I haven't blogged about the books I've read recently. So here goes, in no particular order:
The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
My sister sent me this book and I've since lent it to two coworkers and just last week sent it off to a moocher on
BookMooch. Somehow I'd also gotten an extra copy and gave that one to Shirin. Everyone seems to have liked it a lot. I certainly did.
The 19th Wife is told with two separate but parallel narratives, each pertaining to a woman who is the nineteenth wife of a Morman man. The first portion is narrated by Jordan, a young gay man who had been abandoned by his mother on the side of the freeway a few years earlier because she believed that God was telling her to do so. Jordan never looks back and completely abandons the Mormon faith. Some years pass and he finds himself pulled back to Utah because his mother, wife #19, has been accused of murdering Jordan’s father. Jordan attempts to get his mother out of jail and in the process has to reenter his past.
The other narrative is the story of Ann Eliza Young, the 19
th wife of Brigham Young, one of the leaders of the Mormon faith. Ann Eliza has grown up in the Mormon faith but she has always been aware of her mother's negative feeling about polygamy, despite the fact that her mother is in a polygamous marriage. Ann Eliza is eventually coerced into marrying Brigham Young. After a few years she flees the marriage and begins speaking out against Brigham Young and polygamy all over the country, drawing negative attention towards Mormonism.
The stories, though parallel, actually intersect very little, but the modern Morman youths do end up learning about Ann Eliza Young and I feel it was a very clever and effective tool to tell both stories simultaneously. It's not difficult to see how the events in early Mormon history lead to the Mormon reality of the current era.
Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg
Someone left this book at the office and after sitting around for about a year I finally picked it up. I'm not sure I'm glad I did. There were moments I liked it, but overall I found it contrived.
The main character is Ann, a woman with few friends who finds herself falling in love with Ruth, a woman who is popular and seems (to Ann) to have a perfect life. When Ruth is diagnosed at age forty-three with breast cancer Ann basically leaves her husband and nine year old daughter at home to care for her friend. She even sleeps at Ruth's house at night, which I personally can't imagine a real person doing unless she dislikes her own family. There is also a close knit group of women that hangs out as Ruth lies in her sickbed, an odd group who you don't get the feeling would normally be friends, brought together only by their devotion to Ruth. Despite these unlikely "friends", Berg, who wrote this novel after losing her own friend to breast cancer, handles the topic of death with dignity and beauty.
If you enjoy reading about women and their friendships you might enjoy this book, but it wasn't my cup of tea. Talk was on the New York Times Bestseller List. Did they really think it was that good? Sometimes I think books that cover particular topics (breast cancer, refugee survival) tend to get higher praise than deserved due to the emotional load of that topic. What kind of a jerk wouldn't praise a book about such an important issue? Me.
by Mohsin Hamid (
5 stars)
I'd had this book on my BookMooch wishlist for over a year and finally got a copy. I
loved this book. It is so cleverly written. In my book club our November book is always a "grab bag" book, meaning we each enter the title of an unread book we have on our shelf and the title that's drawn is our selection for the month. I plan to enter this book into the hat (even though I've already read it. Shhh.)
The first page begins, "Excuse me, Sir, may I be of any assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America". This monologue style of writing is truly one of the highlights of the novel. Simply put, this book is about the love affair of a Pakistani man (Changez) with America. And as with most love affairs, he ends up feeling betrayed by the country he loved the most.
The novel is set in a restaurant in Lahore in which Changez engages an American stranger in a conversation over several cups of tea and a meal. He tells the American about his days at Princeton, which get him a job at a prestigious finance firm in New York city. As the top earner Changez feels that his life in America is like a dream. Then September the 11th happens and Changez becomes upset when America unleashes her furious bombs on Afghanistan. He avoids watching TV and as he puts it, prefers "not to watch the partisan and sports event-like coverage given to the mismatch between the American bombers with their twenty-first century weaponry and the ill-equipped and ill-fed Afghan tribesmen below." And while Changez had been happy with what life in America had offered him, he develops resentment about the standard of life in Pakistan compared to that of America as well as America's inability to see the reality of the lives of those beyond her border. As time passes he is unable to continue his successful life in America and returns to Pakistan. All of this he tells us through his conversation, no, monologue, with the American stranger across the table.
