Ok -- so the summer (my summer) is officially over. And so I should get back to this blogging gig. And before I do let me just say how incredibly impressed I am by all of the book bloggers who manage to blog daily! The reading part I have down, the blogging, not so much.
So for this post I will try and get caught up on my summer reads. I am only linking to the two I really liked.
Alice Bliss, by Laura Harrington -- sobbing on metronorth. A really great book about an adolescent girl in....Rochester NY!....and her life after her father is deployed to Iraq. Excellent mother/daughter depiction. Excellent young adult protagonist who is by no means perfect -- but she is trying to do what she thinks that she should, for her family and herself. Harrington gets the weather -- the grey grey cold winter days and the slush totally right (even though I-95 does not lead into downtown Rochester). This book was excellent.
The Known World, by Edward P. Jones -- Finally made it through -- again assigned this semester. Hopefully my students won;t have the same problem falling asleep that I did (and it is good!)
The Fall of the Towers. Samuel Delaney -- pretty good, not great. Perfectly enjoyable, but I am not sure I cared that much about what happened. I thought I would like it better.
The Color of the Sea, by John Hamamura -- Loved, loved, loved this. Bought for a quarter at the Beaver Island library sale. Thought one of my people would like it, but not appropriate, yet. Starts with a 9 year old boy in the 1930s going from Japan to Hawaii with his father, who works on a sugar plantation. Samurai training (that is why I thought my person would like it), sugar plantation work, whites and native Hawaiians and Japanese, ill advised teenage sex, moving to California, better advised teenage sex, WWII and on.....It is both sweeping, but also detailed enough in the right parts to feel as if you have a handle on the main character. Definitely I would recommend this.
Eden Close, by Anita Shreve -- eh, Anita Shreve -- maybe I had read it before, hard to know.
The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson -- finally made it to my reread of this -- really loved it, even though it took a solid 10 days (and vacation days). I still feel as if I need the Companion to Years of Rice and Salt to fully enjoy -- has anyone written that?
The Selected, by Patrick Cave -- the sequel to Sharp North. Really good, but hmmmm has a televised game to the death and seems to have been published prior to Hunger Games.
Eutopia, by David Nickle -- so incredibly terrible. This is why books should tell you very clearly "I made be called eutopia and I may claim to be set in a 'utopian mill town' but I also include disgusting horror book creatures crawling out of the dark and so if you don;t like horror don't even bother."
The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak -- my mom bought me this when I admitted I had not read it. Actually way better than I expected. Death is a surprisingly sympathetic narrator.
Learning to Swim, by Sara Henry -- this came up on someone's blog..Bookslut??...It was fine for the first half and then so incredibly far fetched for the second that it was absurd.
Kindred, by Octavia Butler -- a reread, and my least favorite of Butler's books. But I am teaching it and it is pretty good, as long as you don't think about her (much better) books.
Currently reading Weird Sisters. They need to get way weirder pretty quickly.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Reading but not blogging
This week I have finished Eden and read Raising Cain and skimmed a book I will not be using for a class in the fall. And I am working my way through The Known World, which I will be using in class, and am now reading and enjoying Let the Great World Spin, on the suggestion (surprising) of my sister.
After Eden I think I shall take a break from depressing and incredibly long Israeli novels. This one made me like the David Grossman one better. So is it better to reflect directly on "the situation" in your novel or to seemingly ignore it until it infects every pore of every character's miserable life? Hard to say. But Eden is no eden (which I should have known) and I wish people would be more generous with their quotation marks when using the word "utopian." I thought it might actually be utopian. It was not. Not only that, but many loose ends are not at all tied up -- and by not being tied up it is clear that the misery that the reader knows about will only be compounded by the misery that is yet to come when the characters (all living their lives beyond the book's pages for me) find out.
As for Raising Cain -- I clearly missed this when it came out -- I read it on the suggestion of a teacher at the people's school -- I did learn some useful things (how to frame discussions about fear and how to encourage emotional intelligence through discussions of people and literary characters), and I was glad to finish it in a few hours becuase it would have been an annoying read over a longer period of time.
