I'm off on a trip for which I will be penalized by by spending 12-14 hours on various flights and in at least three different airports. My carry on bag is already loaded with the important things: freshly loaded ipod, several packs of gum, many snacks, and multiple packs of antibacterial wipes. And, after much thought, I have finally settled on the most essential element of any good travel day: the books.
I usually take two books for a short trip. There's the long and involved one, in case I'm blessed with a pleasantly uninterrupted flight and can completely lose myself in it. And then there's the short, quick one for those flights with the chatty neighbor or lots of turbulence. This is a family trip, so whichever book I read will be determined by my seatmate: husband with earphones = long book; kids without earphones = short, quick one (wishful thinking at play there).
My long book this time is Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany by Hans J. Massaquoi. This is a book club pick and promises to be quite interesting. Massaquoi was raised in Nazi Germany, the son of an African father and a German mother. His father returned to Liberia after Hitler came to power, but Massaquoi stayed behind in Germany with his mother.
The short book is Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. I was introduced to Robinson through her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead, which was one of my favorite reads in 2008. I wanted to read her first novel before going back and reading the follow up novel to Gilead, Home. To see the Gilead review and the favorites list of 2008, click here.
Two recommendations I have for you, if you're off on a journey this summer involving air travel (or even if you're not), that both involve bad trips and the noble impulse of passengers to seek justice from the powers that be in the airline industry are:
Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles (click here to see my review)
And the most hilarious (actual) complaint letter I've ever seen:
Virgin: the world's best passenger complaint letter? in the Telegraph Online.
More posts to come after May 6.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Out of fashion
It occurred to me recently that I'm lagging behind the times on some real block busters. My methods of choosing books to read are a bit haphazard, at best. I often pick them on a whim. That is how I've missed some of the books "everyone is talking about".
I'll probably read these books in the future (in fact, several of my friends have said I have to read this or that), but since they're so well reviewed already, I may not post any of my own reviews about them.
Fashionable books I have not read yet:
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Oh, no...I'm not counting the 2008 National Book Award Winners or the Booker Prize Winners or the....
I've got a long way to go.
I'll probably read these books in the future (in fact, several of my friends have said I have to read this or that), but since they're so well reviewed already, I may not post any of my own reviews about them.
Fashionable books I have not read yet:
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Oh, no...I'm not counting the 2008 National Book Award Winners or the Booker Prize Winners or the....
I've got a long way to go.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Ann Patchett's Run Revisited
**I'm re-posting this one because, oddly enough, blogger buried the original below on April 13 because that's the day I started the first draft. So here it is again, on the proper date.
Ann Patchett's Bel Canto was one of my favorite reads in 2008, so I had no hesitation in picking up another of her books, Run. The two novels couldn't be any more different in scope, style, and subject, but in spite of these differences, the reading experiences, for me, were very similar. I quickly and thoroughly got caught up in the plot of each novel and was fully engaged in the central characters' lives.
I have to admit, though, that I have really struggled with writing a review of this novel, and I'm not sure why that is. I very much enjoyed reading this book and had a lively conversation with my fellow book club members about it, but I'm befuddled about why it's so hard to get what I liked about it down in writing. I think I have plugged away at a rough draft for two weeks now!
There is so much going on in this novel...as a reader I liked uncovering each of the many small mysteries in the story as I went page by page. It would be too easy to do what John Updike did in his review of Run in The New Yorker, which is to both critique and give away every detail of the plot. I so dislike it when a reviewer gives away too much of the story when discussing a novel, and it's a very fine balance to achieve harmony between discussing a novel and revealing all of its secrets. Hence, part of my struggle with writing about this book.
Another problem with writing about Run? There are many themes in the story, each of which could be an essay in its own right. Race, faith, religion, parenting, family, reaching for our full potential, class issues...this novel runs the gamut of the Big Questions. The incredible thing is that Patchett brings them all into the storyline without mucking it up or making it too obscure to sift through.
So, I think I'm giving up on writing about Ann Patchett's Run. What I will say is: read this book. Enjoy it. Think about it for a long time--it's a natural side effect of reading it. And then go and get another of Patchett's books and do the same thing.
