she treads softly

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

2012-01-17T19:09:00.002-06:00

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Crown Publishing Group, copyright 2010
Trade paperback, 381 pages
ISBN-13: 9781400052189
Nonfiction
http://rebeccaskloot.com/the-immortal-life/

Description:

Henrietta Lacks, a poor Southern tobacco farmer, was buried in an unmarked grave sixty years ago. Yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medical research. Known to science as HeLa, the first "immortal" human cells grown in culture are still alive today, and have been bought and sold by the millions. Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey from the "colored" ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to East Baltimore today, where Henrietta's family struggles with her legacy.

My Thoughts:

It's always a good feeling when you have the privilege of reading one excellent book right after another. With The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, a selection for a face-to-face book club, I am continuing my winning ways.

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot has written an intelligent, moving nonfiction narrative that tells the story of the Lacks family and the HeLa cells.

Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951) was a poor African American woman who died from cancer in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Without her consent, cells were taken from her cancerous cervical tumor at the free "colored" ward. These cells were given to a researcher who cultured them and created an immortal cell line used for medical research. The cell lines, called HeLa cells, have not only helped in vital medical research they have also made billions of dollars for the medical research industry.

Henrietta's family, however, knew nothing about this cell line and once they learned about the "immortal" and living cell line twenty years after Henrietta's death, they had a multitude of misunderstandings, misgivings, and apprehensions concerning what this meant. They also wondered why there was no compensation provided to the family for these unique cells that were taken from Henrietta. It is an ironic fact that while the HeLa cells have been credited with a myriad of medical advancements, Henrietta's descendents cannot afford health insurance.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a biography about the woman from whom this cell line originated but it also is about her family, racism, class, medical research and medical ethics. The narrative alternates between the personal story of the Lacks family and the scientific history of the HeLa cells. Scientific advancement and discovery is shown along side the darker side of unethical medical practices.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has won several awards, including the 2010 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the 2010 Welcome Trust Book Prize, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Award for Excellence in Science Writing, the 2011 Audie Award for Best Non-Fiction Audiobook, and a Medical Journalists’ Association Open Book Award.

As many readers know, I always appreciate it when authors include a few extras. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks includes a section on Where They Are Now, a note on the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, an Afterword, a Cast of Characters, Timeline, Acknowledgments, Notes, an Index, and a Reading Group Guide.

Very Highly Recommended - one of the best

Quotes:

This is a work of nonfiction. No names have been changed, no characters invented, no events fabricated. While writing this book, I conduced more than a thousand hours of interviews with family and friends of Henrietta Lacks, as well as with lawyers, ethicists, scientists, and journalists who've written about the Lacks family. I also relied on extensive archival photos and documents, scientific and historical research, and he personal journals of Henrietta's daughter, Deborah Lacks. pg. xiii

The history of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells raises important issues regarding science, ethics, race, and class; I've done my best to present them clearly within the narrative of the Lacks story, and I've included an afterword addressing the current legal and ethical debate surrounding tissue ownership and research. pg. xiv

There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her—a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.”

No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells—her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died.

Her real name is Henrietta Lacks.

I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever—bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. pgs.1-2

Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he told us. But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

“Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it,” Defler said. If we went to almost any cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we’d probably find millions—if not billions—of Henrietta’s cells in small vials on ice. pg. 3-4

The Lackses challenged everything I thought I knew about faith, science, journalism, and race. Ultimately, this book is the result. It’s not only the story of HeLa cells and Henrietta Lacks, but of Henrietta’s family—particularly Deborah—and their lifelong struggle to make peace with the existence of those cells, and the science that made them possible. pg. 7

Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment. pg. 30

The Discovery of Jeanne Baret

2012-01-14T15:51:00.000-06:00

The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe by Glynis Ridley
Crown Publishing Group, copyright 2010

Trade Paperback, 304 pages

ISBN-13: 9780307463531

Nonfiction
http://www.facebook.com/authorglynisridley

very highly recommended

Description:

The Discovery of Jeanne Baret tells the remarkable story of the first woman to circumnavigate the globe—who did so disguised as a man. In 1766, a French peasant named Jeanne Baret disguised herself as a teenage boy in order to work as principal assistant to the naturalist Philibert Commerson, royal appointee to the first French circumnavigation. The expedition commander, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, had no idea that the two shared more than simply a passion for botany—they were in fact lovers. In his memoirs, Bougainville reported that Baret was finally exposed by the natives of Tahiti, who recognized a woman where her countrymen had not: a version of events that went largely unchallenged for more than two hundred years. But three members of Bougainville’s crew provide a very different version of Baret’s exposure. Their unpublished accounts suggest that the truth of what happened to her is more brutal than official chroniclers cared to admit.

My Thoughts:

The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe by Glynis Ridley introduces Jeanne Baret, a young woman who was an expert in herb-lore. She posed as a young man in order to assist her lover, the naturalist Philibert Commerson, on French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville's round-the-world expedition from 1766-69. This is a fascinating account of that trip and the oversight history has dealt Baret - ignoring her contributions to Commerson's work, as well as her abuse during that voyage.

Ridley's The Discovery of Jeanne Baret is a well researched portrayal of what likely occurred during the expedition based on the few written documented facts available. Because a French Royal ordinance forbade women being on French Navy ships, Baret had to disguise her sex in order to assist Commerson. In her disguise, whether it was truly fooling anyone or not, Baret worked harder than many men and most certainly harder than Commerson.

Ridley points out that Baret very likely discovered many or most of the plants on the expedition. She certainly discovered the bougainvillea plant, which was named for named for the ship's commander. The one plant named after Baret during the trip has since shed her name.

While Ridley does have to make some assumptions, I felt like they were very likely accurate ones, based on the information and this period of history. Certainly it must be acknowledged that Baret's major contributions to Commerson's work have been largely ignored until now and, additionally, that this was not a kind period of time for women.

The Discovery of Jeanne Baret is not only well researched, it is well written. I would imagine that anyone interested in botany and historical biographies would certainly enjoy this account, but I also felt it is a narrative that would be very accessible to anyone. I know I thoroughly enjoyed this historical overview of Baret's life.

As is my wont, I fully appreciate that Ridley includes eight pages of pictures, an afterword to the paperback edition, notes and references for each chapter, notes on source materials and illustrations, sources and a select bibliography, acknowledgements, an index, and a reader's guide.

Very Highly Recommended - it's early in the year but this may make the top nonfiction list by the end of the year. I enjoyed it immensely.

Disclosure: I was given a copy of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret by Crown Publishing Group for review purposes.

Quotes:

For two years on board, Jeanne Baret had presented herself as a young man, using the name Jean Baret, and had worked as the principal assistant to the expedition's naturalist, Philibert Commerson. When an old leg wound prevented Commerson from collecting specimens around Rio de Janeiro, it was Baret who had ventured inland and had brought back the showy tropical vine that would be named in honor of the expedition's commander: Bougainvillea. pg. 2

Taxonomy - the classification of all living things, plant and animal, according to perceived "family" resemblances - may seem an improbable arena for a protracted historical battle of the sexes. But throughout the eighteenth century, women's attempts to engage in this male-dominated field generated a torrent of vitriol. The systematic exclusion of women from the field of taxonomy is so much a part of Baret's story that the historical silence surrounding her cannot fully be explained without understanding something of taxonomy's history. pg. 8-9

Even if she had returned to France with the rest of Bougainville's expedition in 1769, Baret could not have expected any public recognition of her work for the expedition: A female stowaway was a curiosity, but a female botanist was a breach in the natural order of things. pg. 10

But Bougainville overlooked the allure of the idea she embodied: that one human being, irrespective of the hand dealt by fortune, can have as much curiosity about the world as another. And that, like races and class, gender should pose no barrier to satisfying that curiosity and discovering how far it may take you. pg. 12

So what is the intersection between the world of the mid-eighteenth century Loire peasant and the gentleman scientist? Baret and Commerson came together at the meeting point between two views of the natural world: a folkloric, feminine tradition surrounding the medicinal properties of plants and the emerging field of taxonomy, which aimed to name and classify the natural world. Baret captured the attention of Commerson because she possessed botanic knowledge that lay well beyond the competence of his professors and mentors. She was an herb woman: one schooled in the largely oral tradition of the curative properties of plants. Herb women were for centuries the source of all raw materials to be prepared, mixed, and sold by male medical practitioners, and as botany crystallized as a science in the eighteenth century, a handful of male botanists did not think it beneath them to learn from these specialists. In this light, Baret was not Commerson's pupil, but his teacher. pg. 16-17

Baret was twenty-four and Commerson thirty-six. Though they did not know it, they had begun a journey that would help to redraw the known world. pg. 41

The Five

2012-01-08T16:11:00.000-06:00

The Five by Robert McCammon
Subterranean Press, 2011
Hardcover, 518 pages
ISBN-13: 9781596063419
http://www.robertmccammon.com/

very highly recommended

Description:

The Five tells the story of an eponymous rock band struggling to survive on the margins of the music business. As they move through the American Southwest on what might be their final tour together, the band members come to the attention of a damaged Iraq war veteran, and their lives are changed forever.

The narrative that follows is a riveting account of violence, terror, and pursuit set against a credible, immensely detailed rock and roll backdrop. It is also a moving meditation on loyalty and friendship, on the nature and importance of families those we are born into and those we create for ourselves and on the redemptive power of the creative spirit. Written with wit, elegance, and passionate conviction, The Five lays claim to new imaginative territory, and reaffirms McCammon's position as one of the finest, most unpredictable storytellers of our time.

My Thoughts:

I've been looking forward to reading The Five by Robert McCammon and I wasn't disappointed. The Five is a thriller that celebrates McCammon's love of music and includes in the mix an element of the supernatural along with the suspense. The Five are a struggling rock band following a brutal schedule playing at small venues during what will likely be their last tour together when an unstable veteran decides that their video is an insult to veterans and the members of the band must be killed. The murders will also serve as an example to prove his worth to anyone who wants to hire an assassin.

Before they knew they were being stalked and the first member of the band is shot, the members of The Five decide to write one last song together before they split up. Once the first attack happens, the importance of everything this last song symbolizes takes on a life of its own.

The Five is McCammon's ode to musicians everywhere. It is a study of human nature, the dark and light side of faith, and destiny. While the band members continue to follow their passion for making music and performing, they are also forced to display endurance, courage, and camaraderie as they continue on their tour schedule while working with the authorities to catch the killer.

The many readers who wanted another supernatural novel from McCammon (Swan Song, Boy's Life) may be somewhat satisfied with The Five even though it is not quit like his previous novels. Everyone should be able to readily concede that McCammon is a great writer and he deftly handles the development of both the plot and characters with ease. It should also be noted that at the end of the novel McCammon includes a long list of bands and musicians to whom he is dedicating The Five.

Very Highly Recommended

Quotes:

Nomad decided he would have to kill the waitress.
How he would do it, he didn’t know. But it would have to be done soon, because in another minute he was going to go off like that dude in The Thing whose alien blood bubbled and shrieked under the touch of a hot wire. His neck was going to grow six feet long and spikes would shoot out of his arms before he tore the room apart. The waitress was cheerful and talky. Nomad hated cheerful and talky. He wasn’t a particularly good guy, nor a very bad one. He was a musician.
Besides, he wasn’t worth a damn before noon, and here he was at ten in the morning sitting in a booth at a Denny’s restaurant just off I-35 at Round Rock, about twenty miles north of Austin. Everything was too bright for him in here. opening

“What’s your name? Your band’s name, I mean?”
“The Five,” Ariel said.
There was just the briefest of pauses, and then Laurie wrinkled her brow and cocked her head to one side as if she’d missed part of that. “The five what?”
“Aces,” Mike mumbled, into his coffee cup.
“A**es,” Berke corrected.
But Laurie’s attention was still on Ariel, as if she knew Ariel was probably the only person in this group who wouldn’t steer her into a ditch.
“Just The Five,” Ariel said. “We wanted to keep it easy to remember.” pg. 11

“One thing I’d like to ask, if I could. Then I’ll leave you guys alone. I’ve seen…like…musicians on stage do this.” She transferred the coffee pot to her left hand, balled up her right fist and did the heart thump and then the peace sign. “What’s that mean?”
Nomad studied her through his dark glasses. She was probably five or six years younger than she looked. It was the hard Texas sun that aged the skin so much. She was probably a little dense, too. Happy with her lot in life, and dense. Maybe you had to be a little dense to be truly happy. Or oblivious enough to think you were. He couldn’t help himself; he said, “Bullsh*t.”
“Pardon?” Laurie asked.
“It means,” Ariel said evenly, “solidarity with the audience. You know. We love you, and we wish you peace.”
“Like I said: Bullsh*t.” Nomad ignored Ariel, who likewise ignored him, and then he swigged down the rest of his coffee. “I’m done.” He slid out of the booth, put a buck down on the table, and walked out of the Denny’s into the hot sunshine. pg. 13

Everybody got a birthday celebration, that was part of the deal. Not a written deal, but one that was understood. Just as on stage, everybody got their time. Their appreciation, for what they did. That was an important thing, Nomad thought; to feel appreciated, like you meant something in the world and your life and work wasn’t just like a big busted-up truck spinning its tires in a mudhole. Like what you did mattered to somebody. pg. 14

Because hat was the sharpest thorn in this tangled bush where the roses always seemed so close and yet so hard to reach, and everybody in the Scumbucket knew it. How long did you give your life to the dream, before it took your life? pg. 22

And Nomad realized he would mourn this death, maybe more than any other. When I was running on all cylinders, The Five was tight and clean and everybody had their space. Everybody had their job to do, and they did it like professionals. They did it with pride. And thought the life was tough and the money not much to speak of, the gigs could lift you up. There was nothing like being in the groove, like feeling the energy of the audience and the heat of the lights and the pure electric heart of the moment. It was so real. pg. 31

A hit man could make a lot of money these days. But first he would have to show any potential employers how good he was at the job. It wasn't as if he didn't have enough experience already.
That band...with their lies...they shouldn't be allowed to spread their poison. pg. 85

11/22/63

2012-01-02T19:04:00.000-06:00

11/22/63 by Stephen King
Scribner, November 2011
Hardcover, 864 pages

ISBN-13: 9781451627282

http://www.stephenking.com/

Synopsis:

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.
Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

My Thoughts:

In 11/22/63 by Stephen King Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, is recruited by his dying friend, Al Templeton, to travel through a time portal located in the storeroom of Al's diner. When he goes through the portal, it will be September 9,1958. Al wants Jake to complete a task he was unable to do: prevent Kennedy's assassination.

There are two known facts about the time portal, according to Al. First, when you return from the past, no matter how long you've been there, only two minutes have past in the present. Second, each time you go back everything you've done before is erased so it's all back to how it was originally.

Jake decides to honor Al's request and change history. He travels back in time, calling himself George Amberson. Jake has motives of his own for going back in time. He'd like to prevent a horrific act of violence that occurred on October 31,1958, in Derry. Although it appears to be possible, obviously any effects from changing history are unknown. And it seems that the past pushes back - it doesn't want to be changed.

11/22/63 is not what many people would consider a typical Stephen King book. There aren't an abundance of supernatural events. Fans of Kings work are going to recognize many references to some of his previous books, especially those set in Derry. And, although 11/22/63 is a time travel novel, it's really much more than that. What about the Butterfly Effect? Can history be changed? What will altering a major event set into motion? Will love complicate Jake's mission and change events?

Clearly King has done his research. He masterfully set the time and place, which is clearly evident with all the little period details he includes throughout the story. All the details of Oswald's life are also interwoven into the story. He combines all these real life details into the plot, which is populated with wonderfully developed fully realized characters. The narrative seems very plausible because the people and the setting seem so real.

This is an excellent book by a highly skilled author. Had I finished it a few days earlier it would have certainly made my top list of 2011.

11/22/63 is very highly recommended.

Quotes:

I have never been what you'd call a crying man.

My ex-wife said that my "nonexistent emotional gradient" was the main reason she was leaving me.... opening

As for me, I only wish the former Christy Epping had been correct. I wish I had been emotionally blocked, after all. Because everything that followed - every terrible thing - flowed from those tears. pg. 5

If I'd known what the future held for me, I certainly would have gone up to see her.....But of course I didn't know. Life turns on a dime. pg. 14

“So,” he said. “You went and you came back. What do you think?”
“Al, I don’t know what to think. I’m rocked right down to my foundations. You found this by accident?”
“Totally. Less than a month after I got myself set up here. I must have still had Pine Street dust on the heels of my shoes. The first time, I actually fell down those stairs, like Alice into the rabbithole. I thought I’d gone insane.”
I could imagine. I’d had at least some preparation, poor though it had been. And really, was there any adequate way to prepare a person for a trip back in time?
“How long was I gone?”
“Two minutes. I told you, it’s always two minutes. No matter how long you stay.” He coughed, spat into a fresh wad of napkins, and folded them away in his pocket. “And when you go down the steps, it’s always 11:58 a.m. on the morning of September ninth, 1958. Every trip is the first trip. Where did you go?”
“The Kennebec Fruit. I had a root beer. It was fantastic.”
“Yeah, things taste better there. Less preservatives, or something.”
“You know Frank Anicetti? I met him as a kid of seventeen.”
Somehow, in spite of everything, I expected Al to laugh, but he took it as a matter of course. “Sure. I’ve met Frank many times. But he only meets me once—back then, I mean. For Frank, every time is the first time. He comes in, right? From the Chevron. ‘Titus has got the truck up on the lift,’ he tells his dad. ‘Says it’ll be ready by five.’ I’ve heard that fifty times, at least. Not that I always go into the Fruit when I go back, but when I do, I hear it. Then the ladies come in to pick over the fruit. Mrs. Symonds and her friends. It’s like going to the same movie over and over and over again.”
“Every time is the first time.” I said it slowly, putting a space around each word. Trying to get them to make sense in my mind.
“Right.”
“And every person you meet is meeting you for the first time, no matter how many times you’ve met before.”
“Right.”
“I could go back and have the same conversation with Frank and his dad and they wouldn’t know.”
“Right again. Or you could change something—order a banana split instead of a root beer, say—and the rest of the conversation would go a different way. The only one who seems to suspect something’s off is the Yellow Card Man. pg. 44-45

"You can change history, Jake. Do you understand that? John Kennedy can live." pg. 59

"Also, I'm angry. I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?" pg. 581

Best Books of 2011

2011-12-31T17:44:00.002-06:00

Best Books of 2011

It's time for my list of what I've read in 2011 and my best books of 2011.

It's been an interesting year. Due to a new job, among other things, my reading has been drastically reduced for the last part of the year. I've freely set aside anything that hasn't interested me, though, which made for more quality books in the long run.

Top Fiction - in no particular order. (If I put two books by the same author on this list I've just listed the books together.)

