginsberg once hit on Smith, thinking she was a particularly good-looking boy. I would recommend the book for anyone interested in the New York art scene of the late 60s and early 70s--plus the photos alone are worth the price of the book. My book group discussion about the book was pretty wide-ranging--we touched on misogyny in the art world, feminism, the spectrum of sexuality, poetry and rock and roll, the allure of Paris, obsessiveness about Baudelaire--so even though there was disagreement about the book, it sparked some interesting talk.

We agreed to read a novel next time, and we picked Chang-rae Lee's new book, The Surrendered. One of my good friends really loved Lee's A Gesture Life, so I got hold of a copy of that, too, and I hope to read both before our next meeting.

Lee is one of those novelists that has popped up out of nowhere for me. I'd love to hear what you all think of Lee, if you've read him...