THIS CENSUS-TAKER

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This Census-Taker, China Mieville, Del Rey, 2016, 204 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: For readers of George Saunders, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell, This Census Taker is the poignant and uncanny new novella from award-winning and bestselling author China Miéville. After witnessing a profoundly traumatic event, a boy is left alone in a remote house on a hilltop with his increasingly deranged parent. When a stranger knocks on his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation are over—but by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? Is he the boy’s friend? His enemy? Or something altogether other?

 

 

The second installment about my April reading slump.

 

My Review:

I mostly have loved and admired the books I've read by Mieville. Kraken was a bit challenging and in This Census-Taker he challenged me beyond some limit I guess I have as a reader. In fact, coming after the Mahfouz book I read before it, this nearly incomprehensible story sent me further down into a reading slump, leading to lack of a desire to read. Unheard of for me!

 

Neither the time nor the place are identified. A young boy witnesses what he believes is the murder of his mother by his strange and intermittently violent father. I did admire the writing which for much of the book was from the viewpoint of an eight-year-old boy. I knew I was only getting his unreliable narration. The boy's nightmares and fear are palpable and creepy to the max.

 

As for how he ends up being a census-taker and why and what his job involves and for whom he is doing it, I really had no idea. I have a high tolerance for wandering through a story where I am essentially lost but apparently that tolerance does have a ceiling, especially when I never get my bearings even by the last page.

 

I will keep reading Mieville though. 

 

Books I Have Enjoyed By Mieville
Un Lun Dun

The City & The City

Embassytown

 

 

(This Census-Taker is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)  

AUTUMN QUAIL

Autumn Quail, Naguib Mahfouz, Doubleday, 1985, (first published in Arabic by an Egyptian publisher, 1962), 167 pp

 

 

Note: This will be the first of four posts in which I describe the descent into and the slog through a reading slump I experienced last month. 

 

 

My Review:

Though Autumn Quail was not translated into and published in English until 1985, it was first published in Egypt in 1962. Hence, I read it as part of the 1962 reading list for My Big Fat Reading Project.

 

The novel was not as impressive as other Mahfouz works I have read. It does however tie in with another 1962 novel, Seven Days in May, because the major event is a military overthrow of King Faruq in Egypt in 1952. That event is historically known as the 23 July Revolution and was led by a group of army officers, one of whom was Gamal Abdel Nasser. By 1956, Nasser was President of Egypt but that is another story.

Isa ad-Dubbagh is the main character in the novel. He lost his cushy bureaucratic position in the purge that followed the conflict. Though he was corrupt he reasoned that so were many others. Another sorry repercussion was that his upcoming marriage to the daughter of a wealthy government Minister became out of the question.

After some years of heartbreak and emotional turmoil, during which he drinks a lot, neglects his widowed mother, and has a child with a prostitute, he comes to terms with the Revolution to the point of at least an intellectual acceptance of his country's desire for independence. 

The writing has even more Western influence than earlier novels by Mahfouz and served as another piece of the historical picture I am getting about 20th century Egypt by reading this author. Thus it was good to have read it and knocked another book off my very long 1962 list. Little did I know it was the beginning of the slump.

Tune in next time for what happened next!

(Autumn Quail is available in a paperback collection of three Mahfouz novellas, by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MAY READING GROUP UPDATE

Quite a variety of genres and subject matter this month. 

Tina's Group:

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As I am a bit late posting the reading group update this month, this group has already met. So I can report that in this male/female mixed group, the women liked the book, the men panned it. 

 

 

Laura's Group:

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I played hookie for this one and did not read the book either. It sounded like not my cup of tea, but I am reading The Past, similar topic but assured literary writing.

Tiny Book Club:

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A non-fiction/memoir on sexual fluidity, etc. Looking forward to reading it but not sure if I will like it or not. Stay tuned.

 

 

One Book At A Time:

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Pretty excited that one of my reading groups chose a Joyce Carol Oates book! I haven't read this one before, appropriate for Mother's Day month. We will see what they think.

 

 

Bookie Babes:

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And a crime/mystery thriller by the great Sara Paretsky. I have already read this one but am excited to discuss it as I know the Bookie Babes include some serious mystery readers.

Are you attending any reading groups this month? What will you discuss?

