The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

Our end-of-the-year book club read was chosen from a selection of books from "best of 2012" lists. The book is a first-person narrative covering a year or so in the life of a 12-year-old girl in present day(ish) San Diego, as the axis of the earth suddenly and catastrophically slows.

I finished this book about a week ago, and I'm still not entirely sure what I think overall, but here are a few of my assessments:

1) The book is enjoyable. I found it an easy and interesting read from start to finish. I wouldn't say it was a very deep book, though. The writing and storytelling were straightforward. There wasn't much philosophizing. I liked the book, but I don't know that I'll be thinking about it for months to come.

2) This is not a science fiction book. Although the author clearly thought through the implications of the earth slowing, if you're looking for a book that gets into the hard science of it all you will be disappointed. In fact, I think that's one of the most interesting things about the book. The premise is apocalyptic and science-fictiony, but that's not what the book is. It's just about a 12-year-old girl, experiencing the shifting friendships and crushes and parental dynamics of a 12-year-old girl...just in an apocalyptic context. And the apocalypse in this case is slow (or at least relatively slow). The earth slows gradually, and the effects happen gradually, and much of life goes on as usual, with the changes manifesting themselves incrementally. This is what I found most interesting and most compelling about the storytelling.

3) I found the voice believable. I could see a lot of my younger self in the protagonist, and she seemed like a believably-drawn 12-year-old. It was also fun to see the novel set in southern California. It was very easy for me to picture. A lot of what I've read set in California is not set in the middle-class suburban neighborhoods I know, and I enjoyed the familiarity.

Overall, I wouldn't say this is my favorite of the books I've read for our book club, or the most discussion-worthy (although we haven't discussed it yet, and we always find things to discuss), but it was an interesting read and I enjoyed reading it.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

I was inspired to read this novel after listening to a discussion about the movie on one of my favorite podcasts. I had known nothing about Cloud Atlas except that it was being made into a movie, but from the podcast learned about its structure, and that it was probably better than the movie, and was intrigued enough to download it onto my Kindle.

And then about a third of the way in I finally figured out that I'd downloaded The Cloud Atlas - completely different book. Oops. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't what I'd been wanting to read and I had to go out and get the right book. I still haven't finished The Cloud Atlas, but I just finished the book I originally intended to read, and it left me feeling like I needed to process it a bit more, which can be a good or a bad thing.

After a night's sleep, I'm ready to give my personal assessment.

First a quick overview. Cloud Atlas is structured as six embedded novellas, with each story half-told until you reach the sixth story at the center, after which you proceed back through the other five stories and reach the conclusion of the first story at the very end: 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 4 3 2 1. The stories proceed forward (and then backward) through time, from a 19th century ship traveling the Pacific, to a postapocalyptic Hawaii some hundreds of years in the future, and each is written in a very different voice, and even style. On the surface the stories are mostly unconnected, except that each is also embedded literally in the other. For example, the first story is written as a journal, which is found and read by the main character of the second story. The fourth story becomes a movie seen by the main character of the fifth story.

I actually quite enjoyed the book. At first it felt a bit like a "should read." I found the writing a bit difficult, and it was hard for me to really invest in the first couple stories (and when you know that these are the stories the book will end with, it makes it hard to stay motivated to continue to the end). But the further I got, the more I enjoyed the book, and the more invested I became. And while I enjoyed some of the stories more than others, by the time I finished the sixth and began proceeding backwards, I actually found myself looking forward to the reading the second half of even the stories I hadn't cared for. I felt as though each story colored the stories that came before, and I returned to each story with a different eye than my first time around.

And I was impressed with the writing. Sometimes I have trouble with very intelligently and cleverly written books because they feel pretentious or unreal to me, but as difficult as I sometimes found the prose in Cloud Atlas, I didn't get mired down in pretentiousness. Mitchell brilliantly captures six very different voices written in six very different genres. It's clearly all coming from the same pen, but each story is nevertheless impressively distinct.

My main complaint about the book is that I think leads a reader to believe it is doing more than it actually is. When I finished the book, I felt like I needed to go digest it, look for the connecting threads that I had missed, to figure out what it all meant. I'd just been taken for a ride, and I'd thoroughly enjoyed the ride, but I felt like there was more than just a ride (albeit an intelligent and fascinating and thought-provoking ride). The problem is, I'm not sure there is more, or at least much more, than what I got on the first pass. Either that, or the meaning is so abstruse or deeply buried as to be invisible, or not worth the work it would take to uncover it.

