Setting the Bar

When I was in college, I was very interested in all things Chinese. I didn’t take a language course because at the time, meeting for a class that is that intensive (it met five mornings a week for two hours and you had extensive labs) seemed more of a time commitment than I could handle (kicking myself now, I instead took Spanish for two years). As a history major, I took a Chinese history course - the survey course- as part of my BA requirement and fell in love with Ancient Chinese history. However, the Maoist regime and Cultural Revolution were also fascinating and that is where the Vagrants  by Yiyun Li really comes into play.

The Vagrants is Li’s first novel (she published a collection of Short Stories previously). The setting is Communist China in 1979 - three years after Chairman Mao’s death and ten years before the Tiananmen Square Massacre .  Li introduces us to and follows a group of people that seemingly don’t have anything in common with one another. She follows them over a period of three months in their industrial town of Muddy River, which isn’t really a city but is big enough to make some money for the province and to be noted by the government. In Beijing, a Democratic Wall has been set up - the precursor for the aforementioned revolution in 1989 - and news of the wall has reached Muddy River. Provincial leaders in Muddy River are very nervous that the news of the Wall will cause a lot of unrest and protests. The story begins with the day on which a young woman, Gu Shan, is to be executed after spending ten years in prison for being a counterrevolutionary and not being reformed/re-educated. Her new capital crime is denouncing the Communist regime in her prison journals. A number of the major characters gather to see her executed - Nini (a severely deformed girl), Kai (a seemingly model citizen who married into a good family, had a son and reads the morning news), Bashi (a young man whose father was a commemorated war hero), and Tong (a young boy that has moved to the city recently).

Kai learns that Gu Shan’s execution was pushed through hurriedly so that her kidneys could be harvested and transplanted into the body of a mid level Communist party member. Because of this, she organizes a peaceful revolution that includes Gu Shan’s parents and many town members. I didn’t want to give too much away, so I felt that I had to be pretty barebones in describing the basic premise of the novel.

I loved this novel. Even though the writing is sparse in some places and very simple, you get a rich image of what it was like to live in Muddy River in 1979, during this time.  Li paints a stark picture of the hunger, poverty and competitiveness as well as the stresses of constantly having to look over your shoulder and mind what words you say (or risk being arrested as a political prisoner and maybe executed!). It’s very disturbing when the best advice that a parent can give her 8 year old son is “Follow what you’ve been taught, say what you’ve been taught and sing what you’ve been taught and you will be ok.” The mistrust is enough to cause someone to die of a heart attack because of the stressors on their lives.

This chilling novel is a powerful novel and a requiem to the people that lost their lives in trying to make their country a better place.

Book 74/100

I’ve read a lot of Terry Brooks. I was fascinated and even, some would say, obssessed with the Shannara books (although they seemed to be an updated version of the Lord of the Rings books).  I read them for the first time when I was a 12 year old geek in sixth grade, with nothing better to do on a Friday night and I’ve recently re-discovered them as an adult. So I decided I would try the Landover books, in part because I was fascinated by the premise and in part because I’m a Brooks fan.

In this book, the first of the series, we meet 40-something year old Ben Holiday. Ben’s real life is a shell of his former life. While he is a successful, much respected and wealthy attorney, he is hopelessly in despair. He’s alone more often than not and his wife, Annie, died in a tragic car accident two years before the events in this book while she was 12 weeks pregnant with their first child. Ben hasn’t ever really gotten over the loss and has withdrawn into himself and his work. He doesn’t seem to feel that he has much to live for - as his wife has died and he doesn’t get a whole lot of satisfaction from his job, even though he’s disgustingly successful. While thumbing through a holiday catalog that arrives at his home addressed to his wife, Ben sees an advertisement for a magic kingdom for sale for a mere million dollars. Ben has the money and decides to make the purchase because he’s got nothing to lose except money (of which he apparently has a lot) and the catalog itself comes from a reputable company. Ben is whisked away to Landover by the broker, a wizard himself. Ben finds that the kingdom was once beautiful, but is now in steep decline, having been without a true king for 20 years.  The Blight is slowly killing the kingdom and the castle, Sterling Silver, that he is to live in. Ben learns that in the 20 years since the previous king died, scores of people just like him have attempted to ascend to the throne, but have failed and have actually, mysteriously disappeared upon their renunciation of the throne.