INNOCENTS AND OTHERS

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Innocents and Others, Dana Spiotta, Scribner, 2016, 275 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: Dana Spiotta’s new novel is about two women, best friends, who grow up in LA in the 80s and become filmmakers. Meadow and Carrie have everything in common—except their views on sex, power, movie-making, and morality. Their lives collide with Jelly, a loner whose most intimate experience is on the phone. Jelly is older, erotic, and mysterious. She cold calls powerful men and seduces them not through sex but through listening. She invites them to reveal themselves, and they do.

 

 

My Review:

 

Michiko Kakutani and I have one thing in common. We both think Dana Spiotta is all that as an author. The illustrious critic has called her “wonderfully gifted” in her review of Lightning Field; declared her second novel, Eat the Document “stunning”; and described her as “immensely talented” for Stone Arabia. I am in complete agreement with all those accolades. Since I don’t review for the New York Times, I can be even more personal and say that every one of her novels resonates with the life I have led as an aging free-love hippy with feminist leanings and an artistic bent. Like Dana Spiotta’s characters, I have never achieved any assured success and have suffered from successive identity crises.

Ms Spiotta’s fourth novel, Innocents and Others, reprises her themes: living in but feeling uncomfortable with American culture, engaging in somewhat fringe activities at large costs, and treading the shaky ground of female friendship. Meadow Mori was the privileged only child of indulgent parents in 1980s Los Angeles. She and her best friend Carrie dive into filmmaking as teens and both go on to creative careers, Mori making edgy documentaries and Carrie becoming commercially successful with feminist slanted women’s pictures. They are both committed to honesty and excellence but competition and professional jealousy threaten the deep bond that grew in their experimental days.

Woven between Meadow’s and Carrie’s chapters is one of Spiotta’s most inventive characters. Jelly (not her real name) began her professional life in a call center selling resort condos but discovered she had a gifted voice on the phone. She could get even the coldest called potential customer to talk and reveal himself, leading to a phenomenal sales record. After developing her own techniques of timing and persuasion but leaving the job out of dissatisfaction and low level guilt, as well as losing her boyfriend, she went on to assuage her loneliness by calling men of midlevel Hollywood fame, making them fall in love with her over the phone, and then bailing out at the moment they ask to meet her in person.

Jelly is in reality a consummate actress with her voice alone, but it is not clear what she is doing in this novel until by chance Meadow learns about her, tracks her down, and makes a documentary including her and a man who fell more deeply than most. In fact, Meadow has the uncanny ability to get her subjects to reveal themselves in ways that are psychologically almost pornographic. Though she wins awards and notoriety, she becomes disturbed by doubts about the morality of what she has produced. Her ultimate reinvention, another of Spiotta’s themes, is the third act in the cinematic plot that is Innocents and Others.

The novel demands quite a bit of the reader, something this reader craves, because of the entwining of lives that are each plots in themselves. Nothing is pat or expected, which leaves you wondering where the story is going. Everything lays outside the apparent veneer of American life so one’s reference points about how life should go are simply missing. When a fourth female character is introduced near the end, she is so not what she appears to be that even Meadow is shaken to the core right along with the reader.

The gifted, stunning, and talented Dana Spiotta did for me what each of her earlier novels have done. Left me aghast with admiration and desperately longing for the next novel right away. Though she had given me enough to ponder meanwhile.

  

 

(Innocents and Others is available in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.) 

THE PRICE OF SALT

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The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith, WW Norton (revised edition), 1984, originally published by The Niad Press, 1952, under pen name Claire Morgan, 262 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: Arguably Patricia Highsmith's finest, The Price of Salt is story of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose salvation arrives one day in the form of Carol Aird, an alluring suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce. They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover. With this reissue, The Price of Salt may finally be recognized as a major twentieth-century American novel.

 

 

My Review:

When I learned that the movie, Carol, was an adaptation of this early novel by Patricia Highsmith, I decided to read the book first. I am glad I did.

 

Because it was 1952 and she was worried about backlash in those morally straight-laced times, Highsmith published with a small press under a pseudonym. This publishing history only underscores the main point of the plot: that a woman with a young child going through a divorce risked losing that child to the father on a morals charge.

 

Said husband is portrayed as a vicious homophobe who would sacrifice his daughter's happiness to punish his wife. The story begins slowly and at first lacks the creepy tension I have found in other Highsmith novels. The young woman, Therese, who is jockeying her attempts to start a career as a set designer for theater, an insistent boyfriend whom she does not love or feel passion for, and the personal mystery of her sexual life, is one of Highsmith's most appealing characters.