In short, this is no beach read, but it's also not a slog (although it might feel that way at first). It's definitely not for everyone, but as long as you don't hold out for a grand, startling connection between the stories, and instead just let yourself be swept along, I think it's worth reading.

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

I picked this book up for 50%, maybe even 75% off at a Borders clearance, because no one else had claimed it yet, because it looked possibly important, because Bernard Malamud is an author I haven't read but feel like I ought, although I never felt like I ought to until I actually saw this book on the emptying shelves. It's a book that might very well have languished on my bookshelf thereafter, unread and gathering dust, but for after immersing myself in graphic novels and Stephen King, I felt the need for something that made me feel like I was reading literature that made me work. I don't necessarily believe that good literature has to make you work (or feel like you're working for it). I don't believe you need to run ten miles a day to stay healthy. But sometimes I like to get in a good ten mile run, and sometimes I like a bit of a reading workout.

That said, The Assistant wasn't exactly a slog. Actually, I thought it was a very real, very beautifully written book, and by beautifully written I guess I mean it didn't seem to try very hard to be beautifully written, and still managed to capture the inner and outer lives of its characters in all their complexity.

The story is fairly simple, covering a few months, maybe as long as a year, in the life of a Jewish immigrant running a small, slowly-failing grocery in a neighborhood of New York. A young Italian-American comes into the picture, asking to work as an assistant in the grocery, hoping to get a jump start on his life. The story revolves around both the inner lives of all four characters, and the relationships among them, and is incredibly rich and straightforward, and sad. I don't know that Malamud put great effort, or at least not obvious effort, into painting the scenery, but every time I picked up the book I felt like I could see the grocery, the small apartments above it, the street outside, the faces of the major and minor characters. I felt like I lived there momentarily.

The story was, in the end, more tragic than I had expected or hoped, but still did not end on a bitter note and leave me depressed. I found myself unable to draw a quick conclusion about whether I liked the book once I finished. This usually means I will decide I liked the book, because it means it left a mark.

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Speak is the story of a teenage girl (and I think it was written around the time my sister was in high school, so it's not quite my era but it's also not completely new) who experienced something over the summer that turns friends against her as she enters high school, and causes her to pull inside herself, away from her friends, away from her parents, away from most of her teachers. She doesn't stop speaking entirely, but she avoids it as much as possible, and for a long time there are few people to even notice.

I don't know if there was supposed to be a Big Reveal about why the main character of Speak (Melinda) has essentially stopped talking to her parents, friends, and teachers. If so, I guessed it long before the reveal was made, and so as awful as it was, it carried no huge emotional weight that I hadn't already felt as I read the chapters leading up to the reveal. I think the book is better for that, though. It's not meant to shock or appall, but to put the reader in the head of the teenage character and let the reader experience what she is experiencing. Anything Laurie Anderson fails to tell you until the right time is analogous to Melinda's avoidance of confronting the reasons for her own depression.

Speak is not a happy book, but it's also not an unhappy book. It's also by no means perfect, but it feels believable enough, and Melinda's voice feels real. The story drew me in, and as dark and difficult as it was to see the the character's story through the screen of her depression, the entire book is peppered with hopeful moments. It's very much a YA book, meant to appeal to a young adult audience, and it feels enough like a Big Issue book that I don't really feel the need to go read anything else by Laurie Halse Anderson. With Big Issues authors (like Jodi Picoult, for example) I can let them pull it off once before it starts to lose impact. But this book had impact. I wouldn't recommend it universally, but if you think it sounds worth reading, it probably is.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

When I was in junior high or thereabouts I loved Agatha Christie mysteries. The local library had a pretty extensive collection, and I read half a dozen or more before my interest waned and I moved on to other novels. I preferred Miss Marple to Hercule Poirot, though that was mostly because I read two Miss Marple novels before I read a single Poirot novel, which bred familiarity. And because I didn't know how to pronounce Hercule (Her-cyool? Her-cyool-ee? or something more French-sounding?). My favorite, though, was And Then There were None, and I practically begged to stay home and babysit my sister while my family went to a Dodgers game (not a hard sell) just so I could rent and watch the 1945 movie.

I have lots of fond Agatha Christie memories, and I've often wondered if her novels would hold up for me now that I'm older. So I threw a novel I'd never gotten around to into the mix when I was guest book-chooser for my book club, and when another one of my selections won the vote, I decided to read it anyway.

