nomadreader

The basics:  "Jim Kennoway was once an esteemed member of the ornithology department at the Museum of Natural History in New York, collecting and skinning birds as specimens. Slowing down from a hard-lived life and a recent leg amputation, Jim retreats to an island in Maine: to drink, smoke, and to be left alone. As a young man he worked for Naval Intelligence during World War II in the Solomon Islands. While spying on Japanese shipping from behind enemy lines, Jim befriended Tosca, a young islander who worked with him as a scout. Now, thirty years later, Tosca has sent his daughter Cadillac to stay with Jim in the weeks before she begins premedical studies at Yale. She arrives to Jim’s consternation, yet she will capture his heart and the hearts of everyone she meets, irrevocably changing their lives." (from publisher) My thoughts: I knew very little about this novel when I began reading. I picked up a copy at ALA in June because of the praise for Greenway's first no...

Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows, narrated by Catherine Byers Fallows, a linguist, begins learning Chinese in preparation for moving to China with her husband. Dreaming in Chinese  is part travel memoir and part lingual study of the language. If you already know a lot (or perhaps even a little) about the language, this book may not have even travel to keep your interest. If, however, you know little about the Chinese language, this book is fascinating. I now better understand how and why Chinese native speakers speak English. And it reaffirmed my belief that I do not have the patience or fortitude to actually learn Chinese myself. If you opt to read this one, don't listen. The narration is pretty awful: Byers is an over-anunciator, which works well in some parts, as this is a book about the nuance of language, but it's distracting at others time. Byers doesn't bring any warmth to the travel parts, nor does she bring any nuance to the epiphanies, in language and cult...

narrated by Rita Moreno The basics: Sonia Sotomayor, the newest U.S. Supreme Court justice, writes about her life until she became a judge. My thoughts: I didn't know much about Sonia Sotomayor going into this memoir. I knew her appointment to the Supreme Court was historic because she was the first Hispanic on the Court, as well as only the third woman. Something you may not know about me: when I was younger, I wanted to be a judge. I was convinced I could tolerate a few years as a lawyer if I had to, but I was destined for being a judge. Clearly, that didn't happen, but I delighted in Sotomayor's childhood dream of becoming a judge too. She has perseverance I don't, and I appreciated her methodical approach to everything. She's unbelievably driven and inspiring. Favorite passage:  "You cannot value dreams according to their odds of coming true. Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire. That will, wherever it finally leads, does at ...

The backstory: I discovered These Days Are Ours  when Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review  and said "What differentiates the book from similar fables with young protagonists able to afford endless rounds of drinks in hipster bars is Hailey’s sense of self and her thoughtful inner life; the shopping and club crawls of her privileged life are just a backdrop, not the story." I immediately pre-ordered it for my Kindle, where I foolishly let it languish for nine months before reading it. The basics: These Days Are Ours  follows Hailey, a recent college graduate, in New York City in the spring of 2002. She and her privileged high school friends are in various states of employment, but they're also all still processing 9/11 and expecting another terrorist attack at any time. Hailey searches for a job, a life, a sense of belonging, and a sense of purpose. My thoughts: As I said  the last time I rated a book 6 stars out of 5 , "About once a year, I encounter a...

The basics:  The Beginner's Goodbye, Anne Tyler's nineteenth novel,   is the story of Aaron and his wife Dorothy. After Dorothy dies, she visits Aaron. My thoughts: The novel's first line introduces the reader beautifully to this quirky novel: "The strangest thing about my wife's return from the dead was how other people reacted." It clearly established what this novel isn't: a tearjerker about the death of a spouse, although it is tinged with sadness at times. While it is an examination of a marriage, it's more of a character study of Aaron, with his love for Dorothy being one of his defining characteristics. Aaron is also partially crippled and has been since childhood. He works with his sister, Nandina, at a publishing house whose emphasis is on publishing writers who will them to do so and their successful series of "Beginners" books. Aaron's career serves as both a nice tie-in to the novel's title and an intriguing forum to p...

The backstory: I first read Pearl Cleage's debut novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day , in 1997. I remember the day I picked it up at the library, filled with excitement that my favorite playwright had written a novel. I had ridiculously high expectations, and Pearl exceeded them all. She's my favorite author, yet I haven't read any of her work in the past three years. This year, I'm going back to the beginning to re-read (and then read) her novels in the order they were published. The basics: What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day  is the story of Ava, an HIV-positive black woman who sold her hair salon in Atlanta to get a somewhat fresh start in San Francisco, away from the string of men she's slept with. She decides to spend the summer with her sister Joyce in Idlewild, Michigan. My thoughts: Although I read What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day  almost fifteen years ago, I still remember the last line of the novel. It's my favorite last l...