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz

In the Walled City: Stories and Emily, Alone by Stewart O'Nan,

River of the Brokenhearted and The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards

Doc by Mary Doria Russell

Perdido Street Station and Un Lun Dun by China Miéville

Ibid: A Life by Mark Dunn

City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer

Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum

Top Nonfiction

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

Atlantic by Simon Winchester

Strange Relation by Rachel Hadas

Inside a Cutter's Mind by Jerusha Clark, with Dr. Earl R Henslin

Packing for Mars by Mary Roach

Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett

Ava's Man by Rick Bragg

2011 Books:

98 books; 37,166 pages,

* denotes very highly recommended books

(book, author, pages, date reviewed, rating)

January - 11 books, 4,600 pages

*1. The Doomsday Key by James Rollins, 448 pages, 1/2/11, very highly recommended

*2. City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer, 704 pages, 1/6/11, very highly recommended

3. Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer, 352 pages, 1/8/11, highly recommended
4. Finch by Jeff VanderMeer, 339 pages, 1/9/11, very highly recommended

*5. The Lost City of Z by David Grann, 448 pages, 1/18/11, very highly recommended

*6. Ibid: A Life by Mark Dunn, 270 pages, 1/19/11, very highly recommended
*7. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane, 336 pages, 1/21/11, very highly recommended

*8. Strange Relation by Rachel Hadas, 240 pages, 1/23/11, very highly recommended

9. The Hunt for Atlantis by Andy McDermott, 544 pages, 1/24/11, highly recommended

10. Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, 592 pages, 1/30/11, highly recommended

11. Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe, 327 pages, 1/31/11, so-so

February - 9 books, 4367 pages

*12. Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds, 704 pages, 2/4/11 very highly recommended

13. Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds, 768 pages, 2/8/11, recommended

14. Ancients by David L. Golemon, 480 pages, 2/11/11, recommended (in series)

15. Leviathan by David L. Golemon, 368 pages, 2/14/11, highly recommended

16. The Pesthouse by Jim Crace, 255 pages, 2/16/11, highly recommended

17. Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell, 272 pages, 2/19/11, highly recommended

18. The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, 496 pages, 2/22/11, not recommended

19. Deeper Than the Dead by Tami Hoag, 560 pages, 2/25/11, highly recommended

20. Secrets to the Grave by Tami Hoag, 464 pages, 2/27/11, highly recommended

March - 15 books, 5101 pages

21. Gideon's Sword by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, 352 pages, 3/1/11, highly recommended

*22. In the Walled City: Stories by Stewart O'Nan, 170 pages, 3/2/11, very highly recommended

*23. Comes the Darkness, Comes the Light: A Memoir of Cutting, Healing, and Hope by Vanessa Vega, 240 pages, 3/5/11, very highly recommended
24. When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris, 336 pages, 3/4/11, highly recommended

*25. Inside a Cutter's Mind by Jerusha Clark, with Dr. Earl R Henslin, 240 pages, 3/6/11, very highly recommended

26. The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly, 432 pages, 3/7/11, highly recommended

27. The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, 288 pages, 3/10/11, highly recommended

28. Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez, 288 pages, 3/13/11, highly recommended

*29. River of the Brokenhearted by David Adams Richards, 381 pages, 3/16/11, very highly recommended

30. Into the Looking Glass by John Ringo, 366 pages, 3/18/11, highly recommended

31. Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal, 388 pages, 3/20/11, recommended

*32. Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, 334 pages, 3/22/11, very highly recommended

33. Feed by Mira Grant, 608 pages, 3/24/11, highly recommended

34. Georgia Bottoms by Mark Childress, 288 pages, 3/25/11, recommended

35. Deep Black: Death Wave by Stephen Coonts and William H. Keith, 390 pages, 3/28/11, recommended

(not counted) LaRue Across America by Mark Teague, 40 pages, 3/29/11, childrens book

April - 12 books, 4384 pages

*36. Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, 720 pages, 4/2/11, very highly recommended

37. Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire, 352 pages, 4/6/11, recommended

*38. Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett, 272 pages, 4/8/11, very highly recommended

39. Stealing the Marbles by E. J. Knapp, 302 pages, 4/10/11, highly recommended

*40. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, 272 pages, 4/12/11, very highly recommended

*41. Dark Places by Gillian Flynn, 368 pages, 4/14/11, very highly recommended

*42. The City and the City by China Miéville, 336 pages, 4/16/11, very highly recommended

43. Solomon Spring by Michelle Black, 314 pages, 4/19, recommended

*44. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, 360 pages, 4/22, very highly recommended

45. Death of a Chimney Sweep by M. C. Beaton, 247 pages, 4/23, highly recommended

*46. The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards, 377 pages, 4/27/11, very highly recommended

47. Juniper Tree Burning by Goldberry Long, 464 pages, 4/30/11, highly recommended

May - 9 books, 3138 pages

48. Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks, 306 pages, 5/4/11, highly recommended

49. Tabloid City by Pete Hamill, 278 pages, 5/6/11, highly recommended

50. Pitch Dark by Steven Sidor, 320 pages, 5/8/11, recommended

51. Zor: Philosophy, Spirituality and Science by J. B., 268 pages, 5/9/11, highly recommended

*52. You're Next by Gregg Hurwitz, 406 pages, 5/12/11, very highly recommended53. Exponential Apocalypse by Eirik Gumeny, 200 pages, 5/17/11, highly recommended

*54. Pulse by Jeremy Robinson, 336 pages, 5/20/11, very highly recommended

*55. Flood by Stephen Baxter, 496 pages, 5/27/11, very highly recommended

56. Rules of Betrayal by Christopher Reich, 528 pages, 5/31/11, recommended

June - 3 books, 1136 pages

57. The Sister by Poppy Adams, 304 pages, 6/2/11, highly recommended

*58. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, 464 pages, 6/7/11, very highly recommended

59. Embassytown by China Miéville, 368 pages, 6/11/11, highly recommended

July - 10 books, 3635 pages

*60. Ark by Stephen Baxter, 544 pages, 7/5/11, very highly recommended

61. Dry Ice by Bill Evans and Marianna Jameson, 320 pages, 7/9/11, recommended

*62. As Silver Refined by Kay Arthur, pg 356, 7/12/11, very highly recommended

*63. It Came from The '70s by Connie Corcoran Wilson, 260 pages, 7/13/11, very highly recommended

*64. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, 368 pages, 7/15/11, very highly recommended

*65. Doc by Mary Doria Russell, 416 pages, 7/17/11, very highly recommended
66. The Memory of All That by Katharine Weber, 267 pages, 7/20/11 recommended

67. The Ledge by Jim Davidson and Kevin Vaughan, 288 pages, 7/24/11, highly recommended

*68. Instinct by Jeremy Robinson, 368 pages, 7/27/11, very highly recommended

69. Meg: Hell's Aquarium by Steve Alten, 448 pages, 7/28/11, highly recommended

August - 8 books, 2965

70. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, 352 pages, 8/2/11, highly recommended

*71. Un Lun Dun by China Miéville, 496 pages, 8/8/11, very highly recommended

72. Valley of Day-Glo by Nick DiChario, 240 pages, 8/10/11, highly recommended

*73. Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz, 304 pages, 8/11/11, very highly recommended

*74. Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital, 401 pages, 8/14/11, very highly recommended

75. A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick, 291 pages, 8/16/11, highly recommended

76. Germ by Robert Liparulo, 496 pages, 8/22/11, recommended

77. Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson, 385 pages, 8/27/11, highly recommended

September - 8 books, 2991 pages

78. Kraken by China Miéville, 528 pages, 9/5/11, highly recommended

79. Model Home by Eric Puchner, 360 pages, 9/6/11, highly recommended

80. Carry Yourself Back to Me by Deborah Reed, 303 pages, 9/11/11, recommended

*81. Ava's Man by Rick Bragg, 272 pages, 9/14/11, very highly recommended

82. Love At Absolute Zero by Christopher Meeks, 312 pages, 9/21/11, highly recommended

*83. Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, 416 pages, 9/22/11, very highly recommended

*84. Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud , Dr. John Townsend, 304 pages, 9/26/11, very highly recommended

85. My God, What Have We Done? by Susan V. Weiss, 496 pages, 9/29/11, highly recommended

October - 4 books, 1552 pages

*86. Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King, 384 pages, 10/4/11, very highly recommended

*87. Emily, Alone by Stewart O'Nan, 272 pages, 10/8/11, very highly recommended

*88. Atlantic by Simon Winchester. 512 pages, 10/22/11, very highly recommended

*89. Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum, 384 pages, 10/29/11, very highly recommended

November - 5 books, 1520 pages

90. King Rat by China Miéville, 320 pages, 11/4/11, highly recommended

*91.Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel, 224 pages, 11/6/11, very highly recommended

92.Tunnel Vision by Gary Braver, 384 pages, 11/12/11, highly recommended

93. The Accidental Activist by Alon Shalev, 272 pages, 11/16/11, recommended

94. Rollback by Robert Sawyer, 320 pages, 11/20/11, highly recommended

December - 4 books, 1777 pages

95. Laughing Through Life by Connie Corcoran Wilson, 180 pages, 12/1/11, recommended

96. So Far Away by Christine W. Hartmann, 224 pages, 12/14/11, highly recommended

97. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, 944 pages, 12/17/11, highly recommended

98. Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston, 429 pages, 12/21/11, highly recommended

Micro

2011-12-21T19:24:00.000-06:00

Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston
HarperCollins, November 2011
Hardcover, 429 pages
ISBN-13: 9780060873028
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/books-micro.html
http://richardpreston.net/

Description:

In a locked Honolulu office building, three men are found dead with no sign of struggle except for the ultrafine, razor-sharp cuts covering their bodies. The only clue left behind is a tiny bladed robot, nearly invisible to the human eye.
In the lush forests of Oahu, groundbreaking technology has ushered in a revolutionary era of biological prospecting. Trillions of microorganisms, tens of thousands of bacteria species, are being discovered; they are feeding a search for priceless drugs and applications on a scale beyond anything previously imagined.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven graduate students at the forefront of their fields are recruited by a pioneering microbiology start-up. Nanigen MicroTechnologies dispatches the group to a mysterious lab in Hawaii, where they are promised access to tools that will open a whole new scientific frontier.
But once in the Oahu rain forest, the scientists are thrust into a hostile wilderness that reveals profound and surprising dangers at every turn. Armed only with their knowledge of the natural world, they find themselves prey to a technology of radical and unbridled power. To survive, they must harness the inherent forces of nature itself.
An instant classic, Micro pits nature against technology in vintage Crichton fashion. Completed by visionary science writer Richard Preston, this boundary-pushing thriller melds scientific fact with pulse-pounding fiction to create yet another masterpiece of sophisticated, cutting-edge entertainment.

My Thoughts:

Micro was being written by Michael Crichton at the time of his death in 2008. Richard Preston (The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event, The Wild Trees) was chosen by Crichton's estate to finish the novel. Micro begins with the mysterious death of three men. The deaths occurred after one of them had secretly investigated the high tech company Nanigen. Then it moves on to the main characters, a group of microbiology grad students who are being recruited for research by Nanigen. The group is invited to visit the company's research facilities in Hawaii.

Nanigen's owner turns out to be a deranged killer who uses the technology to shrink the grad students to 1/2 an inch tall. The grad students end up out in the wilds of Hawaii, trying to survive what is found in nature - things such as ants, wasps, centipedes, spiders, birds, and bats to name a few. All of the students are experts in some area that could potentially help them survive.

In the Introduction it becomes clear what Crichton was thinking when he started writing Micro. He pointed out that "...David Attenborough expressed concern that modern schoolchildren could not identify common plants and insects found in nature, although previous generations identified them without hesitation. Modern children, it seemed, were cut off from the experience of nature, and from play in the natural world." Additionally, he wrote that a lesson we all need to learn is that "the natural world, with all its elements and interconnections, represents a complex system and therefore we cannot understand it and can not predict its behavior. It is delusional to behave as if we can...."

The natural world can be full of violence. "What is it about nature that is so terrifying to the modern mind? Why is it so intolerable? Because nature is fundamentally indifferent. It's unforgiving, uninterested. If you live or die, succeed or fail, feel pleasure or pain, it doesn't care. That's intolerable to us. How can we live in a world so indifferent to us. So we redefined nature. We call it Mother Nature when it's not a parent in any real sense of the term. (pg. 126)"

Micro is a fast-paced adventure that will give many readers pleasure. The story was, at times, scary, silly, and suspenseful. It did bring Fantastic Voyage to mind, as well as a "nature of tooth and claw" version of Honey I shrunk the Kids, Gulliver's Travels, The Borrowers, and all the other books and movies featuring very small people. If you think about it, this really is a well-traveled theme, but that didn't make it any less enjoyable. It's a well explored theme for a reason. It's .

A case could easily be made that the characters were all one dimensional caricatures and not well developed. I can not criticize Preston's work on Micro because, to his credit, you simply can't tell what parts he wrote, but I also have a feeling that if Crichton had finished writing this novel, he might have fleshed out all the characters more, including the students, villains, and the Honolulu homicide detective, and worked on the plot.

In order to enjoy Micro, the reader needs to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the adventure. This would make a great movie. (I also appreciated the inclusion of a bibliography which I have to think was part of Preston's contribution.)

Highly recommended because it does have a few flaws, but honestly, I would say it was

very highly recommended when considering the pure enjoyment and escapism it provided.
Quotes:

In 2008, the famous naturalist David Attenborough expressed concern that modern schoolchildren could not identify common plants and insects found in nature, although previous generations identified them without hesitation. Modern children, it seemed, were cut off from the experience of nature, and from play in the natural world. Introduction, pg. XI

Perhaps the single most important lesson to be learned by direct experience is that the natural world, with all its elements and interconnections, represents a complex system and therefore we cannot understand it and can not predict its behavior. It is delusional to behave as if we can.... Introduction, pg. XII

From her he had learned that Nanigen was forty thousand square feet of labs and high-tech facilities, where she said they did advanced work in robotics. What kind of advanced work, she wasn’t sure, except the robots were extremely small. "They do some kind of research on chemicals and plants," she said vaguely.
"You need robots for that?"
"They do, yes." She shrugged.
But she also told him the building itself had no security: no alarm system, no motion detectors, no guards, cameras, laser beams. "Then what do you use?" he asked her. "Dogs?"
The receptionist shook her head. "Nothing," she said. "Just a lock on the front door. They say they don’t need any security."
At the time, Rodriguez suspected strongly that Nanigen was a scam or a tax dodge. No high-technology company would house itself in a dusty warehouse, far from downtown Honolulu and the university, from which all high-tech companies drew. If Nanigen was way out here, they must have something to hide. pg. 4

Rodriguez crouched down to look more closely, and as he peered at the hexagons below, he saw a drop of blood spatter on the floor. Then another drop. Rodriguez stared curiously, before he thought to put his hand to his forehead. He was bleeding, just above his right eyebrow.
"What the—?"
He’d been cut, somehow. He hadn’t felt anything but there was blood on his gloved hand, and blood still dripping from his eyebrow. He stood. The blood was dripping onto his cheek, and chin, and onto the uniform. He put his hand to his forehead and hurried into the nearest lab, looking for a Kleenex or a cloth. He found a box of tissues, and stepped to a washbasin with a small mirror over it. He dabbed at his face. The bleeding had already begun to stop; the cut was small but razor-sharp; he didn’t see how it had happened but paper cuts could look like that. pg. 7

"No," Dan Watanabe answered. "There wasn’t any blood in the bathroom. Means nobody went in there after the cutting started. So we got three dead guys slashed to death in a locked room. No motive, no weapon, no nothing." pg. 10

"Anybody doing good work in the fields that we're interested in," Vin Drake said to the students clustered around him. "Microbiology, entomology, chemical ecology, ethnobotany, phytopathology - in other words, all research into the natural world at the micro- or nano-level. That's what we're after, and we're hiring now. pg. 17

"But listen: if you talk to your brother, ask him why drug companies put up so much money for micro-botics, okay?" pg. 30

Peter said little on the drive back. He wasn't inclined to talk, and the detective didn't press him. It was true the images of his brother vanishing in the surf were disturbing. But not as disturbing as the woman on the hill, the woman in white pointing at the boat with some object in her hand. Because that woman was Alyson Bender, the CFO of Nanigen, and her presence at the scene changed everything. pg. 48

What is it about nature that is so terrifying to the modern mind? Why is it so intolerable? Because nature is fundamentally indifferent. It's unforgiving, uninterested. If you live or die, succeed or fail, feel pleasure or pain, it doesn't care. That's intolerable to us. How can we live in a world so indifferent to us. So we redefined nature. We call it Mother Nature when it's not a parent in any real sense of the term. pg. 126

1Q84

2011-12-17T10:47:00.002-06:00

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami,
Translators: Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel

Knopf Doubleday, 2011
Hardcover, 944 pages
ISBN-13: 9780307593313

Description:

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled. As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.
A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.

My Thoughts:

I have just spent the last three weeks working my way through the eagerly anticipated English translation of 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. The English translation of this best selling novel includes all three parts of the novels that were originally published separately in Japan. The chapters alternate between two characters, Aomame and Tengo, for the first two books. In book three the chapters follow three characters, Aomame, Tengo, and Ushikawa.

Set in 1984, or the alternate reality of 1Q84 (the Q stands for "question mark"), the novel is science fiction but mostly a story about two people who are drawn into an alternate reality and, eventually, begin searching for each other. Aomame is a physical trainer and assassin. Tengo is a math teacher and writer. Aomame enters the alternate reality while on her way to a planned assassination. Tengo enters it after he accepts the assignment of rewriting Air Chrysalis, the debut novel of a young writer. At the beginning, the stories of Aomame and Tengo are separate. About halfway through the novel we learn of their connection and the stories begin to join together.

1Q84 explores the nature of reality - how one's perspective can alter reality and how events are viewed. What is reality for you may not be for someone else. We may all be living in parallel universes, pursuing personal meaning in our own lives. It also explores fate, powerlessness, fringe religious groups, free will, domestic violence, and vengeance.

I'll admit, at the conclusion, to mixed feelings about 1Q84. With the entire pre-publication buzz surrounding 1Q84, I was looking forward to an alternate reality science fiction novel. While it fits that description, it also is filled to a much greater extent with the trivialities of everyday life in the alternate reality, and those mundane activities are very much the same activities we would all encounter. There were tantalizing bits of surreal information disclosed and then pages of the banal activities of the everyday life of the characters.

While I read all 900+ pages during some very busy weeks, it soon became clear that 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami is not really that complex, but it is a very long novel. This feeling that it is excessively lengthy could be because it was originally published as three novels in Japan but one very large novel here. The repetition of information and descriptions makes the novel feel overly wordy when the three books are published as one novel.

In the end I liked 1Q84, but it is not the novel of the year that I was looking forward to reading.

Highly Recommended - when you have the time and patience to tackle it.

Quotes

Aomame:

The taxi's radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janaìcek's Sinfonietta—probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn't seem to be listening very closely, either. opening

Aomame loved history as much as she loved sports. She rarely read fiction, but history books could keep her occupied for hours. What she liked about history was the way all its facts were linked with particular dates and places. pg. 3

"Aomame" was her real name. Her grandfather on her father's side came from some little mountain town or village in Fukushima Prefecture, where there were supposedly a number of people who bore the name, written with exactly the same characters as the word for "green peas" and pronounced with the same four syllables, "Ah-oh-mah-meh." pg. 4

"And also," the driver said, facing the mirror, "please remember: things are not what they seem."
Things are not what they seem, Aomame repeated mentally. "What do you mean by that?" she asked with knitted brows.
The driver chose his words carefully: "It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. Am I right? People do not ordinarily climb down the emergency stairs of the Metropolitan Expressway in the middle of the day—especially women."
"I suppose you're right."
"Right. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality." pg. 9

At some point in time, the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place. Like the switching of a track. In other words, my mind, here and now, belongs to the world that was, but the world itself has already changed into something else. pg. 106

1Q84 - that's what I'll call this new world, Aomame decided.
Q is for "question mark." A world that bears a question. pg. 110

We think we’re choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everything's decided in advance and we pretend we’re making choices. Free will may be an illusion. pg. 192

... and still these despicable fakes continue to thrive. That is because most people believe not so much in truth as in things they wish were the truth. Their eyes may be wide open, but they don't see a thing. pg. 244

Tengo:

Or was this simply a false memory of Tengo's? Was it just something that his mind had later decided - for whatever purpose or plan - to make up on its own? pg. 13

Tengo did not know for certain whether he wanted to be a professional novelist, nor was he sure he had the talent to write fiction. What he did know was that he could not help spending a large part of everyday writing fiction. To him, writing was like breathing. pg. 21

"...You, on the other hand, know how to write. Your story lines are good. You have taste. You may be built like a lumberjack, but you write with intelligence and sensitivity. And real power. Unlike Fuka-Eri, though, you still haven't grasped exactly what it is you want to write about." pg. 24

He still could not tell, though, how seriously he should take her. There was something out of the ordinary about her, a screw slightly loose. It was an inborn quality, perhaps. He might be in the presence of an authentic talent in its most natural form, or it could all be an act. Intelligent teenagers were often instinctively theatrical, purposefully eccentric, mouthing highly suggestive words to confuse people. He has seen a number of such cases when it was impossible to distinguish the real thing from acting. Tengo decided to bring the conversation back to reality - or, at least, something closer to reality. pg. 50-51

So Far Away

2011-12-14T07:00:00.002-06:00

So Far Away: A Daughter's Memoir of Life, Loss, and Love

by Christine W. Hartmann
Vanderbilt University Press; November 18, 2011
Trade Paperback, 224 pages

ISBN-13: 9780826517968
http://www.chartmannbooks.com/cwh2/Welcome.html

Description:

Christine Hartmann's mother valued control above all else, yet one event appeared beyond her command: the timing of her own death. Not to be denied there either, two decades in advance Irmgard Hartmann chose the date on which to end her life. And her next step was to tell her daughter all about it. For twenty years, Irmgard maintained an unwavering goal, to commit suicide at age seventy. She managed her chronic hypertension, stayed healthy and active, and lived life to the fullest. Meanwhile, Christine fought desperately against the decision. When Irmgard wouldn't listen, the only way to remain part of her life was for Christine to swallow her mother's plans--hook, line, and sinker.
Christine's father, as it turned out, prepared too slowly for old age. Before he had made any decision, fate disabled him through a series of strokes. Confined to a nursing home, severely impaired by dementia and frustrated by his circumstances, his life epitomized the predicament her mother wanted to avoid.
So Far Away gives us an intimate view of a person interacting with and reacting to her parents at the ends of their lives. In a richly detailed, poignant story of family members' separate yet interwoven journeys, it underscores the complexities and opportunities that life presents each one of us.

My Thoughts:

So Far Away: A Daughter's Memoir of Life, Loss, and Love by Christine W. Hartmann is a heart wrenchingly personal and honest account of the last years of the author's parents lives and how she handled their deaths. Her parents approached their eventual decline and demise in dramatically different ways. Christina's mother did not want to become a burden on anyone so she planned to commit suicide by age 70. But, inexplicably, she let Christine know about her plan twenty years before this. Her father wanted to enjoy his life as long as possible and he put off his plans to move into a retirement community as long as possible. In fact he put it off too long.

Losing your parents is difficult no matter what the circumstances are, and it is something that most of us will face at some point. So Far Away is a very personal, introspective, and honest record of how Christine Hartmann handled the very different deaths of her parents and her emotional turmoil at that time. Sharing her story and the struggles she had opens up the discussion for all of us to prepare to form our own opinions about how we are going to approach grief and loss.

It was perhaps more difficult for me to read about her mother's planned suicide and I found it almost unbelievable that a parent in their mid-50's would tell a child, in her 20's, that they are planning their suicide before they reach age 70. It seems such a heartless thing to do... especially to then, subsequently, expect your child to support your decision. It was an unbelievable burden to place on anyone. Perhaps that is because I know that I, and I would think most of us, will be more like her father, trying to live our lives to the fullest as long as possible.

There is one major difference between how Hartmann approached the death of her parents and how I know I will approach the death of my parents and, eventually, my own death: I have a strong Christian faith. I would never consider, as Hartmann's mother did, throwing away something as precious as the gift of life. Having a faith and belief in something higher than yourself actually gives you strength every day to handle things that seem impossible.

This is a extremely well written memoir. It is profound and genuine. It is not light hearted or easy to read. The situations and emotions within are very real and sometimes raw. It is such an honest account that even though it's not an easy book to read, it is most certainly a worthwhile book to read. Certainly, if you have aging or elderly parents, you will sympathize with Christine and her emotional turmoil during several very difficult years.

Be sure to read the introduction quoted below.

Very Highly Recommended

Christine W. Hartmann, Research Health Scientist, ENR Memorial Veterans Hospital, Bedford, Massachusetts, and Assistant Professor, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, received her PhD at the Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. She has published numerous articles on healthcare quality improvement, focusing particularly on long-term care.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book for review purposes.