 

But once the slow build of their relationship turns into a Thelma and Louise type of road trip, many issues reach climax and the creep factor enters in. It becomes apparent that Carol is taking advantage of Therese's innocence but I liked that the young woman was not a victim but went on to pursue her life.

 

The movie, though beautifully shot and masterfully acted by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, leaves out much of the nuance in the book and changes the ending. I hate when they change the ending! I felt the movie took much of the Highsmith out of the story.

 

Both did however show the destructive power of men in a society which views homosexuality as immoral and gives men the final word on what women may do with their own bodies. I don't know of other novels in the early 1950s that portray this so well, if at all. 

 

 

(The Price of Salt is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.) 

BOOKS READ IN APRIL

What a strange reading month I had. Equal parts dismal and amazing. The dismal part led me into a deep reading slump so that I only read 9 books. The amazing part was a 688 page book of wonderfulness. You will learn all about both in the posts to come. For now, here are the stats and the titles.

Stats: 9 books read, 9 fiction, 6 by women, 1 from My Big Fat Reading Project, 1 translated, 2 speculative.

Favorites: Innocents and Others, The Little Red Chairs, Winter's Tale

Least favorite: Gutshot

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All I can say is that reading always has been my form of extreme adventure and this month was no exception. What were your favorite and least favorite books in April?

CONTENDERS

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Contenders, Erika Krouse, Rare Bird Books, 2015, 317 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: Street-fighter Nina Black lives by her fists in Denver, stealing wallets and taking advantage of men who try to take advantage of her. This symbiosis is upended when one of her marks, a cop and MMA comeback contender, wants his wallet — and his dignity — back.

Avoiding retribution is difficult enough alone, but it becomes impossible once Nina gets unexpected custody of an orphaned eight-year-old niece she didn’t know existed, accompanied by her long-lost (and ever-vigilant) childhood flame, Isaac. When the situation implodes, only one person can help Nina earn back her life, and prepare her for the fight that might end it.

 

 

 My Review:

"I coulda been a contender." The line I always remember from On the Waterfront. I wonder if Erika Krouse had that line in mind as she wrote this astonishing novel.

Nina Black was not a bum but she lived among bums and other derelicts and made her living by stealing in Denver, CO. Her passion was fighting, trained as she was within an inch of her life in Mixed Martial Arts, MMA. Therefore, she had no need to work in a cubicle or office or retail store and she had no fear of the streets at night or of rapacious men. Except, of course, there was one man about whom she had to be wary.

This novel is full of gritty violence and of a woman's tragic childhood but at the same time explores the heart, longings, and the idea of how one makes a family. It includes a precocious and brave child. Ultimately it is a story of how one woman overcame huge obstacles to find love and to create a family she didn't even know she craved.

In addition to all that there is humor. Erika Krouse's prose is tight and spare, yet she is as at ease with funny, tender moments as she is brilliant when writing fight scenes. She creates unlikable characters only to make you care about and feel you understand them.

Contenders is another novel I received as a Nervous Breakdown Book Club selection. I also listened to a fascinating interview with the author on OtherPeople. She is a private investigator as well as a novelist. Imagine if V I Warshawski also wrote novels!

(Contenders is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

 

 

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY

Seven Days In May, Fletcher Knebel and Charles W Bailey II, Harper and Row, 1962, 341 pp

 

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: "Gentleman Jim" Scott was a brilliant magnetic general. Like a lot of people, he believed the President was ruining the country. Unlike anyone else, he had the power to do something about it, something unprecedented and terrifying. Colonel "Jiggs" Casey was the marine who accidentally stumbled onto the plot. At first he refused to believe it; then he risked his life and career to inform the President. Jordan Lyman was President of the United States. By the time he was finally able to convince himself of the appalling truth, he had only seven days left to stop a brilliant, seemingly irresistible military plot to seize control of the government of the United States.

 

 

My Review:

This was the #7 bestseller in 1962. I wasn't expecting much but it was great. A political thriller inspired by Cold War fears and possibly based on an actual incident.

 

For some reason I couldn't fathom, the authors (both news men in their day jobs) set the book in the early 1970s. That really dates it because the early 70s were not much like the way they were portrayed in the book.

 

The fictional President of the United States, fairly new in office, has managed to put together a disarmament agreement with the USSR intended to put an end to nuclear weapons. His popularity is at an all-time low in the polls. In contrast, that of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has soared. Even though the legislative branches have ratified the treaty, the American people and much of the military are afraid and doubtful that the Soviets will stick to the agreements, and expect WWIII will break out at any moment.