Translated from the Spanish by Carol and Thomas Christensen. The backstory:  Like Water for Chocolate , Laura Esquivel's first novel, is one of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die . The basics: Told in monthly installments interspersed with recipes, Like Water for Chocolate , is the story of the De la Garza family in the Mexican revolution and filled with magical realism of love and cooking. The narrator is the great-niece of Tita, and the novel's focus is the life of Tita, the family's youngest daughter. My thoughts: I first read Like Water for Chocolate  in high school and utterly adored it. Re-reading it fifteen years later, I still enjoyed it, but the magical realism of love's positive and negative effects lacked the dramatic resonance it held for me as a teenager. It is the tradition of Tita's family that the youngest daughter may not marry and must spend her life serving her mother. Tita is enraged, angry and in utter agony when she learns her fate wil...

The basics: Art and Marion's marriage is failing. They're giving it one last-ditch effort by spending a romantic weekend in Niagara Falls, where they also plan to gamble their way back to financial solvency. My thoughts: The Odds: A Love Story  is not the kind of love story fans of Nicholas Sparks would enjoy. It's a real love story, filled with miscommunication, disappointment, blame and exhaustion. O'Nan balances the whimsy of beginning each chapter with a set of odds related to its content with the increasingly depressing vision of Art and Marion's marriage. O'Nan gradually reveals the details of both how dire their marriage and financial situation are, as well as how it got there. More importantly, however, O'Nan seamlessly uses both Art and Marion as narrators. The reader comes to understand the marriage, and it becomes clear neither Art, Marion, nor the reader truly understand it from all perspectives. Favorite passage: "You couldn’t relive y...

The backstory: I've been eagerly awaiting Caroline Preston's latest novel since I first heard about it. The basics: The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt  is, aptly, a scrapbook Frankie Pratt has made of her life. It's a novel in pictures, but not quite a graphic novel. Preston's words are as illuminating as the objects she pairs them with. Amazon allows you to download a sample , and it is worth seeing for yourself. My thoughts: I've enjoyed all of Caroline Preston's previous books, which are all so different, and this one is certainly no exception. I devoured this historical scrapbook even as I savored it. I could not wait to see where Frankie's adventures would take us, yet I hesitated to turn the pages because there was so much visual treasure to explore. In many ways it's a difficult novel to write about because the writing, which is quite strong, is not the star of the novel. It's a visual delight with remarkable depth and character development. ...

The backstory: I Was Amelia Earhart  was shortlisted for the 1997 Orange Prize . At 160 pages, it was the perfect read-a-thon read. My thoughts:   If you read this blog, you might have noticed I have a fondness for fiction about real people. You also might have noticed I grew in Kansas. As a young girl in Kansas, I was rather enamored with Amelia Earhart. What's not to like? She was from Kansas, like me. She dreamed of travel and other places, like me. Her disappearance was mysterious (thankfully, not like me.) Unlike many of my childhood fascinations, I haven't outgrown Amelia Earhart. That lengthy exposition indicates how high my expectations were, even though I didn't know quite what to expect. The title indicates the basics: it's the story of Amelia Earhart, narrated by email, after the fateful flight. Awesome, right? If you answered no, then it might not be the book for you anyway. The book begins before the flight , and it does set the stage well. Some of t...

The basics:   The Marriage Plot  is the story of a love triangle of sorts. Madeleine Hanna is an English major at Brown in 1982. She falls hard for Leonard Bankhead, while Mitchell Grammaticus falls hard for her. Madeleine's senior thesis addresses the marriage plot in classic literature and ponders if it's still relevant today: "in the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely." My thoughts:  This novel has three of my favorite attributes: an academic setting, travel, and it's character driven. I have a soft spot for novels set in academia, and The Marriage Plot utterly immerses itself in it: "College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people droppe...

The backstory: The Night Circus is one of the most buzzed about fall debuts and everyone seems to be loving it . The basics:  There's a black and white circus. It comes at night. It's magical. People love it. My thoughts:  I confess the premise of a magical circus didn't grab me, but the opening pages certainly did. Morgenstern creates a fascinating, magical, historical world. I was utterly absorbed for the first one hundred pages. I stayed awake late to read more. About half-way through the novel, I sensed it plateauing. Descriptions of the circus still abounded, as new tents were added and different people experienced them. I became restless because so little was actually happening. The circus appeared in fascinating cities around the world, yet the setting wasn't incorporated in any way. Knowing it was in Paris or Egypt didn't add anything, which disappointed me. I'm a huge fan of character-driven novels, and much of what I loved in the first half ...