And hopefully The Known World will not make my students fall asleep quite as quickly as it is making me....
You will all note that I am taking a hiatus from Red Mars. I need a summer sci-fi read as good as Sherri Tepper's The Margarets. Any suggestions? (Well, well, well, it seems as if Tepper has a new book AND it is postapocalyptic: The Waters Rising.)
After Eden I think I shall take a break from depressing and incredibly long Israeli novels. This one made me like the David Grossman one better. So is it better to reflect directly on "the situation" in your novel or to seemingly ignore it until it infects every pore of every character's miserable life? Hard to say. But Eden is no eden (which I should have known) and I wish people would be more generous with their quotation marks when using the word "utopian." I thought it might actually be utopian. It was not. Not only that, but many loose ends are not at all tied up -- and by not being tied up it is clear that the misery that the reader knows about will only be compounded by the misery that is yet to come when the characters (all living their lives beyond the book's pages for me) find out.
As for Raising Cain -- I clearly missed this when it came out -- I read it on the suggestion of a teacher at the people's school -- I did learn some useful things (how to frame discussions about fear and how to encourage emotional intelligence through discussions of people and literary characters), and I was glad to finish it in a few hours becuase it would have been an annoying read over a longer period of time.
And hopefully The Known World will not make my students fall asleep quite as quickly as it is making me....
You will all note that I am taking a hiatus from Red Mars. I need a summer sci-fi read as good as Sherri Tepper's The Margarets. Any suggestions? (Well, well, well, it seems as if Tepper has a new book AND it is postapocalyptic: The Waters Rising.)
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Not really a post.....
So on the night stand are:
Dead Tossed Waves -- finished, not as good as the first -- she does have great titles and the last one (The Dark and Hollow Places) I will likely also read.
Our only May Amelia -- a book of my female person's -- not bad, girl in Washington State in 1899 and does show that young people are fully capable of complicated emotional lives
Red Mars -- Kim Stanley Robinson -- wow -- lots of people in my utopian crowd coo over this series and all I can say is that no one cares this much about the make-up of Martian rock. I need some human interaction! Not sure when I will finish this.
Aurora -- last in the trilogy and highly satisfying postapocalyptic young adult fare -- ordered the most recent one from the UK and it was worth the 10$ shipping charge (and I hate paying a shipping charge). But start witrh Exodus and Zenith. But I warn you -- Julie Bertagna's website infected my computer with some odd virus!
And these are the two I am about to start:
Under the Harrow -- cannot even remember why I took this one out of the library.
Eden -- have not yet started, but it sounded intriguing.
Dead Tossed Waves -- finished, not as good as the first -- she does have great titles and the last one (The Dark and Hollow Places) I will likely also read.
Our only May Amelia -- a book of my female person's -- not bad, girl in Washington State in 1899 and does show that young people are fully capable of complicated emotional lives
Red Mars -- Kim Stanley Robinson -- wow -- lots of people in my utopian crowd coo over this series and all I can say is that no one cares this much about the make-up of Martian rock. I need some human interaction! Not sure when I will finish this.
Aurora -- last in the trilogy and highly satisfying postapocalyptic young adult fare -- ordered the most recent one from the UK and it was worth the 10$ shipping charge (and I hate paying a shipping charge). But start witrh Exodus and Zenith. But I warn you -- Julie Bertagna's website infected my computer with some odd virus!
And these are the two I am about to start:
Under the Harrow -- cannot even remember why I took this one out of the library.
Eden -- have not yet started, but it sounded intriguing.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Cranky
I will not be blogging about Copper Elephant this week as my saved copy of Room showed up in the library.