Maybe I should have chosen another novel, because although I'd never read Murder on the Orient Express, I had seen the movie, and I'd forgotten enough of the plot to enjoy the story but not enough that I didn't predict/remember the solution to the mystery before we got there. (I actually like being able to guess the ending of a mystery before the actual end, as long as it's not too obvious, because it makes me feel smart, but I also like to guess it on my own, not with the help of subconscious memories.)

In spite of that, I thoroughly enjoyed the read. It was fast, it was fun, and it felt like watching an old Hollywood movie (again, my memory may have been intruding). I'm not a big mystery reader, but Agatha Christie tells a good story. Had I been traveling, it would have been a good travel book. I don't know that I'm dying to clean out the shelves of the library again, but maybe I'll pick up another next time I have a long flight ahead of me.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

I wouldn't really have expected myself to pick up a book about zombies, but this was one of those books that I saw over and over again on the Borders "Buy One Get One 50% Off" table (once upon a time when there was such a thing as Borders). And in the wake of season one of The Walking Dead on AMC, I decided to give it a try. The Hypothetical Zombie Apocalypse is, after all, sort of the cultural phenomenon of the moment.

This isn't really a novel. It's written as a series of interviews (by the author) with politicians, ordinary citizens, soldiers, etc., in the aftermath of a zombie plague that decimates humanity in the not-terribly-distant future. Through the interviews, the story of the war unfolds but only in bits and pieces. There's no purposeful grand narrative - it's assumed that the readers themselves have lived through the war and already know the basic timeline. So since, of course, we don't, the timeline unfolds through a series of only somewhat connected anecdotes.

I almost didn't make it through the book. I was intrigued for a chapter or two, but then after 50 or 60 pages I kind of got bored and put the book down for several months before I decided to try again. I found the narrative device intriguing, but I had a hard time getting over the fact that each interview sounded like the same person (which they were, of course, because they were all Max Brooks), and the fact that no interview actually sounded the way someone would talk in real life.

But when I picked it up again several months later, it was easy enough to dive back in without rereading what had come before, and this time I got over the stylistic elements that had bothered me at first and found myself pulled in. I was impressed by the history Max Brooks created. It wasn't entirely realistic because, you know, it's about a zombie apocalypse, but it was amazingly intricate, and he managed to tell his fictional history on a grand scale through intimate and detached accounts. I was thoroughly impressed with the book. And I also wanted to know how it ended.

This feels like an uncharacteristic book for me to recommend, but it was just really interesting. So there you go. I recommend it.

Interview with the Vampire by Ann Rice

This sort of falls into the category of my going-back-to-my-high-school-roots theme, but this time I never read the book. Instead, it was the book that everyone (in my little honors English circle) was reading that did not, at the time, interest me in the least.

It was popular back then, of course, because it had just been made into a movie, and also because it's about vampires. Vampires are never really out of fashion, although the nature of the vampire genre is pretty fluid (see: Twilight). The interest among kids in my age group with Interview with the Vampire was spawned by the movie, I think, (which, incidentally, had been written long before the movie came out, before any of us were born), and it followed followed on the heels of their interest in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie) back in junior high. I didn't really understand, and until a few years ago the closest I got to vampire fiction was Bunnicula in elementary school.

Several years ago, though, I read The Historian, which was long and complex and eerie and enthralling. Then I read Twilight, which was fast-paced and hormone-y and not particularly well-written and fun. (But just for one novel. Not five. Sorry.) Then I watched seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV show) over the course of just over a year, which was awesome. And finally I caved and picked up the vampire book that first made me shun vampire books, but only because I stumbled into it while searching for something easy to read on my new Kindle on the elliptical machine during the cold winter months of not running outdoors.

After having read it, I understand why it was so popular. I don't know if I can say that I liked it, but I enjoyed it, if that makes sense. It was definitely intriguing. I felt like Ann Rice (via the narrator, the vampire Louis) tried a little too hard to hit the reader over the head with what the novel was about (the nature of evil, the complexity of characters, etc.), but there was still a lot of interesting stuff going on that made you think about, you know, the nature of evil, the complexity of characters, etc. And there was some good storytelling.

Awhile back I read most of a book called How to Read Literature Like an English Professor, not because I want to read literature like an English professor, but because the author had some interesting things to say about things to look for when you're reading. One of the chapters was all about vampires, and how books about vampires are really all about sex. I have to admit, this book more than any other vampire novel/movie/television series I've encountered (and admittedly, there haven't been all that many), made me agree with his assessment. Yes, even more than Twilight. The descriptions of vampires sucking blood (and they happened often, in great detail) were surprisingly scandalous. And I think what made them so was precisely the fact that they were not sex scenes. It may seem counterintuitive, but you can say a lot more in greater detail when you don't outright tell the reader what you're really talking about. As with any subject in any art form, metaphor can be a lot more powerful and explicit than outright description. 