The basics:   The Buddha in the Attic is the story of Japanese picture brides from their journey on a boat shortly after World War I until World War II. My thoughts: Julie Otsuka enchanted me from the very first paragraph: "On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonas we'd been wearing for years--faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains, and had never before seen teh sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to t...

The basics: Displaced Persons  is the story of Polish Jewsish refugees who have just been liberated from a concentration camp. They are alive, and they are free, but they are essentially homeless. The novel follows them from 1945 to 2000. My thoughts: I seem to be reading a inordinate number of Jewish World War II novels lately. Displaced Persons  carves out its unique niche well, but I imagine it would have impacted me more greatly if I weren't on such a thematic kick. For me, the book began a bit slowly because it was such familiar ground for me. When the narrative shifted geographically, I found it more interesting, partly because the move surprised me. Displaced Persons  is a unique novel in many ways. While the characters go through many changes, it is a relatively calm novel. While many things happen, there is not necessarily a strong plot. Ultimately, it's a quietly reflective and reverent novel about the lingering effects of The Holocaust. The verdict: Disp...

The backstory: When I Lived in Modern Times  won the Orange Prize in 2000. The basics: Set at the end of World War II, When I Lived in Modern Times  is the story of Eve, a young Jewish woman born and raised in London who finds herself alone in this world after the death of her mother (she has never known her father.) Her "Uncle Joe," a man her mother has had an affair with for years but who has a family of his own, encourages her to embrace her Jewishness and join the displaced persons flocking to Palestine. My thoughts: I read Linda Grant's most recent novel, We Had It So Good  ( my review ), earlier this year and loved it. I was surprised when it didn't make the Orange Prize or the Booker Prize longlist. As I read, I couldn't help comparing the two novels, even though they are quite different. There are some striking similarities, however. When I think of Linda Grant, I can't help but think of the impressive scope of these two novels. Both are well unde...

The backstory: I loved Scottsboro , Ellen Feldman's last novel ( my review ), which was on the 2009 Orange Prize shortlist, and I've been eagerly awaiting Next to Love since I first heard about it. The basics: Next to Love  is the story of Babe, Millie and Grace, three long-time friends who together face their husbands (or boyfriend in the case of Babe) going off to war, the tragedies of war and re-building a life after war. My thoughts: Sometimes when I start reading a book, I never want to put it down. It isn't necessarily an indication I will think of the book in the coming months and years. I enjoy thrillers and mysteries, and it's often the experience of reading them I enjoy. Then there are books I may not especially enjoy while reading them (ahem, Freedom ), but I can't stop thinking about them. Sometimes the book is both. Next to Love  was both an exhilarating read, albeit a tragic one, and one that ventured beyond its initial scope to enchant me furthe...

The basics: A Good Hard Look takes a good hard look at Milledgeville, Georgia and its quirky cast of characters, including Flannery O'Connor. My thoughts: It's no secret I often adore novels with real people as characters. A fictional look at Flannery O'Connor and the town of Milledgeville (and likely the inspiration for some of her own fiction)? I was sold. Imagine my surprise when Flannery was my least favorite part of this novel. She was fine, but either Napolitano was afraid to emphasize the character of Flannery or she assumed her readers would bring that knowledge to this novel. There's certainly an argument for either, but in this novel, the rest of the ensemble shined. The novel opens with the wedding of Cookie and Melvin, a New Yorker moving to Milledgeville to make his wife happy. Cookie hated New York and wanted to come home. Melvin's parents are dead, and he is wealthy enough to have options. Cookie has a firm dislike of Flannery, and Melvin initi...

I finished the new novel by Andre Dubus III over a week ago, and I've spent many of those days trying to figure out exactly how I feel about it. I was ridiculously eager to read it after seeing so many glowing reviews, most notably Stephen King devoting an entire column for his monthly Entertainment Weekly gig to the book. Also, everyone whose opinion on books I trust, most notably nomadreaderboy , adored House of Sand and Fog , which sits on my seemingly insurmountable "Books I Want to Read List." The premise of The Garden of Last Days grabbed me immediately. It's a story of the days leading up to September 11 th , and it takes place mostly in the strip club some the hijackers frequented. I find the tension between the hijackers religious beliefs and hatred of the U.S. and their frequenting of tawdry strip clubs fascinating. It's an ambitious subject, and I enjoyed the cast of characters Dubus employed to tell the story. Ultimately, I didn't buy hi...