NPR Books Joins Facebook

NPR Books has launched a page on Facebook. It offers a one stop selection of book recommendations, author interviews and other resources of interest for avid readers and bibliophiles. Since I tend to keep Facebook open at all times it will be a nice addition to my feed.

Indiespensable #23 Shipped!

The newest installment of Powell's Indiespensable is on its way, and I admit that even though I am excited and curious I am even more apprehensive. The Instructions is a monster of a book, over 1,000 pages long. It's been well over a decade since I read anything that lengthy, excluding books in series such as Lord of the Rings. Even with all the bulk, its events occur over a short four day period, so the book is drawing a lot of conclusions to Ulysses (another book I keep meaning to read and putting off). Here's hoping I can make it through!

Reading Arthur Phillips

I've had The Egyptologist on my shelf for years - I greatly enjoyed Arthur Phillips' first novel Prague and picked this up shortly after finishing it. I've started reading it several times but have never been able to get more than twenty or thirty pages in, even though I adore the premise of multiple unreliable, deluded narrators. That being said, I finally got the urge to really dig into this one last week and watched a number of documentaries on Egypt through Netflix to really spark my interest. Then, when I finally went to the shelf to grab the book I realized it was missing. A week later, a thorough overhaul of my bookshelves, car and every bag and surface in my condo and the book still hasn't turned up. Who knows where it has run off to, but I've got a new copy on order from a small bookshop up the hill and will be reading this next week when it comes in. For the time being, I picked up a copy of Phillips' newest book The Song is You and will try to polish that up in the meantime.

Review: The Tassajara Bread Book

I watched a documentary last week called How To Cook Your Life, and picked up a copy of The Tassajara Bread Book mentioned in the film. Over the weekend I stocked up on baking basics and did something that I haven't done in many years - I baked bread. I started off with the simplest wheat bread recipe, and even though it took me all afternoon to make it was definitely worth the effort. Not only did the bread turn out well, it made my condo smell fantastic! I'm going to remake the same recipe tomorrow with honey rather than molasses as the sweetener to see which I prefer. I've also picked out a couple of non-rising breads to try from scratch later this week.

I was surprised to see how many different types of recipes were included in the book - there are many different breads, cookies, cakes and even some condiments to accompany the baked goods. Most impressive is the organization of the book - the concepts of bread baking and shaping are explained up front and with fantastic, simple detail. Each recipe is explained individually as well, and alternative sweeteners, flours and fillings are often offered. This book manages to teach basic bread making skills very clearly and also provides a great deal of information about bread making. This makes it ideal as a reference material, but also as an introductory text - it teaches how and why.

The wheat bread I made was labor intensive and took many, many hours to fully rise. I was nervous that after all that effort I wouldn't like the bread, but it was mild and earthy. I usually dislike wheat bread because the flavor is so strong, but this recipe had both great flavor and consistency. It was simply delicious, and a very simple recipe. It feels good to eat a piece of bread that I made myself and without preservatives and artificial flavoring. I'm going to try the bran muffin and rosemary focaccia recipes next.

Digital Cookbook Project

After years of collecting recipes in a messy binder I have started using a program called MacGourmet to organize my recipes on my laptop. Like most Apple software, the harder it tries to make things easy on the user, the more complicated and frustrating it becomes. But I do enjoy the visual options and it runs easily on my Mac, which is the computer I use around the house.

I am terribly picky about the arrangement of my books, and it's always bothered me that my cookbooks are a mess. Hopefully this project will help me bring some order to the kitchen shelves!

Review: Koko Be Good

Koko Be Good by Jen Wang is an absolutely charming, beautiful book. The story it tells is simple and a bit cliche, but the characters are well crafted and have real depth and a healthy internal life. I think the negative reviews about the storytelling are a bit unjustified and sound mostly to be coming from people who do not read a lot of manga or graphic novels. Yes, the characters are stock - feral, loose cannon girl; introverted teenage boy; directionless twenty-something. But the dialogue and philosophical core of this book have a real honesty about them. Yes, some of the dialogue sounds trite - just enough that I can imagine the words coming out of the mouth of a recent college grad without a clue as to what they want to do with their life now that actual action is required.

Koko is a riot, struggling to "be good" because she ought to be, but dealing with a philosophical question that has always plagued me - if you have to try to be something, if it's against your true nature, then isn't it wrong for you? The character of Jon is uncertain about his choice to follow his girlfriend to Peru, so his moments are overflowing with doubt and trepidation. He struggles with questions of happiness and value, and whether or not pursuing his musical ambitions is a worthwhile contribution to the world. And then there is Faron, the youngest and as introverted as Koko is outgoing. He seems to be powerless in his own life, until he takes unexpected action and is punished for it. All three are trying to figure out who they are and what to do with themselves and are struggling with these questions in different ways. The emotional core of this story is very dear to me, and I believe Wang does a fantastic job at capturing the essence of these types of questions and the young adults who ask them. It was the character of Faron that I enjoyed the most - the quiet, overlooked boy who teaches himself martial arts and loves musical theater. I think the real message in the book is that as hard as Koko tries to "be good" by society's standards, she has already found her way of being good in her own way - by being a friend to Farun and offering him freedom and companionship.