Before you think this is a depressing anti-American political rant, let me say that
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is instead deep, witty, and incredibly engaging. I hope this book gets selected so I can listen to my book club discuss it.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
This was a book club book. It was OK but I didn't pass it on to anyone (sent it to a moocher who wanted it) because I didn't like it that much.
The main character (also named Mario whose life is loosely based on the author's) is a college student in Peru who ends up falling in love with his aunt (by marriage) with whom he has a long, unconsumated affair. The family is kept in the dark for a very long time but when they find out all hell breaks loose and the two begin a journey though the country to find a priest who will marry them before they can be separated.
A large portion of the book is about Mario's job at a radio station and the engaging soap stories his Bolivian coworker writes. In fact Vargas Llosa cleverly intersperses the chapters about Mario and his Aunt Julia with chapters from the Bolivian's soap operas which are interesting at first but then awful toward the end when the Bolivian has a break down and all his stories begin to run together. I began skipping those chapters.
The girl in my book club from Turkey said she remembers her grandmother being glued to her radio to listen to her daily soaps. She really liked this book, as did the girl who just recently returned from a trip to Peru. I think Vargas Llosa is a good writer, but after about 200 pages I just lost interest.
Game of Thrones George R. R. Martin (guilty pleasure)
This is one of those books that Shirin and Gabriel got me interested in. I listened (on my iPod) to the first four books in this series which is called "
A Song of Ice and Fire", and the much anticipated fifth book will be out in a couple of weeks. The series was picked up by HBO as a TV series and the first season just finished. Next year HBO will do book 2 which is
A Clash of Kings. We recently watched 8 of the 10 HBO episodes, rekindling my interest in the stories; I broke down and bought the boxed set of the first four books. Recently I finished this one, book 1, and as much as I'm dying to proceed to book 2 I'm making myself wait till just before season 2 starts so it's fresh in my mind.
Because this series is complicated to explain and there are about a zillion characters I will simply give the Wiki link
here if you're interested. Let me just say that the books are very long, the shortest being over 800 pages, but somehow they end way too soon.
Digging to America by Anne Tyler
This is another book my sister passed on to me, in part because she knew I'd appreciate the bits about the Iranian family who are half of the story.
The story begins in the Baltimore airport as two families await the arrival of their new Korean babies. One family is the Donaldson family, American, loud, friendly, and over-the-top excited with balloons, stuffed teddy bear, and video camera rolling. The other is the Yazdan family, Iranian American, polite, reserved, well-dressed and quietly waiting off to the side with much less fanfare. Tyler does a good job of developing both sets of characters and I was amazed at how well she represented the Iranian culture and immigrants who attempt to adapt to their new reality in this country. She must have Persian American friends!
The families' differences don't stop there. The Donaldsons keep their Korean daughter's original name and dress her in Korean clothes. The mother reads books about how to raise children exactly right, feed them exactly right, which play groups are just right, in short, drives me crazy and unfortunately reminds me a bit of myself. The Yazdans change Sooki's name to Susan, dress her in jeans and T-shirts, and send her off to daycare. Nevertheless, the two families end up becoming friends and hold an annual celebration of the girls' arrival date.
For me the highlight is the Persian family's matriarch, Maryam, a widow who still looks good, takes care of herself, and exudes a quiet strength and dignity. She navigates the Western world with apparent grace and ease, and yet she holds herself away from getting too close to anybody, by instinct and habit elusive. Although she comes across to the others as being unsociable and a bit prickly, she is actually a very empathetic and helpful person; she just doesn't want to step on anyone's toes. Her character is developed more thoroughly than any of the others, and really, the novel belongs to her.
I liked this book quite a lot, enough to recommend it to my friend who is adopting a Korean baby this month, but I wouldn't put it on my top ten list. But remember, out of all the thousands of books I've read there are only ten in my top ten list. :-)
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