Bookends

Two thrillers by Tom Robb Smith: Child 44 and The Secret Speech

Tom Robb Smith is a brilliant freaking genius. The setting for his thrillers Child 44 and The Secret Speech is post-Stalinist Russia, a world of justified paranoia for everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, from powerless citizens to KGB officers and back again (sometimes within the course of an hour). 

Child 44 takes place in a world where the State claims murders don't happen; thus, a serial killer can thrive. Leo Demidov, a former state security officer, puts himself and his loved ones in grave danger just for suggesting there's a killer out there, much less trying to gather evidence and put an end to the crimes. (A confession: I am a bit weak of heart when it comes to stories of children in danger. Child 44, which early on contains a riveting scene of a family near starvation, was almost too much for me. But you'll enjoy the second book more if you read this one first.) 

The Secret Speech, which hinges on a real life document by Krushchev apologizing for Russia's past mistakes, is mind-blowingly good. Leo now has infinitely more to lose; you will gasp at the lengths he goes to to protect his family. Honestly, my heart beat so fast during some of these chapters that I had to get up and walk around the room to calm down. Each character is complicated; good and evil people and deeds mix and match throughout. Yes, it's a popcorn book, but a hell of a good one.

Child 44: PR6119.M586 C48 2008
The Secret Speech: PR6119.M586 S43 2009

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Because I work in Special Collections, people often recommend books to me about archivists, rare books, and the like. Usually I read a few pages and put these books right back where I found them. Not so with Geraldine Brooks's amazing People of the Book, which tells, in its roundabout, fragmented way, the imagined adventures of a particular actual book -- the Sarajevo Haggadah, a 14th century illuminated manuscript used at Passover, housed at the Sarajevo Museum for the past 100 years or so.

The overarching story is of a present-day book conservator and the clues she finds in the book about its past: a bit of butterfly wing, sea salt, wine, blood, a white hair. Brooks weaves together the known facts about the book with amazing made-up tales of those who made the book, those who owned it, those who protected it and preserved it, and those who tried to do it harm over the past 600 years. 

But you know, whatever actually happened to the book may have been just as amazing or even MORE amazing; we'll never know. 

Tiger link:  PR9619.3.B7153 P46 2008

The Magician's Book by Laura Miller

In The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia, Laura Miller explores her childhood love of and belief in the imaginary world of Narnia, and her subsequent feeling of betrayal when she learns that C.S. Lewis's stories are full of hidden (well, not very well hidden, but hidden to children) Christian themes. Along the way she embeds relevant background information on Lewis's works and his life, including his friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien.

Anyone who read the Chronicles of Narnia as a kid will get a lot out of this book, I think. It's a very rare book indeed that makes me wish I belonged to a book club so I could talk about a book with other people -- mostly I just like to read read read and never talk about it at all -- but this is a book that brings up so much about reading, the act of reading, the way our reading habits and abilities change over time, the way the meaning of a particular book can change over time ... oh it's just marvelous. I'll be thinking about this book for a long, long time (though I know I'll never be able to remember it, and the way I felt reading it, the way I remember books and feelings from childhood, like the Narnia books themselves).

Tiger link: PR6023.E926 C53627 2008
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The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke by Steven Hayward

You know in The Catcher in the Rye when Holden Caulfield says there are certain books where you wish the author was your friend and you could call him up and talk to him after you finish the book? Well, this is one of those books, and the best part is, if you're on the CC campus you can, actually, go talk to Steven Hayward after you finish the book, because he works here.

There's something about the structure of the sentences in this book that makes me want to pick them up and bake them cookies. For example, at one point Ruthie Nodelman, age 20, is trying to shake up the class system in 1930s Toronto. She starts small, talking to a bunch of little kids at a playground:

"Now," continues Ruthie, "we're all workers, we know that. So, what has to happen before we can get those fat cats up against the wall?"
     Victorinna puts up her hand. "My cousin Anna Maria had a cat who had babies, and the cat ate five of the babies."
     "I know it," says Meyer, "and when you chop off the head of a chicken it goes on running."
     "Everybody knows that," says Antonio.

If you liked John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, you may like this. It's just a really good story about love and family and friendship and loyalty. I kinda feel like one of those kids on Reading Rainbow right now but I have to say, I just thought this novel was GREAT and I URGE you to read it. Tutt Library has THREE copies so there should be plenty to go around.