The story aside, it's the art that truly steals the show. It's just plain gorgeous. The sketched style and gorgeous muted colors make for a really striking volume. Wang also succeeds in capturing scenes as well as the characters, focusing on small details at times which really enhance the overall effect of the artwork. Additionally, I think it complements the subject matter quite well. The images are not firm and defined, and neither are the characters. They are soft around the edges and not fully formed. And my favorite chapter, the one focusing solely on Farun, is done in a different style - more simplistic and childlike. I feel as though this really represents him well as the least emotionally advanced of the characters. It's as though he's suffering through the same type of existential crisis, but with fewer tools and life experiences to help him navigate through it. The art reflects this more simplistic view of himself and the world.

Review: The Imperfectionists

I snapped up a copy of this book shortly after it came out and it's been sitting in my massive queue (otherwise known as the tower of books on my nightstand) ever since. I finally picked it up this morning, and read it straight through. I'm not really sure what to say about the novel - it was pleasant enough to read, and managed to surprise me several times but I did not find the story or its telling to be very compelling.

I bought the book for two reasons, the first being that the majority of the story's action takes place in Rome, and from the reviews it sounded as though the city was an integral and important part of the story. I was disappointed in this regard. Though I was familiar with many of the streets and locations mentioned, the names were simply tossed out as irrelevant details meant to dress the novel with the appearance of authority. The author may as well have been lifting streets from a map indiscriminately and the story could have just as easily been set in any other European city. The only details that felt authentic to me at all were the descriptions of Trastevere and the Tiber river, as well as a particular moment in which one of the characters follows the dome of St. Peter's church as far as she can while riding a city bus. One of the female characters spends a lot of time walking down a street called Lungotevere, which literally translates to "along the Tiber". It's a street that winds its way through Rome along the river. It is a residential street and a lovely, quiet place to walk at any time of day. Yet it is characterized in the book as being a rather busy portion of the city, which is not at all true to my experience when I was walking along that street daily to get from an apartment in Trastevere to class in Campo dei'Fiori. Incidentally, Campo dei'Fiori was also briefly mentioned and not described in the slightest. This book sets itself in one of the oldest and most fascinating modern cities on the planet, and the proceeds to tell a story nearly devoid of any description whatsoever.

The second reason I bought the book was that I enjoy stories that are told from multiple perspectives. However, the fragmented storytelling did not really work in this case. Each chapter deals with a different individual affiliated with the same international newspaper based out of Rome. Though some characters make multiple appearances, there is no real sense of cohesion. Each person's individual story is a part of the larger narrative - the story of the newspaper. But by the final chapter, the story still feels like a patchwork of individuals tied loosely together through circumstance. Though I did enjoy the different voices of each storyteller and how they characterized one another, the story itself was bland and boring.

What I usually enjoy so much about stories told in this manner is that it leaves the reader to accumulate data, to file away the different ways each narrator perceives the other players and to build your own model of the story based off of contradictory evidence. You come to know the narrators, to see their biases and motives and how they color the perceptions they pass along in their observations. Eventually, the reader is able to chart all these perspectives as though they were data points, and extrapolate out the "true truth" of the story from all the disparate points of view. But this story simply does not work that way. Each chapter is relatively brief, and doesn't allow much insight into the individual characters. The accumulation of narrators doesn't build one upon the last to create a rich mosaic of perspectives, gaining complexity with each new layer. It's just a jumble of slightly related stories held together by a thin historical thread and brief snippets of the history of the newspaper at the head of many chapters.

All in all, I found the book to be quite disappointing. It was not poorly written. The characters were not poorly imagined. The plot was not uninteresting. If you read the novel as a collection of short stories and character pieces, it hold up reasonably well - especially since most chapters end with clever surprises and upsets. There was simply not enough of anything - the mysteries were not mysterious, the characters were not fleshed out enough to be compelling and the historical pieces of the story did not fit together well. The entire book reads as well as a brick wall would stand without any mortar to bind each individual brick to its neighbor.

Review: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire

I've had a copy of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo sitting on my bookshelf and gathering dust for some time now - so long, in fact that I can't accurately recall when I bought it. I haven't had any interest in mysteries or crime fiction since I was a teenager and read mystery and historical fiction novels but after hearing so many positive reviews of the book I picked up a copy, knowing that I would eventually get around to reading it.

I'm not sure what made me finally pick it up, but I began to read while waiting for the election results to process on Tuesday night. I was hooked in the first 30 pages or so, and read the entire book in one 8 hour sitting. I was completely drawn into the story and desperate to unravel the crime and knew I could not sleep without knowing how the novel ended. When I finally finished, it was nearly 9am and I made an impulsive decision - I drove up to Capitol Hill and visited the new Elliot Bay Book Company store to buy a copy of The Girl Who Played With Fire.