Many bloggers and book reviewers have been in a kerfluffle about Emma Donoghue's Room. It seems that this book is universally loved -- and yet I felt the same way in the first half of this book as I did when reading V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic, except that then I was 14 and even that voyeuristic horror-thrill was not particularly satisfying. So here are my three reasons why Room is not a great book, although a perfectly engaging read (thereby giving it the airplane reading score of a 7 [although that could be a 6.8 if you have a long flight -- this is good for the Charleston-LaGuardia route -- but it won't last for that flight to the West Coast]):
1) Reviewers seems to love the voice of the 5 year old narrator -- and there is something intriguing about seeing his world (and then our world) through his eyes. But that voice can be frustrating and limiting -- particularly by the end when you really would like to know more about what his mother is thinking and not simply what she is willing to say to her son. This is the reason why the word "gimmick" seems to appear in almost every review.
2) The voyeurism -- I would like not to read a book that taps into that part of my brain/psyche that reads People magazine stories about Elizabeth Smart. The book itself was written in the aftermath of a case about a woman who was held captive by her father for 24 years. So there is voyeurism at all ends -- the book was created out of a voyeuristic interest in one woman's horrific life experiences and then the book attract readers who want to read about such horrific experiences. But we get that horror through the eyes and brain of a five year old for whom Room is normal -- a voice where Outside is nothing but space and TV is wholly imaginary and Wardrobe is a safe place to sleep when Old Nick comes to call late at night. While I kept reading I hated this horror/normal reality that the book was presenting.
3) And then there are the "mother's love" responses. I reject out of hand any use of rape/torture/confinement as setting up conditions for an argument about the endless depths of mother love. Let us be clear that rape/torute/confinement are exactly as they sound. Let us not rationalize them with any claim about what a great mother Ma is -- it is not about whether or not she is a great mother -- because what she is is confined, raped, tortured. We learn nothing about motherhood from this book because we should not learn anything about motherhood from this book. Can people parent under conditions of extreme deprivation? Absolutely. Do we hold such people in high esteem? Absolutely. Do we seek to learn from their experiences? We do not. First of all it would be the height of absurdity to make any claim about what you can learn when you are not in such an experience of extreme degradation. But more importantly it would be morally wrong for any of us to say: see what a great job Ma did even while being raped and confined! as some sort of message to other women experiencing abuse in their domestic lives. I would say (controversially) that Ma is absent any obligations to her son because of her confinement and continued rape. Is it better for Jack that she cares for him as she does? Yes. But is she required morally to have done so? No.
Martyrdom is not a model of motherhood.
So should you read Room? Well you will get to join in on all the discussions, but if you also thought that The Lovely Bones was a manipulative book that made you want to take a very long shower, then I would not bother.
Many bloggers and book reviewers have been in a kerfluffle about Emma Donoghue's Room. It seems that this book is universally loved -- and yet I felt the same way in the first half of this book as I did when reading V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic, except that then I was 14 and even that voyeuristic horror-thrill was not particularly satisfying. So here are my three reasons why Room is not a great book, although a perfectly engaging read (thereby giving it the airplane reading score of a 7 [although that could be a 6.8 if you have a long flight -- this is good for the Charleston-LaGuardia route -- but it won't last for that flight to the West Coast]):
1) Reviewers seems to love the voice of the 5 year old narrator -- and there is something intriguing about seeing his world (and then our world) through his eyes. But that voice can be frustrating and limiting -- particularly by the end when you really would like to know more about what his mother is thinking and not simply what she is willing to say to her son. This is the reason why the word "gimmick" seems to appear in almost every review.
2) The voyeurism -- I would like not to read a book that taps into that part of my brain/psyche that reads People magazine stories about Elizabeth Smart. The book itself was written in the aftermath of a case about a woman who was held captive by her father for 24 years. So there is voyeurism at all ends -- the book was created out of a voyeuristic interest in one woman's horrific life experiences and then the book attract readers who want to read about such horrific experiences. But we get that horror through the eyes and brain of a five year old for whom Room is normal -- a voice where Outside is nothing but space and TV is wholly imaginary and Wardrobe is a safe place to sleep when Old Nick comes to call late at night. While I kept reading I hated this horror/normal reality that the book was presenting.