Tiger link: PR9199.3.H394 S43 2005
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American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent

American Nerd: The Story of My People, though flawed, is funny and highly edifying, the kind of book where as you read it you keep yelling out to your poor beleaguered spouse "listen to this! did you know THIS?". For example: did you know that Bill Murray's part in the Saturday Night Live nerds sketch was originally intended for John Belushi? Did you know that nobody knows the origin of the word nerd for sure, but that it first appeared in print in 1950 in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo?

If you're interested in nerds or in the things nerds like -- Dungeons and Dragons, Society for Creative Anachronism, video games, etc. -- you may like this book. Nugent's definition of nerd is fluid and imprecise, with room for real people (Brian Wilson, the author himself) along with literary and film creations (E.M. Forster's Tibby, Jane Austen's Mary, Napoleon Dynamite, and more).

I have two quibbles with the book. First, I wanted it to be much, much longer, and to have an index. (What a nerd response!) Second, I believe the book would have benefited from a closer look at the history and proclivities of nerd GIRLS. Nugent seems a bit blind to us -- for example, he goes on at length about Long Duk Dong's infatuation with Molly Ringwald's character in Sixteen Candles, but in my memory this is just a blip -- what matters is that the exchange student soon finds happiness with someone more suitable, a large-busomed nerd-girl! (I believe the world could use a case study in nerd couples in teenage film.)

Tiger link: BF723.G5 Nu 2008
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The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman

This is a picture book for adults. The pictures are beautiful and strange paintings, photographs, and embroideries by Maira Kalman, whose work you may already know from the New Yorker or her children's books. You know how Holden Caulfield says that with some books "you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it"? This is one of those books. It's about all the very biggest things -- the meaning of life, the human condition, mortality, art -- and also about the very small and very important things, like watching someone walk in front of you on the sidewalk.

This is one of a handful of books I've read in the past few years that have made me happy in a deep, life-changing way. (I've written about all the others on Bookends -- I keep no secrets.) I'm not saying it's a happy book -- it isn't, exactly -- but it's the kind of book that might keep a person off the suicide ledge. In fact, just the appendix alone is keeping me off that ledge. Hurray for photographs of abandoned sofas! For the beautiful green of a number-three claim tag! And of course for things that fall out of books.

Tiger link: NC975.5.K35 A2 2007
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Learning to Love You More by Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July

This is a collection of responses to artistic "assignments" delivered through the Learning to Love You More website. The authors say in their introduction: "Our most joyful and even profound experiences often come when we are following other people's instructions."

So many of the assignments in the book just tickle me. "Write a press release about an everyday event" yields some wonderful results, as do "Make an exhibition of the art in your parents' house" and "Take a flash photo under your bed." I had a bit of an art crush on Miranda July after seeing her film Me and You and Everyone We Know, and now it's cemented. I can't promise I'm going to do any of these assignments, but after reading this book I'm thinking about life in a slightly different way, and what more can you want from art?

Tiger link: N72.S6 F5 2007

You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am by Tao Lin

Tao Lin's first book of poems just pisses me off. It's so good, and so deceptively easy, and he's so young (early 20s, I believe), and these poems are so intimate, and so catchy. Seriously, where did he come from? Where did these poems come from? They read a lot like instant messages -- one of the poems is even titled "an instant messenger conversation we had about how my dad was in jail." Lin often doesn't capitalize words -- other titles include "i want to pour orange juice on my face" and "i am about to express myself." This last begins: "i want to check my email / i want to see a movie / i want to kill people" -- taking Frank O'Hara's "I do this, I do that" aesthetic even further, to "I feel this, I feel that, I'm going to write it all down." As I read this book I wanted Tao Lin to be my friend and I wanted to throw the book across the room, in approximately equal amounts. I wonder what he will do next, poetry-wise. (He's already got a book of short stories and a novel out. Damn him.)

Tiger link: PS3612.I5 Y68 2006
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The Art of the Possible by Kenneth Koch

New York School poet Kenneth Koch died in 2002, leaving behind a great number of poetry cartoons, or "comics mainly without pictures," as he called them. Two years later, Soft Skull press published a portion of the comics. Like all of Koch's work, they are full of wit, absurdity, and joy. I wish I could read more of them. Here's an excerpt from the text: "Vanishing is impossible. Lasting is impossible. Being in two places at once is impossible. Speaking the entire truth is impossible. Instantly knowing Spanish is impossible. Living in the midst of ten thousand panes of glass is impossible. Being simultaneously masked and unmasked is impossible. Except in Art. Art is the Art of the Possible." Is there a better explanation for why people make art? Including poetry comics?