I read the entire book in one sitting as well, without breaking for so much as a nap in between books. Now I am torn between buying a hardback copy of the third book to resolve the cliff hanger, or wait for the trade paperback to release in early 2011. I was incredibly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book - beyond the fact that it's a crime novel it's overwhelming in its graphic depiction of violence against women. The main female character is brilliant and unique, a pint-sized gothic punk computer hacker with an extremely secretive past. In a fashion typical to the genre, she is constantly underestimated by everyone around her. Owing to her small stature, her apparent youth, her atypical appearance and her perceived mental handicaps people assume she is harmless until she strikes - either through clever application of her computer and investigative skills or through aggressive physical contact.

The main male character is a decent, nice fellow who has just been dealt a very harsh blow to his personal integrity and career as a journalist crusading against various injustices. Either one of these characters, Mikael or Lisbeth, would make for an exceptional focus to the series. However, what really puts this over the top as an excellent and enjoyable read is the combination of the two. A large portion of the first novel is devoted to the work up to their first face-to-face encounter. When they finally meet, it's very gratifying as a reader. Their parallel investigations converge and the plot explodes. What had until that point been a slowly building juggernaut of complicated corporate and familial intrigue escalates immediately into an intense battle for survival. The final revelations caught me by surprise as they unfolded - at several points in the story I identified possible motives and killers, only to have all my theories repeatedly dashed. The ridiculously large cast is difficult to follow but does allow for so many choices for a villain that it leaves the reader constantly guessing. Being accustomed to the restraints of crime dramas on television I was overjoyed to explore a crime that wasn't simple to unravel.

Though I did enjoy the second book, I didn't find it nearly as good as the first. Though I will need to reread both books when not completely exhausted from a marathon of reading, I suspect that my general impression will hold. Part of what made the original story so engrossing for me was watching each of the main characters develop separately, knowing that they would eventually meet and wanting desperately to see that interaction. The pacing of the story and the character development were extraordinary. I was pleased that the second book revisits this model and tells parallel stories again, but I was displeased with the very small amount of contact Lisbeth and Mikael had. The beginning of the second book was intended to show her growth as a person, the ways she was changing and the travels she undertook during a rather lengthy period of absence, but to me it read as a confusing muddle of stories that never circled back to have any significance to the case that drove the book's plot apart from her newfound interest in complex theoretical mathematics.

Once the plot got rolling, though, I found myself pulled into the story once again. I was pleased to see the return of a smaller character from the first book, and his interactions with Lisbeth. The Girl Who Played With Fire kept me guessing for quite a while, but the plot was not nearly as focused and driven as the first book, with three different camps (the police, the journalists, and the hackers) each attempting to solve their own mystery and the reader along for the ride just wanting to know who the mysterious Zala is and how he might tie together all three crusades. It's not until the very last moment that the investigations truly overlap and the truth becomes clear, but even so the book manages to end right on the edge of the cliff, leaving readers desperate for the next installment.

Indiespensable 22 Arrived!

I'm really loving my membership in the Powell's book club, even though I have to admit that my backlog of books to be read is so overwhelmingly large that I have yet to actually read any of the volumes I've collected from it. I joined over the summer, just missing out on their editions of David Eggers' The Wild Things adaptation of my favorite childhood book, Where the Wild Things Are and Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Having read and enjoyed both, I decided to join Indiespensable, trusting that the clever folks at Powell's would come up with some fantastic books that I might otherwise not add to my ever-growing queue.

For many, many years of her life my grandmother belonged to similar types of book clubs. My shelves are filled with her collection of lovely, worn editions of classic works in tattered cases. It's with great enthusiasm I watch my own lovely little collection starting as well - I've always purchased trade paperback editions of modern books, and my own bookcase is filled with volumes that reflect this preference. I love them for their variety and color, and the way they feel in the hand while they're being read - for me reading a book is as much a tactile experience as a narrative one. I've never been drawn to mass market hardcover editions with their glossy slipcovers and dull bindings, but these editions are well thought out and lovely, and remind me so much of my grandmother's collection that I absolutely adore them. Here's to many more months of literary presents arriving via mail!

On a slightly related note, I've been systematically working my way through the writings of Kurt Vonnegut over the last few weeks and arrived home this afternoon having finished reading Mother Night only to discover my other package from Powell's had finally arrived, containing Galapagos and Cat's Cradle. Excellent timing!

Review: Stitches

It seems like most of my reviews begin forming in my head with the words "I've been meaning to read [insert book title here] for ages, but..." and this is certainly no exception. Graphic novels have been growing in popularity for years, as have biographical comics dealing with dark and complex subject matter. The list of graphic novels I have been meaning to read is shocking in length, and right at the head is Stitches by David Small.