 

This Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman is organizing a military coup! The President gets wind of it and has seven days to stop it. Imagine, just imagine, if our military were running the country; something that has happened many times the world over, including at different times in the Roman Empire.

 

Once all the characters were in place ( and I had done my study of what and who the Joint Chiefs of Staff are), the story took off and was exciting, full of tension, and quite convincing.

 

High points for me:

1. Understanding the conflicts between the military and the Federal government.

2. The power of a President who actually believes in the Constitution and has the overall welfare of the citizens he governs as his prime concern.

3. The absolute agreement to follow orders, no matter what, in the military mindset.

 

This novel is quite relevant to today's concerns. I think most US citizens, of any political party, would do well to read it. It is a complement to that other 1962 bestseller, Fail-Safe. It has been enlightening to read both of these novels and then Voices From Chernobyl within a few months of each other. The novels demonstrate how much nuclear weapons were feared in the 1960s. Voices From Chernobyl shows how much our fear of nuclear power has receded into the background.  

 

There is a movie. I will be watching it. 

 

(Seven Days in May appears to be out of print currently. It is available in libraries and from used book sellers.)  

A THOUSAND MORNINGS

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A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver, The Penguin Press, 2012, 77 pp

 

 

A BIT OF MUSING ABOUT POETRY

 

 

 I read an entire book of poetry! I have not read poetry since I was in 8th grade and fell in love with Edna St Vincent Millay: "Renascence" and "My Candle Burns At Both Ends" and so many more. I have read a little Millay over the years, especially after reading a biography for Young Adults in 1997, Edna St Vincent Millay, America's Best Loved Poet by Toby Shafter and Nancy Milford's very adult and very wonderful Savage Beauty in 2002.

For the past few years I have read the Tao Te Ching over and over, a chapter a day, and it helped me through many rough patches. But as 2016 dawned, I was feeling much more stable in my personal life and cast around for something else to pursue during what had come to be a daily devotional reading.

I was introduced by Carmen of Carmen's Books and Movie Reviews blog to another blog, The Nature of Things, by Dorothy from Texas. She does a poetry feature every Sunday and I began reading her posted poems. I found I could suddenly enjoy poetry again. Why not read a poem a day?

My daughter-in-law's sister had raved to me about Mary Oliver when she stayed with me a couple summers ago, so I started with A Thousand Mornings, found at my local library. 

Her poems in this volume are mostly short observances of the natural world around her as it relates to her state of mind. There was not one poem I didn't like and many brought me either balm or a good kick in the pants, both needed because of the weird places my mind goes sometimes.

I will read her again. Since finishing this slim volume, I have turned to the Penguin Classics edition of W B Yeats Selected Poems, because spring always makes me want to go to Ireland. I'll be on this one for a while since the book contains over 200 poems. It's all good.

(A Thousand Mornings is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE SELLOUT

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The Sellout, Paul Beatty, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015, 289 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, it challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant.

 

 

My Review:

As my readers and followers of this blog know, I am a tough customer when it comes to satire. So score one for Paul Beatty because his book is excellent satire concerning race, class, Los Angeles, and American life, from the viewpoint of a Black male.

 

I am also maybe weird or challenged when it come to humor, whether it be in the form of literature, movies, TV shows or stand up comedy. I don't always seem to find the same things funny as other people do. Back in my indie singer/songwriter days I played more than my share of open mics. An amateur bad song is always cringe worthy but nothing is more painful than a stand up comedian who isn't funny.

Score another one for Paul Beatty. He is consistently funny, almost as abrasive as Richard Pryor, whom he seems to be channeling, and he keeps it up for page after page. In fact, by the time I finished reading the prologue, I worried that he was going to riff like that for the whole book.

He returns to many more comedic routines throughout the novel but he also tells a story of a guy who was raised in a Los Angeles ghetto by highly questionable parenting, makes somewhat inept attempts to put things right in his neighborhood, and most importantly, gets away with it.

I liked that he calls out anyone who thinks we are living in a post-racial era in America. I liked that one of his characters was famous in the hood for having been on the Little Rascals, a show I watched religiously as a kid. I liked and admired the whole book except for some lag in the middle which made me clean the house for a whole day instead of read.

