2008 in Review

Yeah, that whole Booker Prize challenge I pretended I was going to do? Well, I really meant to. I LOVED The Gathering, and re-reading Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha gave me a whole new appreciation for it I didn't get the first time I read it. Then Atwood and her Blind Assassin had to go and ruin it for me. That, and the fact that I read the same 50 pages of The Inheritance of Loss no fewer than three times, after putting it down, reading something else and returning to it. For some reason I just can't get into it. So I put aside the Bookers and just read some books.

Since I last posted, I have read both Mercy and Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, Saturday by Ian McEwan, I, Mona Lisa, by Jeanne Kalogridis, The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold, and Loving Frank by Nancy Horan.

I figured out what it is I love about Picoult--it's when she writes from the point of view of a teenager. Somehow she captures the raw angst of needing to be accepted by your peers, understood by your family, and all that comes with that. This is probably why Mercy, which I expected to be very moving, left me underwhelmed and why Nineteen Minutes disturbed me and touched me on so many levels.

I thought A Thousand Splendid Suns was even more amazing than The Kite Runner, perhaps for no reason other than because it focuses on the lives of two women rather than men. It was the first book in a long time that I found myself sobbing over.

The others were good, but didn't move me enough to recall any specifics this far from when I first read them. Because I read mostly at night before bed, I end up retaining less than I should.

So I had intended to read 50 books this year. I managed 27. Eh. Having been given a $100 gift card to Barnes and Noble and considering Los Angeles has about eleventy billion public library branches to choose from, I am hoping to hit at least 30 books this coming year. Maybe I'll surprise myself and get to 35.

Of course, I am about 30 pages into Tolstoy's War & Peace right now, so maybe I should be just be happy if I can get through that before this time next year.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon

I wish I could say more about this book, but the truth is, I feel like I read it with only one eye and half of my brain. No fault of the book's, it's just been a long month, fraught with dying cats and sleep-allergic children. So much of my reading time has been done either at midnight in emergency pet clinics, or at the end of a long day that started out exhausted and therefore, I have only the vaguest memory of what I read the night before and it makes it hard to string the story together cohesively in my brain.

The premise, though? Fascinating. A Jewish state formed at the end of WWII in Alaska, of all places, is about to reach the end of it's "lease" so to speak and the Jews who have called Sitka home for decades are about to be, as Jews often are, cast once again to the four corners of the earth, on their own, with not official state.

The main character, Meyer Landsman, is a sad, neurotic shell of a man, grieving the death of his sister, and divorced after a personal tragedy tears he and his wife, Bina Gelbfish, (who ends up being his boss) apart. Along with his partner, Berko, who is half-Jewish, half-native Alaskan Indian, Landsman sets out to solve a murder of a man who seems to have been simply a junkie down on his luck, shot in the head in his hotel room (the same hotel, incidentally, in which Landsman resides).

With all odds against them, including the government for which they work, what Landsman, Berko and Gelbfish discover is that this mere junkie was actually a pivotal part in a plan born out of hope and desperation as the Jewish Sitka settlement approaches its reversion back to Alaskan control and almost certain eviction.

For imagination and the sheer beauty in his use of language, I am sorry my reading of Chabon's book doesn't do it justice. It is gorgeously written and parts of it are geniusly funny. The characters pay homage to a sort of 1940's detective noir style of development, but their circumstances are so surreal, they don't end up seeming trite or simplistic. The plot itself, of a Jewish settlement in the most unlikely of places, is a testament to the creative mind of Chabon, and the underlying sadness of the people, at home, but not at home, living under the false-illusion of control and stability for 60 years and now faced with almost certain eviction and the desperate reality of having no place to call home, while it's not lamented openly on each page, weaves it's way through each character and their stories.

Given how absent-mindedly I read this book and how much I enjoyed it, I imagine that had I read it with both eyes and all of my brain, it would have blown me away.

The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta

A fascinating cautionary tales of the dilemmas presented by extremism, Perrotta's book brings together the unlikeliest pairing of "heroes" in Tim Mason and Ruth Ramsey. Ramsey, a sexuality educator who insists on bucking the "abstinence-only" policy implemented by a predominantly Christian-right school board, finds herself head-to-head with her daughter's soccer coach, Tim Mason, a recovering-addict-turned-Christian, after Mason spontaneously breaks into prayer at the end of a game.

The story weaves through each character's history and the experiences that brought them to this particular battle, which, ironically, turns out not to be much of a battle at all.

As he did in Little Children, Perrotta creates characters who are so human, so understandably and thoroughly flawed that the line between 'good guy' and 'bad guy' blur. Being a fairly liberal-minded person myself, I fully expected to scoff at Mason's character and was ready to see him vilified as the judgmental, hypocritical image of Christianity that often gets portrayed in a story that pits the religious right against just about anyone else. I was prepared to embrace Ramsey as my heroine, my voice of reason and champion of my social and political views (what can I say? I am a bit fired up these days...).