When I popped into a B&N a few weeks ago to stock up on Vonnegut books, I happened by a display with a single copy of Stitches stranded between tween vampire romance novels and I felt obligated to give it a new home. I was not at all disappointed, though I was surprised by the darkness of the story. I can't think of much to say about it, honestly, as it's the art that is so powerful. The words are very sparse and like any excellent author he truly shows rather than telling, because when you have the capability to so accurately represent a child's fears, isolation and confusion in picture why would you taint the power of the images with unnecessary words? The story Small has to tell of his childhood is so brutal that it became physically painful to read, in that way that some stories are so tragic that the pain of hearing them told is nearly too much to bear. I wanted to turn away, to close my eyes or shut the book but I couldn't leave the story untold - the telling itself was so beautiful. He focuses on body language, on small details and broad strokes alternatively, entire scenes or single body parts. It's absolutely incredible to me that Small is able to convey so much emotion through his slow telling of the story - some frames don't move the story forward but provide mood or context.

Selections from "Life, or Theatre"

Only the best graphic novelists are really capable of fusing the core components of a story, the actual telling, with just the right amount and type of visual context. In Small's case, he employs similar technique to my favorite autobiographical art book, Life, or Theatre? by Charlotte Salomon. It's also a staggering, painful work painted to tell the story of a tortured childhood. Where Small draws his story to reinforce the absence of a physical voice, Salomon painted hers as an exercise that she hoped would keep her from repeating her family's pattern of early suicide. Both use numerous artistic techniques to represent moods and feelings, notably increasing and decreasing level of detail and focus. Something blurred is present but not the narrator's focus, something highly detailed is the intended focus. Using tools like this allow a simple image to carry an immense amount of information to the viewer, and imbue the art with a nearly mystical power, connecting two minds directly without need for words.

This is not a book I will want to reread. Or flip through. Or think about often. But it's one that will stick with me for the rest of my life. This book made me feel human in the way that only the darkest and most expertly told stories can. For a long moment I had forgotten how deeply I am capable of feeling, but one look into this hellish childhood showed me the depths of my own empathy and the magnitude of suffering that people are able to endure.

Review: Mother Night

I found Mother Night to be an utterly fascinating read, perhaps even more interesting than Slaughterhouse Five. It begins with a plain statement of the book's moral, the eerie and appropriate "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be". I love that the moral prefaces the entire telling of the story, because it kept me on edge throughout the entire book, looking for the danger in every lie and hidden truth.

The story that follows, though it jumps around throughout the narrator's personal history, reads coherently and provides the reader with a robust picture of Howard W. Campbell. Campbell is a frank and honest man facing what he believes will be his execution and this makes him a very reliable narrator. He has the voice of a man completely disinterested with even the smallest lie for the sake of vanity. It is this brutal honesty in the face of his own mortality that endears him to me - not any heroic actions he undertook as a double agent during the war.

The book is typical Vonnegut in that his hero is constantly cut down, ridiculed and marginalized. He is reminded that no matter how much he might have assisted the Allied war effort, he gave considerable justification to the Nazi cause as well - he repeatedly meets Nazis who praise him and attribute their devotion to the cause to his eloquent radio broadcasts. He is a lucid and sane man who sees his actions for what they were - simultaneously constructive and destructive. He is fully aware of the evil done by his words, and takes full responsibility for his actions during the war even though they were done in his patriotic duty as a double agent. Meanwhile he is surrounded by unrepentant Nazis hoping to cop an insanity plea for their own actions. The only man with a half decent excuse for his actions is the only one not looking for one.

The end of this one is really powerful - for me the most touching moment is when Campbell insists on turning himself in, and the old woman recognizes in him the same utter inability to move forward or function without direct command that she saw in the faces of the people interred in the concentration camps. Campbell is so captivated and haunted by that same history and his part in it that he is wasting away himself, unable to place one foot in front of the other and walk out into the night as a free man. And of course, the final verdict managed to catch me off guard - it shocked and thrilled me. It has always seemed to me that the people who suffer the most are those who deserve it the least, and this book really illustrates that principle. Campbell is a sensitive man who suffers doubly, in recalling his actions and admitting his responsibility for them. He believes himself deserving of punishment and lives haunted by his crimes while the world spins around him, full of men denying their crimes and lying to live.

Review: Slaughter-House Five

After reading Armageddon in Retrospect and adoring Vonnegut's style and message, I picked up several of the new editions of his works. The volumes all look great - redesigned to include sketches done by the author. Much better than the old design used by Vintage. I dug into Slaughterhouse Five first and was surprised again - if I loved Armageddon in Retrospect, I absolutely adored this book. Irreverent, funny, ridiculous and extremely humane, this book danced around a subject that has always been of interest to me - the firebombing of Dresden by allied forces during World War Two.

Vonnegut writes with an admirable simplicity and clarity - his stories are not complex and involved. They are snippets of reality and fantasy, compassion and hatred, extraordinary compassion and total apathy. Like so many other writers who lived through wars in the first part of the 20th century, Vonnegut's writing is at its core a plea against the organized violence of warfare and violence of any kind.

I was honestly amazed by this book. It's an easy read and broken into many small sections, and since the story skips around constantly within Billy's life it is easy to read in pieces. I found myself enthralled with the book, yet happy to read a few chapters and then set the book down for a few hours or days before picking back up where I left off. It's remarkable that he is able to treat such dark material, something he lived through himself, with such delicate humor and insight. I wish I had started in on his writings years ago, but it's also nice to uncover such a wealth of excellent literature today.