Christine W. Hartmann’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Monday, November 21st: Peeking Between the Pages

Wednesday, November 23rd: I Am A Reader, Not A Writer – author Q&A

Thursday, November 24th: Life in Review

Monday, November 28th: Boarding in My Forties

Tuesday, November 29th: Book Hounds

Wednesday, November 30th: Colloquium

Thursday, December 1st: Acting Balanced

Monday, December 5th: The Lost Entwife

Wednesday, December 7th: Patricia’s Wisdom

Monday, December 12th: Book Dilettante

Tuesday, December 13th: Luxury Reading

Wednesday, December 14th: She Treads Softly

Quote:

Vanderbilt University Press ; The Introduction from So Far Away, pages xi - xiii

"Parents encourage or discourage, praise or scold, remain silent or yell, and yet despite these influences, children grow up to have their own unique quirks and personality traits. In part, we become who we are to protect ourselves from the people we love who can hurt us. I didn’t quite grow up the way my parents expected. But by their own admission, they didn’t fulfill all their parents’ expectations either. Neither did their parents... and so on.

"My mother always wondered how she raised a daughter who enjoyed hugging so much. She never liked long embraces with anyone over the age of four. I could never get enough of them. I lived as a young adult in a very conservative rural area where physical affection was traditionally avoided, and I suffered severe withdrawal from lack of contact. I even took up martial arts as a hobby partially because it allowed me just to touch someone. Periodic sprains and fractures seemed a small price to pay.

"It just goes to show that not everything turns out as planned. At least, that has been a central theme in my adult life. Nothing prepared me for the radical but methodical approach my mother took toward her own aging. Or
not aging, which was actually her point. I’m not talking about plastic surgery to lift her chin or the daily consumption of a bowl of oat bran. She intended to implement a more aggressive strategy for dealing with the uncertainty of growing old. And I rebelled against her in an extraordinary battle of wills.

"My father, on the other hand, always avoided setting a detailed agenda for his senior years. He lived in the moment, never looking far ahead, and we both anticipated his easy and pleasant retirement. But a series of sudden, apocalyptic events derailed his dream and both our lives.

"My parents emigrated to the United States from Germany in the late 1950s. They met here, and my brother and I were born in Toledo, Ohio. Approximately ten years after they married, they divorced. Both entered their sixties in relatively good health, except that my mother had chronic high blood pressure and my father had high cholesterol.

"The true story I tell here (I have sometimes changed names of individuals and locations) focuses on my parents as they neared the ends of their lives—the time between 2003 and 2008. During these years my mother determinedly put in motion the plan she had hatched decades earlier, and I shouldered the burden of my father’s rapidly deteriorating life.

"Despite describing my parents in detail, this book is chiefly a narrative about me. I originally intended to tell
their tales, from their perspectives. I did not get far with that, before having to interject fiction, assumption, repetition, and sheer fantasy into the mix. So instead I recount here, in my own voice, what I know best: myself, and how I reacted to experiences my parents and I shared.

"Our family issues in many respects mirror those faced by most people. We had our measure of dysfunction; each of us carried some emotional baggage passed down from previous generations; we grieved deeply and loved as best we could; and we feared losing each other and losing the structure of life that bound us together. If you identify with some elements of this story, be kind to yourself as you read.

"Sometimes we think we know how things are going to turnout - a drive to the grocery store, next year’s vacation, the book lying on the bedside table. They all seem so predictable. And having a predictable ending can make the entire process more enjoyable, or at least more comforting.

"But sometimes the process itself, not the foreseeable consequences, sets the tone, allows for change, and provides new opportunities for growth. My parents’ final journeys were not easy, for them or for me. Yet each of us achieved a large measure of personal growth in the process, despite the suffering, and perhaps even because of it.

"We all face permanent loss in our lives - loss of parents, loss of other relatives, loss of close friends. The process wrenches our souls, but it also reveals them. In this book I tell a personal story, but I believe the lessons are collective. When the time comes to deal with inevitable loss, solace and companionship may be found within these pages."

Guest Post by Connie Corcoran Wilson

2011-12-02T07:00:00.001-06:00

Connie Corcoran Wilson, author of Laughing Through Life and It Came From the 70's, addresses the importance of laughing your way through a stressful time:

"And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep." (LaBruyere and Beaumarchais)

In 2003 my mother, then 94, began the long slow fade to black that comes for each of us. She was still of sound mind, but she had a series of small strokes which robbed her of the ability to play bridge (her passion), and it was quite clear to me, her youngest daughter, that she was fading fast. In fact, it had become clear to me that the end was near since Thanksgiving.

Later, nursing home personnel told me it was only my son's wedding and the festivities that surrounded it that kept Mom alive six more months. I was hosting a "welcome to the community" party for the bride and groom. They had married in Matamoros and none of our Midwestern friends would be able to attend the ceremony, so a full-on party was planned, a mini-wedding reception, complete with gowns and cakes and flowers.

I carried in various outfits from the nearby shopping mall for mother to try on (over her strenuous objections that she could simply wear an old velour jogging suit I had once given her for Christmas). The preparations to bring her to the party, 60 miles away, for the evening, even though wheelchair-bound, were many and numerous. I even purchased a giant 52" TV screen (the pre-plasma behemoths) that would replay the actual ceremony in a continuous loop. Mom would be able to see her second (of four) grandchildren being married on this large television set, (contingent upon the store being willing to re-deliver the same TV set to my house after the party was over at no additional fee, which they agreed to do.)

I urged my sister to come with me to visit Mom on Mother's Day in the nursing home where she had resided for 5 years (a necessity imposed by her need for constant medical monitoring for her 4-shots-a-day brittle diabetes.) My 4-years-older sister, who could often be as blank as the proverbial fart, said, "Let's wait until her birthday."

My mother's birthday was May 31st.

I remember saying to my completely oblivious older sister, "Kay, she won't make it to May 31st."

And she didn't.

My mother died May 2, 2003 and we buried her on May 4, 2003. I had begun divesting of my businesses, my responsibilities, my very life, in order to be by her side to be able take care of her and, after that, to be able to take care of estate matters when she was gone---something I never really ever believed would actually happen before she hit 100, as my mother was an indomitable force. (My father died in 1986).

I sold my two businesses (Sylvan Learning Center #3301 and the Prometric Testing Center), businesses I had founded, two months to the day before Mom died, on March 2, 2003.

I remember asking her, on the final day of her life, as she received oxygen and faded in and out of consciousness and I held her hand, witnessing her losing the battle that I had always felt quite sure she would not lose until at least the ripe old age of 100, "What was the favorite city on Earth you ever visited?"

She was very weak, almost to the point of being unable to converse, but she was lucid. She looked at me and said, "Anywhere your father was. And Iowa City."

Mom died in Iowa City, where she had moved over some objections from her children at the age of 82, after an entire lifetime spent in the small northeast Iowa town of Independence, a life spent teaching kindergarteners while my father worked in the bank he had founded. She slipped away in the early hours of the morning to join her husband of five decades.

While my father's death had come at a time when I was expecting a baby and had just launched a new business, my mother's death came when I had dropped everything else in my life, primarily to care for her. In the process of doing so, I had severed ties with my entire support network of colleagues and co-workers and customers.

My husband, recently retired, was doing taxes for H&R Block. I was at home, alone, for long hours, in what seemed like a very cold house. I later learned that the furnace was broken; it took me the better part of a week wearing a parka and gloves in the house and seeing my own breath in front of me to convince my husband that there really was something wrong with the furnace. (It turned out that it was only blowing out cold air.)

What could I do to cheer myself up? Depression was one silly millimeter away?

I dug out the humor columns I had written for a local paper in happier times, when I was a young mother, a young teacher, a budding entrepreneur. I added poetry sold, pictures, my lasagna recipe. (Nobody knew what to make of this book, when it was finished, and I imagined it only as a gift for friends and family, like those ubiquitous calendars that you make as gifts at the holiday season.) I fashioned anything I had ever sold into my second book Both Sides Now. (A few of those columns have made their way, again, into Laughing through Life, but much more of the book is new or the product of online blogs for which I have written).

I found that, as I revisited the silly or the ridiculous or the happy times represented in those columns, my mood rose. Eventually, I sent the columns and pictures off to be published. I did not know this at the time, but this marked the beginning of my "writing long" career. A lifetime hobby had turned into a time-consuming second career as a writer and publisher.

Without humor, for me there is no quality of life. And, in life, even in the grimmest of times, as limned recently in the movie "50/50" about a young man battling a life-threatening form of cancer, there can be humor in hardship.

Humor, to me, is as much what I am all about as weeping and gnashing of teeth. I hope I can continue to see the humor in life, even when I am at my lowest and things seem most bleak. Humor will sustain me and lift me up, I hope, even on my own deathbed.

Maybe I'll leave an epitaph that says, "I can't be done yet. I still have checks left!"

And let us not forget these sentiments from someone far more eloquent than me:

"They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

Love and desire and hate:

I think they have no portion in us after

We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses;

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream."

(Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longani)

Connie (Corcoran) Wilson (MS + 30) graduated from the University of Iowa and Western Illinois University, with additional study at Northern Illinois, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. She taught writing at six Iowa/Illinois colleges and has written for five newspapers and seven blogs, including Associated Content (now owned by Yahoo) which named her its 2008 Content Producer of the Year . She is an active, voting member of HWA (Horror Writers Association).

Her stories and interviews with writers like David Morrell, Joe Hill, Kurt Vonnegut, Frederik Pohl and Anne Perry have appeared online and in numerous journals. Her work has won prizes from “Whim’s Place Flash Fiction,” “Writer’s Digest” (Screenplay) and she will have 12 books out by the end of the year. Connie reviewed film and books for the Quad City Times (Davenport, Iowa) for 12 years and wrote humor columns and conducted interviews for the (Moline, Illinois) Daily Dispatch and now blogs for 7 blogs, including television reviews and political reporting for Yahoo.

Connie lives in East Moline, Illinois with husband Craig and cat Lucy, and in Chicago, Illinois, where her son, Scott and daughter-in-law Jessica and their two-year-old twins Elise and Ava reside. Her daughter, Stacey, recently graduated from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, as a Music Business graduate.

Laughing Through Life

2011-12-01T07:00:00.001-06:00

Laughing Through Life by Connie Corcoran Wilson
Quad City Press July 2011
Trade Paperback, 180 pages
ISBN-13: 9780982444832

http://www.conniecwilson.com/

Description:

A collection of humorous essays and anecdotes that reviewers have compared to “Erma-Bombeck-meets-David-Sedaris.” Whether as a political observer on the campaign trail in 2004 (avoiding arrest at Coors Amphitheater, but just barely), a young mother and teacher, or grandmother to twin two-year-olds (pictured on the cover), this book will help you to laugh through life, providing many chuckles over familiar and universal life situations, whether lost cell phones or golfing foibles.

My Thoughts:

Laughing Through Life by Connie Corcoran Wilson is a collection of humorous essays and anecdotes. The initial essays are all quite funny. Some of the material included in the collection is truly "laugh out loud" funny, while other material, at least for me, is decidedly not as humorous.

This is an easy to read collection that requires no great time commitment in order to enjoy the essays. It is organized and arranged to facilitate reading the essays and anecdotes in short bursts. I would hazard a guess that if your politics align more closely with Wilson's then you might enjoy some of the political essays much more than I did.

I have a feeling many people will be able to relate to some of Wilson's adventures and observations. I actually had a similar experience as Wilson, when I was getting a second piercing in my ears several years ago, although in my case the audience watching me was my daughter and a whole group of young girls who were there to get their ears pierced for the first time.

I'll admit that I found it odd that even though the front cover shows Wilson's twin granddaughters dancing, there is nary a story about them.

In general, as a whole, the political essays were less humorous and more biting, thus less enjoyable for me. This also made the collection feel uneven. Perhaps it would have behooved Ms. Wilson to organize the material into two different collections, making one book humorous essays and anecdotes and another observations about politics.

Readers can always follow Connie Corcoran Wilson's blog, Weekly Wilson, for more of her writing and reviews.

Recommended - actually this would be an easy, enjoyable book to read during this time of the year when people are so busy with other activities.

Please come back tomorrow when Connie Corcoran Wilson will have a guest post addressing the importance of laughing your way through a stressful time.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book for review purposes.

Quotes:

All this came about when my handy dandy space heater shorted out just as I was about to step into the tub. Since I wasn't exactly dressed in my Smokey the Bear fire-fighting costume at bath-time and had no desire to ruin any good towels by putting out the fire with them, I quickly unplugged the heater, crouched on my hands and knees, and blew the flames out.

A charming sight, I assure you. pg. 4

Six people had gathered to watch: two women, obviously as nervous as I, and three sober wide-eyed girls in their teens. And, of course, my first born. pg. 13

Modern-day malapropism is alive and well. Norm Crosby, the stand-up comic, has made a good living from this type of humor for years. I have painstakingly saved a few from my many years of junior high school teaching. pg. 29

I always got the feeling that Mr. Duvall was not really all that enthused about playing golf with a couple of twelve-year old girls who happened to be teacher's kids. Why would I get that impression? Oh, I don't know. Maybe because all we ever did was chip and putt. No REAL playing, just chipping and putting on the hole closest to the winding gravel road. pg. 59

A friend of ours who fancies himself an entrepreneur we have dubbed "the Bar Czar," in honor of one of his schemes: joint ownership of a bar. That project was fairly ordinary by the Bar Czar's standards. pg. 75

Rollback

2011-11-20T15:25:00.003-06:00

Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
Tom Doherty Associates, 2007

Hardcover, 320 pages
ISBN-13: 9780765311085
http://sfwriter.com/

Description:

Dr. Sarah Halifax decoded the first-ever radio transmission received from aliens. Thirty-eight years later, a second message is received and Sarah, now 87, may hold the key to deciphering this one, too . . . if she lives long enough.
A wealthy industrialist offers to pay for Sarah to have a rollback—a hugely expensive experimental rejuvenation procedure. She accepts on condition that Don, her husband of sixty years, gets a rollback, too. The process works for Don, making him physically twenty-five again. But in a tragic twist, the rollback fails for Sarah, leaving her in her eighties.
While Don tries to deal with his newfound youth and the suddenly vast age gap between him and his wife, Sarah struggles to do again what she’d done once before: figure out what a signal from the stars contains.

My Thoughts:

Robert J. Sawyer expertly explores ethical dilemmas and alien contact in his intelligent, highly readable novel Rollback. It is 2048. Astronomer Sarah Halifax, who had been one of the leading astronomers at SETI and the one person who translated the first message from the Draconians in 2009, is now 87. When the Draconians send an encrypted reply, wealthy industrialist Cody McGavin offers Sarah a rollback - a rejuvenation procedure that will result in her being like a 25 year old physically - so she can help decipher the second message. Sarah demands that the procedure also be given to her husband of 60 years, Don. The procedure works for Don, but, sadly, not for Sarah.

While coping with her physical frailties, Sarah ponders the key to solving the encrypted message from the Draconians. At the same time Don struggles with being essentially an 87 year old man with the body and health of 25 year old. While their bond of 60 years continues, Don has to face some tough moral choices while Sarah is working, hoping to solve the puzzle before her death.

Sawyer succeeds in Rollback because he takes a couple themes - rejuvenation and contact with aliens, concentrates on the big picture and the questions that might arise, and then reaches a conclusion in a story that doesn't demand a sequel. Even though this is an alien contact story, it's really mostly a story about moral dilemmas and choices. The narrative mainly focuses on the effects of the rejuvenation for Don and the choices challenging him. One of the opening quotes is from Jonathan Swift, "No wise man ever wished to be younger." But is that true? And if you were to suddenly be returned to a young adult at age 87, how would you cope? What choices would you make?

I have one problem with Rollback. Honestly, the young Don got on my nerves a bit. Even though he is now physically 25, he still is 87 and has still been married to 60 years to Sarah. I would have thought he'd be more in touch with many of the life lessons he must have learned in that time. I think the main root of any problem I have with the story is that it is definitely told from a male point of view - and I am not male. So, while the ending of the story Sawyer is telling didn't work quite as well for me, a case could be made that Rollback will work for the majority of the targeted readers of science fiction who are male.

All of that is likely a minor quibble with what is a very enjoyable, intriguing, provocative novel. Sawyer is an accomplished writer, he knows how to tell a story, and he has all the awards to prove it.
Highly Recommended

Quotes:

It had been a good life.

Donald Halifax looked around the living room of the modest house that he and his wife Sarah had shared for sixty years now, and that thought kept coming back to him. opening

“Everybody, everybody!” shouted Carl. He was the elder of Don and Sarah’s kids and always took charge. “Your attention, please!” The conversation and laughter died down quickly, and Don watched as Carl raised his own champagne flute. “I’d like to propose a toast. To Mom and Dad, on their sixtieth wedding anniversary!” pg. 16

“Well,” said Sarah, sounding as though she couldn’t believe that she was uttering these words, “Lenore says a reply has been received.”

“What?” said Carl, now standing on the other side of her chair.

Sarah turned to face her son, but Don knew what she meant before she spoke again; he knew precisely what she meant, and he staggered a half-pace backward, groping for the edge of a bookcase for support. “A reply has been received,” repeated Sarah. “The aliens from Sigma Draconis have responded to the radio message my team sent all those years ago.” pg. 18-19

On March first, 2009, a radio message had been received from a planet orbiting the star Sigma Draconis. The world had puzzled over the message for months, trying to make sense of what the aliens had said. And then, finally, Sarah Halifax herself had figured out what they were getting at, and it was she who had led the team composing the official reply that had been sent on the one-year anniversary of the receipt of the original signal. pg. 20

"....we think the message is....encrypted. Not just encoded for transmission, but actually encrypted - you know, scrambled so that it can't be read without a decryption key." pg. 24

"But rejuvenation, well, that's like a code rewrite - it's a real fix. You don't just look young again; you are young." His thin eyebrows climbed his wide forehead. "And that's what I'm offering you. The full-blown rejuvenation treatment." pg. 41

"I'm not regressing, am I?"

...."I'm so sorry," she said, very softly.

"I knew it," said Sarah. "I - in my bones, I knew it." pg. 55

Transformational What?

2011-11-17T07:00:00.000-06:00

Transformational What?

(A guest post by Alon Shalev, author of The Accidental Activist.)

At a recent author's panel, I was asked what genre I write. I replied: “Transformational fiction.”

“What’s that?”

I was asking for it. I have adopted a phrase I heard from the presenter of a workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference a couple of years before but never heard it used since.

I responded along the lines: “I write about change – ordinary people who want to help fight a social injustice and in doing so experience a life-shifting internal change.”

What followed was a meaningful conversation about the theme that runs through my books. In A Gardener’s Tale, the protagonist helps a young outcast become a meaningful and respected member of the community. In The Accidental Activist, my central character is a self absorbed computer programmer who takes up the struggle against a multinational corporation who is trying to silence protestors in order to get laid (well kind of), but discovers he can harness his talents to help improve the world.

I have written three other manuscripts and, in each, the protagonist goes through a transformative process. Unwanted Heroes will be released in January and tells the story of a young man who befriends a mentally disturbed war veteran and uses his talents to help the old man come to terms with his past and rebuild his life. As I wrote my novels, I never planned this common theme until The Accidental Activist was being critiqued.

The man who asked the question came up to me afterwards and we began discussing which social causes we each volunteer in and when we finished, I felt he had bought my book because of our newly formed connection. We have remained in touch and he later became, and still is, a regular contributor to Left Coast Voices. I love to share my passion about social injustices and utilize my writing to cultivate relationships that can help empower us all to work for a better world.

I have tried to make my website fit that transformational flavor: the Richard Wright quote, the request to purchase my book at an independent bookstore and showcasing non profits and causes on the Left Coast Voices blog.

And so I will go out into the world and introduce myself: Alon Shalev. I write transformational fiction. And maybe one day, the person I am being introduced to won’t respond: “Transformational fiction – what’s that?”

Maybe one day they will even say: “Alon Shalev? Yeah I read your novels.”

——————————————————————————————————-

Alon Shalev is the author of The Accidental Activist and A Gardener’s Tale. More on Alon Shalev at http://www.alonshalev.com.

The Accidental Activist

2011-11-16T07:00:00.003-06:00

The Accidental Activist by Alon Shalev
Three Clover Press, October 2010
Trade Paperback, 272 pages
ISBN-13: 9780981955353

http://www.alonshalev.com/home

Overview

David meets Goliath in the law courts of England in the 1990's. The advent of the Internet is leveling the playing field as a multinational corporation tries to silence two young political activists in a riveting court case that captivates the political and business world's attention.
The company will try anything (sex, espionage, bribery and coercion) to stop or win this case. In fighting the corporation, a self-absorbed computer programmer discovers romance and a way to change the world one mega-pixel at a time.

My Thoughts:

The Accidental Activist by Alon Shalev is a novel based upon the McDonald’s libel trial that took place in England in the 1990’s. In the novel two young activists, with nothing but raw determination, take on a multinational corporation that tries to silence them. At the same time a young computer programmer discovers the power of the internet after he sets up a website to support the cause of the woman he wants to have a relationship with.

I'm torn on this one. On one hand I really was engrossed in the actual story of the legal case. It totally held my attention and was, in truth, the reason I accepted a review copy. It's always inspirational to read about ordinary citizens taking on multinational corporations and some of their nefarious practices. It was also very interesting to learn about Great Britain's archaic libel laws that were still in place in the 1990s. The courtroom drama part of The Accidental Activist was riveting.

On the other hand, I also experienced two less than stellar impressions.The rather graphic sex scene at the beginning of the novel seemed out of place, especially in comparison to the rest of the novel. To be honest, I would have stopped reading right then except for the fact that I had promised to review the novel. I was glad I kept reading because the scene was a fluke. The novel improved dramatically and I was hooked... but that just reinforced the awkwardness of the early sex scene.