Tiger link: PS3521.O27 A95 2004
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I Love You, Beth Cooper by Larry Doyle

You know that scene in Sixteen Candles where Anthony Michael Hall is in the car with the drunk popular girl and it seems like they might actually get together? (If you don't, you can probably catch the movie on cable right now, it's always on.) Well, I Love You, Beth Cooper is like that scene extended and enlarged into novel form. (And guess what, there's talk that the novel will be a film in a couple more years.) The story of a nerdy guy's pursuit of a cheerleader pushes the bounds of plausibility, but I suppose that's part of the fun of teenage stories. The main thing is, it's very, very funny. There are a lot of jokes that go by really quickly, much like the little asides in "The Simpsons" -- which makes sense, since Larry Doyle wrote for that show. (He also wrote for "Beavis and Butthead.") As in "The Simpsons," the main plotline is not what you care about -- what entertains you are the endless funny details in every scene.

Tiger link: PS3604.O9549 I3 2007

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My Life in France by Julia Child (with Alex Prud'homme)

Before reading this book, I only knew Julia Child in a referential way. I was familiar with Dan Aykroyd's impression of her on Saturday Night Live (he cuts into his hand and blood spurts everywhere, but he keeps on going); I read Julie Powell's Julie & Julia, in which the author cooks every recipe from Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking; and I remember my grandmother watching her show and admiring her. Well, now I know why she was so beloved and emulated -- what an amazing woman! Funny, too. This book reminded me why it's good to be alive, in an artistic, creative, non-new-age kind of way.

And since I'm a librarian, and this is a library book review blog, I just have to quote a passage about a librarian the Childs met during their travels: "He kept all the volumes in his musty, dark, one-room operation 'protected' by wrapping them in plain brown paper (thus obscuring the titles). The books were shelved on rough, hand-hewn planks, which reached to the ceiling and were accessible only by a rickety ladder that not even he dared to climb." (p. 166) A good example of a librarian doing everything possible wrong!

Tiger link: TX649.C47 A3 2006
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Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Then We Came to the End is written in first person plural. (Should that be first people?) It takes some getting used to, but after a chapter or two I felt like first person plural was the natural and perfect narrative voice for this novel. It's about the men and women who work at an advertising firm in Chicago. They goof around with each other, they have their foibles and their tragedies. They get fired, they fall in love, they become somewhat deranged. The "we" of the book is the "we" of corporate culture, very real people thrown together through no will of their own -- a big, temporary, complicated, functional/disfunctional family. If you liked Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, you'll probably like this even more.

Tiger link: PS3606.E774 T47 2007
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Once Upon a Day by Lisa Tucker

Dorothea and her brother Jimmy grew up in a mansion, miles from town, forbidden to leave the house for more than twenty minutes at a time. Why did their father think this was the right way to live? What happened to their mother? What will happen to them?

Lisa Tucker's new novel is a gothic family story full of secrets and intrigue. It's immensely satisfying, the kind of book that has no minor characters -- every character is at the center of his or her own story. It's about the lies people tell to protect the people they love, and also the lies people tell themselves. These are characters with fatal flaws who nevertheless go around loving and being loved, and this is a novel that magnifies and celebrates the complicatedness of real and lasting love.

Tiger link: PS3620.U3 O53 2006

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Winkie by Clifford Chase

This is the weirdest book I have read in a long time, maybe ever. It's about a teddy bear accused of being a terrorist. But it's not some kind of jocular postmodern aren't-I-clever novel, it's actually very moving, and you end up feeling really sorry for the bear. In fact, I was so worried about poor Winkie that I found myself skimming the beautifully written, near-poetry text just to find out if he would be all right. Legal-case nerds will enjoy the references to the Salem witch trials, the Scopes monkey trial, and the trials of Oscar Wilde and Galileo. Literary folks will see an overarching metaphor of some kind. I just kinda basked in the weirdness.

Tiger link: PS3603.H3793 W56 2006

Two Novels by Peter Carey

My Life as a Fake (2003) and Theft: A Love Story (2006) are both concerned with angry artists, devious ambition, and lies. They make a good pair. My Life as a Fake is loosely based on the Ern Malley literary hoax of the 1940s. It's got Indiana Jones daredevilry side by side with serious literary types trying to sort out fakery, parody, and genius. Theft: A Love Story concerns a valuable painting, forgery, and family and sexual love. It is narrated by two brothers, each foolish and brave in his own way. Both books are flawed: I found the ending of My Life as a Fake dissatisfying and murky, and I much preferred one narrator over another in Theft. But these flaws are forgivable, like those of a good friend.