Indiespensable #21 Arrived!

I really do enjoy waiting for my surprise packages from Powell's every 6 weeks. This time around the featured title is the hefty Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen. The surprise gift turned out to be a bag of Stumptown coffee beans, which is a terrific Portland present! I am definitely a fan of both their beans and baristas, which is saying a lot. I am very picky about my coffee.

The slipcase is quite fetching this time around, and I've heard very, very good things about this book so I am looking forward to digging into it soon.

Project 2010: Reading Vonnegut's Full Body of Work

With ample time on my hands this fall and having found Armageddon In Retrospect such an unexpectedly enjoyable read, I have decided to read my way through Kurt Vonnegut's writings one by one. Being unemployed is a mostly unpleasant and unsettling experience, but the financial uncertainty does carry some fringe benefits - most notably all the extra free time and the natural impulse towards introspection that occurs in the course of major life changes. This makes it the perfect time to tackle some philosophical literature that I've overlooked up until this point.

I'll be progressing roughly in this order and ticking off the titles as I finish them:

• Armageddon in Retrospect
• Slaughterhouse Five
• Mother Night
• Galapagos
• Cat's Cradle
• Breakfast of Champions
• The Sirens of Titan
• Welcome to the Monkey House
• Jailbird
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
• Deadeye Dick
• Hocus Pocus
• Timequake
• Bluebeard
• Look at the Birdie
• Canary in a Cathouse
• Bagombo Snuff Box
• Palm Sunday
• A Man Without a Country
• Fates Worse than Death: an Autobiographical Collage
• While Mortals Sleep

Review: Armageddon in Retrospect

As stated in a previous post, I'm quite embarrassed to admit that I've somehow managed to live twenty-nine years without reading any of Kurt Vonnegut's work. After finishing Armageddon in Retrospect this morning, my embarrassment has blossomed to full on mortification.

A collection of short stories loosely themed around war and many specifically pertaining to the Second World War, this is a fantastic volume that seems to be a perfect introduction to his work, though it is technically his last - published after his death in 2007. It's a lovely volume that I bought for primarily aesthetic reasons - it's a beautiful trade paperback with folding sleeves and original artwork by the author and it screamed at me from the shelves. I've always meant to pick up a volume or two since I have been told many times by reputable sources that I would enjoy his writing. But this volume was the first to ever catch my eye, and so I begin at both the beginning (with his letter sent home as a POW during WWII) and the ending (his final written speech).

I read this book rather quickly, one story at a time every few days. The only exception was the story "Spoils" - one of the shortest but easily the most emotional for me. After reading that story and having a good cry, I held off reading for a few weeks. It's a simple story, but it conveys acutely the pain of losing everything in a war only to realize that there is always something else left to lose. Just thinking of the little boy and his rabbit now makes me tremble and tear up - it's one of those stories that gets under your skin because it's so sad, but also because it's so true. And that, to me, is the essence of what makes these short stories so great. They are sketches of real men, real places, real wars and real suffering. No one is inherently good or evil, right or wrong.

Vonnegut sees the world with the cold gaze of a man who has lived through some of the worst history has to offer, and like many other men of his time he has seen through the haze of lies we weave to soften the edges of the world. He sees the world and its inhabitants for what they are, and he describes them with great integrity. You see his pity, his apathy, his disbelief in every word. And most importantly, you see few heroes and few villains, just people caught on both sides of a struggle to survive. His own account of the war is remarkable, and his letter home voiced with a total detachment from the facts that causes them to play out with a sick humor as he relays the series of events occurring between his capture by the Germans and his release from POW camp. Included in this, and written about in several of the stories, is the firebombing of Dresden.

Though some of his stories, especially those based on the actual events he experienced in the war, hit me with an unexpected strength of emotion, it was his humor I enjoyed most of all. In particular, the final quote in the book: "Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization."

Now I finally see what the fuss has been about all these years, and why he's remained such a popular author. I can't wait to dig into the rest of his writings, and to make a good thing even better Random House is reissuing all his works in editions designed with his own artwork. Time to clear more space on the shelf!

Review: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

I usually don't read stories written from the perspective of young girls for the same reason I avoid "lifestyle" television programming - I tend to find both overly feminized and sappy. But something about the synopsis for this book struck me, and I decided to take a chance. I read a book written from the perspective of a young boy a few years ago, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, and it was unexpectedly wonderful. A lot of the enjoyment came from the fact that the boy was obsessive compulsive, and therefore quite different from most child narrators. The narrator of this book, Rose, is different from most children because she has a fanciful ability - to read the hidden emotions of whomever cooks the food she eats. I thought the idea sounded clever and offered a lot of narrative possibilities, so I snagged a copy a few weeks ago and finally read it last night in its entirety.