The other thought I had was this: Since it is set in the 90's during the time when the internet was just emerging as a powerful tool to influence people and spread information, the setting also had the effect of making the novel feel dated because the internet is now so much a part of our daily lives. The 1990s wasn't that long ago, but, in the case of technology, it was. Keeping this dichotomy in mind while you are reading will be helpful. It's likely any "historical" novel that is actually set in rather recent times will induce the same feeling.

All in all, I enjoyed The Accidental Activist and would Recommend it, especially if you enjoy courtroom dramas.

Come back tomorrow for a guest post by author Alon Shalev where he discusses his "Transformational Fiction."

Disclaimer: I accepted a copy of this novel for review purposes.

Quotes:

“The truth, Your Honor, is that I got involved because of a woman, the defendant.” opening

I looked at myself in the mirror—for only the eighth or ninth time that hour. A smooth-shaven, pathetically optimistic Romeo peered back, reassuring me that, should the Juliet of my dreams turn up at tonight’s party, I was surely in with a chance. pg. 1

“Here’s the deal. You’re having a miserable time, and I need to get out of here quick. You have a car. I need a lift. You drive me home, and I don’t invite you in. Impress me with your conversation and we’ll stop at my local on the way and I’ll buy you a drink. Whatcha say?” pg. 5

“Tomorrow I’m busy.” She paused, thought for a moment then her face lit up. “But I will see you Sunday, noon at Hyde Park Corner. Then, my brave knight, I’ll treat you to lunch.”

“Hyde Park Corner. I haven’t been there for a while.” Actually, I couldn’t recall when I had last been there, no doubt incidentally passing through. “It’ll be crowded. How will I find you?” pg. 8

As we walked through the park, Suzie explained about their campaign to stop oil drilling somewhere in South America. Her adrenaline was still flowing from the speech, and her words were filled with excitement.

She didn’t stop talking until we reached the restaurant she had chosen. It was a crowded place with simplistic décor and natural pine furniture. The high roof and long windows made the place naturally light. A vibrant energy exuded from my fellow diners, a contrast to my largely fast-food culinary experience. pg. 14

We both laughed. Then she squeezed my arm and looked up—her face serious. “Getting involved with me will throw you in at the deep end, you know. But if we’re going to have any chance together, well, this is my life. You understand?”

I nodded. “Yeah I do.” I didn’t have a clue. pg. 19

When he finished, I turned to Luke. "What happened? Where's Suzie?"

"They've been arrested, mate, Suzie and Bill. They'll charge them with libel. Seems we've pulled the tiger's tail too hard and it's decided to take us seriously. The others arrested will apologize. They're people with jobs, assets and dependants. Suzie and Bill will go to court." pg. 42

"British libel laws are archaic. They haven't been revised literally in centuries. With libel, no one is entitled to legal representation. In fact, they enjoy very few rights." pg. 43

Tunnel Vision

2011-11-12T15:26:00.000-06:00

Tunnel Vision by Gary Braver

Tom Doherty Associates, 2011
Hardcover, 384 pages
ISBN-13: 9780765309761
http://www.garybraver.com/

Description:

Following a biking accident on icy Boston streets, grad student Zack Kashian lapses into a coma. When he wakes up on Easter, months later, muttering the Lord's Prayer in the original Aramaic, the media is set abuzz about the "Miracle Man." Religious fanatics flock to Zack's hospital bedside, though he claims to be an atheist.
Zack's revival also catches the attention of Dr. Elizabeth Luria, who heads up a small team of neuroscientists secretly researching near-death experiences (NDE). Their objective: to determine if there is anything to the claims of NDE victims about floating down tunnels into the celestial light and meeting spiritual beings. Is all that evidence of the afterlife? Or is it just neurobiology, as Sarah Wyman, one of Luria's young researchers suspects.
For personal reasons, Luria is desperate to prove the afterlife exists. So are her wealthy, evangelist backers, who can't wait to announce the greatest discovery in human history: that God exists. A discovery that would at last reconcile science and religion. A discovery that would end the world's religious strife and unite all humanity.
Yet Zack's experiences are anything but heavenly. While he and Sarah struggle to understand his horrific out-of-body experiences, they have no idea that sinister forces have taken an interest in them. Forces to whom near-death experiences are utter blasphemy—deceptions by Satan himself. They enlist a menacing agent who, in the name of God, will stop at nothing to terminate the project and all involved.

My Thoughts:

In Tunnel Vision by Gary Braver an atheist graduate student, Zack Kashian, lapses into a 12 week coma following a bicycle accident. He attracts the interest of religious zealots when he says The Lord's Prayer in the original Aramaic while still in the coma. He later finds himself involved with a team of neuroscientists who are being privately funded by an evangelist to research near-death experiences (NDE) in an attempt to prove that people are wired to find God. Another religious group hires an assassin to kill those involved in the project. Zack finds himself inadvertently caught in the middle of a war between science and two religious extremes. And everything isn't quite what it seems...

This is a fast-paced scientific/medical thriller based on current research in neuroscience that people are wired to find God. Author Gary Braver, the pen name of Gary Goshgarian, does an excellent job keeping the suspense going as the risks increase. Additionally there are plenty of clever plot twists. The science behind the novel was obviously well researched, as are the religious discussions. The large amount of theology in the book might bother some readers, but they are handled well and tie in completely to the plot. This one is a page turner!

Highly Recommended

Source: Won a copy from TOR at Caribousmom

Quotes:

It was the dead man - Karen's John Doe, his toe tag in her pocket - still naked from the waist up, still barefoot, EKG electrodes still visible on his chest - shuffling down the empty corridor toward the exit with no pulse, no heartbeat, no blood pressure, no body functions, flatlined and moving on his own power. Prologue, pg 16-17

"Thought I'd died and gone to heaven."
"You did. Two jacks staring at you from Anthony's hand, and you draw another. Don't you believe in counting?" Damian said. "Bro, you take some wild-ass risks."
"But I won," Zack said.
"Yeah, on pure luck. 'Least you don't have to play beer money for a while."
"More like blood money. Found a clinic that pays thirty bucks a pint."
"You mean you're selling your blood?"
"I'm down thirty-six hundred on my Discover card, and they're threatening court action."
"Maybe you should stop gambling." pg. 18

In a protracted moment, Zack saw the fatal error. His front tire slammed into the jagged edge of a pothole. In the next instant—played out in weird slow motion—the front wheel snapped to the left, sending him flying over the handlebars and coming down dead smack on the top of his head into the base of the crosswalk lights.
In a fraction of a second, Zack was suddenly looking down from someplace above, seeing himself lying crumpled across the curb with his head at the base of the pole and his bike on its side, the front wheel at a crazy angle. In that sliver of awareness, he knew he was viewing things from an impossible perspective. And just as he tried to make sense of it, the moment blinked to total black. pg. 20-21

"This is Kyle Kerr. I'm the resident physician at the emergency center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Your son Zachary is here. Unfortunately, he was in a bicycle accident and is in our intensive care unit." pg. 22

"What if this is punishment?" she asked.
"Punishment for what?"
"For not believing. What if this is God getting back at us?"
"My guess is that this was an accident pure and simple," Kate said. "You're a dedicated teacher who does volunteer work for abused children. If God's in a punishing mood, He's got the wrong person." pg. 27

"If something good happens, people claim their prayer was answered. If something bad happens, it's because your prayer wasn't good enough. It's all a sham. God's a sham." ....
Damian put his hand on Maggie's shoulder. "He'll wake up," he said. "God has faith in him."pg. 33

"And what do you think are the motivations of evil?"
"I never thought about that. I guess lots of motivations - power, money..."
"No, only one: revenge. It is the one true source of evil in the world. All other motivations - power, money, lust - they're mere variations. Revenge. It's what Satan taught mankind. It's his sole motive: getting back at God...." pg. 52

Beatrice and Virgil

2011-11-06T20:41:00.000-06:00

Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel
Random House Publishing Group, 2010
Hardcover, 224 pages
ISBN-13: 9781400069262

Overview

When Henry receives a letter from an elderly taxidermist, it poses a puzzle that he cannot resist. As he is pulled further into the world of this strange and calculating man, Henry becomes increasingly involved with the lives of a donkey and a howler monkey—named Beatrice and Virgil—and the epic journey they undertake together.
With all the spirit and originality that made Life of Pi so beloved, this brilliant new novel takes the reader on a haunting odyssey. On the way Martel asks profound questions about life and art, truth and deception, responsibility and complicity.

My Thoughts:

In Yann Martel's fable-like novel Beatrice and Virgil, author Henry L'Hote, who had a wildly successful first book, gives up writing after his second book is rejected by his publisher. He and his wife, Sarah, move to a large city where he concentrates on living. Henry stumbles into an awkward relationship with a taxidermist, also named Henry, who wants his help in writing a play about a donkey and a howler monkey named Beatrice and Virgil. This relationship between the two Henrys and the play is clearly hinting at hidden but much darker secrets.

Beatrice and Virgil has received a host of mixed reviews since its publication. It seemed to polarize readers to such extremes that the widely vacillating reviews resulted in my procrastinating on reading Beatrice and Virgil because I enjoyed Life of Pi so much. As is sometimes the case I should have just read Beatrice and Virgil sooner and ignored the people who were probably disappointed that it isn't Life of Pi part 2.

Now, I agree with those who concluded that Martel takes a long time to get to the point of the novel, but, in contrast, following along on the journey did not disappoint me. I felt like it made the ending more powerful because of the stark contrast it presents to the rest of the novel. It is allegorical and Martel certainly gives the reader plenty of clues about the true subject matter of the play. As the description intimates, these clues cover life and art, truth and deception, responsibility and complicity.

Written in simple language but filled with symbolism, Beatrice and Virgil is a dark novel, especially at the end. (At this point it is probably not a spoiler to mention that it deals with the holocaust.) Most certainly Beatrice and Virgil will make the reader think about the cruelty men inflict upon each other.

very highly recommended

Quotes:

Henry’s second novel, written, like his first, under a pen name, had done well. It had won prizes and was translated into dozens of languages. Henry was invited to book launches and literary festivals around the world; countless schools and book clubs adopted the book; he regularly saw people reading it on planes and trains; Hollywood was set to turn it into a movie; and so on and so forth.
Henry continued to live what was essentially a normal, anonymous life. Writers seldom become public figures. It’s their books that rightly hog all the publicity. Readers will easily recognize the cover of a book they’ve read, but in a café that man over there, is that . . . is that . . . well, it’s hard to tell—doesn’t he have long hair?—oh, he’s gone. opening

Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting—that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art—and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strangers, be it a smile, a pat on the shoulder or a word of praise, is truly a comfort. pg. 4-5

But fiction and nonfiction are very rarely published in the same book. That was the hitch. Tradition holds that the two must be kept apart. That is how our knowledge and impressions of life are sorted in bookstores and libraries—separate aisles, separate floors—and that is how publishers prepare their books, imagination in one package, reason in another. It’s not how writers write. A novel is not an entirely unreasonable creation, nor is an essay devoid of imagination. Nor is it how people live. People don’t so rigorously separate the imaginative from the rational in their thinking and in their actions. There are truths and there are lies—these are the transcendent categories, in books as in life. The useful division is between the fiction and nonfiction that speaks the truth and the fiction and nonfiction that utters lies. pg. 6-7

He stopped writing; the urge left him. Was this a case of writer's block? He argued later with Sarah that it wasn't, since a book had been written - two in fact. It was more accurate to call it writer's abandonment. Henry simply gave up. But if he did not write, he would at least live. pg. 20

Still, art is rooted in joy, as his music teacher had pointed out. It was hard after rehearsing a play, or practicing a piece of music, or visiting a museum, or finishing a good book, for Henry not to ache for the access he once had to creative joy. pg. 24-25

Virgil: Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark. pg. 50

Virgil: I was thinking about faith.
Beatrice: Were you?
Virgil: To my mind, faith is like being in the sun. When you are in the sun, can you avoid creating a shadow? Can you shake that area of darkness that clings to you, always shaped like, as if constantly to remind you of yourself? You can’t. This shadow is doubt. And it goes wherever you go as long as you stay in the sun. And who wouldn’t want to be in the sun? pg. 103

King Rat

2011-11-04T16:18:00.000-05:00

King Rat by China Miéville
Tom Doherty Associates, copyright 1998
Trade Paperback, 320 pages
ISBN-13: 9780312890728

Overview

Something is stirring in London's dark, stamping out its territory in brickdust and blood. Something has murdered Saul Garamond's father, and left Saul to pay for the crime.
But a shadow from the urban waste breaks into Saul's prison cell and leads him to freedom. A shadow called King Rat, who reveals Saul's royal heritage, a heritage that opens a new world to Saul, the world below London's streets—a heritage that also drags Saul into King Rat's plan for revenge against his ancient enemy,. With drum 'n' bass pounding the backstreets, Saul must confront the forces that would use him, the forces that would destroy him, and the forces that shape his own bizarre identity.

My Thoughts:

In King Rat by China Miéville Saul Garamond's father is murdered under mysterious circumstances the night Saul returns to London. Saul, who was asleep at the time of the murder, is left implicated in the crime. After being questioned by the police and left locked up in a cell, a mysterious figure, King Rat, breaks Saul out of jail and the adventure begins in London's underground and sewers, with the music of Drum ‘n’ Bass, mixed strangely with the flute, always in the background.

King Rat is a murder mystery, urban fantasy, and horror story, that uses rewritten folk lore and mythical characters to tell the story. China Miéville reworks the story of the Pied Piper and includes King Rat, Anansi the spider, and Loplop the king of birds, as characters. In his version the Pied Piper is an evil psychotic killer. This is a dark, gritty narrative set in the garbage strewn alleys, sewers and the underbelly of London.

There are some similarities to Miéville's Un Lun Dun. As in any good myth, in both a seemingly normal person has a destiny or task that they must complete to save others from a deadly outcome. While King Rat is set in London, Un Lun Dun is in an alternate London. King Rat is, however, a far darker and menacing tale and a very urban fantasy.

This was China Miéville's first novel and probably would be considered the start of his "new weird" genre of literature. In some ways I wish I knew Drum 'n' Bass music in order to hear the musical background pulsing throughout the novel. On the other hand, I could have looked into it and didn't, so my lack of total understanding didn't prohibit me from enjoying the tale. Admittedly, I enjoyed Perdido Street Station, Un Lun Dun, and The City and the City more, but King Rat is highly recommended.

Quotes:

I can squeeze between buildings through spaces you can't even see. I can walk behind you so close my breath raises gooseflesh on your neck and you won't hear me. I can hear the muscles in your eyes contract when your pupils dilate. I can feed off your filth and live in your house and sleep under your bed and you will never know unless I want you to. opening

His father would probably be waiting for him. He knew Saul was coming back, and he would surely make an effort to be welcoming, forfeiting his usual evening in the pub to greet his son. Saul already resented him for that. He felt gauche and uncharitable, but he despised his father's faltering attempts to communicate. He was happier when the two of them avoided each other. Being surly was easy, and felt more honest. pg. 15

"Mr. Garamond," he said. "I'm sorry to have to tell you that your father is dead."
Saul gazed at him. That much was obvious surely, he felt like shouting, but tears stopped him. He tried to speak through his streaming eyes and nose, but could issue nothing but a sob. He wept noisily for a minute, then struggled to control himself. He sniffed back tears like a baby and wiped his snotty nose on his sleeve. The three policemen stood and watched him impassively until he had controlled himself a little more.
"What's going on?" he croaked. pg. 22-23

“I’m the big-time crime boss. I’m the one that stinks. I’m the scavenger chief; I live where you don’t want me. I’m the intruder. I killed the usurper, I take you to safekeeping. I killed half your continent one time. I know when your ships are sinking. I can break your traps across my knee and eat the cheese in your face and make you blind with my piss. I’m the one with the hardest teeth in the world, I’m the whiskered boy. I’m the Duce of the sewers, I run the underground. I’m the king."....

I’m King Rat.” pg. 34

He was swallowing with anxiety. He was remembering his father. This was the key to everything, he thought; his was the catalyst, the legend that would make sense of the surreality which had caught him up in its gusts. pg. 43

"You're a special boy, Saul, got special blood in your veins, and there's one in the city who'd like to see it spilled. Your mum was my sister, Saul.

"Your mum was a rat." pg. 44

Amaryllis in Blueberry

2011-10-29T00:17:00.000-05:00

Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum
Gallery Books, February 2011
Trade Paperback, 384 pages
ISBN-13: 9781439156896
http://christinameldrum.com/amaryllis.php

Overview

In the stirring tradition of The Secret Life of Bees and The Poisonwood Bible, Amaryllis in Blueberry explores the complexity of human relationships set against an unforgettable backdrop. Told through the haunting voices of Dick and Seena Slepy and their four daughters, Christina Meldrum’s soulful novel weaves together the past and the present of a family harmed—and healed—by buried secrets.
“Maybe, unlike hope, truth couldn’t be contained in a jar. . . .”
Meet the Slepys: Dick, the stern doctor, the naïve husband, a man devoted to both facts and faith; Seena, the storyteller, the restless wife, a mother of four, a lover of myth. And their children, the Marys: Mary Grace, the devastating beauty; Mary Tessa, the insistent inquisitor; Mary Catherine, the saintly, lost soul; and finally, Amaryllis, Seena’s unspoken favorite, born with the mystifying ability to sense the future, touch the past, and distinguish the truth tellers from the most convincing liar of all.
When Dick insists his family move from Michigan to the unfamiliar world of Africa for missionary work, he can’t possibly foresee how this new land and its people will entrance and change his daughters—and himself—forever.
Nor can he predict how Africa will spur his wife Seena toward an old but unforgotten obsession. In fact, Seena may be falling into a trance of her own. . . .

My Thoughts:

Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum is set in Michigan and West Africa during the summer and fall of 1976. It is a highly atmospheric novel that follows the highly dysfunctional Slepy family: parents Dick and Seena and their four daughters, the Marys - Mary Grace, Mary Catherine, and Mary Tessa - and Amaryllis, known as Yllis. After their summer in Michigan, Dick decides to take his family to Africa where he will serve as a medical missionary.

The first chapter reveals the end of the novel - when Seena is on trial for Dick's murder in West Africa. Then the narrative goes back to the summer and intertwines scenes from the past and present. The novel is told from the viewpoints of all the Slepys, their elderly neighbor Clara, and a single, final chapter from the viewpoint of the priest, Father Heimdall. Although each character has a unique voice, Meldrum makes an interesting stylistic choice and has everyone but Yllis tell their stories in the present tense, even when they look back on past events. Yllis tells her story in past tense.

In Amaryllis in Blueberry truth and reality are questioned. Obsessions, imagination, storytelling, and cross cultural myth-making (Greek mythology, African mythology, and Catholic doctrine) are explored. Additionally, we learn that Yllis has synesthesia; she is an emotional synesthete so she sees and feels all the emotions of everyone around her. The Slepy's bring a myriad of emotions and problems with them to Africa where Dick hopes they will find redemption but instead everything escalates out of anyone's control. All of the characters are flawed and it is these flaws that form a basis for their problems. There is also a feeling of distant reserve, a separateness, from all the characters in the novel.

Although it shares some similarities with Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, which apparently turned some readers off, I felt there were enough differences to separate the two novels. In Amaryllis in Blueberry creditability was a little stretched when the Slepy's were in Africa so quickly after Dick's decision and their family is so radically affected immediately upon arrival. Although I accepted it, I will also admit to liking the second half of the novel a bit less than the first. Additionally, since it is set in 1976, I could certainly pick up any cultural references to the time.

Meldrum is a very talented writer and I imagine we can look forward to more well crafted novels with intricately developed characters from her in the future. (The Artist in me must note that the cover of this book is simply gorgeous.)

Very Highly Recommended

Quotes:

Dick is dead. Seena knows this, of course: her husband is dead. Yet she keeps expecting him to barrel in, his enormous, gangling self plodding along, a spectacle unaware that he is one. Was one, she thinks. Was one. Still, she finds herself waiting for him to call out, make some pointless point, make it clear to everyone that he just doesn’t get it. opening

“What don’t I have to say?” she would like to say. “You want me to admit guilt? I’ll admit it. I came here having little respect for your beliefs and laws and I flouted them willingly. You want me to say I hated my husband—that I wanted him dead so I could be free to love my lover? I’ll say it. You want me to tell you I committed adultery and squandered the welfare of my children for the sake of lust while I spit in God’s face. It’s all true.”
“No,” she says. “I have nothing to say.” pg. 5-6

Mama named me Amaryllis, right out there in the blueberry field, and when Papa’s mustache quivered after she told him the name, and his eyes took on the glassy, stunned gaze, Mama straightened her long back and stretched her giraffe’s neck and flounced that Mary-hued hair as she pointedly turned away, and Papa knew the name was not negotiable. pg. 9

I myself have an affinity for the name Seena, perhaps because it contains the word “see.” Long before I had any understanding of who I am—what I am—I could see Mama’s instincts were right: I was different, and not just on the surface. I didn’t fit in my family, I didn’t fit in at school. pg. 10

People say joy is infectious, but that’s a myth. It’s melancholy that’s infectious. And sneaky. It skulks about, climbing legs, mounting skirts. It’s particularly active when joy is in the room. Joy shows up, a sort of humming, and melancholy gets the jitters. I’ve seen it time and again. While joy bathes one person— who purrs almost, like she’s been plugged in—melancholy makes the rounds. And those closest in proximity to joy are melancholy’s most likely targets. That’s not to say joy’s humming doesn’t sometimes spread—it does—but melancholy is crafty and determined, while joy spreads mostly when it tries not to. At least when it doesn’t try too hard.
Guilt, in contrast, is tricky to see, smell, hear, because guilt is a mush—a combination of envy and anger, joy and melancholy. And love. But I know guilt. I know the taste of its quivering, shimmering, cloudy, smelly, buzzing self. pg. 11

Yet it seemed to me in that moment there is a painful sort of beauty in seeing things for what they really are. pg. 15

Funny thing was, once Dick had seen Seena's face, he couldn't think of anything else. Not even her neck. Those eyes that at first seemed demonic came to seem like burning-hot suns, exposing parts of him he barely knew. She'd become the perfect woman to him. An angel. The Virgin Mary. pg. 28

He thumbs through the magazines, though page after page of breasts and spread thighs and come-hither looks, until he chooses one set of breasts and spread thighs, one come-hither look. And for the few minutes while he is with this paper girl who is not his wife, he forgets he loves his wife. pg. 35

"We have choices in life. You have choices. You don't have to live your life trapped in a box. You don't have to be the person you've been. Be the person you want to be - the kind of person you admire. Control what you can control." pg. 38

I've come to learn there is a name for what I am....the name I'm referring to is "synesthete," meaning I have synesthesia, from the Greek syn, which means "with," and aesthesis, which means "sensation." pg. 89

We weren't sardines so much as we were popcorn kernels sizzling in hot oil, pressed kernel to kernel to kernel. We could only sizzle this way for so long before one of us cracked. pg. 97

Set up the tripod and the timer and snap a picture of your happy family, being protected by you, this God-fearing father and husband who worships the Virgin Mary. Then hang it up alongside your centerfolds. pg. 197

Atlantic

2011-10-22T13:16:00.000-05:00

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
HarperCollins, 2010
Hardcover, 512 pages
ISBN-13: 9780061702587

nonfiction

http://simonwinchester.com/

Overview

Atlantic is a biography of a tremendous space that has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists, and warriors, and continues profoundly to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams. Simon Winchester makes the Atlantic come vividly alive. Spanning the ocean's story from its geological origins to the age of exploration-covering the Vikings, the Irish, the Basques, John Cabot, and Christopher Columbus in the north, and the Portuguese and the Spanish in the south-and from World War II battles to today's struggles with pollution and overfishing, his narrative is epic, intimate, and awe inspiring. More than a mere history, this is an unforgettable journey of unprecedented scope by one of the most gifted writers in the English language.