In both books, you know you can't trust anyone, and that everyone is lying -- but you don't know what kind of lies, or how deep the lies go. And in both books, the most important lies are the ones characters tell themselves -- as Sarah in My Life as a Fake puts it: "I went to bed with the disconcerting knowledge that almost everything I had assumed about my life was incorrect, that I had been baptised in blood and raised on secrets and misconstructions which had, obviously, made me who I was."

Tiger link for My Life as a Fake: PR9619.3.C36 M9 2003b
Tiger link for Theft: PR9619.3.C36 T5 2006

jPod by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland's jPod produced in me a feeling no book has ever before produced. An unpleasant feeling.

JPod is about a group of people working in Vancouver in the computer game industry. Like Chris Bachelder's excellent U.S.!, this novel makes use of high-tech forms: EBay entries, out-of-office messages, game profiles. But it's done so freakin' self-consciously that it made me want to throw up.

Also, the book contains pages and pages of numbers, and the reader is expected to believe that the characters in the novel pored over the numbers looking for a letter O in place of a digit 0 or the like, and what's more, we're apparently supposed to put in the same kind of effort ourselves.

Is Coupland trying to be the most annoying write on the planet? He has to know what he's doing -- but why? Why? Is he deliberately calling attention to the emptiness of the book? Is the self-reference stuff a moral statement of some kind about the blankness of these characters' lives? Is he just bothering me, the reader, to prove that he can?

Full disclosure: I met Douglas Coupland very briefly at a book party for his 1995 novel Microserfs. (The souvenir giveaway at the party was a Microserfs-brand wet-nap.) We had a very short conversation -- I told him how much I liked Elvissa's line "I emptied the contents of my soul into his," and he got a bit shy and said that such a topic was too important for a book party, something like that. I walked away feeling that we had, for one teeny-tiny second, connected, that he was a thoughtful, funny writer who, in a parallel universe of some kind, might have been my friend.

But now ... no way.

I feel betrayed and irritated by him, and I also feel angry that any publisher allowed this self-indulgent crud into print.

Tiger link: PS3553.O855 J68 2006

Digging to America: A Novel by Anne Tyler

I had kind of given up on Anne Tyler the way I'd given up on John Irving -- writers I used to love but love no longer. Well, Digging to America has brought Anne Tyler back to me, and I'm very happy about it. It's up there with The Accidental Tourist or Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. It's about two families who adopt Korean girls, and, like all Tyler novels, it's about small, well-meant gestures that get misunderstood, manners, love, hope and disappointment. But this novel goes deeper than the last few: it's also about being American and feeling like an outsider for one reason or another.

TIger link: PS3570.Y45 D47 2006

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Intuition by Allegra Goodman

Allegra Goodman's novel Intuition is set in the 1980s in a cancer research lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It has all the intrigue and page-turnerness of a Michael Crichton thriller, but at heart it's a character study; the plot is the natural, inevitable result of the characters' characters. Goodman uses omniscient narration in a way I can only describe as brilliant. It's not a postmodern trick -- it's the absolute perfect way to tell this particular story -- a story of possible deceptions, of mistrust, of relationships and how they change. Over the course of the novel, we come to understand these people and their relationships in a profound way, as if we'd known them for decades. As Marion, co-director of the lab, says about two new employees: "But, of course, who knew how these two would turn out? ... It would take months and years to know; it took that long to find out about people." Yes, it does, but in this novel -- as in no other I've ever read -- in 344 fast-passing pages you will feel as though you truly know a whole cast of characters.

Goodman's last novel, Kaaterskill Falls, was an omniscient narrative and character study, too, and it was pretty good, but not much happened in it. Intuition is ten times better. I didn't want it to end.

TIger link: PS3557.O5829 I58 2006

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Numbers Don't Lie by Terry Bisson

Terry Bisson's 1993 collection of short stories, Bears Discover Fire, knocked my socks off -- and I don't usually like short stories. Numbers Don't Lie is a collection of three long short stories (not quite novellas -- maybe novellinas?) about Irv and his friend Wilson Wu, genius mathemetician. If you like Douglas Adams, you'll probably like Bisson -- you may even like him MORE (I do). These stories also remind me of my all-time favorite Steven King short story, "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," in which a woman shaves minutes off her commute by driving through an alternate universe. Here's a taste of Numbers Don't Lie: in the first story, Irv discovers an out-of-the-way spot in Brooklyn, a Volvo graveyard that appears to contain a direct-entrance to the moon. The Volvo guys are using it to dispose of all old tires.