3) And then there are the "mother's love" responses. I reject out of hand any use of rape/torture/confinement as setting up conditions for an argument about the endless depths of mother love. Let us be clear that rape/torute/confinement are exactly as they sound. Let us not rationalize them with any claim about what a great mother Ma is -- it is not about whether or not she is a great mother -- because what she is is confined, raped, tortured. We learn nothing about motherhood from this book because we should not learn anything about motherhood from this book. Can people parent under conditions of extreme deprivation? Absolutely. Do we hold such people in high esteem? Absolutely. Do we seek to learn from their experiences? We do not. First of all it would be the height of absurdity to make any claim about what you can learn when you are not in such an experience of extreme degradation. But more importantly it would be morally wrong for any of us to say: see what a great job Ma did even while being raped and confined! as some sort of message to other women experiencing abuse in their domestic lives. I would say (controversially) that Ma is absent any obligations to her son because of her confinement and continued rape. Is it better for Jack that she cares for him as she does? Yes. But is she required morally to have done so? No.
Martyrdom is not a model of motherhood.
So should you read Room? Well you will get to join in on all the discussions, but if you also thought that The Lovely Bones was a manipulative book that made you want to take a very long shower, then I would not bother.
Monday, May 16, 2011
One no, one maybe, one wait until next week
Currently reading: Copper Elephant, by Adam Rapp
Will not be discussing: The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano (which I would recommend if you were interested in a book about the two most unhappy people in the world)
Will be discussing: Lucy by Laurence Gonzales
I will begin this post with a secret admission: I love Michael Crichton (almost as much as I love Stephen King). I love the bizarre scenarios and the pseudo-science and the fast pace and the ginormous length. So Lucy had "in the tradition of Mary Shelley and Michael Crichton" on the back and I said "yes, please.".
Bonobo researcher (Jenny), insurgents in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, daring escape through the forest, detours to alert the british researcher who was never very friendly, researcher found dead, but his 14 year old daughter (Lucy) on the floor of their home with her arms around dead bonobo. Jenny takes the daughter and returns to the US.....with Lucy, the 1/2 bonobo child. [Now is the time for a long tangent about how terrible jacket copy is -- this would be a far cooler book if you did not know that Lucy was part bonobo....the reader should find out when Jenny finds out -- but instead we know from the jacket. The long and tiring and yet really quite good David Grossman novel I dicussed earlier included a piece of information on the jacket that is not revealed until the halfway point of the book. Part of my narcolepsy with the first part of the book is waiting to figure out how what I already know can be true. Someone out there in the publishing world should do something about this. And while you are at it do something about ridiculous movie previews (really you had to give the world's biggest hint in the preview for Never Let me Go that they are clones??]
Ok, where were we....in Chicago with Lucy and Jenny. Lucy who has never lived anywhere but the jungle....the best parts of this book are the Mean Girls style high school scenes, minus the gossip, the plastics, and the mean girls. Eventually all sorts of things happen and while you are never on the edge of your seat, you do want all to work out in the end. And I am not sure that they do, because, sadly, the novel breaks down in the last 25 pages.
So if I was giving scores I guess I would give this a 6.5 * -- good for a plane ride, but if you leave it on the seat next to you with 25 pages to go -- don't bother rushing back to find it. (So a question to my reader(s): how do I put the little asterisk at my new rating system with a footnote to explain how it will work?)
Update -- answer from comments: do it manually!
So here is my scale (all books listed on my bookroll are either 9s or 10s):
* the scale coordinates with well-known authors clearly at each level (ha! so it is an entirely idiosyncratic scale! The primary rule about this scale is that: it is my blog and I get to be as judgmental as I wish [iimbaigtbajaiw]
1: offensive books that I hated, i.e. silly mommy war novels [it would be good to have an example, but I already said I hated it]
2: genres that annoy me -- fantasy (unless it doesn't), historical, steampunk
3: tedious boy books, i.e Philip Roth
4: entertaining books that other people push that I won't read: Swedish crime fiction
5: one step above entertaining books that other people push on me: Like Water for Elephants
6: books that are needlessly depressing, or confusing, or sleep inducing, that nevertheless I finish: I would put David Grossman's See Under Love here, but I never finished it....