I am a white, middle-class, female American. Probably this book wasn't written for me. I feel a little weird trying to review it. I have a sneaking suspicion that Paul Beatty wrote the book for himself (not a bad thing) and is happy and surprised that so many people are reading and praising it. The Sellout won the Rooster in The 2016 Tournament of Books as well as the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. Most of the reviews I have seen are written by white males. Perhaps African-Americans don't need to read this book because they are living it!

In closing, I want to recommend my favorite satirical novel written by a female African-American: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall. It is her retelling of Gone With the Wind.

 

 

(The Sellout is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

 

 

MISTER PIP

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Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones, Dial Press, 2006, 256 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.

On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations.

 

 

My Review:

A friend from one of my reading groups loaned this book to me, saying that it was a special book for her. I convinced another one of my groups to read it and we all found it special and great.

 

Thirteen-year-old Matilda lives in extreme times on a tiny tropical island near Papua New Guinea. Because the island is rich in copper it has been mined for a long time by an Australian company. In the early 1990s when the story opens, Bougainville Island is beset by civil war over ownership of the mines. Who knew that was going on then?

Mr Watts (called Pop Eye by the natives) is the only white man remaining on the island. He has stayed behind after all the other whites have abandoned the place because his wife is a native. He takes on the role of Matilda's village school teacher and along with math, etc, reads the students a chapter a day from Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. 

 

The kids are captivated. Pip begins to invade their minds and dreams as well as the village because they go home and tell their parents the story. But Matilda, whose father left for the mainland six years ago and has not been heard of since, begins to look at Mr Watts as a father figure. Meanwhile she is navigating her devoutly Christian mother's inexplicable moods. Her imagination becomes taken over by the young orphan Pip, Miss Havershim, the other characters, and London.

 

It is an unusual story about the effects of white culture on a native island recently occupied by priests and businessmen but now taken over by Charles Dickens. Of course, as the civil war escalates, it all gets mashed up into catastrophe. Reading about the way Matilda makes her way through it all, in the captivating first person voice of her older self, was as captivating to my imagination as Pip's voice was to Matilda.

Great Expectations is my favorite of the Dickens novels I have read. Lloyd Jones somewhat parallels the twists and turns of that novel and Matilda's fate does so as well.

What I took away was the idea that cultures may mingle and borrow from each other, but to most people, home is home.

(Mister Pip is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

SHYLOCK IS MY NAME

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Shylock Is My Name, Howard Jacobson, Hogarth Press, 2016, 275 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: Winter, a cemetery, Shylock. In this provocative and profound interpretation of “The Merchant of Venice,” Shylock is juxtaposed against his present-day counterpart in the character of art dealer and conflicted father Simon Strulovitch. With characteristic irony, Jacobson presents Shylock as a man of incisive wit and passion, concerned still with questions of identity, parenthood, anti-Semitism and revenge. While Strulovich struggles to reconcile himself to his daughter Beatrice's “betrayal” of her family and heritage – as she is carried away by the excitement of Manchester high society, and into the arms of a footballer notorious for giving a Nazi salute on the field – Shylock alternates grief for his beloved wife with rage against his own daughter's rejection of her Jewish upbringing. Culminating in a shocking twist on Shylock’s demand for the infamous pound of flesh, Jacobson’s insightful retelling examines contemporary, acutely relevant questions of Jewish identity while maintaining a poignant sympathy for its characters and a genuine spiritual kinship with its antecedent—a drama which Jacobson himself considers to be “the most troubling of Shakespeare’s plays for anyone, but, for an English novelist who happens to be Jewish, also the most challenging.”

 

My Review:

Why would anyone living today want to read Shakespeare? Thanks to Hogarth Press and their Shakespeare  Project, I am finding out. I am only two books in, but reading the retellings after reading the plays is becoming an eye-opener for me. I have been told he is revered and still famous because he captured the timeless conundrums of human existence. I have come to find out that is true. I realize that sounds lofty but seriously, The Gap of Time based on The Winter’s Tale covered the pitfalls of jealousy. Shylock Is My Name, a retelling of The Merchant of Venice, features revenge, anti-Semitism, and cultural trickery.

While doing my reviewer research, I found two conflicts among critics of The Merchant of Venice over the years: was Shakespeare actually an anti-Semite or just portraying the commonly held views of his era and is Shylock a sympathetic character or just a cliché? Of course, choosing Howard Jacobson for the retelling was a pretty sure bet as to how those conflicts would be resolved.