Ben sets off, with the help of Questor (the court magician), Abernathy (the court scribe), Bunion and Parnsip (a pair of kobolds), Willow (a sylph) and a pair of gnomes to try to convince the various groups of subjects to pledge their allegiance to him. This wasn’t the best book generally that I’ve read and it wasn’t particularly good fantasy either.  My two year old probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it either, even though it seems more appropriate for a group of people other than adults.  I just couldn’t get into it, even though I liked the writing style very much. There just isn’t a whole lot of creativity going on either. For someone that had such rich names for places and descriptions in the Shannara books, names like the Wastelands and Ben Holiday just didn’t quite raise to the challenge.

The plot was utterly devoid of any turns that I couldn’t see coming at me miles in advance. It was almost like driving through the flat lands in the midwest and being able to see everything coming at you for miles and trailing behind you for miles. There were no surprises or plot twists that left you breathless or savoring the moment or wanting to read more.  It was just plain boring.

If you’re going to have a lawyer as your main character, don’t make them some boring big firm litigation type.  Make them a public defender with some spunk for crying out loud.  Ben Holiday was BORING too and didn’t really learn anything during the 300 plus pages of this novel. He was flat, just like the rest of this book. I had no connection with him at all and he could failed or succeeded, but I honestly didn’t care which. I just wanted it to end.

I was embarassed that Terry Brooks wrote this and that it was actually published because it was absolute garbage. Sorry Mr. Brooks - I liked some of your other stuff, but this wasn’t your most shining of moments.

Book Number 73/100

I find books about the Middle East, and Iran in particular, fascinating.  This book was very illuminating. Pasha, the main character, is a 17 year old young adult in Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s tyrannical regime.  He and his best friend, Ahmed, fall in love with their neighbors - Ahmed with Faheema and Pasah with Zari. Pasha is in his senior year of high school and is well along the path towards attending school in the United States, where he will study engineering. Pasha has a crush on his next door neighbor Zari, but from the beginning, things seem stacked against them. She is engaged to a progressive University student that Pasha admires greatly. Doctor is also involved in revolutionary activities and leaves town for some time in order to engage in his activities. While Doctor is away, Ahmed, Faheema and Pasha meet at Zari’s home to keep her company. When Doctor returns home, tragedies mount and mount and mount. They seem to beget each other.

This was a first book by Seraji, who came to the United States from Iran when he was 19 to study film.  It was a very good first novel and I felt like I learned a lot from it.  At times it was very lyrical. At the same time, however, there were parts where the writing was very jerky.  The young people that he wrote about were very well developed and faced so much in their very short lives.  The relationships are wonderful and very well developed. The dialogue is just as rich as the descriptions and they balance each other out very well. This is a very realistic and beautifully done first novel in general.

I have never read a book that was about a person or people I know.  I have read books about places that I’ve gone to and am going to many times in the past. This book intimately combined a place where I lived for 18 months and people that I lived in the community with and worked with, knew all about and occasionally socialized with.  In some ways, it was really bizarre because I think that I had more intense feelings than I would have normally had.

This book is a true crime book in which Casey Sherman (a veteran journalist who has published a few other books on similar topics) about the deaths of Franconia Police Corporal Bruce Mckay and the person that shot him - Liko Kenney.  The homicides happened in May of 2007 in the North Country of New Hampshire, a very rural area that isn’t always hospitable to outsiders.  He looks at the incident from many different perspectives. In them, Floyd isn’t as much a clear cut hero as originally thought. Liko isn’t as much a bad, rebellious kid and Corporal Mckay isn’t as clear cut a noble cop. Floyd had a history of violence and mental health issues and on May 11, 2007, he was on at least 20 different medications. McKay was still a good, decent cop who didn’t know when to compromise and let himself get caught up in a pissing match, for lack of a better phrase, with a young man that was very much a product of his unique family and their perspectives on things. The Kenneys were hippies, who moved to Franconia because of their anti-establishment and pot smoking/growing tendencies. Sherman also describes the history that existed between Liko and Corporal McKay - a stop that quickly escalated into three officers being there and Liko assaulting McKay by grabbing his testicles.