7: The perfect airplane book sufficiently distracting to keep me from wondering how it is that a plane stays in flight: Ken Follett (thus violating rules 1 and 2! Remember -- idiosyncratic)
8: Excellent books that maybe go off track; or books I should like better, but am too shallow to love: Philip K. Dick and other sci fi written by males that does not fall into the offensive category, and yet this is a malleable category: Orson Scott Card -- love the books, yet so offensive....)
9: Books I want to teach and worry when students do not also love: Ursula Le Guin (minus the unreadable Always Coming Home) plus books I would not teach and yet re-read.
10: Books I love love, i.e.Octavia Butler (except for Kindred)
Will not be discussing: The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano (which I would recommend if you were interested in a book about the two most unhappy people in the world)
Will be discussing: Lucy by Laurence Gonzales
I will begin this post with a secret admission: I love Michael Crichton (almost as much as I love Stephen King). I love the bizarre scenarios and the pseudo-science and the fast pace and the ginormous length. So Lucy had "in the tradition of Mary Shelley and Michael Crichton" on the back and I said "yes, please.".
Bonobo researcher (Jenny), insurgents in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, daring escape through the forest, detours to alert the british researcher who was never very friendly, researcher found dead, but his 14 year old daughter (Lucy) on the floor of their home with her arms around dead bonobo. Jenny takes the daughter and returns to the US.....with Lucy, the 1/2 bonobo child. [Now is the time for a long tangent about how terrible jacket copy is -- this would be a far cooler book if you did not know that Lucy was part bonobo....the reader should find out when Jenny finds out -- but instead we know from the jacket. The long and tiring and yet really quite good David Grossman novel I dicussed earlier included a piece of information on the jacket that is not revealed until the halfway point of the book. Part of my narcolepsy with the first part of the book is waiting to figure out how what I already know can be true. Someone out there in the publishing world should do something about this. And while you are at it do something about ridiculous movie previews (really you had to give the world's biggest hint in the preview for Never Let me Go that they are clones??]
Ok, where were we....in Chicago with Lucy and Jenny. Lucy who has never lived anywhere but the jungle....the best parts of this book are the Mean Girls style high school scenes, minus the gossip, the plastics, and the mean girls. Eventually all sorts of things happen and while you are never on the edge of your seat, you do want all to work out in the end. And I am not sure that they do, because, sadly, the novel breaks down in the last 25 pages.
So if I was giving scores I guess I would give this a 6.5 * -- good for a plane ride, but if you leave it on the seat next to you with 25 pages to go -- don't bother rushing back to find it. (So a question to my reader(s): how do I put the little asterisk at my new rating system with a footnote to explain how it will work?)
Update -- answer from comments: do it manually!
So here is my scale (all books listed on my bookroll are either 9s or 10s):
* the scale coordinates with well-known authors clearly at each level (ha! so it is an entirely idiosyncratic scale! The primary rule about this scale is that: it is my blog and I get to be as judgmental as I wish [iimbaigtbajaiw]
1: offensive books that I hated, i.e. silly mommy war novels [it would be good to have an example, but I already said I hated it]
2: genres that annoy me -- fantasy (unless it doesn't), historical, steampunk
3: tedious boy books, i.e Philip Roth
4: entertaining books that other people push that I won't read: Swedish crime fiction
5: one step above entertaining books that other people push on me: Like Water for Elephants
6: books that are needlessly depressing, or confusing, or sleep inducing, that nevertheless I finish: I would put David Grossman's See Under Love here, but I never finished it....
7: The perfect airplane book sufficiently distracting to keep me from wondering how it is that a plane stays in flight: Ken Follett (thus violating rules 1 and 2! Remember -- idiosyncratic)
8: Excellent books that maybe go off track; or books I should like better, but am too shallow to love: Philip K. Dick and other sci fi written by males that does not fall into the offensive category, and yet this is a malleable category: Orson Scott Card -- love the books, yet so offensive....)