I definitely enjoyed the story, and felt that it built upon itself well. I was never overly emotional at any point up until the very end, which allowed me to enjoy the story without any distraction, and I absolutely adored the writing style and narrative voice. There was just the right amount of sadness mixed into the story, enough to make it believable without becoming cliche. The primary focus of Rose's ability is on her mother since she prepares the family meals and children's lunches. At first she doesn't understand why the food tastes so terrible, why it feels empty. Discovering the nature of her talent leaves Rose with many questions about why her mother's interior emotions are so different from her exterior. The struggle to understand adult emotions as a girl is overwhelming to Rose, and she faces each meal with dread - both for the tastes of the food and the experience of her mother's sadness. I found this to be an interesting way to tell a coming of age story - learning about the world through exposure to the dark emotions people hide behind happy facades. Rose is not a traditionally bright child in the way her brother is constantly hailed as being gifted, but she comes to understand the world far ahead of the curve, and is a prodigy in her own way. Her perceptions are simultaneously childlike and astute. What she does not yet understand about the world is endearing and sad, as are truths she uncovers at too young an age.

I think my favorite part of the book is how Rose's own emotional development is stunted by her gift. Rose shrinks from her gift throughout her childhood, eating snacks and processed foods, and avoiding her mother's cooking at all costs trying to avoid the unpleasant emotions contained within her meals. To my mind she does everything she can to hide from these emotions, and this aversion affects her own emotional development. When she finally eats her own meal as a young woman, she is shocked to discover how empty she feels. She tastes like the factory food she loved as a child - without any emotion, good or bad. I feel like this is her big coming of age moment. She has finally overcome her fear and faces herself down with a steady gaze. She doesn't like what she sees, and instead of trying to mask her unhappiness as her mother had done for so many years, she confronts herself head on. She wants her inside emotions to match her outside, she wants to be whole and be able to cook and live honestly, without the hollowness of deception. As the character of George says quite early on, her curse is also a terrific gift that could be grown into, and is.

I enjoyed Rose's mother and father as well, and loved George, though he is perhaps a bit unrealistically kind and wonderful. Rose's brother, however, is a mystery to me. At first he played as a contrast to Rose, and I enjoyed their hollow suburban family dynamic - it felt both bizarre and real at the same time, and Bender's prose style really brought the entire family to life. But towards the end I was absolutely confused about Joseph's character and his purpose in the story. Rose's father's surprise reveal was unexpected and welcome - seeing those two grow closer slowly over time was a real pleasure. The scene where she tells him of her skill might be my favorite from the entire book, it played out with real tragicomic shine. And then there is her brother - I just cannot make any sense of his bizarre and senseless final appearances. Everything else about the book holds together and tells a warm yet not overly sweet story. Minus the strange ending parts with Joseph, it's a great story. I only wish the plot device was put to further use - it's wonderful to see Rose grow up with this gift of seeing people's hidden emotions, and learning to get by seeing and knowing things she shouldn't. But there is a lot more potential that was not explored, and I feel in the end the story stops short and doesn't deliver in this regard.

Fiction Book Club - Seattle

I've started a fiction book club for Seattle on Shelfari as an experiment. It's tough to get the first few members to this sort of thing, so unless it picks up quickly, I don't expect it to get off the ground, but I'm ever hopeful! Perhaps this clever peer-pressure tactic will help me progress with my goal to read all the unread volumes on the shelf.

Manga Withdrawal

It may sound crazy but I hate suspense - not knowing, even for a short time, drives me absolutely insane. Because of this I generally don't read mysteries, and I heavily favor stories that start at the ending and then work backwards. I also struggle with waiting for new manga chapters every week, so I tend to hold off from reading them weekly and read them in batches to negate some of the cliffhangers and suspense.

Because of this, I didn't realize that my very favorite online manga source had taken down its online reader and I now don't have a reliable source of well translated manga! Fortunately, I have some volumes of Yotsuba&! to read to tide me over while One Manga sorts out some options to launch a new online reader (I hope!). It's not difficult to find new sources for the most popular mangas, but the more obscure ones are difficult to find in English and often take weeks to appear in translation. Here's hoping they're back soon!

Indiespensable #20 Arrived!

I received my first package from Powell's last night! I was not disappointed in the least - everything was shrink wrapped in place and arrived without any damage. The volume of I Curse The River of Time is beautiful - I adore books in slipcases! And the bonus gifts are nice, some pre-release chapters and a delicious smelling gourmet salt. I love the idea of this club. The books are sometimes volumes I would buy, but frequently they are unfamiliar and something that I might not chose for myself. The supplemental gifts are a nice little treat, and best of all they are not something I would typically buy for myself. Sometimes the best "gifts" are the things you'd never think to buy! I've never belonged to a book club of any sorts, as I like to read on my own (agonizingly slow) schedule and my reading preferences are also a rather narrow band of fiction. I suspect that this subscription will be a good experience for me, pulling me out of my normal comfort zone and into new types of fiction, new authors, and even experiencing new treats.

