Sweet said haunting and all that stuff

All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr

I'm scared to look back and see why some people I admire didn't like this book.  Don't count me among them.

Sometimes the writing was provokingly beautiful.  Sometimes he used words in unfamiliar ways that didn't make sense but I'll forgive him--so many other times he used words that made me see and feel it all: the grit of coal mining, the crash of war, and the squishy aliveness of small sea creatures. 

In scope, story, and drama, I think he created a masterpiece--neither too much nor too little.  Of course I wanted more, but sometimes you can't have it any more than the real people he imagined could have it. War sucks. A lot. Always will, any where and for any reason.

The narrator of the audiobook was a genius with a charming gift for (or rigorous training in) accents.  I always knew who was speaking--or thinking--and never had to said for the 'he said'.




I see it won a Pulitzer prize. As a teenager I undertook a task to read all of the Pulitzer prize novels for literature. I didn't make it very far, but I guess I'm one book closer now.

Aside: I've not yet found an explanation for the tin can thingy. Author's mistake?

Kids and lions, for real

The Lion Children

by Angus McNeice, Maisie McNeice, Travers McNeice
Three clever children write about their lives in Botswana among the lions.  With pictures.

Best thing I like about it is, they don't have a hidden agenda.  Other than lions--lions are cool. And southern Africa is full of amazing creatures we need to preserve at all costs.  But other than that, they're just telling it like it is without a lot of moralizing. They're just kids having adventures, good and bad, but always great.

The family story is pretty beautiful, too. The one thing I never exactly understood was why their mother took them to Africa in the first place.  It said she'd begun to study biology and she didn't think that the civilized world was a good place for children to grow up. In the modern world, all knowledge is (apparently) available at the tap of a button; all things we might ever need are easily procured and casually tossed away when no longer useful.

I wasn't brought up that way--I know there are things we don't know. Heaps of them. And I know it's a lot more satisfying to build or invent or concoct things that to buy them on Amazon. But it general, you shouldn't romanticize ignorance, nor should you long for a time when the mere struggle for basic needs could occupy one's whole life. There's a different way to bring up strong, independent children in the modern world, and I expect she would have found it no matter where she went.

But, hey--Africa!

A modern day children's classic

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
by John Boyne




What a shocker!  I was lucky not to have known all about it beforehand.  I started the book with no more than the mental image of a small boy sitting on the ground behind a tall, barbed-wire fence.

After the end they had an interview between the author and the publisher--I wish all books would have that!  They talk about where the idea came from, how the book was written, and what the readers' reactions were. He didn't give very many specific reader's criticisms, unfortunately because I was wondering if some people were upset at the things he left out.  Not me--I was glad to be spared the details.  Some were things you wouldn't expect a 9-year-old to understand or even recognize, like his mother's issues.  And a few were simply to awful for him to speak about, if he even knew the words to use. I think Mr. Boyne  made a very wise choice to leave some pages blurry and let the reader imagine what he would, based on his age and level of sophistication.  It broadens his base of readers. I hope the movie did the same.

Not deep but interesting

Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee

, from Childhood to Go Set a Watchman
by Charles J. Shields

This was published in 2006 so don't expect it to answer the question of whether she did or did not authorize the publication of her second novel.  I've read enough about the novel to believe that it's about what you'd expect from a writer working alone, without the collaboration of an editor, publisher, or group of colleagues.  In other words, a first draft.

It's funny that in all his research Mr. Shields never found out that she actually completed the manuscript. He only said that she stopped working on it. I wonder if she really did?

Better leave that question to the experts.  This is a pretty good biography although it didn't exactly have the depth I sought for.  I imagine it's harder to write about a person who doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve and blurt out all her private, personal thoughts in endless letters to her best friends.  I wonder if it's easier in this age of twitter and instagram?

Pile on the agony, humorously

Fat Cat
by Robin Brande

One of the really good teen books I've encountered lately.  Starts out simple--overweight girl wants to win the science contest because she's sick and tired of losing to her former best friend.  A boy, of course.  But it doesn't stay simple for long.

Soon we're dealing with some pretty intense issues of self-loathing, food comfort, control, betrayal... and maybe even dating.  At first I thought the girl seemed impossibly naive about sex--she seemed to be shockingly ignorant about what seventeen-year-old boys thought about--but I was wrong. She had such a negative self image that she never considered herself attractive.

Lots of good stuff here. My only quibble is that she didn't dress the part for her final presentation.

Trip in time and place--the best kind

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

by Laurie Lee

Best travel book I've read in a long time. A year or so long time, anyway.  He really gets it--you know?  Some travelers don't, and their books are a bore.  But Laurie Lee knew how to travel!

So it starts out in 1934 with Mr. Lee stepping out his door in Stroud, ready to walk to London via the scenic route.  He stops in London, working for a while as a manual laborer, then heads to Spain--for no apparent reason other than he knew a sentence in Spanish.  Literally--A sentence.

But he can play the violin and has tough feet, so he sets out to tramp around Spain. Not all is well in pre-Franco Spain; if life had been prosperous and generally happy, the country might have undergone an easy transition from a monarchy to a republic and Franco wouldn't have been able to seize power. There's not a lot of politics in the book, but there are a lot of villages where food is scarce and jobs nonexistent. People who don't have a future and can't imagine one--people easily fooled by a big-talking bully who agrees with their nonsensical theories about "what's wrong" and promises to make it all come right.  Does that remind you of someone?

It's surprising Mr. Lee didn't get taken for a spy. But he appears to be a likeable tramp and certainly doesn't have any money. He's just a bum on the road who can fiddle like crazy. And write a darn good memoir.