9: Books I want to teach and worry when students do not also love: Ursula Le Guin (minus the unreadable Always Coming Home) plus books I would not teach and yet re-read.
10: Books I love love, i.e.Octavia Butler (except for Kindred)
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Reading the people
So it seems to me that one of the items on the good parent list would be "reads the books your children are reading." Of course we all start out reading those books because we are the ones doing the reading! But once your people take off and read on their own then it is up to the parent to decide: am I in or out? Theoretically I think we should be in: by reading what our children read we can both keep tabs on potential pitfalls and get another clue about how our people think. On the pitfalls -- a few summers ago when Harriet the Spy was popular we did what any sensible family would do -- get all the other books written by Louise Fitzhugh and so the girl child started reading The Long Secret and the boy child started reading Sport. At this point we would read with the people maybe 1/3 of the time -- so some days they would read to themselves and other days we would read to them. So I was the one reading when a police officer in Sport used the n-word. But the girl child had to ask me what menstruation was from one of her reading alone nights. While the n-word made Sport unacceptable reading for a rising 2nd grader, the menstruation part was not problematic except that it was of no interest to my reader -- and so here the lesson was: read, or at least pay attention to, the books your people read just to keep tabs on the issues that come up (my uncle gave me a 'teen in the french revolution' novel when I turned 12 that included my first enounter with the "string of pearls" phenomenon -- I did not fully understand, except to know that I should not ask my mother).
The opportunity is that by reading what your people read you gain insight into their largely opaque heads. And yet....I dislike fantasy....one of my people loves the fanatsy: the dragons, the elves, the endless battles, the inexplicable places and spaces. And I don't wish to read these books. But to only read the books I am interested in that my people read may be a bad move. But this week I did just that -- avoiding the fantasy that I have promised I will read (The Looking Glass Wars) I instead read Betti on the High Wire by Lisa Railsbeck. Babo, who will be renamed Betti by her adoptive parents, is the child of circus performers killed in a nameless war in a nameless country. Babo has lived as the leader of a group of forgotten children, looked after by Auntie Moo and avoiding soldiers and the potential ministrations of a local missionary woman. But on occasion adoptive parents come and one day someone wants Babo. Most of the book is about her adjustment to life in the US. Written from Babo's perspective the book does a nice job of seeing American life from a radically different perspective. I disagree with the author's refusal to name Babo's country. Railsbeck notes in the afterword that she wants her readers to think that Babo's life could be happening in many countries around the world. I think, instead, that it makes Babo less real -- by being any child she becomes no real child and her home country seems to be little other than the circus that Babo remembers almost as a fantasy. Babo makes very clear that she does not want to leave her country or her parents (who she thinks are alive -- and my reader also thought the parents were alive, although I thought the text was fairly clear on their death in the war -- this meant my reader was certainly more critical of the idea of foreign adoption). The adoptive parents are portrayed with a nice mixture of humor and patience and interest in Babo's past (an interest it is hard to satisfy as her country of origin is not named). My reader described the book as funny and sad. On the other hand that same reader declared the thoughts in her own head as her own -- and so there went my great moment of insight into reading a book to read my people.
Perhaps the dragon book will work better. Shoot.