My Thoughts:

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories is Simon Winchester's biography of the Atlantic Ocean. Winchester decided that, since the ocean is a living thing, the story of the Atlantic could be told in the format of a biography. In an extension of this comparison, Winchester decided to structure the chapters in the book based on the seven stages of man as outlined in Shakespeare's As You Like It:

"Infant; School-boy; Lover; Soldier; Justice; Slipper'd Pantaloon; and Second Childishness. It seemed all of a sudden, just about the ideal. Pinioned within these seven categories, the stages of our relationship with the ocean could be made quite manageable.

"I could examine in the First Age, for example, the stirrings of humankind's initial childlike interest in the sea. In the second, I could examine how that initial curiosity evolved into the scholarly disciplines, of exploration, education, and learning - and in this as in all the other Ages I could explore the history of that learning, so that each Age would become a chronology in and of itself. I could then become captive in the Third Age - that of the lover - by the story of humankind's love affairs, by way of the art, poetry, architecture, or prose that this sea has inspired over the centuries.

"In the Fourth Age - that of the soldier - I could tell of the arguments and conflicts that have so often roiled the ocean....In the Fifth - that of the well-fed Justice - I could describe how the sea became a sea of laws and commerce....In the sixth Age, that dominated by the fatigue and tedium of the pantaloon, I could reflect upon the ways man has recently wearied of the great sea, has come to take it for granted....And in the Seventh and final Age....I could imagine the ways by which this much-overlooked and perhaps vengeful ocean might one day strike back, reverting to type, reverting to the primal nature of what it always was. (pg. 26-27)"

As a fan of Winchester's books, I was really looking forward to reading Atlantic, and, as much as I enjoyed it, I must add a few precautions for those considering reading this massive narrative. First, it helps if you have read other books by Winchester and appreciate his writing. Since he's a talented writer who has a good eye for interesting details and can share many entertaining anecdotes, many people will find this part easy. Second, this is not an easy-to-read-light-hearted-entertainment. While it is entertaining and Winchester can be humorous, it's also dense, expansive and detailed - it's not a quick read. You need to know you will be investing some time in reading. Third, it will help if potential readers have an appreciation for a wide range of topics from ancient history to geology to art to military history, to exploration.

Atlantic includes: A Table Of Contents, List of Maps and Illustrations, Preface, Prologue, Seven Chapters, an Epilogue, Acknowledgments, A Glossary of Possibly Unfamiliar Terms, Bibliography, and Index.

Very Highly Recommended

Quotes:

The ocean romance that lies at the heart of this book was primed for me by an unanticipated but unforgettable small incident. opening

There was something uncanny about the sudden silence, the emptiness, the realization of the enormous depths below us and the limitless heights above, the universal grayness of the scene, the very evident and potentially terrifying power of the rough seas and the wind, and the fact that despite our puny human powerlessness and insignificance, invisible radio beams and Morse code signals had summoned readily offered help from somewhere far away. pg. 11

Wasn't the ocean just distance for most people these days? Didn't we all take for granted a body of water that, so relatively recently - no more than five hundred years before, at most - was viewed by mariners who had not yet dared attempt to cross it with a mixture of awe, terror, and amazement? pg. 19

It is both possible and reasonable, then, to tell the Atlantic Ocean's story as a biography. It is a living thing; it has a geographical story of birth and expansion and evolution to its present middleaged shape and size; and then it has a well-predicted end story of contraction, decay, and death. pg. 22

He had arranged his chosen poems in seven discrete sections, to illustrate each of the seven stages of a man's life that are listed so famously in the "All the world's a stage..." speech in As You Like It. And I was reading Owen's book one day when I realized that this very same structure also happened to offer me just what I needed for this human aspect of the Atlantic story: a proper framework for the book I planned to write, a stage setting that would transmute all themes of ocean life into players, progressing from infancy to senescence, so that all could be permitted to play their parts in turn. pg. 25

Emily, Alone

2011-10-09T13:36:00.001-05:00

Emily, Alone by Stewart O'Nan
Penguin Group, 2011
Hardcover, 272 pages
ISBN-13: 9780670022359
http://stewart-onan.com/

Description:

A sequel to the bestselling, much-beloved Wish You Were Here, Stewart O’Nan’s intimate new novel follows Emily Maxwell, a widow whose grown children have long moved away. She dreams of visits by her grandchildren while mourning the turnover of her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood, but when her sole companion and sister-in-law Arlene faints at their favorite breakfast buffet, Emily’s days change. As she grapples with her new independence, she discovers a hidden strength and realizes that life always offers new possibilities. Like most older women, Emily is a familiar yet invisible figure, one rarely portrayed so honestly. Her mingled feelings-of pride and regret, joy and sorrow- are gracefully rendered in wholly unexpected ways. Once again making the ordinary and overlooked not merely visible but vital to understanding our own lives, Emily, Alone confirms O’Nan as an American master.

My Thoughts:

The Stewart O'Nan fan club is back in session. Please note that O'Nan is incapable of writing a bad book. All reviews of his books here at She Treads Softly are done only in comparison to his other books. They are all very highly recommended.

In Emily, Alone it is amazing how Stewart O'Nan realistically captures the inner thoughts of Emily Maxwell, an 80 year old middle class widow in Pittsburgh. Her life revolves around future visits from her children and grandchildren, Tuesday breakfast buffets with her sister-in-law, Arlene (using, naturally, a two for one coupon), her dog Rufus, and attendance at the early church service. Emily is financially secure and has her health.

It was amazing how seemingly effortlessly O'Nan captures the life of an elderly woman. Loving difficult family members, visiting an art museum, dealing with the aging of a beloved pet, following a certain radio station, feeling disenfranchised politically, being dismayed over a scratch on the car, attending funerals for friends who have passed away, making sure Christmas cards are sent out in time... I know this woman, who plans meals for visits down to the smallest details and whose year is planned by holidays. When O'Nan records and captures all these commonplace parts of Emily's life, they are clearly routine parts of many people's daily lives.

Emily, Alone is a sequel to Wish You Were Here, however readers do not need to have read Wish You Were Here to appreciate Emily, Alone. Emily may be an aging woman, but her life is depicted with honesty, dignity, and compassion rather than sappy sentimentality. O'Nan follows Emily's life in short chapters using precise prose. While thrill seekers maybe won't be satisfied with this very quiet introspective novel that follows the seemingly mundane days of Emily, sensitive readers who can appreciate an exquisitely drawn detailed character study will cherish every word.

Very Highly Recommended - one of the best

Quotes:

Tuesdays, Emily Maxwell put what precious little remained of her life in God's and her sister-in-law Arlene's shaky hands and they drove together to Edgewood for Eat'n Park's two-for-one breakfast buffet. The Sunday Post-Gazette, among its myriad other pleasures, had coupons. The rest of the week she might have nothing but melba toast and tea for breakfast, maybe peel herself a Clementine for some vitamin C, but the deal was too good to pass up, and served as a built-in excuse to get out of the house. opening

She was dying, yes, fine, they all were, by degrees. If Dr. Sayid expected her to be devastated by the idea, that only showed how young he was. There was no point in going into hysterics. It wasn’t the end of the world, just the end of her, and lately she’d come to think that was natural, and possibly something to be desired, if it could be achieved with a modicum of dignity, not pointlessly drawn out, like Louise undergoing all those torturous last-ditch procedure because Timothy and Daniel refused to give up. pg. 3

"Taking no chances, I see," said Arlene, whose own hair was a deep henna she's adopted a few years ago, and which, like Arlene's carmine lipstick, Emily considered garish, too young. pg. 4

When she was young, the city was her new world. Now it seemed she was losing it piece by piece. pg. 11

It was just one of her spells, Arlene insisted. She had them whenever her blood pressure dipped too low. She didn't seem too surprised. pg. 16

"Do you have any idea who these people are?" Arlene asked, pointing at the TV.

"They all seem to wear a lot of makeup," Emily said. "Especially the men." pg. 21

"That's all right," Emily said, because it wasn't a proper offer, just a sop, and once she'd said, "I love you," and gotten off, she wondered why she'd brought this insult upon herself. For a while she sat in Henry's chair, pinching her lips between her thumb and forefinger, pondering what perverse urge made her ask Margaret the one question she'd specifically forbidden herself. Flopped at her feet, Rufus raised his head to look at her, then let it drop back to the carpet. pg. 25

"It's only two more days," Emily said, patting her hand, but she understood. Of all people, she knew how easily one's world could be taken away. pg. 30

The temptation was to mourn those days, when they were young and busy and alive. As much as Emily missed them, she understood the reason that era seemed so rich - partly, at least - was because it was past, memorialized, the task they'd set themselves of raising families accomplished. The thought of Margaret was enough to remind her that not all of their times had been happy, that, in truth, much of it had been a struggle, one that was far from over, if that was in fact possible. pg. 55

She was too used to living alone. While she loved them all dearly, she'd forgotten how exhausting other people could be. pg. 104

Full Dark, No Stars

2011-10-04T18:47:00.000-05:00

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
Simon & Schuster, 2010
Hardcover, 384 pages
ISBN-13: 9781439192566

http://www.stephenking.com/

Description:

“I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger…” writes Wilfred Leland James at the start of a riveting confession that makes up “1922,” the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife Arlette proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.
In “Big Driver,” a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters a stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face to face with another stranger: the one inside herself.
“Fair Extension,” the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Harry Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment.
When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It’s a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends a good marriage.

My Thoughts:

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King features four novellas that examine the dark side of human nature.

"1922" is Nebraska farmer Wilfred James' confession to the murder of his wife. He talks his son into helping him murder her before she can sell the land her father left to her and move to Omaha. Wilfred is a conniving man, but guilt can be burdensome and followed by madness.

In "Big Driver" Tess, an author of cozy mysteries, is out for revenge after being ambushed, beaten, raped, and left for dead. Sometimes retribution is the only answer.

In "Fair Extension" Dave Streeter, a man with terminal cancer, is offered fifteen or more years of life. The catch is that not only does he have to pay, but he also has to name someone he hates, someone to have the dirty done to them if the dirty is to be lifted from him.

How well do you know your spouse? In "A Good Marriage" Darcy and Bob have been together 27 years. Darcy discovers a dark secret her husband has been hiding and must make a decision on what to do about it.

Fans of King's short stories have probably already read this collection. Even though I didn't officially participate in Carl's R.I.P. IV Challenge, this is certainly the time of year for some terrifying tales. While I found "1922" almost too graphic, I thought "A Good Marriage" was perhaps the most satisfying of the four stories for me. "Big Driver" and "Fair Extension" both closely followed. Be forewarned that this collection of short stories is gruesome and graphic. Detractors may want to deny it, but King proves time and time again that not only is he prolific, he is a good writer. Very Highly Recommended (if I were still giving stars I'd give it 4.5)

Quotes:

And I know where I shall find myself after this earthly life is done. I wonder if Hell can be worse than the City of Omaha. Perhaps it is the City of Omaha, but with good country surrounding it... pg. 4

I believe that there is another man inside of every man, a stranger, a Conniving Man. And I believe that by March of 1922, when Hemingford County skies were white and every field was a snowscrimmed mudsuck, the Conniving Man inside Farmer Wilfred James had already passed judgment on my wife and decided her fate. "Twas justice of the black-cap variety, too. pg. 4

Tess didn't believe in past lifetimes, or future ones for that matter - in metaphysical terms, she thought what you saw was pretty much what you got - but she liked the idea of a life where she was not a small woman with an elfin face, a shy smile, and a job writing cozy mysteries, but a big guy with a hat shading his sunburned brow and grizzled cheeks, letting a bulldog hood ornament lead him along the million roads that crisscross the country. pg. 136

Whether you could put a price tag on pain, rape, and terror was a question the Knitting Society ladies had never taken up. pg. 138

"I specialize only in extensions, a very American product. I've sold love extensions, sometimes called potions to the lovelorn, loan extensions to the cash-strapped - plenty of those in this economy - time extensions to those under some sort of deadline, and once an eye extension to a fellow who wanted to become an Air Force pilot and knew he couldn't pass the vision test." pg. 253

"You have to transfer the weight. In words of one syllable, you have to do the dirty to someone else if the dirty is to be lifted from you..... But it can't be just anyone. The old anonymous sacrifice has been tried, and it doesn't work. It has to be someone you hate. Is there someone you hate, Mr. Streeter?" pg. 255

The one thing nobody asked in casual conversation, Darcy thought in the days after she found what she found in the garage, was this: How’s your marriage? They asked how was your weekend and how was your trip to Florida and how’s your health and how are the kids; they even asked how’s life been treatin you, hon? But nobody asked how’s your marriage?
Good, she would have answered the question before that night. Everything’s fine. pg. 283

A successful marriage was a balancing act—that was a thing everyone knew. A successful marriage was also dependent on a high tolerance for irritation—this was a thing Darcy knew. As the Stevie Winwood song said, you had to roll widdit, baby.
She rolled with it. So did he. pg. 286

Did she know everything about him? Of course not. No more than he knew everything about her.... There was no knowing everything, but she felt that after twenty-seven years, they knew all the important things. It was a good marriage, one of the fifty percent or so that kept working over the long haul. She believed that in the same unquestioning way she believed that gravity would hold her to the earth when she walked down the sidewalk.
Until that night in the garage. pg. 289

My God, What Have We Done?

2011-09-29T07:00:00.002-05:00

My God, What Have We Done? by Susan V. Weiss
Fomite, September 2011
Trade Paperback, 496 pages
ISBN-13: 9780983206347http://www.susanvweiss.com/

Description:

In a world afflicted with war, toxicity, and hunger, does what we do in our private lives really matter?
Fifty years after the creation of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, newlyweds Pauline and Clifford visit that once-secret city on their honeymoon, compelled by Pauline's fascination with Oppenheimer, the soulful scientist.
The two stories emerging from this visit reverberate back and forth between the loneliness of a new mother at home in Boston and the isolation of an entire community dedicated to the development of the bomb. While Pauline struggles with unforeseen challenges of family life, Oppenheimer and his crew reckon with forces beyond all imagining. Finally the years of frantic research on the bomb culminate in a stunning test explosion that echoes a rupture in the couple's marriage. Against the backdrop of a civilization that's out of control, Pauline begins to understand the complex, potentially explosive physics of personal relationships. At once funny and dead serious, My God, What Have We Done? sifts through the ruins left by the bomb in search of a more worthy human achievement.

My Thoughts:

In My God, What Have We Done? author Susan V. Weiss draws comparisons between two seemingly diverse events: the modern day marriage of an average couple, Pauline and Clifford, to J. Robert Oppenheimer's development of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Chapters from events in one time period and storyline will be reflected in some manner in chapters featuring the other.

Both narratives are well written and given careful consideration. They become not only a reflection of relationships but also serve as powerful character studies of human nature. Taking two very different stories and slowly building and shaping a correlation between them turned what could have been simply a clever plot device into a viable honest comparison. The making of the bomb is not just a metaphor for the marriage in the book, but is a viable narrative in and of itself. While Weiss doesn't beat you over the head with the comparisons (and I did feel a few times the comparison was a slight stretch) it was the juxtaposition of what felt like coincidental similarities in two very different stories that gave the novel interest.

I was drawn into both stories and eager to find out what happened next. Having read Bird's biography of Oppenheimer, I knew his story. (Note: Weiss has a list of her sources at the end of the novel, always a plus for me.) What surprised me was how much I enjoyed this version of part of the story as well as the tale/comparison to a modern marriage. Do we ever consider the future consequences of our actions, however simple or well meaning?

One fact that struck me early on when reading My God, What Have We Done? is that Weiss is an excellent writer. It really rather begged the question "Why wasn't this novel picked up by a major publisher?" If you by-pass this novel based on its publisher, you will be missing a great novel. I'm actually honestly surprised at how much I truly enjoyed his novel.

highly recommended

Disclosure: I was provided a copy of this book for review purposes.

Quotes:

For our honeymoon, my husband and I went to Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb. opening

Clifford took two or three photographs of me standing beside the Los Alamos National Laboratory sign, grinning as jubilantly as I should have been in our wedding pictures. pg. 18

"We show a film here that'll give you a sense of what life in Los Alamos was like in hose days. Better hurray. It started a minute or two ago." pg. 20

The movie concluded with the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay. My wedding ring felt uncomfortably tight, so I began to rotate it around my finger. I glanced at Clifford and just then heard the co-pilot's legendary reaction to the explosion: "Oh my God, what have we done?" pg. 23

Soon after Clifford and I had begun dating, we went to an experimental theater performance in Philadelphia about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. pg. 24

This wasn't exactly a memory that I would willingly preserve or recount to our children. In fact I tried to forget the awkwardness of the scene and hoped that it wasn't predictive of a shared lifetime of miscommunication - miscues, retractions. pg. 32

Most of the books on his two bookshelves had been with him for years and never been subject to any kind of purge. pg. 46

So in 1942 Oppenheimer led them - the strange pairing of military men and academics - to that same corner of the country, and when they arrived at the mesa, all of them recognized it as the site they'd been seeking: surrounded by a margin of isolation, forlorn by human interest and separating distant residents from the bomb that would one day be tested. pg. 49

Never in my life had I felt as worthless, wicked, and unclean as during those times when I was in the market for a job. pg. 206

"Tragedy can bring people together, so they say." she paused. "But it can just as well drive them apart, you know." pg. 301

Again our history was being shaped by what we didn't do more than by what we did. pg. 429

Susan Weiss is a writer and a teacher who lives in Burlington, Vermont. Her stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies. In addition to teaching adult literacy and expository and creative writing, she has initiated community-outreach writing projects for offenders, refugees, and homeless people.
Visit Susan at her website, susanvweiss.com.

TLC Book Tour:

Monday, September 19th: A Bookish Libraria
Tuesday, September 20th: “That’s Swell!”
Wednesday, September 21st: Lit Endeavors
Wednesday, September 28th: Savvy Verse & Wit
Thursday, September 29th: she treads softly
Monday, October 3rd: Bloggin’ ‘Bout Books
Wednesday, October 5th: Booksie’s Blog
Monday, October 10th: Steph and Tony Investigate
Tuesday, October 11th: Col Reads
Wednesday, October 12th: Regular Rumination
Wednesday, October 12th: The Well-Read Wife

Boundaries

2011-09-26T21:07:00.004-05:00

Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud , Dr. John Townsend
Zondervan, 1992
Hardcover, 304 pages
ISBN-13: 9780310585909

http://www.cloudtownsend.com/

Description:

Having clear boundaries is essential to a healthy, balanced lifestyle. A boundary is a personal property line that marks those things for which we are responsible. In other words, boundaries define who we are and who we are not. Boundaries impact all areas of our lives: Physical boundaries help us determine who may touch us and under what circumstances -- Mental boundaries give us the freedom to have our own thoughts and opinions -- Emotional boundaries help us to deal with our own emotions and disengage from the harmful, manipulative emotions of others -- Spiritual boundaries help us to distinguish God's will from our own and give us renewed awe for our Creator -- Often, Christians focus so much on being loving and unselfish that they forget their own limits and limitations. When confronted with their lack of boundaries, they ask: - Can I set limits and still be a loving person? - What are legitimate boundaries? - What if someone is upset or hurt by my boundaries? - How do I answer someone who wants my time, love, energy, or money? - Aren't boundaries selfish? - Why do I feel guilty or afraid when I consider setting boundaries? Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend offer biblically-based answers to these and other tough questions, showing us how to set healthy boundaries with our parents, spouses, children, friends, co-workers, and even ourselves.

My Thoughts:

I've been taking a class this summer on boundaries, based on the book Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend. According to Wikipedia, "Personal Boundaries are guidelines, rules or limits that a person creates to identify for him- or herself what are reasonable, safe and permissible ways for other people to behave around him or her and how he or she will respond when someone steps outside those limits. Personal boundaries define you as an individual. They are statements of what you will or won't do, what you like and don't like...how close someone can get to you."

Setting and communicating our personal boundaries to others allows us to protect ourselves. They allow us to separate who we are as unique individuals, including our thoughts and feelings, from others. They prohibit other people from manipulating, abusing, or using us. Boundaries allow us to preserve our individual integrity.