To be honest, I sincerely doubt I would have picked up on this had I read the book when I was fourteen years old. But it's no wonder my peers (many of whom were probably much more capable of picking up on such things) devoured the novel. Of course some of them, I'm sure, were probably just reading for the story. Don't get me wrong - this didn't have the feel of a dirty novel at all, and it was certainly no paperback romance. The story was what drove the novel, but there were definite undertones, and that itself added an interesting layer of complexity to the story. In fact, overall I would say the novel tries a bit too hard to be deep and complex, and is at the same time a bit more rich and complex and thought-provoking than it seems after you've realized that it's trying a bit too hard. It didn't make me want to go out and read more Ann Rice vampire novels (she has plenty), but I feel like I did my cultural duty in reading this one.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

This was our October book club selection, and I kind of wasn't thrilled by it. We read Fahrenheit 451 for our first book about a year ago and for me it was a disappointing high school revisit, partly because in high school I loved Ray Bradbury. Also, I had read this book, years and years ago, and so far there have only been two book club choices that were new to me.

But I dutifully read the book. Actually, I put off reading it until a few days before book club and therefore I kind of speed-read my way through the novel. And on (speed) reading the book, I still wasn't thrilled by it. Ray Bradbury is a very flowery writer. He crams metaphor after metaphor into his sentences, to the point that it gets a bit exhausting and annoying. I don't think my issues with Ray Bradbury have anything to do with whether or not he was talented. I just don't care for his style like I once did. His style bugs me.

That being said, we still managed to have a great book club discussion. Ray Bradbury's style may bug me, but he gave us an awful lot to talk about.

Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem

A month or two ago I turned on NPR in the middle of a superhero-themed "Three Books" segment on NPR. I don't know why, but the paragraph-long blip on Men and Cartoons caught my attention, enough so that I went onto Amazon a couple days later to find myself a cheap used copy.

I really didn't know what to expect. Seriously - the blip told me almost nothing about the book. And I'm not really an avid short story reader. I'm not sure why I felt compelled to buy this. But I enjoyed it. I liked that when I finished I could go back and scan the titles and still remember every single story and the thoughts and emotions and atmosphere it evoked. I liked that Lethem mixed everyday with absurd or fantastical in very natural ways and in widely varying proportions in each one of his stories. I liked that he didn't write like he was trying to hard. Except for the last story. I didn't like that the book ended on my least favorite of the stories.

But I can forgive that. I'm not sure I feel wildly inspired to go read more Jonathan Lethem. Like I said, I'm just not really a short story person. I'm also not sure the book merited the powerful urge I felt to go buy it, but I'm still digesting what I read and rolling it all around in my head, so maybe it did.

Désirée by Annemarie Selinko

This book came to me as a recommendation from my uncle Jonathan. Although I picked it up on my Kindle right about the time he sent the recommendation my way with the intention of reading it eventually, it took some time before I finally got around to it. I have to confess that I'm not much of a historical fiction person. I can't really put a finger on why. It's just not what I usually go to. When I read the first chapter or so, I quickly saw that it was a fictionalized historical account of a young woman during the French revolution. It didn't turn me off. It just didn't inspire me to pick it up when I had other books waiting on my bedstand.

But over the summer I had some time on airplanes and in hotels, and it seemed like a good time to pull out my Kindle and give the book a fair chance. When the author put the fictional young girl in the path of a young Napolean, and them gave them a love story, it felt like a stretch to me. Napolean's a big name. I didn't buy it, historically. Clearly I hadn't read the fine print - it took several chapters for me to realize that this was a fictionalized book about a real person, Napolean's jilted fiancée Désirée Clary, who went on to have a rather interesting, high profile life herself.

I think realizing that this was a real person, but I real person I actually knew nothing about, was what finally drew me in to the story. I have to admit that I'm still not a historical fiction person. It wasn't my favorite book ever. But I did enjoy it, and I found it fascinating from a historical perspective. The French revolution and the campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte are important pieces of European history about which I have a surprising lack of knowledge, and it was kind of fun to learn something while I read. The book was well told, too. I could relate to the characters, and I was interested in their well-being and their story. So I welcome the recommendation, and I'm glad I read it. (Thanks Jonathan!)