The opportunity is that by reading what your people read you gain insight into their largely opaque heads. And yet....I dislike fantasy....one of my people loves the fanatsy: the dragons, the elves, the endless battles, the inexplicable places and spaces. And I don't wish to read these books. But to only read the books I am interested in that my people read may be a bad move. But this week I did just that -- avoiding the fantasy that I have promised I will read (The Looking Glass Wars) I instead read Betti on the High Wire by Lisa Railsbeck. Babo, who will be renamed Betti by her adoptive parents, is the child of circus performers killed in a nameless war in a nameless country. Babo has lived as the leader of a group of forgotten children, looked after by Auntie Moo and avoiding soldiers and the potential ministrations of a local missionary woman. But on occasion adoptive parents come and one day someone wants Babo. Most of the book is about her adjustment to life in the US. Written from Babo's perspective the book does a nice job of seeing American life from a radically different perspective. I disagree with the author's refusal to name Babo's country. Railsbeck notes in the afterword that she wants her readers to think that Babo's life could be happening in many countries around the world. I think, instead, that it makes Babo less real -- by being any child she becomes no real child and her home country seems to be little other than the circus that Babo remembers almost as a fantasy. Babo makes very clear that she does not want to leave her country or her parents (who she thinks are alive -- and my reader also thought the parents were alive, although I thought the text was fairly clear on their death in the war -- this meant my reader was certainly more critical of the idea of foreign adoption). The adoptive parents are portrayed with a nice mixture of humor and patience and interest in Babo's past (an interest it is hard to satisfy as her country of origin is not named). My reader described the book as funny and sad. On the other hand that same reader declared the thoughts in her own head as her own -- and so there went my great moment of insight into reading a book to read my people.
Perhaps the dragon book will work better. Shoot.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
An actual book!
So I have finished a book not assigned for my classes and without incurring a library fine (well that is not really true, finishing the book did not magically return it to the library, so it will be returned late tomorrow). David Grossman's To the End of the Land (this is an excellent interview with Grossman), as this is my blog and not a review I will share with you a few thoughts, somewhat random and then perhaps come up with something to say about whether you should read it. The book tells the story of Ora, who escapes to hike in the Gallilee in order to avoid any notifiers who might come and tell her that her son, serving in the army, is dead. She hikes with an old friend and lover who was a POW in Egypt 30 years prior to to the novel's main time frame.
So actual book reviews are often filled with these stock phrases and this is a book that calls out for such phrases (the back of the book, which includes excerpts from seven reviews, favors words like "wrenching," "full of anguish" and "passionate" -- and one Israeli paper says this book is the "stamp of maturity upon Israeli literature," which I misread as the "swamp of maturity," which struck me as an intriguing thing to say....alas.). Ok, so my reviewy phrases will be paired with my actual thoughts in brackets. The book opens with an utterly captivating first chapter [why? because you could imagine it was the first chapter in a postapocalyptic plague novel -- three young people in an empty hospital and a nameless nurse]. Each chapter reminds the reader of the various forms of pain that humans are capable, and willing, to inflict on one another [to this I responded -- 7 days in a row -- by falling asleep with the book on my head. Some of this pain is inflicted on the reader: you will not know what is happening, you will not know when it is happening and you will never know why it is happening]. The descriptions of the Israeli landscape are lyrical [and compel me to find out what a terabinth tree looks like and to really find out what a wadi is]. The main character, Ora, is maddening [ok, that is me not my reviewer voice -- reviewers say she is Emma Bovary (pish) and Anna Karenina (posh) and that Grossman has created a "fully alive" character -- actually I found her to be not particulalry alive, she is always in her head, -- and that is what makes her maddening, and compelling].
So, in all seriousness -- two things I really liked about this book: first is the telling of a child's life. Ora describes her family life to Avram and in doing so brings her children to life in words. She is not just telling funny or not so funny anecdotes. She tells them into being for Avram and for the reader. As she tells she remembers more and more about the early years of both of her children (the years you don't remember unless you, unlike me, had the good sense to write things down). As the world knows, Grossman's son Uri was killed during his army service while Grossman was writing this book. The book reminds about the work that words can do to bring someone alive. Second is the sense of place -- the geography of Israel (and I have never been and know little about its geographic feel) is palpable and striking -- primarily in contrast to my own sense of the geography of the US. Most of the book takes place on a hike along the Israel trail -- a comparable hike along the Appalacian trail would not yield quite the same combination of army base, arab village, grocery store, creek, mountain, school group, sheep, shepherd, bedouins, wild dog and coffee. Nor would it include the multiple plaques dedicated to the memory of soldiers who died. I suspect some do hike the appalachian trail and make coffee three times a day (and if you are planning such a trip, invite me!) and I have seen cows on the Appalachian trail -- but this description of the Israel trail makes me think about two things: first of all the United States is just huge and its landscape is so incredibly variable and regional and specific. And second, I am not sure there are very many places (particulalry natural spaces) that I could describe in such detail: having lived in 6 states as an adult I am not sure there is any one landscape that feels particulalry like home. I could give a fair description of the inland woods of Beaver island, MI or a certain beach in Maine or even Tom, Dick and Harry trail in Oregon -- but I do not have spaces that I return to daily or weekly that I know so well. This book gives you the sense that Grossman is describing his home -- and it is a home that he knows so intimately in flower and stream and mountain and rock and sound and bird and lizard and flower and fruit trees and people.