Boundaries also prohibit us from taking responsibility for things that are not our responsibility. "No" is not a bad word. Other people need to understand that their actions have consequences. Setting our own personal boundaries can allow others to experience the consequences of their actions and their choices and prohibit them from blaming us for their actions and choices.

For me, the class has been eye-opening and life-changing. At this point I'm a convert and would suggest that if you have the opportunity to take a class on boundaries, do so - and then start setting them. I'm hardly an expert and could probably benefit from taking the class again in a few months, but at this point I can say with conviction that any abuse, even "just" emotional or verbal, is not okay with me and that I am not responsible for the choices and actions of others. I am responsible for my actions and my choices. Boundaries are freeing.

very highly recommended - along with the classes on video

Quotes:

Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me. A boundary shows me where I end and someone else begins, leading me to a sense of ownership.

Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me freedom. pg. 29

No is a confrontational word. The Bible says that we are to confront people we love, saying, "No, that behavior is not okay. I will not participate in that." The word no is also important in setting limits on abuse. pg. 34

Sometimes physically removing yourself from a situation will help maintain boundaries.... you can remove yourself to get away from danger and put limits on evil. The Bible urges us to separate from those who continue to hurt us and to create a safe place for ourselves. pg. 35

Behaviors have consequences. As Paul says, "A man reaps what he sows" (Gal. 6:7-8). pg. 41

We need to take responsibility for our choices. This leads to the fruit of "self control" (Gal. 5:23). A common boundary problem is disowning our choices and trying to lay he responsibility for them on someone else.... We need to realize that we are in control of our choices....

Setting boundaries inevitably involves taking responsibility for your choices. You are the one who makes them. You are the one who must live with their consequences. pg. 42-43

Envy defines "good" as "what I do not possess," and hates the good that it has....what is so destructive about this particular sin is that it guarantees that we will not get what we want and keeps us perpetually insatiable and dissatisfied. pg. 97

To a boundary-injured person, people who can say a clear no sometimes seem curt and cold. But as the boundaries become more firm, curt and cold people change into caring, refreshingly honest people. pg. 273

You will begin to see that taking responsibility for yourself is healthy, and you will begin to understand that taking responsibility for other adults is destructive.

When people are treated as objects for long enough, they see themselves as someone else's property...

Grace must come from the outside for us to be able to develop it inside. The opposite side of this truth is that we can't love when we aren't loved. And, taking the thinking further, we can't value or treasure our souls when they haven't been valued or treasured.

This is a key principle. Our basic sense of ourselves, of what is real and true about us, comes from our significant, primary relationships. pg. 275

Mystic River

2011-09-22T22:10:00.000-05:00

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
Harper Collins Publishers, 2001
Hardcover, 416 pages
ISBN-13: 9780688163167
http://www.dennislehanebooks.com/

Description:

When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car drove up their street. One boy got in the car, two did not, and something terrible happened — something that ended their friendship and changed the boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con. And Dave is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay — demons that urge him to do horrific things.
When Jimmy's daughter is murdered, Sean is assigned to the case. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy, who finds his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered in someone else's blood. While Sean attempts to use the law to return peace and order to the neighborhood, Jimmy finds his need for vengeance pushing him ever closer to a moral abyss from which he won't be able to return.

My Thoughts:

After being made into a movie with a star-studded cast, I would guess that almost everyone either knows or has several good clues about the plot of Mystic River by Dennis Lehane. Since I recently read Lehane's Shutter Island, I knew I'd also be reading Mystic River at some point.

Mystic River is both a murder mystery and a character study. Set in a blue-collar Boston neighborhood, Mystic River opens in 1975, following ten year old friends Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle during the time when Dave is kidnapped by a pair of child molesters. Dave escapes, but is changed. Then the novel jumps forward to one week in 2000 when Jimmy's daughter is murdered and Sean is now a homicide investigator for the Massachusetts State Police.

Mystic River is a crime novel, but is more importantly a character study of these men now grown and their wives. It focuses on a crime and the fragile, flawed, damaged characters dealing with their feelings of remorse, grief, revenge, passion, and hopelessness. While dark and moody, it totally captivates the reader and transports you to the neighborhood. You will feel like you are in the Boston neighborhood with these characters and experiencing their uncertainty, grief, guilt, and doubts.

As each of the character's actions seem to indicate guilt or influence the actions or perceptions of the other characters, it soon become clear that Lehane really is a masterful writer. There was no superfluous scene, no extra words, no unnecessary details. Everything was very carefully and skillfully presented right up to the end. You will be asking yourself "Are all our futures so uncertain, so fragile? Does destiny really all hinge on one action, one event, one decision? Could one decision have changed everything?"

The ending wasn't as big a surprise as Shutter Island, but it was a very satisfying novel.

very highly recommended

Quotes:

When Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus were kids, their fathers worked together at the Coleman Candy plant and carried the stench of warm chocolate back home with them. It became a permanent character of their clothes, the beds they slept in, the vinyl backs of their car seats. Sean's kitchen smelled like a Fudgsicle, his bathroom like a Coleman Chew-Chew bar. By the time they were eleven, Sean and Jimmy had developed a hatred of sweets so total that they took their coffee black for the rest of their fives and never ate dessert. opening

It wasn't like the Point glittered with gold streets and silver spoons. It was just the Point, working class, blue collar, Chevys and Fords and Dodges parked in front of simple A-frames and the occasional small Victorian. But people in the Point owned. People in the Flats rented. Point families went to church, stayed together, held signs on street corners during election months. The Flats, though, who knew what they did, living like animals sometimes, ten to an apartment, trash in their streets -- Wellieville, Sean and his friends at Saint Mike's called it, families living on the dole, sending their kids to public schools, divorcing. So while Sean went to Saint Mike's Parochial in black pants, black tie, and blue shirt, Jimmy and Dave went to the Lewis M. Dewey School on Blaxston. Kids at the Looey & Dooey got to wear street clothes, which was cool, but they usually wore the same ones three out of five days, which wasn't. There was an aura of grease to them-greasy hair, greasy skin, greasy collars and cuffs. A lot of the boys had bumpy welts of acne and dropped out early. A few of the girls wore maternity dresses to graduation. pg. 4-5

And he was glad, too, once again, that he hadn't gotten in that car.

Damaged goods. That's what Jimmy's father had said to his mother last night: "Even if they find him alive, the kid's damaged goods. Never be the same." pg. 26

For the rest of her life, Diane would wish she'd stayed in that car. She would give birth to a son in less than a year and she'd tell him when he was young (before he became his father, before he became mean, before he drove drunk and ran over a woman waiting to cross the street in the Point) that she believed she was meant to stay in that car, and that by deciding to get out, on a whim, she felt she'd altered something, shaved an overriding sense that her life was spent as a passive observer of other people's tragic impulses, impulses she never did enough to curb. pg. 47-48

And for a quarter second, looking into his face, she felt nauseous. She felt something leering behind his eyes, something turned on and self-congratulatory. pg. 56

The harsh light caught her face, and Sean could see what she'd look like when she was much older - a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she'd never asked for. pg. 164

"....but it would hit them sooner or later - life isn't happily ever after and golden sunsets and sh*t like that. It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves the burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But, sh*t, you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything - because that's what growing older is." pg. 262

Guest Post by Christopher Meeks

2011-09-22T07:30:00.029-05:00

A Guest Post by Christopher Meeks,
author of Love At Absolute Zero

Christopher Meeks began as a playwright and has had three plays produced. Who Lives? A Drama is published. His short stories have been published in Rosebud, The Clackamas Literary Review, The Santa Barbara Review, The Southern California Anthology, The Gander Review, and other journals and are available in two collections, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea and Months and Seasons. He has two novels, The Brightest Moon of the Century, a story that Marc Schuster of Small Press Reviews describes as "a great and truly humane novel in the tradition of Charles Dickens and John Irving," and his new comic novel, Love At Absolute Zero.

Thank you, Lori, for joining the Love At Absolute Zero blog tour and for letting me jump in here. You asked me about the research I did to get the scientific details down pat in the novel. Your question coincidentally came on the opening day of the Steven Soderbergh film Contagion, and from an article I read recently in the Los Angeles Times, he had the same goals I had: to get the science right yet not let the science be overwhelming or hijack the story.

As you have in your review, Love At Absolute Zero centers on a physicist using the tools of science to finding a soul mate in three days—which I find funny. One of the things I most adore about writing novels is I get to research and become expert at something that I hadn’t ever thought of being an expert on before. Here, I had to learn quantum physics and then be able to explain it to the average reader. However, before I jump
ahead, let me clarify why Gunnar is a physicist.

When I conceived this novel, I needed my protagonist to work in Denmark for plot reasons, and it’s difficult for Americans to get a work permit there unless no other European can fill the job. Denmark is big into physics as I learned when I’d spent my junior year abroad in Denmark. I lived in a town called Roskilde, and there was an important nuclear research facility there called Risø, which was a part of the Niels Bohr Institute. Some Americans worked for Risø. I’d met them at a local bar, long before I was thinking of this novel.

Once I decided Gunnar would be a physicist, I made him nuclear, and he worked at
Risø—easy enough. Then I’d learned the Danes had outlawed all nuclear facilities in the
late 80’s. He couldn’t be a nuclear physicist. So what would he do? I leaped onto the
Internet and looked up the Niels Bohr Institute. I found the email addresses of many
people who worked there—graduate students, post-docs, researchers, and even the
director of the Institute, Nils O. Andersen. I wrote a handful of them a note explaining I
was a novelist looking to write about a physicist working in Denmark but I had to make
him real. What kind of research might he be doing that year?

The only one who wrote me back was the director, Dr. Andersen, and he was fascinated
by what I was doing. I learned from him that the hottest research topic was in the
ultracold. He and others were exploring what happens to matter near absolute zero.
Atoms become a new form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), which
turns out to be a really strange thing. Many known laws of the universe fall away when
atoms become BECs.

From there, I had to understand the simplest things about the subject, and I found a

great book called Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold by Tom Shachtman. I also saw
a great Nova program on Absolute Zero.

I ended up studying more and more history and even using physics textbooks to grasp
how quantum mechanics came about and played into BECs. There’s a wonderful play
called Copenhagen by Michael Frayn about Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg that uses
real science as background, which I found inspiring.

I called on Dr. Andersen several times, as well as scientists I found in America, such as
Dr. Sidney Nagel at the University of Chicago and Dr. Mark Saffman at the University
of Wisconsin, where I’d already decided Gunnar would be working. I knew the Midwest
well, having grown up there. Because my last novel, The Brightest Moon of the Century,
took place in Minnesota, this time it would be Wisconsin. Once I grasped the science,
then I used it to inform my characters.

This takes me to a truth I have about people. What a person does for a living colors the
way he or she looks at the world. Police officers who deal with the more twisted people
in society tend to look at anyone they meet with suspicion. Kindergarten teachers tend
to smile a lot because kids and people are inherently good. And scientists have a certain
sense of logic to them. The physical rules of the universe make things clear, and why
shouldn’t love be observed and quantified and understood?

As I explored quantum physics more and more, I came to understand how Gunnar
might view love from his angle of the way atoms in the ultracold behaved. Atoms in a
BEC no longer have an individual identity. They become a wave—a wave with properties
like no other wave. For me, this became a metaphor for love. Gunnar’s despair at
one point screams so overwhelmingly, it’s as if his soul joins the souls of other love-
saddened people, and they are a single unique wave racing through space.

To build on this, I started every chapter with an epigram, a law of physics that might
connect to the emotions that Gunnar experiences in that chapter. I didn’t expect most
readers to catch onto this—that it’s an extra, simply there for the taking. However, when
I gave my first polished draft to several trusted readers including my mother and father,
who are very intelligent readers, they didn’t get what I was doing with the epigrams.

My goal is to communicate, so with a few more drafts, I played with those epigrams,
moved them around in some cases or found better ones, and I hired a fantastic editor,
Lynn Hightower, who happens to teach fiction at UCLA Extension, as I do. She teaches
a master class in fiction where she makes her students outline their books after they’d
written a draft. As my editor, she suggested that some of my epigrams might go outside
of physics—to psychology or religion, for instance. Some might even be funny.

Hightower gets my humor, so this was what I needed. With her, I played more with

the epigrams. I cut out some chapters for pacing and added two characters, Gunnar’s
research partners, for more comic possibilities. The last thing I did is change the ending.
After all the drafts I did, I wasn’t happy with the end. It was too pragmatic, and if
Gunnar learns anything, love isn’t neat and tidy. The end couldn’t be true to scientific
logic, but it had to be true to love. In one clear vision, it came to me. I’m pleased that the
reviewers agree.

The science in the book is real, but it’s simply background in understanding who Gunnar
is. If plumbers and lawyers and hairdressers can fall in love, why not a physicist? It’s
meant to be a fun book, and if you learn something about the universe along the way,
that’s not so bad.

Thank you so much Christopher and Virtual Author Book Tours!
Be sure to check out the links below for more information and links to more reviews and giveaways:

http://christophermeeks.weebly.com/

http://www.virtualauthorbooktours.com/

Love At Absolute Zero

2011-09-21T07:30:00.012-05:00

Love At Absolute Zero by Christopher Meeks
White Whisker Books, 2011
Trade Paperback, 312 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0983632917
http://christophermeeks.weebly.com/

Description:

Love At Absolute Zero is the story of Gunnar Gunderson, a 32-year-old physicist at the University of Wisconsin. The moment he's given tenure at the university, he can only think of one thing: finding a wife. This causes his research to falter. With his two partners, Gunnar is in a race against MIT to create new forms of matter called Bose-Einstein condensates, which exist only near absolute zero. To meet his soul mate within three days--that's what he wants and all time he can carve out--he and his team are using the scientific method, to riotous results.

My Thoughts:

In Love At Absolute Zero by Christopher Meeks the plot is really quite simple: boy wants to meet girl. In this case the boy is 32 year old Wisconsin physicist Gunnar Gunderson. Gunnar gets tenure and decides he needs a wife. He consults with his research partners and they chart a course of action for him to find his soul mate in three days - which is all the time they are able to devote to the search while keeping to their research schedule.

The premise behind Christopher Meeks's novel Love At Absolute Zero intrigued me right from the start. I know scientifically inclined geeks rather well and will admit that I could totally see one of them seriously consider using the scientific method to find a mate. Their seriousness and ability to immerse themselves in their research combined with taking a similar approach to finding a wife is where I imagined the hilarity would ensue. I was not disappointed.

Since readers of She Treads Softly know I like science in my science fiction, you will understand my curiosity when I wondered how would Meeks approach incorporating science in an purely entertaining novel. (Be sure to come back tomorrow for a guest post by Christopher Meeks where he addresses my question about the research he did to get the scientific details down pat in the novel.) I applaud Meeks for doing an admirable job keeping the science real while at the same time not bogging down the entertaining aspects of the novel with too much information about the science.

At the opening of each chapter is a quote or law that relates to physics or science in some manner. Pay attention to them because they enhance the humor in Gunnar's search. Chapter Five opens with: "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" -Albert Einstein. Chapter Seven: "The great tragedy of science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." -English Biologist Thomas H. Huxley. Chapter Twenty-one: "An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." -Neils Bohr. (As many of you know, I love good quotes!)

I found Love at Absolute Zero a very quick, entertaining, and enjoyable novel. He's also quite grounded in the real world, for example mentioning the RateMyProfessor.com site, and, of course speed dating. While I will admit to one minor quibble with the novel, the sheer humor and originality more than made up for it. My minor criticism is that the scientific geeks I know also all have very well developed vocabularies that they use without hesitation. As a character Gunnar was rather plain spoken in comparison to some real life counterparts.

However, my minor complaint was all but erased when yet another funny scene occurred. My absolute favorite is in the quotes below and concerns the physicists visiting the Humanities department. Not that the novel is all humor. It is actually quite serious at times, but Meeks is a clever writer and has perfect timing - he knows when the reader needs a bit of levity to lighten up the mood. Actually, Love At Absolute Zero should be adapted to a screen play. The timing in the novel would perfectly suit a romantic comedy.

Highly Recommended

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book for review purposes.

Please note that the Kindle and Nook versions of the book to .99 cents for the duration of the tour.

Come back tomorrow for a guest post by author Christopher Meeks! Be sure to visit the other Virtual Author Book Tours blogs for more reviews and opportunities to win a copy of Love At Absolute Zero!

Quotes:

Gunnar didn't know that rushing to this meeting would become the first falling domino to lead him to the bathroom floor - but there were many steps ahead and things he might do to miss the bathroom floor. some people, strict determinists, might say that our first breath in the world sets up all that follows. Others talk about destiny. Still others argue free will. Gunnar didn't particularly like philosophy. It was too imprecise. Science was better, and he was happy with science. pg. 8-9

One screen was reserved for word processing, which included his upcoming assignments for his classes as well as a paper he was writing about strontium condensates that he'd told Jeet about. The condensates were Bose-Einstein condensates, a state of matter so rare, its properties baffled many scientists. Atoms at such low temperatures lost their individuality and physical properties, going through an identity crisis. pg. 17

He knew the way to find the right person. He should use the same approach that had always served him well: the scientific method. Use the scientific method for love. pg. 32

"Attraction and connection can't be explained any more than sunspots," said Harry. "It's about chaos."

"Anything can be explained by the scientific method," said Carl, disagreeing. "Even love."

"There has to be a science behind companionship," Gunnar said.

"You sound like Einstein saying God doesn't play with dice."

"Does this have to do with your getting tenure?" said Carl. "After I earned mine, and I was forty, I just wanted to settle down. It's how I met Jolene."

"How?"

"I don't remember. She found me, I think. There's an idea of pheromones, that we put out our whiffs of desire, and women sense these things. Women sense everything, believe me." pg. 36

"There has to be a science behind sex attraction," said Gunnar. "We need the data. We're scientists. We can do this."

The other two nodded readily. "I think we can do this," said Carl.

"We can do this," said Harry. "Three days."

"So where do we start?" said Carl.

"I know one place for answers," said Gunnar. "The humanities."

Harry loudly whispered the words "the Humanities," as if they were deep and dark, never to be mentioned.

"The theatre, specifically," said Gunnar. "That's what plays are about, right? Love?"

Both Harry and Carl shrugged their shoulders, and Harry said, "We don't know what plays are about." pg. 49

"This is how most men walk who are not dating," said Harry, and he stepped quickly and purposefully, his shoulders not moving at all. It was Gunnar's normal walk. "And this is how men on the make do it." Harry slowed down, put strut into his amble and his shoulders moved side to side.

"That looks fakey," said Gunnar.

"You don't see men do this?" asked Harry.

"Some of my male students, I suppose, but I always thought they were just from California." pg. 67

Virtual Author Book Tours

Raging Bibliomania Sept. 12th

Alive on the Shelves Sept 13

Book Briefs Sept. 14 & Sept. 15

Booksie's Blog Sept. 16

A Casual Reader's Blog Sept.19 & Sept 20

She Treads Softly Sept. 21 & Sept 22

This Miss Loves to Read Sept. 22

From the TBR Pile Sept 23

Butterfly-o-meter Books Sept.26 & Sept. 27

So Many Precious Books, So Little Time! Sept 27

The Book Addict Sept 28th & Sept 29th

Lit Endeavors Sept. 30

Books and Needlepoint Oct. 5

My Bookshelf Oct 6 & Oct. 7

Laurie’s Thoughts and Reviews Oct.7 & Oct. 10

Gabriel Reads Oct. 10 & Oct. 11

Dan's Journal Oct. 11 & Oct. 12

Words I Write Crazy Oct. 12

Ramblings of a Daydreamer Oct. 13 & Oct. 14

Drey's Library Oct. 14

Ava's Man

2011-09-14T21:22:00.000-05:00

Trade Paperback, 272 pages
ISBN-13: 9780375724442

Very Highly Recommended

Description:

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All Over but the Shoutin’ continues his personal history of the Deep South with an evocation of his mother’s childhood in the Appalachian foothills during the Great Depression, and the magnificent story of the man who raised her.
Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a whiskey-maker, a fisherman who knew every inch of the Coosa River, made boats out of car hoods and knew how to pack a wound with brown sugar to stop the blood. He could not read, but he asked his wife, Ava, to read him the paper every day so he would not be ignorant. He was a man who took giant steps in rundown boots, a true hero whom history would otherwise have overlooked.
In the decade of the Great Depression, Charlie moved his family twenty-one times, keeping seven children one step ahead of the poverty and starvation that threatened them from every side. He worked at the steel mill when the steel was rolling, or for a side of bacon or a bushel of peaches when it wasn’t. He paid the doctor who delivered his fourth daughter, Margaret—Bragg’s mother—with a jar of whiskey. He understood the finer points of the law as it applied to poor people and drinking men; he was a banjo player and a buck dancer who worked off fines when life got a little sideways, and he sang when he was drunk, where other men fought or cussed. He had a talent for living.

My Thoughts:

In Ava's Man Rick Bragg has written a unique tribute to his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, a man he never knew but one he learned about through the stories of others. Bragg introduces us to Charlie through the carefully written anecdotes he has collected from those who knew Charlie personally. Charlie was a husband, father, roofer, and bootlegger. He was a man who lived by his own personal code in a specific area and place in time.

Charlie Bundrum was "so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make them [his grown daughters] cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky."(pg. 9) "He grew up in hateful poverty, fought it all his life and died with nothing but a family that worshiped him and a name that gleams like new money." (pg. 12) Bragg said that he wrote this book in response to those who told him that he "short-shrifted them in the first book, especially about Charlie, about Ava, about their children" (pg.13) After Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin' readers wanted to know more about the people who were his mother's parents.