I really thought that Sherman did an excellent job in portraying the story of McKay/Kenney feuds and altercations.  It would have been so easy to be swayed one way or the other after conducting the interviews that he did, but he managed to tell the story in a neutral light. There were a couple of things that did bug me, mostly related to proofreading issues and things that I knew about the area that an insider may have better understood. For instance - place names. It’s Grafton COUNTY Superior Court, not Grafton Superior Court.  Also, Mr. Sherman was inaccurate in his use of legal terminology in describing what happened with Mr. Floyd’s outstanding sentences. Mr. Floyd wasn’t on parole at any point during his interactions. He was on a term of good behavior - which is completely different than parole and everything that parole entails. Also, if Mr. Sherman had bothered to check the Littleton District Court files for Mr. Kenney, he would have seen that Mr. Kenney’s public defender wasn’t Robin Warren (I know Robin, I worked with her, she’s not a lawyer and I think would be rather offended at being called that) but another lawyer. Also, at some points, the years were off — these things would have been fixed had a lawyer consulted on it or Sherman had done some more research or had a proofreader.

All in all though, I enjoyed the book and it renewed my obsession with this case.

So this was a re-read for me but hey, what the heck. Right now, my life won’t let me focus on anything BUT re-reads like Harry Potter! The story is simple enough and starts simply enough. Harry Potter is orphaned as an infant by Voldemort - He Who Shall Not be Named to most of the wizarding folk - and is brought to live with his aunt’s family. The Dursleys are a non-wizarding, Muggle family who live on Privet Drive. Harry is offered a spot at Hogwarts, the school that his parents attended, because he apparently will follow in their footsteps into the wizarding world. On his first night in Hogwarts, he is sorted into Gryffindor and within his first month, he has two best friends (Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger), becomes the seekr of the House’s  Quidditch team, and realizes that there is a mystery surrounding one of the wings of the castle, which stands protected by a three headed dog named Fluffy.

The last few days of reading this novel were really entertaining. Ms. Rowling provided me with an escape - that involved simple reading and some predictability but a wonderful, escapist world. The character development was very, very subtle; however you could tell that the characters had changed immensely if you compared the people that they had become at the end to the people that they were at the beginning. The book moved very quickly and had a pretty decent, if somewhat predictable plot (but maybe that’s because I know all of the Harry Potter books and movies so well by now). The shortness and quickness of the chapters make this a good book to read to young children (OK maybe not your toddlers) at bedtime.

I generally thought that this book was a good first time or re-read.

Book 70/100

I think I’ve read just about all of Jennifer Weiner’s books and while it’s chicklit, it’s not exactly like the other books that she has written - it’s about a few girls that are the main characters that deal with issues, but only superficially. Addie Downs is the first of the main female characters. She’s lived in Pleasant Ridge for her entire life. As a young, pre-adolescent girl, her life growing up in the middle class suburb of Chicago was somewhat normal.  Then, Valerie Adler moved in next door and her life became, somehow, more glamorous. The two were quick and fast friends. Addie envied Val her life, her mother and her life. In high school things drastically changed.  Valerie became a cheerleader and everything that entails - popularity, beauty, being sought after - while Addie became an overweight, socially uncomfortable and anxious teenager. Fifteen years later, Addie is still in Pleasant Ridge, living in the house that she grew up in and has continued, in a way, her mother’s career of decorating/writing greeting cards. Val and Addie had lost touch, as a result of an incident involving a popular football player that occurred during their senior year of high school.  So, when Val knocks on Addie’s door on the night of their fifteenth high school reunion, Addie’s mind is blown away when Val tells Addie that she may have killed that popular football player.