As for my pledge to soldier on through this stack of summer reading: I am halfway through Kurt Vonnegut's posthumous Armageddon in Retrospect, a collection of short writings around the theme of war. I am utterly embarrassed to admit it's my first read of anything by Vonnegut, and it's left me speechless. The stories are short but incredible, and I've had to take a break after one of the stories in particular. But the most impressive bit of writing is in his own letter sent home after being rescued from the POW camp in Germany. Everything about its sparse language and dry tone repeats in his later stories, but here it is especially powerful. He is a man who understands the unlikelihood of his own survival and the inhumanity of war and that reflects heavily in the remaining stories.

Indiespensable #20 Shipped

I'm very excited - my first volume of Powell's Indiespensable collection is on its way! I was disappointed last month to discover that the previous selection, Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, had sold out before I could reserve a copy. To avoid this happening again, I subscribed! Now I will receive a volume every six weeks. I look forward to getting a nice variety of books, and having new volumes for my collection.

Finally Unpacked

Sorting, cataloguing and packing my grandmother's books and my own was a massive undertaking that dominated Spring. Now that I've finally settled in to my new place and got all 35 boxes of books unpacked and organized in my new place I've started reading again. I will be posting once a week for the rest of the year and attempting to get through as much of my queue of books as possible.

The stack of unread books on my nightstand is quite impressive so I had better get to it!

New Elliot Bay Book Company Location is Gorgeous!

I popped up to Capitol Hill today for some ice cream at Molly Moon's, and wandered by the new Elliot Bay Book Company location on a whim. It looked incredible from the outside, and I felt compelled to pop in for a quick look since I had the pup with me and didn't want to leave him out front for too long. [note: upon later visits I have since discovered they are dog friendly!]

I was amazed at the interior - it's very spacious and beautiful, and they have a large table up front with new hardback and trade paperback books. I picked up a copy of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, since I missed out on the Powell's special edition and impulse bought a clever looking book called Johannes Cabal The Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard. The staff was sharp, and informed me that Ms. Bender would be giving a reading the following week, and giving me some info about it. Looking over the calendar, they seem to be getting the same touring authors as Powell's down in Portland - this has likely always been the case but I've never frequented the old location to know for sure!

All in all it was a great visit. The location is fantastic, too - very easy to buy a book and swing over to the park to read in the sunshine!

Project 2010: Library Catalogue

I was absolutely astonished by how long this project wound up taking me! I started cataloging while I was packing to move into my new condo, and it took weeks to get most of my grandmother's collection entered into my spreadsheet and boxed up. I did make it hard on myself by cataloging a number of properties - title, author, publisher and year, along with any notable comments about the editions, but it seemed best to do everything all at once.

The hardest part was letting go of some of the books, but I decided it was better to have a manageable collection that I would be able to keep on the limited shelf space in my home, rather than keep every book my grandmother collected in her lifetime. I passed a number of books along to family, and took most of the paperbacks, mystery novels, and some others to the used bookstore.

I also went through my own collection of books and finally turned in most of my books from college, save my collection of used philosophy and classics texts. All in all, I was very proud that I was able to let go of some books that I should have parted with years ago. I even managed to get them all on the shelves - I only have a few boxes with oversized coffee table books and my grandmother's individual volume Shakespeare collection in storage.

More New Books

There are an extraordinary number of great books coming out this summer, and I've been picking them up much faster than I can read. The queue already has bloated to include:

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
Johannes Cabal: The Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard
The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
Descartes' Bones by Russell Shorto
Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie
Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut
The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay

R.I.P. Jose Saramago

I was really sad to hear that Jose Saramago passed away yesterday. I've had several of his novels sitting on my nightstand waiting to be read for some time now and am nearly through reading Death With Interruptions. I was drawn to his writing when I heard of his novel about Fernando Pessoa's heteronym Ricardo Reis, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis.

His style is often dense, but enjoyable, and I cannot wait to really dig in to the remainder of his works.

Review: The Bell Jar

On my recent trip to Portland, I picked up a nice trade paperback edition of Sylvia Plath's infamous novel The Bell Jar. I wasn't sure what to expect beyond my general awareness of the subject matter and its parallels to her own life, but I wasn't more than a dozen pages in before I realized this was a book that I should have read a decade ago. As cliched as it might be, Catcher in the Rye was one of the most influential books I read as a teenager. Even though I couldn't identify with Hayden's life in the slightest, I had an overwhelming sense of empathy for his philosophical situation. The Bell Jar is interesting as a similar type of narrative, a woman's coming of age story that deals with similar types of questions and problems.

Hayden and Esther are both anti heros. Their struggle with difficult questions that most people push out of their minds leads them both to cast aside their designated roles in society, and fight against leading normative lives. Though the particulars of their situations are a part of an outdated social structure, the ideas absolutely hold. Though there is more freedom in how one arrives at their destination, that goal is still largely the same: good job, good husband or wife, strong family life. This struggle is what I identified with most in Catcher - Hayden is rebelling against the type of life society told him he ought to live, and Esther is doing the same.