In this tribute to his grandfather, Bragg has crafted an amazing, descriptive portrait of his grandfather, a man who lived in crushing poverty during the Depression. He protected his children at all costs. He liked to drink the "likker" he distilled, yet he was a drinker who would laugh rather than get angry. "Even as a boy, he thought people who steal were trash, real trash. 'And a man who'll lie,' he said, even back then, 'will steal.' " (pg. 53)

This biography of Charlie Bundrum is a truly amazing tribute. Bragg's use of language clearly evokes the time and place as well as establishing the characters. This is a memoir that could have become maudlin, but I really think that the quality of Bragg's writing sustains the narrative and elevates it above the ordinary. This is a genuine, honest, portrait of the grandfather Bragg never knew except through the stories of others and a book that should be treasured for generations to come.
Very Highly Recommended - one of the best

Quotes:

A man like Charles Bundrum doesn't leave much else, not a title or property, not even letters in the attic. There's just stories, all told second- and thirdhand, as long as somebody remembers. The thing to do, if you can, is write them down on new paper. pg. 18

Ava met him at a box-lunch auction outside Gadsden, Alabama, when she was barely fifteen, when a skinny boy in freshly washed overalls stepped from the crowd of bidders, pointed to her and said, “I got one dollar, by God.” In the evening they danced in the grass to a fiddler and banjo picker, and Ava told all the other girls she was going to marry that boy someday, and she did. But to remind him that he was still hers, after the cotton rows aged her and the babies came, she had to whip a painted woman named Blackie Lee.

Maybe it isn’t quite right to say that she whipped her. To whip somebody, down here, means there was an altercation between two people, and somebody, the one still standing, won. This wasn’t that. This was a beatin’, and it is not a moment that glimmers in family history. But of all the stories I was told of their lives together, this one proves how Ava loved him, and hated him, and which emotion won out in the end.

Charlie Bundrum was what women here used to call a purty man, a man with thick, sandy hair and blue eyes that looked like something you would see on a rich woman’s bracelet. His face was as thin and spare as the rest of him, and he had a high-toned, chin-in-the-air presence like he had money, but he never did. His head had never quite caught up with his ears, which were still too big for most human beings, but the women of his time were not particular as to ears, I suppose. pg. 19-20

All my life, I have heard the people of the foothills described as poor, humble people, and I knew that was dead wrong. My people were, surely, poor, but they were seldom humble. Charlie sure wasn’t, and his daddy wasn’t, and I suspect that his daddy’s daddy wasn’t humble a bit. And Ava, who married into that family, was no wilting flower, either. A little humility, a little meekness of spirit, might have spared us some pain, over the years, but the sad truth is, it’s just not in us. With the exception of my own mother, maybe, it never was.

For a family so often poor, we have, for a hundred years or more, refused to adapt our character very much. But then, if we had been willing to change just a little bit, we never would have gotten here in the first place.

We are here because our ancestors were too damn hardheaded to adapt, to assimilate. We are here because someone with a name very much like Bundrum picked a fight with the King of France, and the Church of Rome. pg. 26-27

Carry Yourself Back to Me

2011-09-11T12:48:00.000-05:00

Carry Yourself Back to Me by Deborah Reed
AmazonEncore, September 2011
Advanced Reading Copy, 303 pages
ISBN-13: 9781935597674

http://reed-braun.com/

recommended

Description:

With a broken heart, a stalled career, and a troubled family, singer-songwriter Annie Walsh seeks refuge at her secluded home, surrounded by a lush Florida tangelo grove and the company of her old dog Detour. But a crime connected to her brother Calder threatens to tear her family apart, and Annie is forced to shore up her loyalties and question some profound disappointments of her past. From the ever-changing present, where each hour brings an unforeseen piece of news, to the poignant childhood days of first allegiances and life-changing losses, circumstances converge and Annie steps out to lull the listener into this soulful, stirring journey like a fine and forlorn love ballad. Carry Yourself Back to Me cultivates an often tender, sometimes tart world of love and loss. Inflected with melancholy and redeemed by melody, this deeply affecting story is certain to strike a resonant chord in the heart.

My Thoughts:

Carry Yourself Back to Me by Deborah Reed is the story of singer/songwriter Annie Walsh. Annie has secluded herself at her home in Florida after being abandoned by her lover, Owen, six months ago. This also caused her to be estranged from her brother, Calder. Calder tries to mend their relationship but he is then accused of murdering his girlfriend's husband.

This is author Deborah Reed's first literary novel. She writes suspense fiction under the penname Audrey Braun. Reed includes several mysteries and questions that must be answered in this novel, as well as a lot of introspective musing, reflection on memories, and pondering the meaning of life. There is more going on under the surface than outward appearances would indicate.

Stylistically, Reed is a good writer. While I will effortlessly concede that the writing is thoughtful and contemplative, and that the descriptions evoke a real sense of place, I would be remiss if I didn't also confess that I had a few problems with Carry Yourself Back to Me. To be honest, I found all the characters whiny and too self absorbed. It was like a stereotypical country song where everything goes wrong, everyone is cheating, and then your dog dies. All of this made the plot feel contrived to me. Apparently bad things have targeted this group of people and they have had it all happen to them.

Carry Yourself Back to Me just felt way too morose and desolate to me. However, with a nod to Reed, the quality of the actual writing kept me reading to see what happened in the end. Once I reached the ending, it felt implausible, but I suppose it neatly tied up all the loose ends of the plot. My issues with the novel may be more indicative of my frame of mind than of the merits of the novel itself. I would say that this novel is a bit more "chick lit" than I normally read.

Recommended - especially if you tend to like introspective chick lit.

Disclosure: I received an advance reading copy of this novel for review purposes.

Quotes:

Since my copy is an ARC, I have quoted the opening of the book from The Nervous Breakdown:

Annie lifts her father’s old binoculars off the porch. Out past the cornfield a lime-colored pickup idles in the fog of Mrs. Lanie’s tangelo grove next door. The driver’s side hangs open, but no one is behind the wheel. Clutter juts from the truck bed, vapor rises from the tailpipe. Annie knows most of Mrs. Lanie’s pickers, but she doesn’t know this truck.

A ridiculous thought occurs to her. Owen’s come back. He’s sneaking through the grove and coming around the back of the house to surprise her. He’ll cup her eyes from behind and say something stupid like, “Guess who needs glasses?” Or “Who turned out the lights?”

It’s early. She hasn’t brushed her teeth or concealed her dark circles. She hasn’t washed her hair or even pulled it back. The ropey ends catch on her mouth as she sips her coffee. She scans the grove for the shape of a person stealing tangelos. There’s no one she can see.

The last thing Annie wants to do is think about Owen. But it’s like one foot tumbling over a slippery edge of earth the way she unexpectedly falls again and again into the same opening. Her thoughts have become flimsy, sentimental, throwaway songs. Nursery rhymes. Where oh where have you gone?

Steam rises to her lashes from the coffee stalled at her lips. She lowers the cup and presses its warmth into her chest, into the pocket of chilled bare skin above the zipper of her fleece.

It’s not as if their five years together were perfect. They were riddled with rough patches, cruel things slipping from their mouths. She watches the fog shift over the field and remembers all those brassy, merciless words. No doubt she’d use them again, given the chance.

The problem is the nights she couldn’t sleep for all the pleasure rushing through her. The malty scent of his skin, like freshly cut grain, something meant to be eaten. The feel of his cuff brushing her wrist made her greedy for sex and food and music to be played even louder. She’d spent years floundering in smoky, mediocre venues hoping for a crowd to show, and suddenly, here was her muse, her good luck charm, making her old hopes seem puny, amateurish in comparison to what she had with him.

She can’t forget this is the porch where most of the songs for Gull on a Steeple were written. Detour the same old dog that howled at the harmonica. These Adirondack chairs the ones whose red paint Annie and Owen wore away from so much use. Annie circles the rings of coffee and wine with her finger, the oily bug spray sealed into the arms like evidence of mornings, evenings, late nights spent trying to get it right. He made an honest-to-God singer-songwriter out of her. She made a sought-after music producer out of him. Rolling Stone declared Gull on a Steeple “An instant classic filled with vivid tales of love and loss without the slightest hint of sentimentality.” Depression magazine claimed, “Annie Walsh’s painful, clear-eyed, storied songs are woven with a voice reminiscent of the great Patsy Cline, Lucinda Williams, and Aimee Mann, all spun into one.” The comparisons flattered her for the first few minutes, but after that and ever since she’s done nothing but worry about measuring up. Even when Entertainment Weekly came along and knocked her down to something of a Disney production. “A sprightly, nearly elfin frame that charms its way across the stage and into your heart.”

Now it’s hard to even listen to music, let alone play it.

Model Home

2011-09-06T18:07:00.000-05:00

Model Home by Eric Puchner
Scribner 2010
Hardcover, 360 pages
ISBN-13: 9780743270489

http://www.ericpuchner.com/

Synopsis:

Warren Ziller moved his family to California in search of a charmed life and to all appearances, he found it: a gated community not far from the beach, amid the affluent splendor of Southern California in the 80s.But his American dream has been rudely interrupted. Despite their affection for each other—the “slow, jokey, unrehearsed vaudeville” they share at home—Warren, his wife Camille, and their three children have veered into separate lives, as distant as satellites. Worst of all, Warren has squandered the family’s money on a failing real estate venture.
When tragedy strikes, the Zillers are forced to move to one of the houses in Warren’s abandoned development in the middle of the desert. Marooned in a less-than-model home, each must reckon with what’s led them there and who’s to blame—and whether they can summon the forgiveness needed to hold them together. Subtly ambitious, brimming with the humor and unpredictability of life, Model Home delivers penetrating insights into the American family and into the imperfect ways we try to connect, from a writer “uncannily in tune with the heartbreak and absurdity of domestic life” (Los Angeles Times).

My Thoughts:

Model Home is Eric Puchner's debut novel about a family dealing with failure. A failed real estate venture sends Warren Ziller's family into an economic down turn, but, truthfully, the family was already disjointed and spiraling out of control and away from any connection with each other before their American dream became a nightmare. Model Home opens in the summer of 1985, right after Warren's car has been repossessed, but before his family knows the truth about he family's financial condition.

Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, mainly Ziller family members. This includes Warren, Camille (his wife), Lyle (daughter), Dustin and Jonas (sons). Even while their illusions of happiness slip away from them, the reader will realize that the Zillers were never happy to begin with. The novel is alternately depressing, and heartbreaking. There are funny moments, but they are few and far between. And the depressing addition of the diminished capacity of the family's dog was more than I could take

Puchner is certainly a talented writer whose ability elevated this tale about a dysfunctional family above the norm, however, in the end I didn't feel like Model Home broke any new ground. The characters felt stereotypical, flat, and emotionally stunted. The good news is that this was a debut novel, which makes Puchner a writer to watch.

highly recommended for the writing, but be forewarned that it is a depressing story

Quotes:

Two days after his car—an ’85 Chrysler LeBaron with leather seats and all-power accessories—vanished from the driveway, Warren Ziller crept past the expensive homes of his neighbors, trying to match his dog’s limp. opening

A guilty hush came over the table. In the silence, Warren had a chance to take in the spectacle of his children: Dustin, his college-bound son, shirtless as usual and eating an Egg McMuffin he must have picked up on the way home from surfing, preparing for another deafening day of band practice in the garage; Lyle, his redheaded, misanthropic daughter, sixteen years old and wearing a T-shirt with DEATH TO SANDWICHES stenciled on the front, her latest protest against corporate advertising; Jonas, eleven and haunted by death . . . what could he say about Jonas? Every morning he poured granola in his bowl and then spent five minutes picking out all the raisins and dates, only to sprinkle them back on top. He liked to know where they were so “they wouldn’t surprise him.” Today he was wearing an orange windbreaker over a matching orange shirt. Warren felt something brush his heart, a draft of despair. He glanced under the table: orange corduroys, and—glaring conspicuously above Jonas’s Top-Siders—coral-colored socks. pg. 4-5

“Maybe it’s the same guy who stole the Chrysler,” Dustin said. “I doubt it. Car thieves don’t generally abduct people.” Warren said this without batting an eye. There were surfboards leaning undisturbed in all their neighbors’ yards, yet Warren’s family had believed him when he’d said the Chrysler was stolen. It dismayed him, how easy it had been. A fake call to the police, a trip downtown to file a report. (The truth was he’d spent the afternoon at the office.) He’d smoothed any wrinkles of doubt by telling them there were bands of crooks who specialized in gated communities, knowing that people left their keys in the car. “Sitting ducks,” he’d called the families of Herradura Estates.

In truth, Warren had been in denial about the Chrysler. He’d hoped—despite the fact that he hadn’t made a payment in six months, had ignored the bill collector’s increasingly terse and belligerent notices—that the lender might just forget the whole business. Instead the men had come at night, while Warren was asleep. He’d gone out to the driveway with Mr. Leonard and found a dark drool of oil where his car had been. And the stain was only a herald of things to come. There was the furniture, the new Maytag washer, the house itself.

Dustin finished his breakfast, licking some grease that had run down his wrist. It was such a boyish gesture, so casually innocent, that the taste of fear eased back down Warren’s throat. He would protect this innocence at all costs. If that meant lying to his family until he found a way out of this mess, so be it. pg. 5-6

She was a Midwesterner in the way Blackbeard was a pirate: iconic to the species. pg. 7

Kraken

2011-09-05T10:14:00.000-05:00

Kraken by China Miéville

Random House, 2010
Hardcover, 528 pages
ISBN-13: 9780345497499

highly recommended

Description:

British fantasist Miéville mashes up cop drama, cults, popular culture, magic, and gods in a Lovecraftian New Weird caper sure to delight fans of Perdido Street Station and The City & the City. When a nine-meter-long dead squid is stolen, tank and all, from a London museum, curator Billy Harrow finds himself swept up in a world he didn't know existed: one of worshippers of the giant squid, animated golems, talking tattoos, and animal familiars on strike. Forced on the lam with a renegade kraken cultist and stalked by cops and crazies, Billy finds his quest to recover the squid sidelined by questions as to what force may now be unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Publishers Weekly

My Thoughts:

Kraken by China Miéville is definitely in his New Weird genre. Set in a London you won't recognize (reminiscent of Un Lun Dun and The City and the City) Miéville has created a totally new and weird world full of myths, cultists, magic, and murder. In the opening of Kraken, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist at the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum is giving a tour when the prize specimen, Architeuthis dux, or the giant squid and the tank it is preserved in are discovered to be missing.

This crime results in Billy's introduction to a previously hidden population of London, including a cult of squid worshippers (the Congregation of God Kraken), the criminal mastermind called Tattoo (who is literally a tattoo), the FSRC (the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit), Wati (a spirit from ancient Egypt), and Londonmancers. The most terrifying characters, feared by everyone, are the violent duo Goss and Subby, a malevolent old man and a seemingly simple boy. The theft of the squid has somehow set into motion an apocalypse... or two.

Kraken's roots are firmly planted in geek culture. It is both satire and parody. There are lots of references and allusions to various science fiction stories and shows, both the new and classic. There are prototypical characters found in almost all science fiction and fantasy novels, but Miéville's characters are all given a different little twist. Actually, the supporting cast of characters is so varied that it can threaten to overshadow the main characters.

Miéville's eloquent prose continues here. Readers have to pay careful attention to his word choice and descriptions. Sometimes this made reading Kraken feel like work rather than pleasure - until another little gem of a description or word play came up and then I appreciated the care taken in the word choices. Still, at over 500 pages, sometimes a reader will want a break from quite so much thought needed. (Or perhaps my week of work made me want more pure pleasure in the reading rather than careful consideration of the specific words.)

I did feel that Kraken could have been edited down a bit for length. There were a few places where the plot seemed to stall and wander aimlessly. Admittedly, Miéville did get it back under control quickly, but still the places where the plot seemed to meander were evident. All in all, though, I still enjoy Miéville and am going to read more of his previous novels.

Highly Recommended

Quotes:

An everyday doomsayer in sandwich-board abruptly walked away from what over the last several days had been his pitch, by the gates of a museum. The sign on his front was an old-school prophecy of the end: the one bobbing on his back read forget it. opening

"Can I just . . . ?" he said. "Let me explain about what'll happen when we're in there." Billy had evolved his own pointless idio-superstitions, according to one of which it was bad luck for anyone to speak the name of what they were all there for, before they reached it.
"I'm going to show you a bunch of the places we work," he said lamely. "Any questions, you can ask me at the end: we're a little bit time constrained. Let's get the tour done first."
No curator or researcher was obliged to perform this guide-work. But many did. Billy no longer grumbled when it was his turn.
They went out and through the garden, approaching the Darwin with a building site on one side and the brick filigrees of the Natural History Museum on the other. pg. 5

There were children: mostly young boys, shy and beside themselves with excitement, and vastly knowledgeable about what they saw. There were their parents. There were sheepish people in their twenties, as geeky-eager as the kids. There were their girlfriends and boyfriends, performing patience. A few tourists on an unusual byway.
And there were the obsessives.
They were the only people who knew more than the young children. Sometimes they did not speak: sometimes they would interrupt Billy's explanations with too-loud questions, or correct him on scientific detail with exhausting fussy anxiety. He had noticed more of such visitors than usual in the last several weeks. pg. 6

Everyone would be staring at the great tank in the centre of the room.
This was what they came for, that pinkly enormous thing. For all its immobility; the wounds of its slow-motion decay, the scabbing that clouded its solution; despite its eyes being shrivelled and lost; its sick colour; despite the twist in its skein of limbs, as if it were being wrung out. For all that, it was what they were there for.It would hang, an absurdly massive tentacled sepia event. Architeuthis dux. The giant squid. pg. 8

But this time when he opened the door he stopped, and stared for several seconds. The visitors came in behind him, stumbling past his immobility. They waited, unsure of what they were being shown.
The centre of the room was empty. All the jars looked over the scene of a crime. The nine-metre tank, the thousands of gallons of brine-Formalin, the dead giant squid itself were gone. pg. 10

That wasn't the only reason Billy glanced repeatedly behind him. He thought he heard a noise. A very faint clattering, a clanking like a dropped and rolling beaker. It was not the first time he had heard that. He had been catching little snips of such misplaced sound at random moments since a year after he had started at the centre. More than once he had, trying to find the cause, opened a door onto an empty room, or heard a faint grind of glass in a hallway no one could have entered. pg. 13

Billy had bad dreams. He was not the only one. There was no way yet he could know that night sweats were citywide. Hundreds of people who did not know each other, who did not compare their symptoms, slept harried. It was not the weather. pg. 18

"We're the bloody cult squad, Harrow," Baron said. "Why d'you think we we're called in? Who do you think's responsible for what's going on?"
"Teuthies." Vardy smiled. "Worshippers of the giant squid." pg. 41

"That's what gets converts these days," Baron said. "It's a buyer's market in apocalypse. What's hot in heresy's Armageddon." pg. 53

Started Early, Took My Dog

2011-08-27T23:00:00.000-05:00

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
Little, Brown & Company, March 2011
Advanced Reading Copy, 385 pages
Jackson Brodie Series #4
ISBN-13: 9780316066730

http://www.kateatkinson.co.uk/

Overview

Tracy Waterhouse leads a quiet, ordered life as a retired police detective-a life that takes a surprising turn when she encounters Kelly Cross, a habitual offender, dragging a young child through town. Both appear miserable and better off without each other-or so decides Tracy, in a snap decision that surprises herself as much as Kelly. Suddenly burdened with a small child, Tracy soon learns her parental inexperience is actually the least of her problems, as much larger ones loom for her and her young charge.
Meanwhile, Jackson Brodie, the beloved detective of novels such as Case Histories, is embarking on a different sort of rescue-that of an abused dog. Dog in tow, Jackson is about to learn, along with Tracy, that no good deed goes unpunished.

My Thoughts:

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson is her fourth novel featuring private eye Jackson Brodie. This novel explores hidden crimes all connected to the 1975 murder of a prostitute in Leeds. It appears to be another victim of the Yorkshire Ripper, but appearances can be deceiving. And what happened to her child, found starving in the apartment along with the body of the presumed mother.

Started Early, Took My Dog has multiple narratives following several characters in the past and present. These narratives include Tracy Waterman, currently a retired policewoman, who was one of the investigating officers in 1975. But Tracy has her own issues. She inexplicably finds herself buying a young child from her mother, an abusive prostitute. She sets out to create a new life for her and her new daughter.

Recurring character Jackson has now rescued a dog (a border terrier) while searching for the real parentage of an adopted woman currently living in New Zealand. Another character, Tilly, is an aging senile actress. Additional characters are part of the police force, many now retired.

As the story progresses, coincidences seem to be something more than happenstance. Eventually all the characters from the various narrative strands start to come together. Started Early, Took My Dog is a clever, well written book, but it also requires your complete attention and focus to follow the various narrative threads. (I'm not sure I was completely up to the task and reading it over a week wasn't helpful in that area. Taking the time to finish it in one sitting today was very helpful, though.

Highly Recommended if you can give it your complete attention (and maybe read it in a shorter time span.)

Quotes:

1975: April 9
Leeds: “Motorway City of the Seventies.” A proud slogan. No irony intended. Gaslight still flickering on some streets. Life in a northern town. opening

Her stomach rumbled like a train. She’d been on the cottage cheese and grapefruit diet for a week. Wondered if you could starve to death while you were still overweight.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Arkwright gasped, bending over and resting his hands on his knees when they finally achieved the fifteenth floor. “I used to be a rugby wing forward, believe it or not.”

“Ay, well, you’re just an old, fat bloke now,” Tracy said. “What number?”

“Twenty-five. It’s at the end.”

A neighbor had phoned in anonymously about a bad smell (“a right stink”) coming from the flat.

“Dead rats, probably,” Arkwright said. “Or a cat. Remember those two dogs in that house in Chapeltown? Oh no, before your time, lass.”

“I heard about it. Bloke went off and left them without any food. They ate each other in the end.”

“They didn’t eat each other,” Arkwright said. “One of them ate the other one.”

“You’re a bloody pedant, Arkwright.”

“A what? Cheeky so-and-so. Ey up, here we go. Fuck a duck, Trace, you can smell it from here.”