This was typical chick-lit in my opinion. It was shallow, easy to read and generally superficial. However, I did appreciate Addie and her struggles. Her loyalty led directly to her loneliness and her misery during her senior year.  I did, however, find her loyal to a fault and it got on my nerves - I mean, you have to have SOME little bit of self-preservation, selfishness or something in you right? And because of this, I had a tremendously hard time  relating to Addie OR to Val.  However, at the same time, I particularly liked Weiner’s chattiness. Her writing style puts you at ease and it feels comfortable, as if you’ve known each other for years.

This is one that I could have lived without and was pure fluff.

Everyone has told me about Outlander (published as Cross-Stitch in the UK) and how if I loved anything Scottish, I had to read this historical romance/science fiction book by Diana Gabaldon.  And being that I’ve been on a Scottish kick as of late, I was willing to give it a try.

When the book starts, we meet Claire Randall (maiden name Beauchamp) in the town of Inverness in post World War II Scotland. She is traveling there in 1945 with her husband, historian Frank Randall, on a second honeymoon and so that he can do some research on his ancestor - Black Jack Randall, a captain in the British army in the 18th century. Claire finds a grouping of stones (think Stonehenge), where she mysteriously hears a buzzing after seeing a group of pagans performing their mysterious rituals around it. She touches the stones, blacks out and awakens to the sound of battle around her. Thinking it a re-enactment, which apparently is common in the area, she doesn’t feel disoriented at all until she tries to find her way back to the hotel. She notes that her ride is gone and the man that she meets, although he looks astoundingly like her husband, is in actuality Black Jack Randall. Claire is saved from Black Jack by Murtagh, a Highlander, who introduces her to the cast of MacKenzies and Frasers that she eventually marries into. Claire marries Jamie and they begin their adventures together, including a daring escape from a castle and an escape from a hanging. This first novel in the currently eight book series, is an integral step in the series because it introduces you to all of the main characters.

I couldn’t believe that this novel was over 600 pages because I quite honestly devoured it.  It feels as if you are transported to the Scottish Highlands during both time periods.  Ms. Gabaldon’s descriptions were phenomenal - she engages all of the reader’s senses in telling her story.  There is a lot of discussion about sex and rape in this novel, so if you don’t have the stomach for it, this may not be the novel for you. What I also really appreciated is that Ms. Gabaldon didn’t spend a whole lot of time with Claire’s disorientation in the time travelling part of the novel. What time she did spend could have been cut a little shorter - any more would have been over the top and tedious. Claire and Jamie were both well-drawn. Claire is a well rounded and resourceful heroine who grows and deepens throughout the novel, with each step that she takes. Jamie, too, learns a lot about himself during the course of his interactions in the novel and I can appreciate that very, very much.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Ever since I read The Handmaid’s Tale in college , I have been a tremendous Margaret Atwood fan. I have read all of her books, multiple times and had the privilege and pleasure of meeting her at law school when she was promoting Oryx and Crake.  When I heard that she had a new book coming out, I quickly put my name on the list for the book at the library and got the book first when it came in.

The Year of the Flood begins in year 25, which is the year that the flood happens. It is, in essence, a dry flood - we learn fairly quickly and early on that the flood is an epidemic that has spread  quickly among humans and has wiped out most of them.  Very few humans remain. The nature of the disease, aside from coughing, is undescribed. We don’t know anything about the disease at all. This book is a companion novel to Oryx and Crake and we see a lot of the same characters - the God’s Gardeners play a big role in this novel. They are a religious, vegetarian sect - a cult if you will - that lives on rooftops in the urban settings. They are contrasted quite sharply with the Corporations and the communities that surround them - they actually have taken control of the government and police functions that we are familiar with in our day. All technology and science is owned by the corporation for the sole purpose of making money, not for anything benevolent.  For instance, one medical company secretly makes its own customers sick just so that they will have to continue to purchase medicine from them, creating a barbaric and disgusting cycle of violence. Genetic mutations and experiments abound, creating awful and toxic creations that serve absolutely no purpose at all.