Room by Emma Donoghue

Note: There are minor spoilers in this review. I don’t consider them book-ruining spoilers, and I wouldn’t direct you away from this page if you intend to read this book, but consider yourself warned.

I’d read a lot of reviews of this book before I picked it up myself. It earned praise from reviewers and readers alike, and while the premise sounds sinister (a man is holding a young woman captive in a room with no access to the outside world; her son was born there, and it is the only world he has ever known), I didn’t get the impression that the book itself was sinister. I did get the impression that the entire novel took place in that one room, though, and so when I first started reading I felt kind of claustrophobic. I found the first fifty pages or so very engaging as we got to know the space from the child's perspective, and to see how his mother had provided him with a surprisingly rich life within such an awful and constrained situation, but I didn’t know if I could spend 300 pages in that same space.

So I was surprised when the author suddenly removed the characters, and the readers, from that space only partway into the book. It was a relief, but it happened faster than I was expecting and I found it disorienting (in a literary sense). Since most of the first part of the book is spent setting up a world in great detail, you kind of expect that you'll be staying in that world for awhile. The narrator is the five-year-old, who doesn’t even know that a world exists outside the room, and Donoghue does a remarkable job of creating an authentic voice for the boy and his perspective is convincing. Removing him suddenly from the only world he knows is beyond disorienting for the boy, and so I suppose that it ought to be disorienting for readers as well. But it took me some time to get past the abruptness and to buy into the change. Maybe if I had expected it from the beginning I would have made the transition more easily.

Still, overall I really enjoyed the book. The book was less about the story than about the perspective from which it's told, and I thought Emma Donoghue handled the perspective incredibly well, if not faultlessly. To write from the perspective from a child without sounding too adult is difficult. To have that child tell a story that speaks to adult perspectives is more difficult still. And to write from the perspective of a child whose entire known world is constrained to a single known room, then thrust him into the world that all of us know and see what happens, takes a level of creativity that I really admire.

The story was dark at times, and sad at times, but it was also hopeful. I'm glad I read it.

The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales by Edgar Allen Poe

I don’t think I’ve read anything by Edgar Allan Poe since high school. I’m not quite sure what inspired me to pick up a book of his short stories, other than that I saw it, and it seemed to fit in nicely with my reread-stuff-I-read-in-high-school project, and it wasn’t too much of a commitment when my summer life started getting busy and I started reading less.

What I remember about my high school encounters with Edgar Allan Poe was that I didn’t think he was nearly as creepy as I thought he was going to be. I think maybe I was expecting ghosts and unsolved mysteries, but instead I got . But my conclusion the second time around, with both familiar and unfamiliar stories, was different. He’s creepy. Part of the change in my perception is that I read fewer Edgar Allan Poe stories in high school than I realized. There’s a gruesome double murder in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" that, while described with police report detachment, is as gory as any prime time television crime drama, but I never read that story in high school, nor had I read "The Pit and the Pendulum" or "The Fall of the House of Usher" (this was news to me - the names are so familiar that I just took it for granted that they were part of the high school reading list).

But I also think that in high school I didn't have quite enough life experience to understand what makes the skin crawl. Edgar Allan Poe's stories, with some exceptions, don’t require blood or putrefaction or the supernatural. They are psychologically unnerving.

But not all of them. I was surprised to find out that Edgar Allan Poe wrote more than just creepy. The first story in the book was a mock newspaper article written in the spirit of speculative fiction, and another piece later in the book could only be classified as humor, a bit satiric and not in the least dark. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" read like Sherlock Holmes. Poe's fiction was a lot more diverse than I knew.

Reading the stories made me want to know more about the man who wrote them. I read the introduction to the book (something I always intend to do with classics, but rarely get around to), and a month or two after finishing the stories I got to visit the Edgar Allan Poe memorial (and his grave site) in Baltimore, the city he claimed as his home, but I can't say I know much. Still, after reading this book I feel like I know Poe a little better than I did in high school, and better understand his place in literature and history and culture.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

A few months ago when the organizer in chief of my book club put up a poll for the month, this was my choice. Instead the members of the book club chose a different book that was long and unwieldy and got horrible reviews on Amazon, and which I quite frankly didn't feel like reading. So I didn't. But I kept this one on my list and picked it up not long ago and read it without the motivation of a pending book club discussion.

