Another YA but better things to come

Gabi, A Girl in Pieces
by Isabel Quintero

Remarkably long and honest tale of teenager coming of age.  Her Dad is a meth addict; her mother works too many hours and isn't exactly tactful about Gaby's food issues, but she has her instincts in place when they need to be.  Gaby learns to cope with the conflicting demands of family and school  by pouring out her soul in poetry, and I enjoyed that a lot.  Recommended, especially for a conflicted teen who wants a friend who's going through the same kind of messed up stuff she is.

Quick and forgetful

Close to famous
by Joan Bauer

Very solid YA cozy by the author of Hope Was Here.   I liked it, and in general, I like her stuff. It doesn't have that mysterious spark that makes me want to read more, but it served its purpose well--to give me light and cheer on an evening when I feel blue.

She maybe could have sneaked in a little more detail on Foster's struggles, or dug some depth into any one of the other characters.  The actress would have been an interesting character to explore.  Maybe I shut up and quit criticizing kid lit--let the people of the right age do it--but still, shouldn't I get an opinion?  There's a whole lot of it I do like.

Still, maybe I should find some grownup books to read for comfort food...but it's hard. Grownup books seem to think they have to rip your heart out, like My Year Of Meats or All The Light You Cannot See.  How to find a "light" grownup book?

The garden has returned!

The Liberator: One World War II Soldier's 500-Day Odyssey from the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau

by Alex Kershaw

Beautifully written, neither too much nor too little. This is the war story of Felix Sparks and the 45th infantry division--The Thunderbirds--during World War II and a little after.  The author included a bit of Sparks life after the war so we wouldn't be left hanging, and I really appreciated that.

From the disastrous beach landing on Sicily, to the blind hand-to-hand combat of the Vosges forest, to the liberation of Nuremberg,  Sparks was in the thick of the bloodiest battles of the whole bloody war. Near the end, he ended up at Dachau in time to stop some of his men from enraged execution of SS troops left behind when the real killers departed.  In my book that makes him a true war hero--not one who kills, but one who prevents killing.  Killing seems to be the real reason for war. We says it's for territory or control or even to enforce peace, but somehow it all comes down to killing the people who disagree with you.  There are better ways to enforce peace...if only we can seek them.

Anyway, this is one of the best histories I've ever read.  Right up there with A Bridge Too Far or some of Catton's Civil War novels.

Not for me, I'm afraid

On the Bright Side, I'm Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God (Confessions of Georgia Nicolson, #2)
by Louise Rennison

Okay, this was a mistake for me. I refuse to say anything bad about this book because I'm way out of its target audience and therefore I don't get to have an opinion. All I can venture to say is this--I didn't think it was as funny as the first one.

If you are in the target audience--say, 10 to 14 years old--you'll probably find this hilarious and rush to get the next one.

Wild and wonderful romp amid the weird

Stiletto

(The Checquy Files #2)

by Daniel O'Malley

Almost as good as the first.  No...as good except for the element of surprise.  No...not quite as good.  No....

In any event, following a book as weird and wild as The Rook was, this one couldn't help but suffer a little in comparison. I mean, how do you trump a skinless man?  How do you improve on the method the grafter used to smuggle himself into the Rookery?  Where do you take a book after a glorious romp with amnesia?

He did an awesome job. Can't wait for the next.  Hurry, Mr. O'Malley, please?  No, don't hurry--take your time and make it awesome. No...hurry.  No....

Fan girl author does it again

Attachments
by Rainbow Rowell

Awwww!  Such a sweetie!

The IT manager of a daily newspaper, whose mother saddled him with the idiotic name of "Lincoln" (probably to reduce his chances of ever meeting girls), is given the task of monitoring the new email scanner and reading any personal emails that it flags. He's supposed to ensure they're not actually pornographical or criminal, then send a friendly warning to the person(s) involved.

But he gets interested in the conversations between two ladies--one who is conflicted about whether or not she wants to have a baby and another who is in a relationship with an emotionally absent musician.  He gets so interested that he can't stop reading.

What ensues is pretty funny, and oh, so very very sweet.  Great little book  I be it'll be a movie one day.

Wow--the author has other books!  I knew her name sounded familiar--she was the author of Fangirl.  I raved about it a few months back.  Where's my reading list....