Some years ago, I reviewed Jacobson’s Booker Prize winning The Finkler Question. I was delighted to be introduced to his wit, his fascinating characters, and his insouciant look into the human condition. Shylock Is My Name is unrelentingly literary but I honestly did not mind having to stop every few pages and look up a word I’d never come across before. Nor did I mind a feeling of wading through paragraph after paragraph of intellectualism. On the contrary, I felt his respect for the reader and became imbedded in the lives of these modern characters.

A wealthy Jewish father living in the midst of London’s Golden Triangle, worried near to death about his precocious teenage daughter and her choice of boyfriends. The daughter whose sheer audacity is underscored by her love for that father. Plurabell, a character defined by social media and too much money, who perfectly embodies Portia’s famous double cross. The effete art dealer, always sad, never decisive, and nemesis to the Jewish father.

Best of all is Shylock. Shylock is my name, he says. He appears in a graveyard almost like a member of the undead and hangs around that Jewish father like an Old Testament prophet, giving cryptic advice and calling the modern Jew on his bullshit. Shylock rules over the novel as he laments his losses and still rages against the oblivious discrimination and cruelty of the Gentiles. While we hapless readers are being led by the nose through Jacobson’s cryptic plot, he sees it coming. He has been there.

When I was 13 years old, a newly confirmed Christian, I had a church-school teacher who was a converted Jew. I spent a year of Sunday mornings with a group of bored teenagers studying comparative religion. He even took us to all the church services of the other denominations and faiths in our community. One of my best friends, also named Judy, was a fairly devout Jew who loved Christmas carols, Christmas dinner and Christmas cookies. I got to sit next to her when we visited the Synagogue at Passover. We ate the foods together and prayed the prayers and she was impressed by my comprehension of all that was going on, even though I had some issues with the food. I could never quite understand anti-Semitism after that. It just made me sad. Why would I ever want everyone I know to be just like me?

Shylock Is My Name is humorous, witty, even sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Ultimately though, it is deeply sad. I suppose human beings love to bully. We are taught to deal with bullying in various ways depending on our race, gender, or religion. It still sucks. There have been many great Jewish apologists among writers over the centuries, but Howard Jacobson is one of the best. Like the sad clown who makes us laugh with him over his pratfalls, he makes us feel what it is like to be a Jew. He doesn’t forgive but he gets it. He also does not spare the mean spirited or provide comfort.

If you want to know the plot of this novel, you are not going to read it here. It is however brilliantly faithful to Shakespeare and at the same time a rebuttal. Just to tempt you, watch for the part where Shylock delivers Portia’s The Quality of Mercy speech. Be prepared to grin through your tears.

(Shylock Is My Name is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

  

VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL

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Voices From Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich, Picador, 2006, 236 pp (translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen)

Summary from Goodreads: On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown---from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster---and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty.

My Review:

The first non-fiction author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is also the first Ukrainian female writer to win this prize. Svetlana Alexievich began her career as a journalist but turned to creating books based on collages of interviews with people who have lived through catastrophe. After winning numerous awards, she received her Nobel Prize in 2015.

The subtitle of this book is The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. I have always been opposed to the proliferation and use of atomic weapons, but I had thought that nuclear energy might be a good alternative to petroleum based sources. Reading Voices From Chernobyl has pretty much disabused me of that idea.

Alexievich's interviews with the eyewitnesses, firefighters, cleanup team members, physicians, physicists, and ordinary people about the explosions at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power reactor in 1986 and the aftermath, combine to create an explosion of loss, destruction, and long term effects. It is almost unbelievable and extremely hard to read about what those people experienced at the time. She also gives a clear picture of the long term legacy of cancer and birth defects that is still ongoing. Several women sob as they say, "It is a sin to have children."

If you can stand to read this book I highly recommend it. You will get details and viewpoints never seen in any news reports. The governments of the world can be counted on to downplay such events. 

I am now convinced that homo sapiens is not responsible enough as a species to handle nuclear power. Should we evolve as a species to a point where we are immune to radioactivity, I wonder if we would even be the same species. Most dangerous of all is ignorance.

I read the book for discussion with The Tiny Book Club. We did so, long and deeply a couple weeks ago. Last night we met again at my house to watch the documentary "Radioactive Wolves" and learned that the indigenous plant and animal life in the "Zone," the vast contaminated area around Chernobyl, appears to be unaffected by the radiation and is in fact thriving. The area is returning to the wild country it was before the Soviets "developed" it for farming and the power plant. Thought provoking and grounds for more discussion!

