I Love Books!

The Swallows of Kabul, by Yasmina Khadra

This small book (it's only 195 pages) was so moving and powerful, I could hardly put it down.  Even though Iraq and Afghanistan are in the news so frequently, it's hard for me to imagine what life is really like in these countries.  The writing in The Swallows of Kabul is stark and evocative.  It puts you so clearly in Kabul, even under the physically and emotionally stifling woman's burqa.

It's one of those stories where the lives of unrelated characters intersect.  Usually you can guess how this will happen, but this climax surprised me.  And the ending was a shock, but I can't see how it could end any other way.

The Whole World Over by Julia Glass

I finished this book awhile ago and there have been many shiny things distracting me this month, so now I'm finally getting around to writing about what I've been reading. 

InThe Whole World Over Julia Glass once again sucks you in completely.  The unlikely plot (NYC pastry chef becomes chef for governor of New Mexico) seems completely believable as she writes it.  And that's just the primary character.  The book had amazing breadth with several other interconnected stories running simultaneously.  It was wonderfully easy to keep the characters and all their stories straight.  You know how sometimes multiple complicated storylines can be difficult to follow?  Not at all a problem here. 

Fenno from Three Junes appears in the book near the beginning, around page 45 or 50.  He seems to have matured out of his angst of the first the book. I read an interview with Glass, where she says that she was surprised to have him show up. 

Love and relationships are the centerpiece of this book.  But more specifically, I'd say it is about connections and connecting.  What brings people together, keeps them together and splits them apart.  And like connections and relationships, the end of the book just sort of happens, there isn't any miraculous coming together or resolutions to the issues of the characters. 

I continue to think about the characters of this novel, as if they exist out there in a world not unlike my own.

Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris

Mother/daughter relationships and food play a big part in this book as they did in Chocolat (by the same author).  But Five Quarters of the Orange is a much darker story.  It takes place in a small French village during and then years after the German occupation during World War II.

The protagonist, Framboise, is tenacious and clever, both as a nine year old and as the much older widow.  Her mother is a hard woman, plagued by incapacitating migraine headaches.  Few of the characters are likable in the traditional sense.  Disconcertingly, the kindest character is a Nazi soldier.  It was interesting when I realized that I didn't really like any of these people, as that's one thing that usually draws me into books.  But, I respected them, cut them some slack, perhaps because of the time during which they lived, or maybe the fact that they didn't seem to care about being likable.

Framboise inherits her mother's notebook, which is a mélange of recipes, notes, memories and entries in a foreign language that she doesn't recognize.  The notebook helps her piece together a fuller picture of the dramatic events of her ninth year.

It's interesting how we think we have the whole picture based on our own experience, and yet, the "reality" can be very different, when all the parts start coming together.

Three Junes by Julia Glass

This was my pick for July bookclub.  It was originally recommended to me by my Aunt.  She's a voracious reader and has turned me onto all kinds of books, from all time favorites like Bel Canto and The Kite Runner to fun reads like the Jane Whitefield series.

The title, Three Junes, refers to the three sections of the novel, each takes place during June of different years.  The sections overlap in interesting and unexpected ways.  We had quite a discussion about Fenno McLeod the main character in the second June.  His personality quirks were fascinating to some and annoying to others.  But, he was so well-developed and whole and real we spent a lot of time discussing why he might be the way he was.  Like he was an older brother or old friend we were psychoanalyzing.

Glass writes beautifully.  I re-read sentences and even entire paragraphs because the writing was so amazing.  A couple of bookclubbers mentioned doing the same thing.

I don't want to spoil the end, but I do want to say that there was something the reader knew that the characters didn't.  I kept expecting it to be revealed.  It wasn't.  I reconciled this in my mind because it seemed if there was a relationship blooming in the book that would continue after it was over and the information would eventually come out.  Now that's getting sucked into a literary world!