History told at the time

Dear Miss Breed: True Stories of the Japanese American Incarceration During World War II and a Librarian Who Made a Difference

by Joanne F. Oppenheim

There's only so much you can cram into a book. I don't remember any of the history I was taught in school, but if I did remember, I expect it would be about presidents and wars and inventions and discoveries.  Columbus discovered America-- how exciting is that? Well...not exactly America. The West Indies (which he thought were the East Indies) and the coast of Central America.  Nowadays I think history textbooks try a little harder, but they still seem to be telling the tale, not showing.

If I were boss, schoolkids would spend ten minutes of each class period on facts and the the rest on books like this. Movies, too--documentaries for sure, and works of fiction so long as the fiction was true to the times.  Every American schoolkid learns that Hitler killed Jews, but how many know that the United States relocated and incarcerated 110,000 people?  Once a Jap, always a Jap--even if they were American citizens born in America and speaking no more than a word of two of the Japanese language.  Most of the people had to leave behind their possessions and sell their properties at a huge loss. They were kept in concentration camps (actual term employed at the time), surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers with guns...for their own protection. If the guns are for our own protection, they wondered, then why are they pointed at us?

In San Diego a children's librarian named Clara Breed walked among the kids queuing up for evacuation trains, hugging her many small patrons and handing out stamped postcards with her address on them.  Write to me, she begged.

This book is the result.  Her letters from Elizabeth, Ellen, Tetsuzo (Ted), little Katherine and others make up the icing of this nutty treat.  The letters are mostly cheerful and amusing, speaking of the sunsets on the distant mountains or the stars overhead...but the darker reality left unsaid is always in the back of your mind, if you only stop to think. 

Everyone else liked it

Walking Across Egypt
by Clyde Edgerton

I just didn't get the point of this book.  The characterization is awesome, I must say.  The author manages to be in everyone's head almost all the time, and it's not even annoying.  It's like an exercise in perspective--take a scene and tell it from ten different perspectives and you'll come up with ten completely different descriptions of what just happened.  You don't notice it at first, but it's a clear demonstration of how what we see is so very much colored by who we are...and that's freakish and frightening.

Plot in short: an elderly lady living alone moves through the adventures of her ordinary life with charity and hopeful love for everyone.  (Except the bossy lady at church.)  It could teach us all a few lessons about how people can be kind and tolerant without sacrificing their principles.

But I still didn't get the point.  It was fun meeting the people, especially Mattie--she of the rigid Christian principles, fantastic pound cake, and unrelenting hospitality.  But I didn't finish the book smiling, satisfied, or even particularly happy to have read it. I wanted something more...and no idea what.

Those who can't do, read

Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart: An Adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail

by Carrot Quinn
Astonishing--this travel tale had almost none of the elements that make me love a travel tale, and I still loved it.  The daily journeys were relayed in a plain, sequential narrative, and in present tense. The present tense was annoying at first, but after a couple of pages it pulled me in and swept me along--

I close my eyes, listening to the sound of the freeway in the distance. Turning the wheel of life, as they say.
or
I eat my rehydrated instant pinto beans from my plastic peanut butter jar. They taste amazing.

I quoted a couple of mundane passages on purpose--this gives you the idea of the simple, no-nonsense narrative of the journey. It's simple, but by no means mundane. One doesn't hike over two-thousand miles through desert and mountains without experiencing enervating heat, grinding weariness, aching cold, and gnawing hunger.  In dizzying intervals she is literally on the top of the earth and in the depths of despair, and it's good being there with her.

Not as good as doing it yourself might be...but then, not as tiring.

Now I'm a true know-it-all

The Complete Book of Running for Women

by Claire Kowalchi

I read  almost all of this, except for the section on shoes, which I sneered at, and the race training schedules, which didn't seem relevant since I won't qualify for a race for a hundred years at least.  Re shoes: I wonder if runners will ever see the absurdity in asking someone who sells shoes for a living, probably on commission, for advice about buying shoes.   Shoes a little worn on the outside of the sole? You need better shoes. You won't get advice on shortening your stride or practicing barefoot running on grass--you'll get sold new shoes designed to correct overprotonation and by the way, they'll need to be replaced every hundred miles.  (If they're so good, why....  Don't ask.)

Shoes aside, her advice is good.  She's a little paranoid about amenorrhea--it's mentioned at least eight times and there's a whole section about it--but probably she sees of lot of cases of it in her practice.  In her diet advice she doesn't say much about sugar--maybe she assumes that anyone seriously interested in running isn't going to down three cans of coke a day.  Most everything else seems right on.  (I'm no expert but I've read a couple of books.)