(Voices From Chernobyl is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

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Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vintage Books, 1993, 551 pp (translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, first published in Russia 1866.)

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: The poverty-stricken Raskolnikov, a talented student, devises a theory about extraordinary men being above the law, since in their brilliance they think “new thoughts” and so contribute to society. He then sets out to prove his theory by murdering a vile, cynical old pawnbroker and her sister. The act brings Raskolnikov into contact with his own buried conscience and with two characters — the deeply religious Sonia, who has endured great suffering, and Porfiry, the intelligent and discerning official who is charged with investigating the murder — both of whom compel Raskolnikov to feel the split in his nature. Dostoevsky provides readers with a suspenseful, penetrating psychological analysis that goes beyond the crime — which in the course of the novel demands drastic punishment — to reveal something about the human condition: The more we intellectualize, the more imprisoned we become.

 

My Review:

Another milestone in my reading history. A member of one of my reading groups (the one who got me to read Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol) convinced us to tackle Dostoevsky, claiming that Crime and Punishment was his most accessible novel, as long as we read the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation.

 

Thanks goodness for the character list in the front of the book and the notes in the back. The characters often have multiple names as well as nicknames (called diminutives.) Like Shakespeare, there are cultural and literary references in the text that were mostly unknown to me.

 

[One reader's oddity: The main character in Viet Hguyen's The Sympathizer often referred to a seminal communist text What Is To Be Done by Nikolay Chernyshevsky, 1863. The same book is mentioned in Crime and Punishment as an influence in both Dostoevsky's and Raskolnikov's time.]

 

I found Crime and Punishment to be very readable. I plowed through it in four days, covering over 100 pages a day. It is truly a study in the folly of youthful idealism, the psychological effects of guilt, and the investigation of crime. I imagined all of my favorite crime/mystery authors reading and absorbing the book into their psyches.

 

Melodrama and stereotypical female characters aside, it was a compelling read. I doubt I will ever forget it. 

 

A personal quirk: Many characters lived in small rooms called "closets." Some even lived in corners of other peoples' closets. I just kept picturing that actual closet where Harry Potter had to live when he was a child. Did J K Rowling read Crime and Punishment?

 

 

(Crime and Punishment is available in paperback on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.) 

THE SYMPATHIZER

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The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Grove Press, 2015, 367 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

 

My review:

This is the best novel I have read so far in 2016. It is super smart, employs excellent satire, contains huge amounts of empathic emotion, has sections that read like a John le Carre spy thriller...I could go on and on.

 

The author was born in Vietnam and fled with his family in 1975 during the fall of Saigon at the age of four. He spun that trauma into an intricate story about a Vietnamese double agent, spying for the North Vietnamese while working as a CIA-trained spy inside the South Vietnamese Army.

 

Most literature about the Vietnam War has been written by American, British, or French authors. While Viet Nguyen grew up as a deeply Americanized immigrant, he was also immersed in his extended Vietnamese family and community. He seems to have internalized the conflict, the sense of loss of country, and the feeling that for these immigrants, the war never ended.

 

If you grew up or were an American young person during that war, especially if you were against the war, but maybe even if you weren't, I think you need to read this novel. It is the other side of the story, the one we never got in the news, but a big part of the reason we protested.

 

The author also examines conscience, friendship, effects of being a mixed race child in Vietnam, love of family, and coming of age as an immigrant in America. Highly, highly recommended.

 

The book made it through two rounds of The Tournament of Books and while I felt fine about The Sellout (review coming soon) winning, I would have loved it had The Sympathizer won. It is out in paperback next week.  

 

 

(The Sympathizer is available in hardcover and paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.) 

WE ARE PIRATES

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We Are Pirates, Daniel Handler, Bloomsbury, 2015, 269 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: A boat has gone missing. Goods have been stolen. There is blood in the water. It is the twenty-first century and a crew of pirates is terrorizing the San Francisco Bay. Phil is a husband, a father, a struggling radio producer, and the owner of a large condo with a view of the water. But he’d like to be a rebel and a fortune hunter. Gwen is his daughter. She’s fourteen. She’s a student, a swimmer, and a best friend. But she’d like to be an adventurer and an outlaw.

Phil teams up with his young, attractive assistant. They head for the open road, attending a conference to seal a deal. Gwen teams up with a new, fierce friend and some restless souls. They head for the open sea, stealing a boat to hunt for treasure.