The main characters are two women - Toby and Ren - who meet in one of the Gardener sects. Toby comes there from a fast food joint when she is saved from her sexually abusive boss. Ren is brought there by her mother and then removed back to the Corporation outpost that she was initially born in. The book takes place mostly in flashbacks held by Toby and Ren to the year Five when things were ok - they were bad but not as bad as the Year of the Flood. Toby’s boss never really stops pursuing her so she hides in a day spa after the flood. Ren defects and becomes a pole dancer.

This book tells about Ren and Toby’s life leading up to and during the Flood and is a searing critique of contemporary society and how we are ruining our world.  However, it’s also a very poignant and strong celebration of the strength of women’s friendships because Ren and Toby demonstrate their loyalty to one another and to another women throughout the entire novel. Where one wouldn’t expect the relationship to survive it does, and surpasses all bounds with flying colors. I loved Atwood’s style of writing - it’s creative and witty and far from boring. This novel entertained me on my flight from Boston to California and the parable’s warnings were something that a mere six hours was unlikely to have me forget.

RUN to get this one.

After a Church vote, 16 year old Olivia and her family are uprooted from her home and forced to move after her father loses his job as a minister in a small, Ohio town. Olivia, her much younger and oddly named sister (Callapher), her mother and father opt to relocate to West Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains. When they get there, the family rents a home from their Aunt Margaret and her friend Ruby, who are affectionately known around town as the Old Maids. Olivia feels that the suffering in her and her family’s life shows that God really doesn’t exist and, if He or She does, they don’t really care because if they did, they wouldn’t have made their lives so awful. Olivia spends her days mentally calculating calories and fat grams, ignoring the hunger in her body and ignoring the fact that she’s wasting away and is anorexic. Olivia’s parents are too consumed by their own problems, rendering them unable to help her even though they realize that something awful and drastic is happening to her.

This first novel is about struggle. It’s about the struggle to accept oneself and ones own beauty and flaws and to love oneself in spite of any perceived imperfection. It’s specifically about how women struggle with body image and eating disorders and how it becomes about control in a world that seems to be descending into an uncontrollable frenzy. But even though there’s a fair amount of gloom and doom in the pages, there are also glimmers - hope, love, faith are there for Olivia too in spite of her struggle with a disorder that no one wants to admit she has, not even Olivia herself. Olivia has a new beginning, which is also what this novel is about, and somehow manages to overcome her disorder with help, counseling and, of course, Jesus Christ.

Generally, this was a pretty good book. The descriptions of the obsessions with food were very true to form and I thought that the development of the characters was also really, really good.  This was a good first novel.

I was really surprised to read the back of this book and learn that the author, Rachel Keener , was a law student. I think that law school, for me, was about learning how to think and write like a lawyer, which didn’t always mean exciting.

Anyways, The Killing Tree introduces us to Mercy Heron the summer after she has graduated from high school. She is 18, working at a diner, not going to college and living in her tiny, rural town in Appalachia.  She lives with her grandfather (Father Heron) and Mama Rutha, her grandmother and they are the mirror opposites of one another. Father Heron is domineering and seemingly cold, always worried about how the family will be viewed in the community and in the Church. Mama Rutha is a free spirit, what some in the town call crazy. They take care of Mercy, because her mother (their daughter), died giving birth to her under the apple tree in the backyard, after Father Heron refused to admit her to the home or get her help. She spends her days working and hanging out with Della and never considers leaving her home, until she meets Trout, a migrant worker, with whom she falls in love with. They end up keeping their relationship a secret, until she no longer can, and then she realizes that Father Heron will do everything in his power to make sure that she isn’t happy and that the family name is protected.

For a first book, this was amazing. It exposed me to “mining country.”  While I have lived in rural areas, I don’t think that they’re all the same in their character. I have never lived in Appalachia, so this opened my eyes up to some extent to the culture associated with that and with the migrant culture.  Keener did a masterful job in drawing her characters and developing, and didn’t indulge in stereotyping, which would have been easy to do (think Deliverance, the movie).  Keener also did a really good job in developing her themes, including the battle between socio-economic classes and the struggles that youth face in breaking away and becoming independent. I really enjoyed it and look forward for more from this author.