Whether you're a beginner or an expert, this is a good book to dip into. Much, much better than the Runner's World guide I picked up. I had to give that on that one.

The train to crystal city:

FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II

by Jan Jarboe Russell

 

A lot of history crammed in here, but somehow, it felt like an overview.  Especially toward the end.  How is that possible?

Mr. Russell  chose a handful of significant people to follow, in particular the director of the camp and a few of the American children who were involuntarily detained. In the first few chapters, he'd frequently adopt the point of view of one of those people. And he'd then expand out to tell the family history of the children, how they came to be there and what their family life was like.

This was great stuff and I loved it. But at some point it began to be less episodic and more linear, almost textbookish. I found myself involuntarily "skimming" to get to something I could relate to. Not that I don't love reading history--dates, times, places and people are all fascinating--but didn't start out simply reading facts and didn't have my brain geared that way.

Luckily, the personal narration resumed for some of the people, in particular two families who were "repatriated" to Germany and Japan, so I ended feeling somewhat satisfied.  But there was still a certain unsettling lack of structure about the work.

And there's one I haven't read

The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L Sayers
by Catherine Kenney

Not a biography--as I'd thought--but something just as good. It's a scholarly review of her major works, concentrated on what they did for detective fiction in particular and fiction writing in general, then. And for her later, non-fiction works, it explained why they're so awesome. I can't speak to personal knowledge of the later works, but I think I can trust the author's honest opinion on the matter.

The only one I knew about was her translation of The Inferno.  But it appears that at about the time when World War II started, she'd brought the Wimsey/Vane saga to an appropriate close and she shifted her writing efforts to nonfiction--the Dante translation, plays including a rather lengthy series dramatizing the life of Christ, and essays, including her notable The Mind of the Maker.  This one compares the work of the Creator to the work of man and concludes that the highest and most fulfilling work a man can do is to imitate God--by doing creation.

The most surprising thing Ms. Kenney does is to point out the myriad ways in which Sayer's fiction is rooted in the solidity of her Christian faith.  I'd never noticed it--it was just part of the scenery. But there it was, and when she points it out, you marvel at how she snuck the little gems of philosophy into her light, enjoyable froth.

Reflections on running

To Be A Runner
How Racing Up Mountains, Running with the Bulls, or Just Taking On a 5-K Makes You a Better Person (and the World a Better Place)

by Martin Dugard

Totally elevating. Even his descriptions of bloody, chafing thighs fail to demotivate.  He talks of his own running, his coaching, and his racing with equal intensity.  This is clearly a runner who runs because...well...because he runs.

He's run many marathons and other races in his life, but at some point he realized it was time to reconsider--
When would crossing the finish line of yet another superhuman test of endurance make me feel complete?  A still, small voice in my head reminded me that the time I'd been happiest in my athletic life was when I was just a runner. Just a guy who laced up his shoes and ran because it felt good. That was enough.

The thought didn't lead him to disparage running the marathon or to discourage his young runners from own their dreams. But it was probably the reason he wrote this book--to reflect on what running really meant and share that with the world.  The many thoughts and observations scattered through this book that will make me pick it up again and again.  If for no other reason, just to get a different perspective when things look grim.

Makes me want to go buy a dress

A Vintage Affair
by Isabel Wolff

What a darling book!  I think it got unfairly typecast as a romance novel and thus it missed the praise it deserved. There's romance in it, yes, but there's also loss, suffering, regret, conflict, friendship, mothers, fathers, parenting, and a whole lot of other stuff.  It's no more or less a romance than an Anne Tyler novel.

In retrospect, the only fully developed character is the heroine. Some of the other people, most notably the heroine's mother and the older lady Mrs. Bell, got a little extra treatment. But everyone else was a shell person--like one of the bumper posts that your pinball bounces off. They had nothing to do except divert the course of the ball.

So...I guess it was a little shallow in that regard. But I liked it anyway.

With a brief aside on the "warning label"

Don't eat this book

Lot of lectures by the creator of Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock. I was expecting it to be all about the documentary but that was only a small portion, maybe a third.  Those parts were really interesting--how he threw up on the first (or was it second?) day; how sluggish he felt, almost from the beginning; how he got to where he hated the food even while he craved the sugar-fat rush he got from it; how his metabolic indicators plummeted so badly that his doctors were alarmed and wanted to take him off the "diet".