And my last thought about the book? Its take away for me: remember that being right is rarely enough.
So actual book reviews are often filled with these stock phrases and this is a book that calls out for such phrases (the back of the book, which includes excerpts from seven reviews, favors words like "wrenching," "full of anguish" and "passionate" -- and one Israeli paper says this book is the "stamp of maturity upon Israeli literature," which I misread as the "swamp of maturity," which struck me as an intriguing thing to say....alas.). Ok, so my reviewy phrases will be paired with my actual thoughts in brackets. The book opens with an utterly captivating first chapter [why? because you could imagine it was the first chapter in a postapocalyptic plague novel -- three young people in an empty hospital and a nameless nurse]. Each chapter reminds the reader of the various forms of pain that humans are capable, and willing, to inflict on one another [to this I responded -- 7 days in a row -- by falling asleep with the book on my head. Some of this pain is inflicted on the reader: you will not know what is happening, you will not know when it is happening and you will never know why it is happening]. The descriptions of the Israeli landscape are lyrical [and compel me to find out what a terabinth tree looks like and to really find out what a wadi is]. The main character, Ora, is maddening [ok, that is me not my reviewer voice -- reviewers say she is Emma Bovary (pish) and Anna Karenina (posh) and that Grossman has created a "fully alive" character -- actually I found her to be not particulalry alive, she is always in her head, -- and that is what makes her maddening, and compelling].
So, in all seriousness -- two things I really liked about this book: first is the telling of a child's life. Ora describes her family life to Avram and in doing so brings her children to life in words. She is not just telling funny or not so funny anecdotes. She tells them into being for Avram and for the reader. As she tells she remembers more and more about the early years of both of her children (the years you don't remember unless you, unlike me, had the good sense to write things down). As the world knows, Grossman's son Uri was killed during his army service while Grossman was writing this book. The book reminds about the work that words can do to bring someone alive. Second is the sense of place -- the geography of Israel (and I have never been and know little about its geographic feel) is palpable and striking -- primarily in contrast to my own sense of the geography of the US. Most of the book takes place on a hike along the Israel trail -- a comparable hike along the Appalacian trail would not yield quite the same combination of army base, arab village, grocery store, creek, mountain, school group, sheep, shepherd, bedouins, wild dog and coffee. Nor would it include the multiple plaques dedicated to the memory of soldiers who died. I suspect some do hike the appalachian trail and make coffee three times a day (and if you are planning such a trip, invite me!) and I have seen cows on the Appalachian trail -- but this description of the Israel trail makes me think about two things: first of all the United States is just huge and its landscape is so incredibly variable and regional and specific. And second, I am not sure there are very many places (particulalry natural spaces) that I could describe in such detail: having lived in 6 states as an adult I am not sure there is any one landscape that feels particulalry like home. I could give a fair description of the inland woods of Beaver island, MI or a certain beach in Maine or even Tom, Dick and Harry trail in Oregon -- but I do not have spaces that I return to daily or weekly that I know so well. This book gives you the sense that Grossman is describing his home -- and it is a home that he knows so intimately in flower and stream and mountain and rock and sound and bird and lizard and flower and fruit trees and people.
And my last thought about the book? Its take away for me: remember that being right is rarely enough.
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