It turns out that Fenno shows up as a minor character in Glass' new novel, The Whole World Over.  It's on my stack of books to read.  I wonder how Fenno will be?

Chocolat by Joanne Harris

I'm re-reading Chocolat, one of my all-time favorites.  I found it by chance when I was changing planes in Minneapolis or Houston or Detroit on my way to somewhere else.  I finished another book on the first leg of the flight and didn't want to make the next connection without something new to read.  I grabbed Chocolat at the airport bookstore as I was rushing to the next gate.  What a find!  Often these quickly snagged books are just distracting, and occasionally entertaining.  But, I was delighted with my choice. 

Harris' writing style drew me in immediately.  The mystical nature of Vianne's chocolate creations -- her way of interacting with people, juxtaposed against the unyielding, hard-hearted priest.  I wanted to re-read it, not only because I enjoyed it so much the first time, but because I wanted to look closer at how Harris developed her characters in the first-person narrative.  She uses lots of flash-backs to round out the characters, as well as other interesting writing devices to tell the story.  It's magical.

P.S.  The movie is a wonderful adaptation.  It keeps the magic and lightness while telling the story.  Plus Juliette Binoche makes a beautiful Vianne and Johnny Depp is handsome as ever as the rogue Roux.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen Part II

Okay, so apparently it was just me.  Everyone else in my bookclub thought that the impossibility of carrying water for elephants was explained well enough in the book.  I guess somehow I expected a greater revelation.  Incidentally, just about all of us really enjoyed the book.

We had a visitor (one member's mother-in-law) at the get together whose daughter and son-in-law toured with circus elephants.  She recounted some of their real-life experiences, which other than having occurred much more recently, weren't all that different.  Although, thankfully, it seems the treatment of both the people and animals has improved dramatically. 

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

For everyone who wanted to run away and join the circus, Water for Elephants: A Novel may be the closest you'll ever get.  And, after reading it, you'll probably be thankful you didn't go, at least not in the 1930s. 

From the prologue to the final chapter, Gruen draws you into the world of the big top and midway, the trains, even the assisted living center where the 90-some year old protagonist, Jacob Jankowski, is placed by his children.  The characters are engaging, the kind you want to talk about as if you know them.  I'm so glad this is my bookclub's choice for this month.  I can't wait to talk about it next week.

The only disappointment I have with this book, is that early on, there's an incident about carrying water for elephants.  Jankowski, calls a fellow assisted living inmate a liar when he tells the table that he carried water for elephants.  I expected the reason he was so sure he was a liar to get fleshed out a little more in the story, although everything else was so engrossing, it's a real possibility that I missed it.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards

I'd been hearing about The Memory Keeper's Daughter for awhile, but hadn't managed to put it on my reading list until I sat next to a very interesting man on a plane who highly recommended it.  He and his sister had been separated at a young age as a result of divorce.  They didn't reunite until decades later.

Like my seatmate and his sister, the siblings in this story were separated and grew up without each other.  Except The Memory Keeper's Daughter has a few different twists.  In this engrossing novel which begins in the early 60's, the daughter is born with Down Syndrome.  The father, a doctor who delivered the twins, decides that life will be better for everyone if the baby goes immediately to an institution.  He enlists the help of his nurse to deliver the baby girl.  He tells his wife that the girl died.  The nurse, appalled by the conditions at the institution, leaves town with the baby to raise her as her own.

The way each character in the story, the parents, the nurse, the children, live with and without each other is fascinating.  The way they each cope, suffer and love is irrevocably changed by that one act and the ripples it creates.

The chapters are written from alternating points of view and sometimes overlapping timelines.  The writing for the different characters was distinct and easy to follow.  I felt as if I were really in each characters head and felt the story from each point of view.

I have two friends that have daughters with DS.  While I wouldn't call this a "book about Down Syndrome" Edwards does what seems like a good job of telling an honest story of what it can be like to have a child with DS.