But mainly it was lectures on topics only too familiar these days--what fast food is made of, where it comes from, why it's so cheap.  More shocking is his description of how junk food is marketed to children from a freakishly early age.  Fast food has the money to fund video game development, school activities, and even sports games. I wonder how fast you'd be ejected if you'd tried to hawk Burger King products at the 2012 Olympics?

He spoke of, but didn't attempt to quantify the ultimate cost to society of the stuff.  It's a hard number to quantify, but I think we'd find that the our dollar menu chicken nuggets ends up costing us five times that.  Too bad we can't make junk food manufacturers subsidize health care.

If you don't already know all this, read this book.  You'll start to wonder when Big Macs will start coming with warning labels--and you'll know why they never will.

Agony and its reward

My Year of Meats
by Ruth Ozeki

Unbelievable. No, inconceivable. Why doesn't this woman win a Pulitzer prize?

I started this book and, after a couple of chapters, put it aside in favor of a nonfiction book about mystery novels. Did I sense, somehow, that Ruth Ozeki was going to do it to me again?  Did I unconsciously flash back to the torture that A Tale For the Time Being applied to my soul?

Okay, that's a little overdone.  In any event, she has a rare gift for making you feel suffering as intensely as you would feel watching a tiny, helpless child alone on a battleground. The child cringes away, covering its ears from the pain of explosions. It scurries into unsafe shelter when the only right thing to do would be to run far, far away...and that's the one thing it can't do.  And you're powerless to help!

She doesn't hit you over the head first thing out of the box. Things start out normal-ish, maybe a bit uneasy, enough to make you keep reading...to scratch that niggling itch. If her books didn't start off slowly, you would ever read another.  It's like the way women decide to have a second baby as soon as they forget the agony of the first. Remembering only the joy of the ending, they jump in a second time...and find themselves in the same horrible mess all over again.

My Year Of Meats has a few themes in common with A Tale, but the people and plot are totally, marvelously unique. Jane Takagi is our American hero, strong and determined and maybe able to save the day...but can she save herself? Akiko seems to be waiting for permission to break loose from her passive position as the dutiful wife, but will she ever get it?

I'm shutting up now. I can't talk any more without giving away secrets. All I can say is, I cried at the end.

Wish I were there

Without Reservations

The Travels of an Independent Woman

by Alice Steinbach
 

It's so cool that this woman, so comfortable alone, is able to make friends so easily and naturally. A chance table companion at a crowded restaurant who introduces her to two old friends. A gentleman at the bookstore who cautions her that dripping tears on Jane Eyre will make her have to buy it. A slim, handsome stranger met on a train....

The friendship with the stranger, Narohito, comes to dominate large swathes of the book, yet the spirit of adventure lives on. It's had to explain what makes this book so appealing--it's slow in pace but lively in detail. Never laugh-out-loud funny but always light-hearted. She's able to throw off even the occasional disappointment and even an attempted mugging--with difficulty--and see the good and beauty in all her adventures. What an excellent traveling companion she would be!

Didn't go down well with me

Food a love story
by Jim Gaffigan

Wow. Did that get old!

Even a very funny comedian should be taken in sound bites. A series of twenty-minute comedy routines would be perfect for this guy. He's very, very funny--at first.

I especially enjoyed his description of the regional cuisine of the United States. It consists of bugs (Northeastern States), steak (Texas and the Midwest), Mexican (the southwest), and coffee (Northeast). At some point he got bored with this endeavor--or else my IPod glitched--and he launched into a description of his favorite foods, favorite fast-food restaurants, holidays, and meals. And so on and so on. Ad nauseum.

I'd recommend the comedy act, but not the book. Unless possibly you're a person who has a very short attention span and listens to a book in ten-minute snippets. That might work.

Absolutely charming

The Birds of Pandemonium
by Michele Raffin


Charming little book about a woman's accidental descent into foster care for pet birds, then her eventual creation of a rare species breeding facility. I gained a new respect for people who take on other people's stupid mistakes. And I lost any possible desire I'd ever had for keeping a bird as a pet. I did it a couple of times as a kid, but only with short-lived birds who'd been bred in captivity for thousands of years.

The book is not preachy at all; well, not annoyingly preachy. It would be impossible to write a book about any kind of pet foster care without a brief backstory of why the pets in question needed foster care. But that part is very matter-of-factly written--any judgement calls are left up to the reader.

And best of all, the book is not about human beings--it's about birds. Very enjoyable.