The novel takes place in New York City in the 1970's, and revolves around the day that Philippe Petit strung a wire between the Twin Towers and walked the wire well over a thousand feet above the streets below. This was what intrigued me originally about the book, especially after watching Man on Wire a couple years ago (a movie I'd highly recommend, although I'd warn anyone afraid of heights that there are moments that may make you queasy). Petit himself is never mentioned by name in the novel, although he is given a few small sections and a voice in the story. Rather, McCann slowly weaves together several narratives of other citizens of the city. They seem unrelated at first, but slowly come together over the course of the book while maintaining their individual voices and narrative integrity.

There were a few points in the book where I felt like McCann's prose tried just a little too hard, enough to be distracting, but most of the time I was impressed with his ability to jump from one voice to another, to inhabit such different characters. Some of the ways that the characters' lives intertwined seemed as though they should have been a leap, but they didn't feel like it, at least not to me. And New York of the 1970's took on a life of its own in the book. I could see and feel and hear the characters' surroundings. I was drawn in almost from the beginning, and I enjoyed the book quite a lot.

CAVEAT: I would warn potential readers that, being New York in the 1970's, parts of the book are quite gritty. There was even a large section that I skimmed because there was language and description that I didn't care to be reading. But it never felt unnecessary or gratuitous (and I've read books where it has).

The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

I hate to admit it, but I got bogged down in these books. After finishing the first, and starting the second, I felt compelled to finish off the whole trilogy before really diving into anything else. But where the first book was engaging and entertaining, in spite of not really being my genre, the second didn't hold my interest as well, and the third was just a slog for the sake of finishing.

It's not that I hated the books. I just didn't care the way I want to care about a book. It's not that I didn't feel any investment in the characters. I did. Just not a deep investment. It's not that I didn't want to know what happened. I did. But sort of in the way that I wanted to know what happened in the last book in the Twilight series (in spite of only having ever read the first book) enough to go skim the Wikipedia entry on it. I would have been satisfied with reading the Wikipedia entry for this one too.

I know that there are an awful lot of people out there who love these books, who feel like the trilogy finishes even stronger than it starts. I think part of my feelings might be that I'm just not familiar with the genre. I read the first book as though it were a mystery, and it kind of was. So I expected that of the second and third installments, but they weren't. It was about halfway through the third book when I was feeling resentful that we knew everything - what the bad guys were doing, what the good guys were doing, and all of their motivations - that I finally realized that I was reading the book wrong. It wasn't a mystery at all, it was a crime drama. Which is even less my thing than a mystery.

So I'm putting this out there as just my opinion. I might recommend the first book as a fast, engaging summer read, and for the purpose of knowing what all the fuss is about. But you can probably pass on the other two. But I did finish.

Silas Marner by George Eliot

This was a book club read, although I was out of town when they met to discuss it and didn't get to participate in the discussion. All the books so far have been great for discussion, but this is the first one since the book club started up back in November that I can say I truly enjoyed. Yes, there are a few criticisms I could offer, but it left a good taste in my mouth and I'd rather talk about that.

Silas Marner seems like a moral tale, in which wrong is punished and good is rewarded, and a quick google search on themes in Silas Marner suggests that "Is Silas Marner just a simple morality tale?" is a pretty common high school English essay question, which in turn suggests that the "right" answer is that, no, Silas Marner is not just a simple morality tale. I'd agree with that. My very first thought upon finishing the book was that everything had worked out awfully well in the end, but for all that I believe about complexity and ambiguity in life, the ending still felt right and I was very happy with it.

This thought led me in two directions. The first is that Silas Marner does have strong moral themes and the characters really do get their just rewards in the end, but it's by no means simple. The characters are not as complex as in some novels I've read, but they are not one-sided either. And Eliot tackles issues of class and industrialization and agency and community - the theme of reward and punishment is only one of many.

But the other direction that the thought led me was that the idea of "everything works out in the end" absolutely should resonate with me. It's true that I have certain limits. I've read books and stories or seen movies or TV shows where I think it all just worked out a little too conveniently. But my worldview, shaped and formed by my religious beliefs, is one where everything does work out in the end. It might be complex and messy and it might sometimes take longer than we hope or happen in unexpected ways, but ultimately I do believe that our honest and good but imperfect efforts are rewarded, and that our deliberate mistakes and unkindnesses do take their toll. I don't see any of this as simple or easy or naive. That "everything works out" ending to Silas Marner took years and years of the characters lives and there was a lot of unjustness and unhappiness along the way. Nor did the ending leave any guarantee that the future of the characters would be all roses and sunshine thereafter. But things were put right that needed to be put right, and I really, truly believe that of life.