But it was not nearly that simple. While my fundamental beliefs about the issues weren't changed by the book (and I don't think it was Perrotta's intention at all to do so), my idea about the people behind the issues were. I found myself, over and over again, sympathizing with Mason and also being a little annoyed with Ramsey. Even more surprisingly, I found the characters sympathizing with each other and ironically, even finding a sense of kinship between them as they each in their own way end up alienating those who are closest to them.

Just as Perrotta challenged us to look more closely behind the facade of suburbia in Little Children, he illustrates in The Abstinence Teacher that rarely is anything as black and white as our society tends to want to make it. It's not a comfortable realization; we like to believe we are right in our beliefs and sometimes it's easy to close ourselves off to the other side's point of view in an attempt to feel more secure in our own ideas. It's even easier to forget the human face of the other side; Perrotta's book serves to remind us that that human face is there, whether we like it or not.

See Jane...

The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler


This is one of those books I am liking more now that I'm done with it and can think about the characters' experiences with a little distance between us. I didn't fall in love with any of them, didn't really feel compelled by them as I was reading. On one occasion, I found myself checking to see how many more pages I had to get through and was happy to find a huge chunk of pages at the end that were additional materials and not stuff I *had* to read.

But now that I've finished reading it, I am finding that it did plant little seeds of "oh, I did like that" all over my brain and I have to say it is a good read.

The best thing about the book, though, and the thing I appreciated and liked from the get-go, is the way Fowler pays homage to Austen through the structure of her own novel. Each chapter takes a particular Austen book, and uses the theme of that book as the backdrop for the tale of the character hosting the reading group that month. Obviously, if you've read Austen at all, that makes the story lines created by Fowler fairly predictable in nature, but it's still an interesting read.

I have to admit I've yet to get on board with the whole Jane Austen revival that's gone on as of late; there are about eleventy billion books being published today that go back to contemplate Austen's stories from the point of view of another character, or creating new stories branching off where Austen left off. I hesitate to pick any of those up because I have a hard time believing they can even come close to duplicating Austen's style or perfection. They all look like they'd be hokey romantic drivel to me and Austen's novels go so far beyond that, I think it might be insulting to try to pick up where she left off. But I don't think Fowler's book does that at all. She brings some of Austen's themes (and truly she does focus on the romance of Austen's stories in her own recreations, but in a unsentimental way, I think) into a modern circle of people and simply shows the timelessness of Austen's thematic content.

Not going to go down as my favorite book ever, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Straight Up and Fabulous...

Straight Up & Dirty, Stephanie Klein

Girl crush, right here, my friends. I want to buy this woman a drink and maybe kiss her goodnight.

Klein's candid and almost uncomfortably honest account of getting through and over her divorce is one of the best reads I've had in a long time. When dating a bevy of men ("a pair and a spare") proves unsuccessful, Klein undergoes an at times painful journey of self-discovery that hit close to home in a way I've never encountered through the written word.

I'm finding that memoir is becoming far more riveting to me than fiction--had this book been fashioned about a character, invented inside the mind of a writer, it would have been good, probably great. But the fact that, as I'm reading it, I am constantly aware of the fact that this is a real, flesh and blood woman, sharing her real flesh and blood experience, it makes the act of reading the words a form of communication one just doesn't get with a novel. She could have easily created a character and written a "semi-autobiographical" account of a woman struggling to find herself, "loosely" based on her own life. But the rawness of memoir, especially this one, makes the story that much more alive. This is not a character, but a real woman, one who you might walk by on the side walk, or sit next to at a bar. And she lived this.

Not that it's an extraordinary or unusual experience she's gone through. When I was the age she is in this memoir, I went through a similar sort of experience, although it wasn't as messy as divorce. I went through a similar journey to find a sense of satisfaction, contentment and peace in my life. I knew other women had to have gone through it, too; I knew I was not unique in my grief and in the transformation I went through. But I've never read it before. Never seen it put out there so eloquently and beautifully.

Reading Straight Up & Dirty took me back to that time in my own life, to both the pain of loss and the elation of self-discovery and self-reliance. Tonight as I absorb the last bits of the book into my consciousness, I am so grateful to have picked up the book and to have not only read Stephanie's story, but to have reminded myself of my own journey to the woman I am today.

Back on track...

Burning Bright, Tracy Chevalier

Oh. So. Good.

I loved The Girl with the Pearl Earring, so I assumed this book would also capture my attention. Add to that my abject adoration of all stories based in 18-th century London (the more down-trodden or plague-y the better, my friends), and my love of poetry and there was really no other reasonable expectation to have other than that I would fall madly in love with the characters, the setting, the story, the whole nine yards.