I found the difference in tone to be interesting, but each book seems genuine to me in its own way. Hayden's detachment, anger, and wry amusement with life is a masculine reaction to his feelings of alienation and dissatisfaction with what his family expects of him. Esther's unhappiness begins with her limited social options and the expectations society has of all young women to grow into happy mothers, but as the story progresses she begins to see the entire world as the problem and contemplates suicide as the only escape. Hayden leaves prep school, forsaking his expected path to adulthood but retaining options as to how he may live his life. Esther attempts to do this when she enters the asylum - forsaking sanity for the stigma of a stay in a psychiatric hospital. But even this freedom imprisons her, and she begins to realize that though she's managed to escape from one prison, marriage and motherhood, she is now trapped in a new cage of her own making - that of the unstable woman, apart from the rest of society. She seems trapped between classic models of femininity, the mother and the prophetess, and is dissatisfied with both options. Seeing no middle ground, then, it is only a matter of time before Esther follows with her own suicide.

The main factor that complicates this book as a coming of age tale and makes it a bit of a cautionary one is Esther's mental state. From my own experiences as a young woman, I know that much of what she describes is an accurate representation of normal levels of depression. As a teen who was plagued by self-doubt and heavy questions about life, I experienced much of what she described in the early parts of the book. The depression, the confusion, the inability to function practically in day to day life - these are all things I experienced myself and confronted head on without medication or therapy. I knew my questions made me different from most of my peers, and I also knew that if I allowed others to see the depth of my depression I would be medicated in an attempt to make me "normal", able to function among my peers, much like how Esther underwent shock therapy in attempts to make her normal as well.

I really enjoyed reading this book because I was able to identify with Esther's struggle to figure out who she was separate from society's pressures. I found it intriguing to peer into the mind of someone so similar to me, and at the same time so much more troubled. I never contemplated suicide, and always had trouble understanding how people make the transition from depression to despair. I have always found my intellectual struggles stimulating and enjoy the darkness of depression for what it is - a natural part of life. By embracing all my emotions equally and appreciating sadness, helplessness and apathy as occasional parts of my existence I was able to conquer my own depressive tendencies. Esther was unable to do so - the power of her depression was too great to integrate into the rest of her life and eventually it overwhelmed her. The dark cloud of Plath's own suicide weighs upon me as the reader, and likely on most others as well. Though Esther survives several close calls in the book, it seems only a matter of time before she follows the author into an early death.

First Trip to Powell's Bookstore in Portland

My first trip to Powell's largest bookstore in Portland was absolutely amazing! I ducked in with a friend for a few minutes while we waited for our dinner table to open up down the block and was immediately amazed. I've been frequenting used bookstores my whole life - most commonly the Half Price Book chain in and around Seattle - but this is on an entirely different scale. After just a few moments, it became clear we'd need to return so I stashed my cache in the vegetarian cookbook section (which was unbelievably broad!) and headed to dinner. We came back after dinner and beer and spent some quality time roaming through the fiction section.

The selection of quality used paperbacks is very high - it was like looking through a well stocked regular bookstore. Being picky about the condition of my books always restricts me when used book shopping, to the extent that I shop by browsing the entire fiction section fully, pulling out all the high quality volumes and then selecting from them. This was completely impossible at Powell's. In fact, I didn't even make it through the full fiction section. My feet got tired after approximately half of the alphabet and we didn't even go beyond the fiction section!!

I bought several books but managed to restrain myself to limit how many books I would have to pack for my upcoming move:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (Heritage Press edition from the '60s to supplement my grandmother's collection)

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Collected Novellas by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (this book is terrifyingly heavy for a paperback)

Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon

Karma and Other Stories by Rishi Reddi

Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie

Empress: A Novel by Shan Sa

Project 2010: Library Catalogue

In light of how unsuccessful my 2009 resolution turned out to be, I have decided to start of 2010 with a full inventory of my personal book collection (all those pretty paperbacks I have been stockpiling for years) as well as the books my grandmother left behind. The goal is to get a comprehensive list to assist me in flushing out my classic literature collection and to help me properly organize my physical library.

Currently, I have catalogued 170 of my own volumes and 260 of my grandmother's. I was surprised to see that her collection is heavy in Dickens, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Kipling, Steinbeck, Hemmingway, and Russian Literature. It's also very light in Asian Literature and women authors.

Admittedly, a large reason for my failure to finish reading many books last year was to the extensive amount of time spent playing MMORPG video games - hopefully my retirement in this category of games will allow me to return to my happier, heavy reading days!

Resolution 2010

So another year has flown by, but this one leaving me with a paper trail in this blog - I can now see just how sharply my reading habits declined as I picked up a new MMORPG game in the fall. I plan to retain my 2009 New Year's resolution to read 2 books for every 1 purchased, in an attempt to finally clear out my new book reading queue. I also plan to finally catalog my full collection of books as well as those left behind by my grandmother. This will be a large project, but it seems to be the best time possible to undertake it since I will need to box up all the books to move to my new home anyway.

Here's to 2010 and another year of reading!