I also think that most novels reflect some moral view. An author is creating a world, not letting a world come into creation, and has to set up implicit rules of "how things are" to decide how the story will come together. Even when the rule the author chooses is that there are no rules, that's still a reflection of a particular worldview. The implied worldview of a few stories that I read/watch/hear run counter to what I believe about the rules of the world I actually live in, but most speak to me on some level, and a few resonate so deeply that they stay with me for days or weeks or even years afterward. I don't know that Silas Marner is one that will resonate for years (like Cry the Beloved Country or Les Miserables, for instance), but it definitely resonated.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

It turns out I really had no idea what this book was about when I started seeing it everywhere and made the completely uninformed decision that I just wasn't interested. And as I started seeing it not just everywhere, but everywhere else as well, I started to think that maybe I should revise my decision. But I also heard a lot of mixed reviews - mostly that there were plot inconsistencies and some clunky writing, but it was still an awfully fun read. My book snobbery kicked in and I paid attention to the first part, but not the second, until my brother and sister-in-law gave me the book (and its sequel) for my birthday, and when someone gives me a book I can't not read it anymore.

So I did. And the reviewers were right. It's not perfect. I couldn't always tell if it was the writing that felt clunky, or if it was just the translation. Some important characters were more fleshed out than others. And when Larsson starts describing character interactions with technology, I felt like I had just stepped out of the story and into an Apple commercial.

But the story pulled me in. And like I said, the story was not at all what I thought it was. I think I was imagining sort of an action-hero movie in book form, but it's not. The main character (who is not actually the titular girl with the dragon tattoo, but a middle-aged journalist) spends most of his time in a small, sort of isolated Swedish town doing research. The story is really about about an aging tycoon who hires the journalist, Mikael Blomkvist to write a family history, and to secretly investigate the 50-year-old unsolved murder of his beloved...granddaughter? niece? grandniece? I can't quite remember, because the family tree is complicated and full of Swedish names, and while I had fun imagining that I was pronouncing all the names and places and phrases in perfect Swedish, it was also a challenge to keep everything straight in my head.

In fact, for that very reason, I had a hard time getting into the book. The action doesn't really pick up until about halfway through, and the first half of the book takes a slow pace and throws out a lot of complicated background information without giving the reader much help in sorting out what's going to be important to the story later in. But it works, and there's a payoff. This is definitely an airplane novel - it doesn't require too much deep thought or analysis or concentration. But it's a good airplane novel. Favorite novel ever? Probably not. But my interest is definitely piqued enough to read the next two books.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Speaking of things that were once new becoming commonplace, Wilkie Collins opens his novel The Woman in White by basically telling the reader, “I’m about to do something no one to my knowledge has done,” and then explaining that he will jump back and forth between different characters' perspectives as he tells the story. Wilkie Collins was conducting a literary experiment that he was pretty sure no one had ever tried. Now whether or not he was actually the first, I don’t know, but that particular literary device doesn’t seem so new and daring anymore. Everyone tells stories from multiple perspectives these days. I guess I'd never really thought about the fact that this must have started somewhere. And Collins didn’t just use the device haphazardly. He very carefully crafted a way to make the telling of the story from several different perspectives natural, necessary, and integral to the plot. The main character had important reasons to collect the accounts of other involved characters, and then intersperse his own account with theirs, in the forms of letters, journals, and even one long, delightfully annoying exposition in which a sinister character takes great delight in laying out the entirety of his dastardly plan.

I don’t know that I have anything much deeper to say about the book, but I definitely enjoyed it. Collins wove a good tale, but (okay, I guess I do have something deeper to say) I think the strength of the book was the characters, who had very distinct personalities, almost to the point of being exaggerated, but not to the point of being unbelievable. Some were likeable, some were unlikeable, some where a mix of both.

In fact, the only character, major or minor, who had no well developed personality was the main love interest. This was the only thing I can actually say I disliked about the book. She was beautiful and helpless and therefore the main character fell madly in love with her, while her cousin, who was plain, but intelligent, resourceful, loyal, pragmatic, and interesting, just accepted that her lot in life was spinsterhood. I kept rooting for the main character to suddenly wake up and realize that she was a much better match for him, but alas, the thought didn’t ever seem to cross either of their minds. I liked seeing a strong female character, but I disliked seeing that she got the short end of the stick in her society.

Still, it wasn’t enough to make me dislike the book. It was a good read. I have to thank my mom for this recommendation, and for giving me the book for Christmas so that I could actually get around to reading :).