Tiger link: PS3552.I7736 N85 2005

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The Commitment by Dan Savage

Dan Savage writes a sex advice column that appears in The Onion and elsewhere. His newest book is about gay marriage -- not in the abstract, but in the particular. Dan and Terry have been together for ten years; their adopted son, D.J., is six years old. Should they get married? Dan's mother sure thinks they should. What would it mean for them to get married? Where and how could they do it? If they did, what would their wedding be like? Can they convince D.J. that boys can marry boys? Can they sit through four hours of gay wedding reality TV? What kind of cake should they have?

I was weeping like a mother-of-one-of-the-grooms by the end of this book.

Tiger catalog link: HQ1034 .S28 2005

An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender has a new collection of short stories out, Willful Creatures (PS3552.E538447 W55 2005), and that book was so odd and cool (think Russell Edson turned girlish and cruel) that I went back and read all of Bender's oeuvre, all three books of it. An Invisible Sign of My Own is a novel about an elementary school math teacher who thinks numbers predict the future; she has a little problem with obsessive-compulsive knocking on wood and buys herself a shiny sharp axe for her birthday. If that doesn't get you interested, then don't bother reading this book, but if it DOES, then GO READ IT. It's also a love story, and it may unbuckle you.

Tiger catalog link: PS3552.E538447 I58 2000

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

If you haven't read any of the Harry Potter books, you're not going to start with number six; if you have been reading them, you're going to read it. So there's not much point in a review. All I'll say is: if you have liked the sequence so far, you'll like this book; you may, however, have a few quibbles and questions. Like: why does J.K. Rowling feel it necessary to treat the house elves as "Step-n-Fetchit"-style comic characters - in other words, how can she treat race slavery so lightly? And: might the books have been a bit better if film versions weren't almost definitely looming ahead? And: how is it that the word poo is so dang funny, even to me, a 35-year-old mother of preschoolers, who really ought to know better?

But most important: was it really necessary for a certain character to be killed? I think Rowling decided it was necessary in terms of Harry's growth to adulthood, but really, realistically, do we have to LOSE someone we love and trust in order to grow up? Isn't it more the case that we simply have to recognize the fallibility of such people? Of course, this is just the self-serving, forlorn talk of one sad reader who was hoping the rumors about a certain character's death in this book were, you know, only rumors.

On to the next.

Tiger catalog record for this book

The Love Wife by Gish Jen

I have liked all of Gish Jen's books, but The Love Wife is extra good. Most reviews of the book make some obligatory mention of the changing culture of the American family, but you don't need to care about that to care about the Wongs -- Chinese-American dad, white American mom, two adopted Asian girls, and a biological son. A happy family, or maybe not. When Lan, a relative from China, comes to help care for the baby, everything starts falling apart ... and coming together. It's that kind of book. Oh, and it's written from everybody's point of view -- mixed together, paragraph by paragraph, narrators sometimes interrupting each other, repeating or negating what each other have said.

If you like early Anne Tyler or Margaret Atwood, I think you'll like this.

Tiger link: PS3560.E474 L685 2004

Persepolis and Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi

The Persepolis books are memoir in the form of graphic novel. Satrapi's distinctive solid black and white cartoons tell the story of a young woman growing up in fundamentalist Iran in the 1970s and 1980s. These are poignant coming-of-age tales set against a backdrop of war and oppression, but Satrapi's self-deprecating humor buoys the book up. The young graphic artist's fight to wear a short headscarf rather than a long one in order to have freedom of movement in art class rightfully takes on the profundity of an epic struggle. These are really cool books!

Tiger links: PN6747.S245 P4713 2003 and PN6747.S245 P4913 2004

The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy

This is the best book I've read in ages. Nancy Knipe recommended it. It's like Watership Down, except with elephants instead of rabbits. Or it's like 100 Years of Solitude, except with elephants instead of people.

Gowdy has invented a culture for elephants that is so beautifully imagined you'd swear she discovered it rather than made it up. The novel is a family saga, a quest tale, a story of friendship, a romance, and -- yes -- a polemic against human mistreatment of elephants (but not in an overbearing way).

Read it! Read it!

Tiger link: PR9199.3.G658 W47 1999