Tracy Waterhouse pressed her thumb on the doorbell and kept it there. Glanced down at her ugly police-issue regulation black lace-ups and wiggled her toes inside her ugly police-issue regulation black tights. Her big toe had gone right through the hole in the tights now and a ladder was climbing up toward one of her big footballer’s knees. “It’ll be some old bloke who’s been lying here for weeks,” she said. “I bloody hate them.”

“I hate train jumpers.”

“Dead kiddies.”

“Yeah. They’re the worst,” Arkwright agreed. Dead children were trumps, every time.

Tracy took her thumb off the doorbell and tried turning the door handle. Locked. “Ah, Jesus, Arkwright, it’s humming in there. Something that’s not about to get up and walk away, that’s for sure.”

Arkwright banged on the door and shouted, “Hello, it’s the police here, is anyone in there? Shit, Tracy, can you hear that?”

“Flies?”

Ken Arkwright bent down and looked through the letter box. “Oh, Christ—” He recoiled from the letter box so quickly that Tracy’s first thought was that someone had squirted something into his eyes. It had happened to a sergeant a few weeks ago, a nutter with a Squeezy washing-up bottle full of bleach. It had put everyone off looking through letter boxes. Arkwright, however, immediately squatted down and pushed open the letter box again and started talking soothingly, the way you would to a nervy dog. “It’s OK, it’s OK, everything’s OK now. Is Mummy there? Or your daddy? We’re going to help you. It’s OK.” He stood and got ready to shoulder the door. Pawed the ground, blew air out of his mouth and said to Tracy, “Prepare yourself, lass, it’s not going to be pretty.” pg. -6

Germ

2011-08-22T17:56:00.000-05:00

Germ by Robert Liparulo
Thomas Nelson, copyright 2006
Trade Paperback, 496 pages
ISBN-13: 9781595541703
http://www.robertliparulo.com/

recommended

Overview

If you breathe...It will find you.
The list of 10,000 names was created for maximum devastation. Business leaders, housewives, politicians, celebrities, janitors, children. None of them is aware of what is about to happen—but all will be part of the most frightening brand of warfare the world has ever known.
The germ—an advanced form of the Ebola virus—has been genetically engineered to infect only those people whose DNA matches the codes embedded within it. Those whose DNA is not a match simply catch a cold. But those who are a match experience a far worse fate. Within days, their internal organs liquify.
Death is the only escape.
The release of the virus will usher in a new era of power where countries are left without defense. Where a single person—or millions—could be killed with perfect accuracy and zero collateral damage. Where your own DNA works against you.
The time isn't coming. It is now. Pray the assassins get you first.

My Thoughts:

When I came across Germ by Robert Liparulo, I was initially excited to see it featured the Ebola virus used in germ warfare. That premise alone made me anxious to read it. Once the concept that the virus was modified, encoded, to attack the specific DNA of individuals was introduced in the "Facts" section at the beginning of the novel, I was hooked. In Germ, special agent Julia Matheson must figure out what is happening and why she and Dr. Allen Parker are being targeted by assassins before the deadly weaponized infection is released to ten thousand people.

While it would appear that the premise would be enough to keep readers interested in the plot, the short chapters and switching to the view point of multiple characters made this novel feel choppy. Additionally, the number of gun fights, chase scenes, hand-to-hand combat, narrow escapes, etc., could have been edited down. This would have tightened up the novel and helped the pacing. As difficult as it seems, I was becoming bored with the sheer overwhelming number of fight scenes.

There is no "who done it" mystery to solve, so the main suspense is in asking what will happen next. The action scenes are the star of the novel, with the Ebola virus taking a back seat to it. Ebola is horrific enough that I will admit to being a bit disappointed that it didn't take a more prominent place in the action throughout the novel.

This is Christian fiction, but I don't think that that really matters at all except for the lack of colorful language. There really are not pages of theological discussions. One character is a minister and there were a few Biblical quotes, but that's about it. All in all, it was okay for a thriller (but not so much for a virus novel).

Recommended

Quotes; Chapter One:

Hardly resembling a man anymore, the thing on the bed jerked and thrashed like a nocturnal creature dragged into the light of day. His eyes had filled with blood and rolled back into his head, so only crimson orbs glared out from behind swollen, bleeding lids. Black flecks stained his lips, curled back from canted teeth and blistered gums. Blood poured from nostrils, ears, fingernails. Flung from the convulsing body, it streaked up curtains and walls and streamed into dark pools on the tile floor.

Despesorio Vero, clad in a white lab coat, leaned over the body, pushing an intratrachael tube down the patient's throat; his fingers were slick on the instrument. He snapped his head away from the crimson mist that marked each gasp and cough. His nostrils burned from the acidic tang of the sludge. He caught sight of greasy black mucus streaking the blood and tightened his lips. Having immersed his hands in innumerable body cavities—of the living and the dead—few things the human body could do or produce repulsed him. But this . . . He found himself at once steeling his stomach against the urge to expel his lunch and narrowing his attention to the mechanics of saving this man's life.

Around him, patients writhed on their beds. They howled in horror and strained against their bonds. Vero ached for them, feeling more sorrow for them than he felt for the dying man; at least his anguish would end soon. For the others, this scene would play over and over in their minds—every time an organ cramped in pain; when the fever pushed beads of perspiration, then blood, through their pores; and later, during brief moments of lucidity.

The body under him abruptly leaped into an explosive arch. Then it landed heavily and was still. One hand on the intratrachael tube, the other gripping the man's shoulder, Vero thought mercy had finally come—until he noticed the patient's skin quivering from head to toe. The man's head rotated slowly on its neck to rest those pupil-less eyes on the doctor. With stuttering movements, as if a battle of fierce wills raged inside, the eyes rolled into their normal position. The cocoa irises were difficult to distinguish from the crimson sclera.

For one nightmarish moment, Vero looked into those eyes. Gone were the insanity of a diseased brain and the madness that accompanies great pain. Deep in those bottomless eyes, he saw something much worse.

He saw the man within. A man who fully realized his circumstances, who understood with torturous clarity that his organs were liquefying and pouring out of his body. In those eyes, Vero saw a man who was pleading, pleading . . .

The skin on the patient's face began to split open. As a gurgling scream filled the ward, Vero turned, an order on his lips. But the nurses and assistants had fled. He saw a figure in the doorway at the far end of the room.

"Help me!" he called. "Morphine! On that cart . . .

"The man in the doorway would not help.

Karl Litt. He had caused this pain, this death. Of course he would not help.

Still, it shocked Vero to see the expression on Litt's face. He had heard that warriors derived no pleasure from taking life; their task was necessary but tragic. Litt was no warrior. Only a monster could look as Litt did upon the suffering of the man writhing under Vero. Only a monster could smile so broadly at the sight of all this blood. pg. 1-2

A Reliable Wife

2011-08-16T20:13:00.000-05:00

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2009
Hardcover, 291 pages
ISBN-13: 9781565125964

http://robertgoolrick.com/

Description:

He placed a notice in a Chicago paper, an advertisement for "a reliable wife." She responded, saying that she was "a simple, honest woman." She was, of course, anything but honest, and the only simple thing about her was her single-minded determination to marry this man and then kill him, slowly and carefully, leaving her a wealthy widow, able to take care of the one she truly loved.
What Catherine Land did not realize was that the enigmatic and lonely Ralph Truitt had a plan of his own. And what neither anticipated was that they would fall so completely in love.
Filled with unforgettable characters, and shimmering with color and atmosphere, A Reliable Wife is an enthralling tale of love and madness, of longing and murder.

My Thoughts:

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick is a moody gothic tale set in 1907 to 1908. Ralph Truitt, a fifty-four year old wealthy business man from rural northern Wisconsin has advertised for a reliable wife. Catherine Land has answered his personal ad. Catherine is not the simple daughter of a missionary that she claims to be, but circumstances lead them to marry anyway; as the story says repeatedly: "These things happened."

In the novel, Ralph is very aware that the winters in Wisconsin are cold, bleak, and depressing - a setting that compels people to commit horrendous, violent acts in desperation. Goolrick does an admirable job setting the dark tone to the novel and the psychological torment the characters are going though. Neither character is precisely what they appear to be. Both of them hold their own dark secrets and reasons for wanting to marry.

Although I found parts of the plot of A Reliable Wife predictable, the quality of Goolrick's writing does elevate the book above the ordinary. He has a real gift for setting a mood and elevating the tension between the characters. The longing and sexual tension is palatable in his very real, complex characters. These characters want: they want love; they want to escape; they want redemption; they want hope - but they don't feel they are worthy of any of it.

I'm going to have to admit that I found the pacing of A Reliable Wife uneven and inconsistent. At times I did feel a compulsion to read on until I hit parts where it felt flat and repetitious. And, as I mentioned, the plot itself offered no great surprise. It was certainly worth reading.

highly recommended

Quotes:

It was bitter cold, the air electric with all that had not happened yet. opening

Ralph Truitt checked his silver watch. Yes, the train was late. The eyes around him were staring silently; they knew. He had counted on the train being on time today. To the minute, he had told them. He ordered punctuality that way another man might order a steak cooked to his liking. Now he stood like a fool with everybody watching. And he was a fool. He had failed at even this small thing. It would come to nothing, this last small spark of hope. pg. 4

Some things you escape, he thought. Most things you don't, certainly not the cold. You don't escape the things, mostly bad, that just happen to you. The loss of love. The disappointment, the terrible whip of tragedy. pg. 5-6

You can live with hopelessness for only so long before you are, in fact, hopeless. He was fifty-four years old, and despair had come to Ralph as an infection, without his even knowing it. He could not pinpoint the moment at which hope had left his heart. pg. 8

Love and money. She could not believe that her life, as barren and as aimless as it had been, would end without either love or money. pg. 17

But this woman was not expected. He was angry. He was confused. He had read her letter until it fell apart in his hands. He had looked at her picture a thousand times. Now it was clear she wasn't the woman in the photograph, and he had no idea who she might be. pg. 31

Her true heart was buried so far inside her, so gone beneath the vast blanket of her lies and deceptions and whims. Like her jewels now beneath the snow, it lay hidden until some thaw might come to it. She had no way of knowing, of course, whether this heart she imagines herself to have was, in fact, real in any way. pg. 49

Learning became her. She loved the smell of the books from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book. pg. 170

New Job!

2011-08-15T17:07:00.000-05:00

Started my new job today!

I have a new job(!!!) and I'm excited - but it may mean a few changes here at She Treads Softly. I'm hoping my reviews will still be out in a timely manner, but please forgive me if they temporarily slow down during this transition time.

Due Preparations for the Plague

2011-08-14T12:43:00.000-05:00

Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital
Norton & Company, 2003
Hardcover, 401 pages
ISBN-13: 9780393057645

http://www.janetteturnerhospital.com/

very highly recommended

Overview

From the author of the critically acclaimed novels Oyster and The Last Magician comes a psychological suspense tale that crystallizes our deepest hopes and fears for the twenty-first century. Lowell, a single father, is haunted by the memory of a hijacked Paris -- New York flight on which his mother was killed when he was a teenager. A stranger, Samantha, has recently begun harassing him with phone calls about information from declassified documents. She is obsessed with learning the whole truth about Air France 64. "I was on that flight. I was six years old. I have a right," she says. "What can be worse than not knowing?" It is the death of Lowell's father, and his legacy of a blue sports bag crammed with documents and videotapes, that finally convinces Lowell to join Samantha's search for a shadowy figure called Salamander, a man she believes was a sinister key figure in the tragedy. Janette Turner Hospital's electrifying new novel is a tightly woven web of familial and national histories, of sexual and political passions, and of individual and national complicities in the age of terrorism. In this murky world of endless aliases and surveillance, who can be trusted? When does the quest for truth become a dangerous obsession? When does the assembling of facts tip into paranoia? And what difference can the truth make? Hospital probes with astonishing acuity the worlds of espionage and intelligence gathering, and the painful meaning of survival.

My Thoughts:

Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital focuses on characters that all have one thing in common: they all have some connection to a plane that was hijacked by terrorists thirteen years earlier. When he was sixteen, Lowell's mother was on the flight and killed during the hijacking. Lowell's life is still tormented by her death. Samantha is a survivor. She was a six year old child and allowed off the plane. She is searching declassified documents connected with the hijacking and trying to discover the identity of a shadowy agent called Salamander. Additionally, it seems that all those connected with the hijacking are dying mysterious deaths. After Lowell's father dies and leaves him a bag filled with documents and tapes about the hijacking, he and Samantha team up.

This is a psychological thriller that deals with terrorism and espionage. It will play on your emotions as it tells a tale of deceit and deception and how one man's duplicity affects the lives of many. The story switches narrators and points-of-view, drawing out surprising connections between the people involved and offering the reader more insight into the whole terrifying event.

Certainly recent events give Due Preparations for the Plague a poignancy and timelessness that bodes well for the lasting impact it has on the reader. It could be a real story. The paranoia running rampant through the characters could be a legitimate feeling that they should be paying attention to. Today we know there are terrorists, unethical political maneuvers, humans used as collateral, and chemical warfare.

Due Preparations for the Plague also deals with the psychological destruction of personal loss and death. As the overleaf quote, from Daniel Defoe's Due Preparations For the Plague says: "I have often asked myself what I mean by preparations for the plague... and I think that preparations for the plague are preparations for death. But what is it to make preparations for death? or what preparations are proper to be made for death?" Exactly what preparations can you make for your own death that are truly beneficial and not simply reactions to the obvious? What risks must be taken? What must we be willing to leave behind?

Due Preparations For the Plague is a beautifully written literary novel with sharp characterizations. Every little detail is also well researched and woven seamlessly into the plot. The different narrators are fully formed and developed characters; each of them has a distinct and individual voice. While this is a political thriller that requires some effort and concentration to read, in the end you will feel your time was well spent. "To state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise." Albert Camus, The Plague
Very Highly Recommended

Quotes:

Brightness falls from the air, and so do the words, which rush him. opening

But it is after a death, Lowell knows, that riddles and slow torments begin. pg. 8

Lowell thinks that his losses may have become simple at last. He thinks they may have become simple and respectable and therefore manageable. He thinks he will be able to speak of them almost lightly. My mother died in that airline disaster of '87 when I was sixteen years old, he will be able to say, and the effect on my father was devastating. Our lives were never the same. pg. 13

He feels the pain of his like a razor blade in his heart. He is never sure which might inflict greater damage: not spending enough time with his children, or spending time with them. pg. 15

"He claimed all he ever really wanted to be was a classics professor."
"Sometimes I believed that," Lowell says. "But mostly I didn't. What made him take the direction he finally did, I've never understood."
"They needed linguists," she says. "In intelligence. That's what he told me. Especially ones with scientific training as well. An old friend from his prep school recruited him, he said." pg. 21-22

One month after the funeral, Lowell receives a letter of sorts and certain documents in his father's handwriting. Dr. Reuben delivers the package, and the circumstances are strange. pg. 27

"I don't know precisely. A journal, I believe. And some papers, possibly classified ones. And some videotapes - I don't know of what - but the tapes are of crucial importance. Crucial, your father said..." pg. 31

Some days, when she watches children playing in the park, she can feel the ground giving way. You have no idea, she wants to tell the children. The swings, the sandbox: they are all illusions. You have no idea how unreliable things are, or how suddenly the sky can turn to fire. pg. 50

"But this is the mystery, she thinks: how do we ready ourselves for what might happen tomorrow?
What possible preparations can be made? pg. 401

Northwest Corner

2011-08-11T07:00:00.002-05:00

Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz
Random House, July 2011
Hardcover, 304 pages
ISBN-13: 9781400068456

http://www.johnburnhamschwartz.com/

Very Highly Recommended

From the Cover:

John Burnham Schwartz reintroduces us to Reservation Road’s unforgettable characters in a superb new work of fiction that stands magnificently on its own. Northwest Corner is a riveting story about the complex, fierce, ultimately inspiring resilience of families in the face of life’s most difficult and unexpected challenges.
Twelve years after a tragic accident and a cover-up that led to prison time, Dwight Arno, now fifty, is a man who has started over without exactly moving on. Living alone in California, haunted yet keeping his head down, Dwight manages a sporting goods store and dates a woman to whom he hasn’t revealed the truth about his past. Then an unexpected arrival throws his carefully neutralized life into turmoil and exposes all that he’s hidden.
Sam, Dwight’s estranged college-age son, has shown up without warning, fleeing a devastating incident in his own life. In its way, Sam’s sense of guilt is as crushing as his father’s. As the two men are forced to confront their similar natures and their half-buried hopes for connection, they must also search for redemption and love. In turn, they dramatically transform the lives of the women around them: the ex-wives, mothers, and lovers they have turned to in their desperate attempts to somehow rewrite, outrun, or eradicate the past.

My Thoughts:

Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz continues the story from his novel Reservation Road. Dwight Arno is now fifty years old and out of prison. He is now living in California and is the manager of a sporting goods store. Dwight is surprised by an unexpected visitor, his estranged son, Sam. Sam has left college in Connecticut and is running from something he has done. Northwest Corner examines the lives of ordinary men and woman who are all damaged in some way and are all searching for meaning and redemption.

All the chapters are short and each one is from the point of view of a different character. Rest assured, though, that you do not need to have read Reservation Road in order to appreciate Northwest Corner. For those who have read Reservation Road, the characters include: Dwight, Sam, Ruth, Penny (Dwight's girlfriend), and Emma Learner.

Schwartz explores his damaged characters, their desires and fears, while slowly building an emotional tension that should resonate with most readers. The characters are all so very, very real - so true to life.The sheer raw emotion that leaps off the page is heart wrenching, yet does not feel manufactured. The characters feel like real people. You know these people. You feel their sadness and despair. You may have been through circumstances similar to these tortured souls. You will hope that they find redemption, that there is some resolution to their pain.

This is an incredible novel, exquisitely written. Schwartz is a gifted, poetic writer with a keen sharp insight into human character. There are observations throughout the novel that are brilliant gems of perfect cut and clarity. His descriptions transport you into the scene with the characters. While the plot itself is not full of action, the emotional landscape explored is packed full to overflowing.

Very Highly Recommended - one of the best

Quotes:

“Arno — bus.”
Coach dips out of the locker room. Sam listens to the footsteps echoing down the long corridor and only now, knowing he’s the last, removes the towel draped over his head. He picks up the thirty-one ounce aluminum bat lying by his feet, jams it into the UConn duffel with the rest of his gear, and zips the bag closed. opening

Jake’s voice is almost insultingly tender. The comfort you receive when, bases loaded and two out in the tenth inning of the college playoffs, you strike out without taking a swing, ending your team’s season. pg. 3

O’Doul’s is hot and crowded, the walls painted dark. A long time, Sam stands drinking by himself. When a stool at the bar finally opens, he slides onto it, the UConn duffel shoved down into the sawdust-and-gum shadows at his feet. A Bacardi mirror with fogged glass hangs above the backbar next to a St. Pauli Girl clock, the clock’s hands frozen at twelve minutes to six, permanent happy hour. pg. 5

Listen to me. These are the sorts of thoughts that too often come back while you're spending thirty months in the hole. And after, too. There's violence in the air even when nothing is happening. pg. 7-8

My red plastic SoCal Sports tag says Dwight Arno, Manager in clear white letters. Under expected circumstances I would be a figure of rectitude and probity.
To which I can add that I still want to be. pg. 9

Rage rises in him like animal blood. And suddenly everything but what burns inside him is underwater-quiet. He doesn't think; at last he just becomes. pg. 11

According to the law, as I still recall it, words are our fate, perhaps our character, too: they will make us or break us. But the gloomier truth is that the breakage usually happens in an instant, life changing in a single wordless act. The words are the last thing you hear before you slip into the darkness of afterward, mere nails in the coffin. pg. 25

Because it's been like this for so long - half Emma's entire life - that the memory of that earlier, supposedly happy time is like an old sheet that's been washed too many times: thin, stained, torn, in places translucent - you can see right through it.
And that's what life is now. pg. 42

Her parents were close and loving once, she is almost certain. There are photos that stand as, if not proof, then emotional attestations to familial and marital happiness, what human lives produce instead of proof. pg. 54

... a "practical relocation," her parents call it, as if she's a head case and can't tell the difference: separation, divorce, the long, cold withdrawal into an ever smaller and more isolated chamber of the heart. pg. 55

A boy and his dad. Folks as good as extinct now, or at best reduced to cheap replicas of themselves in foreign lands. pg. 71

But who, she desperately needs to know, will be there in the end to see her over to the other side? pg. 77

A hard breath taken into the lungs: washing out the unsaid things that seem to clot any room, even this moving one, in hitch they find themselves together. pg. 147

You cannot reach fifty years of age and still think that nothing is better than something, unless you are a fool as well as an a**hole. Despite what the mathematicians assure us, zero is not a meaningful number in real life. pg. 157

Because if you are not taken in, if exile is as guaranteed as death, then you are kicked out and alone.
Who will have you then? Who? The fire is no more. The fire that was love. pg. 174

Disclosure: As a part of TLC Book Tours I received a copy of this book for review purposes.

she treads softly

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Discovery of Jeanne Baret

The Five

11/22/63

Best Books of 2011

Micro

1Q84

So Far Away

Christine W. Hartmann’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Guest Post by Connie Corcoran Wilson

Laughing Through Life

Rollback

Transformational What?

The Accidental Activist

Tunnel Vision

Beatrice and Virgil

King Rat

Amaryllis in Blueberry

Atlantic

Emily, Alone

Full Dark, No Stars

My God, What Have We Done?

TLC Book Tour:

Boundaries

Mystic River

Guest Post by Christopher Meeks

Love At Absolute Zero

Ava's Man

Carry Yourself Back to Me

Model Home

Kraken

Started Early, Took My Dog

Germ

A Reliable Wife

New Job!

Due Preparations for the Plague

Northwest Corner

John Burnham Schwartz’s TLC Book Tours TOUR