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

I watched The Maltese Falcon (the movie) for the first time not that long ago, so when the book was picked for the March read of a book club I'm in, I was sort of intrigued...and sort of not. I'd actually seen the book in the downtown Ann Arbor Borders once and picked it up and flipped through it and decided that it was probably a dated, pulp-fictiony novel that was only still in print because it happened to be made into a movie that became famous.

And now that I've read it, I can say that that's kind of what it is. It reads like a dime store novel from the 1930s. The plot isn't terribly complex, the characters' motivations aren't well developed. There's mystery and snappy dialogue peppered with sex and violence and rough language (1930's style - it's pretty tame by today's standards), and while it was engaging enough that I didn't dislike reading it, it is a bit dated in style and tone. I found the movie easier to appreciate and enjoy.

I don't think it's that The Maltese Falcon is a poorly written book. I think there are a lot of interesting things in there (gender roles, the falcon as a MacGuffin, historical context, the importance of place) and our book club discussion, which covered some but not all of those, was long and interesting. But one of the things we talked about in our discussion was about how popular genres change over time, and how this book reflected that change. We talked about how themes and tropes and storytelling elements that seem trite or cliché originated somewhere, and weren't trite or cliché at the time. This book is a different read now than it was 80 years ago when it was written, and while it didn't really resonate with me, there was something historically and culturally interesting in reading it. I wouldn't go out and read more Dashiell Hammett detective novels, but it was kind of fun to read just one.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

I just like Neil Gaiman. I think I once had the impression that he was a very dark writer, and it turned me away from picking up his books for a long time. But while it's true that even his children's books have dark themes, he is also funny, playful, and a bit absurd. In my mental categorization of books, Neil Gaiman goes with Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, but he's darker than either, and his absurdness is not quite as over-the-top.

So Neverwhere didn't blow me away, but it was a delightful read. It was the kind of read where you skim over a sentence and then laugh two seconds later because you just caught the joke - not because it was obscure but because it was written in absolute earnestness. It was also the kind of read where you are surprised to find that events that seemed written for the joke or the play on words actually factor into the plot in subtly important ways. It was a quick read, which made it nice for balancing out my foray into Borges territory.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

I'm often amazed how an ending can make or break a book. I felt sort of lukewarm about Cutting for Stone for most of the read read (and it's a longish read), and as the book rolled around to the climax I still wasn't certain. But the very last chapter, the denouement (thank you 8th grad English!), really did it for me, and left me with a good, happy, satisfied feeling about the entire novel.

The novel centers on a medical clinic in Addis Ababa, which is located in Ethiopia, if you did not know this (and I'm a little embarrassed to say that I could not have told you this fact before reading the book). It begins in the 1950s, with a back story that stretches back a little further, and spans a few decades to end in the 1980s. The narrator, Marion, is one of two twin boys born to a nun who worked in the small hospital, who no one knew was pregnant until she went into labor, dying and leaving the boys to be raised by their adoptive parents, Ghosh and Hema, who are also physicians at the clinic.

The story follows Marion from his childhood with his brother Shiva, to his young adulthood as a doctor in New York, but while it might be considered a coming of age story, the story centers just as much on his parents, both his birth parents (largely absent from the narrative but important nonetheless) and his adoptive parents. In fact, even though they don't even enter the narrative until several chapters in, it is Hema and Ghosh who hold the family, the clinic, and the novel together.

The organization of the novel is interesting. A full third of the novel is devoted to the day the twins are born (although interspersed with backstory), and then the remaining two-thirds of the novel covers several decades. I thought this should feel imbalanced, and yet that first day set everything into place and the telling of the story felt absolutely necessary. Even so, my interest in the novel ebbed and flowed as I read. I was drawn in by the story of the twins' birth, but felt my interest wane at times as the story progressed beyond into the subsequent years. There were times that I felt I couldn't relate well to the narrator. There were times that the medical details were more technical than they needed to be (Verghese himself is a physician, and can be forgiven for wanting to teach his trade). There were even a few times that the story felt tedious. But there were also times when I was drawn in, or when the characters felt particularly compelling, and I found the historical details about Ethiopia in the 50's and 60's and 70's to be really interesting. I know so little about that part of the world.

So in the end, particularly after the final chapter, I didn't begrudge the 600+ pages (and it was on my Kindle, so I actually didn't even know I'd read 600+ pages until after I finished). I don't know if I would recommend it or not, but I liked it well enough that if you were inclined to read it in the first place, I'd say go ahead.