And I did. But only after having completed it and having contemplated it for a bit did I really get it. The story is that of the Jem Kellaway, a country boy from Dorset whose family moves to London after a family tragedy. He and his younger sister, Maisie, befriend rough and tumble Maggie Butterfield, the typical, hardened street urchin-y smart mouth who is savvy in the ways of London's seedy underbelly. Together Jem and Maggie befriend the poet William Blake, who lives next door to the Kellaway's, and who seems to see Jem and Maggie as more than simply two kids running through the streets of London looking for mischief.

The tension between opposites, and more importantly, what lies between the poles, is the main motif here. Jem, the country boy to Maggie's city girl. One seemingly representing innocence, the other experience. But as the story unwinds we realize that isn't always the case and that people are, at once, a mixture of these two ideas, depending upon the circumstances in which they find themselves. The loss of innocence, and the multitude of forms that loss can take, plays out over and over again in the pages of the story, each time painfully reminding the reader that pure innocence is fleeting and impossible to replace.

However, this loss of innocence doesn't bring with it only dispair--there are glimmers of hope and happiness sprinkled amidst warehouse fires, mob scene riots and exhausting treks across the country-side.

Initially I was disappointed with the ending of the story--it seemed, well, anticlimactic to me. There was no screamingly big finish--no great tragedy or overwhelming joy. There is the sense, simply, that life will go on for these people. My first impulse was to feel let down. But after a time I realized that this is precisely the intention of the novel--life is not lived in the extreme, in the realm of opposites--it's lived within the space in between those poles, balancing between innocence and experience.

I'm going to miss these characters, but given the conclusion Chevalier created for them, I will probably spend some idle time imaging with the future could possibly have held for them. And I've always thought that's the mark of a good piece of literature.

What? I read.

I just don't seem to be able to remember to write about what I read. But seriously, I do read. Not as voraciously as I'd like to, but I sneak it in there. Soooo, what have I read lately?




Driving Sideways, Jess Riley

I really enjoyed this; I read it while undertaking a huge cross-country move of my own and appreciated the "gigantic new adventure"ness of it all.

After years of basically waiting to die, main character Leigh is faced with the fact that she just might end up living after all. She receives a new kidney and is given the "okay" to embark upon the coming-of-age adventure that so many of us take for granted, and at an earlier age, even--driving cross country.

She has some pretty serious expectations built up about what this trip will entail--everything from learning more about from where her donated kidney comes, to confronting the mother who left her and her overbearing, begrudgingly over-protective brother years earlier.

It's safe to say that NOTHING is as Leigh expects it to be as she journeys towards a clearer sense of herself and the grown-up she's been given the opportunity to become.

Yummy Mummy, Polly Williams

Well, I love me some British chick lit, so I was a sucker for this. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the premise being that of a once svelte and fashionable career woman having morphed into a frumpy, insecure milk-bar of a mother with zero self-esteem and a brooding sense of doom in her relationship. Who could relate to that (well, minus the doomy relationship part)?

I loved this book--it was not, overall, a *deep read* by any means. But I loved watching Amy peel back the layers of her experience as a mother to find the core of her being again. Since having my own child over two years ago, the identity shift a woman experiences when becoming a mother is of particular interest to me. And I found her moment of clarity--a walk in a London park that just happens to be my "happy place" (ah, Regents Park, how I pine for you and my view of the pond from my dorm room)--to be tear-worthy and motherhood/womanhood-affirming. And sometimes, even if it's just a little treacly (which I didn't think it was, but I've read that others did), we need that.



Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Friend
Christopher Moore

Seriously? So funny. Not being Christian, I'm not sure just how high it would rate on the "irreverent scale". Well, actually, since Jesus was a Jew and most of the knocks are at Judaism, and since I'm a Jew, I guess I didn't find it very irreverent--just freaking hysterical.

Premise? Biff, brought back to life in modern times, is tasked with telling the story of Jesus (um, Joshua) that no one knows. See, Biff was with him during those lost years, the ones when, according to Biff, he and Joshua traveled the East in search of the Magi who visited the manger the night Joshua was born.

This journey forms the basis of Joshua's later teachings and Moore is able to weave Eastern thought and religion into Jesus' message in a way that is effortless and, as absurd as the story can be, makes perfect sense.

Biff is hysterical--apparently he invented sarcasm and is very particular about who uses it and is really pissed off when they mangle it. One doesn't normally picture Jesus roaming the world with an over-sexed (seriously, he's got a thing for Mary. The Virgin Mary) ready-to-fly-off-the-handle sidekick. But in almost every way, it was absolutely perfect.

I was a little disappointed with the ending, but you know, it is what it is. Not like Biff could change all of that dying on the cross thing (although he did try). Interestingly, this book humanized the story of Jesus for me in a way that eleven years of Catholic school couldn't do. I think a bunch of nuns would probably clutch their rosaries in horror at that, but again, I kinda like that.