We Are Pirates is a novel about our desperate searches for happiness and freedom, about our wild journeys beyond the boundaries of our ordinary lives. Also, it’s about a teenage girl who pulls together a ragtag crew to commit mayhem in the San Francisco Bay, while her hapless father tries to get her home.

 

My Review: 

Ten years ago I read the first book in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning, because two of the girls I was tutoring at the time were reading the series. Lemony Snicket became a huge success but he wasn't real. He was a pen name.

 

I never continued reading the series though I fell in love with Violet, Klaus, and baby Sunny. They are the kind of kids I've loved in fiction ever since I read The Secret Garden and Pippi Longstocking. The real writer behind the pen name is Daniel Handler. He has written six adult books but I had never read any of them.

 

I belong to one subscription book club: The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. For $9.99 a month I get a book in the mail, sometimes paperback, often hardcover. These are books of all types: under-the-radar books from new young authors, indie press releases, and occasionally hot new literary novels like Alexander Chee's The Queen of the Night. That is how I happened to have We Are Pirates on my shelf and on a whim, grabbed it to read.

 

I am so glad I did! Even though the book is for adults and has an absurd title, the heroine Gwen is the 14-year-old daughter of a struggling radio producer in San Francisco. In a moment of teen rebellion, fueled by unhappiness at home, she goes nuts shoplifting and gets caught.

 

Through her own series of unfortunate events, Gwen runs away with her soul-mate/bestie, a senile old man, and the little brother of the guy she has a crush on. They have decided to become pirates.

Don't ask. If life has become too serious, if the election news is getting to you, if you are depressed about climate change, just read this incredibly improbable book.

Did you ever read High Wind in Jamaica? Or Bloody Jack by L A Meyer? Two of the best books ever with female kid pirates. Gwen reminded me of them.

(We Are Pirates is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

 

 

APRIL READING GROUP UPDATE

I thought I would go abstract for an image this month. What do you think? What if reading group members had no faces and wore nothing?

This month I will put a short comment after each reading group pick. Because. I have little things to say about each. 

Here goes:

Tiny Book Club:

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We were supposed to meet last month, but each of the three of us took turns getting sick. Finally we held our meeting on April 1 at a Polish restaurant and had one of our best discussions about nuclear disasters, the dangers of nuclear anything, and what it must have been like for Svetlana Alexievich to gather all those interviews.

 

 

 

Molly's Group:

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I had already discussed this book with another group. If you have read my review, you know that I thought the book was great. Molly's Group met last Sunday and once again I had to defend my views and listen to people trash the novel. Actually we were split about one third pro to two thirds against. Sometimes I wonder how I can love a book and others can hate it with so much passion. Sometimes I start to take it personally. Did this ever happen to you?

 

 

 

Laura's Group:

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Another book I loved when I read it last year. I am already prepared to be in defense mode because the reactions to this book at blogs and reading social media were so divided. We meet tomorrow.

 

 

One Book At A Time:

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I read this one over a year ago and loved it. I wasn't posting reviews at the time so you will have to take my word for it. I predict this group will also love it. Everyone loves Emily Dickinson, right?

 

 

Bookie Babes:

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I am so excited to read and discuss this. It is set in Persia where the author grew up. In this group we choose our books by voting on a list prepared by a different member each time. So if someone doesn't like the book, she either did not vote for it and can say I told you so, or she voted for it and has to live with that. Our motto is "Take a chance on a book" and we don't get vicious with each other. 

 

 

What are your reading groups reading in April? Have you ever had a meeting where the disagreements got heated? Actually some of the best discussions happen when there are different responses to the book.

 

 

 

BOOKS READ IN MARCH

March sure was Reading Month for me. I read the highest number of books in one month for this year so far. I even cleaned the house once and worked out at least 3 days a week. I hope I can keep up this energy level for the rest of the year!

Stats: 13 books read, 10 fiction, 1 nonfiction, 1 drama, 1 poetry collection, 5 by women, 2 from My Big Fat Reading Project list, and 3 translated.

Favorites: The Sympathizer, Voices From Chernobyl, and Contenders.

Least favorite: Near to the Wild Heart.

Most of my reviews of these books have not made it to the blog yet, but stay tuned. I may have to post more often to get caught up!

The books are:

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What did you read in March? Which ones did you like, which ones not so much?