Ah, now I can go on and read and write about something else! Whew.
Ann Patchett's Bel Canto was one of my favorite reads in 2008, so I had no hesitation in picking up another of her books, Run. The two novels couldn't be any more different in scope, style, and subject, but in spite of these differences, the reading experiences, for me, were very similar. I quickly and thoroughly got caught up in the plot of each novel and was fully engaged in the central characters' lives.
I have to admit, though, that I have really struggled with writing a review of this novel, and I'm not sure why that is. I very much enjoyed reading this book and had a lively conversation with my fellow book club members about it, but I'm befuddled about why it's so hard to get what I liked about it down in writing. I think I have plugged away at a rough draft for two weeks now!
There is so much going on in this novel...as a reader I liked uncovering each of the many small mysteries in the story as I went page by page. It would be too easy to do what John Updike did in his review of Run in The New Yorker, which is to both critique and give away every detail of the plot. I so dislike it when a reviewer gives away too much of the story when discussing a novel, and it's a very fine balance to achieve harmony between discussing a novel and revealing all of its secrets. Hence, part of my struggle with writing about this book.
Another problem with writing about Run? There are many themes in the story, each of which could be an essay in its own right. Race, faith, religion, parenting, family, reaching for our full potential, class issues...this novel runs the gamut of the Big Questions. The incredible thing is that Patchett brings them all into the storyline without mucking it up or making it too obscure to sift through.
So, I think I'm giving up on writing about Ann Patchett's Run. What I will say is: read this book. Enjoy it. Think about it for a long time--it's a natural side effect of reading it. And then go and get another of Patchett's books and do the same thing.
Ah, now I can go on and read and write about something else! Whew.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Busy Patch at HQ, more to come
Things have fallen behind a bit here at Too Fond of Books. Lots going on, not the least of which is beautiful spring weather here in the Pacific Northwest. Please stay tuned...that post on Ann Patchett's Run is still on the way.
Monday, April 13, 2009
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
There should probably be a specific section of the library devoted to particular books that adults should read, though they're officially classified in the Juvenile or Young Adult sections. As a parent, I am fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time in these parts of the library, so I have a pretty good handle on what is there, but aside from the obvious appeal of Harry Potter books to the general public, there are hundreds of similarly shelved books that adults all too often miss.
One such book is Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, winner of the 2008 Caldecott Medal and a National Book Award Finalist in 2007. Selznick explains the unusual nature of the novel on the Hugo Cabret website:
This 526-page book is told in both words and pictures. The Invention of Hugo Cabret is not exactly a novel, and it’s not quite a picture book, and it’s not really a graphic novel, or a flip book, or a movie, but a combination of all these things. Each picture (there are nearly three hundred pages of pictures!) takes up an entire double page spread, and the story moves forward because you turn the pages to see the next moment unfold in front of you.
The book jacket describes The Invention of Hugo Cabret as "cinematic", and that is really the best way to describe the reading experience of this book.
It has a relatively simple plot. Orphan Hugo Cabret is secretly living in a Paris train station. To avoid the orphanage, Hugo keeps out of sight and maintains the station's clocks, as his uncle had before him. Hugo believes that as long as the clocks run perfectly, as they always had under his uncle's care, he will maintain his freedom. Hugo has a talent for tinkering with all things mechanical, so it is easy for him to keep the clocks running. In his spare time he works obsessively to repair a broken automaton that he inherited from his beloved father. Hugo believes that if he could just get the automaton to work, then he will receive a message from his father about how he should live.
Hugo's story becomes complicated when he is caught stealing mechanical supplies from a toy maker's booth in the train station. After his cover is blown, Hugo learns that though outsiders have the capacity to destroy his carefully orchestrated secret life, there are also those whom he must learn to trust in order to unlock the secrets of his father's precious gift to him.
With a balanced blend of traditional plot narration and beautifully rendered pencil drawings, Brian Selznick has created a unique story for any reader, adult or child, who appreciates a good yarn and a good film. Here is how it works at the beginning of the book: the first 45 pages of Part 1: The Thief are told with detailed drawings that you read as if the illustrations were the words themselves. The story picks up with text on page 46 and 47, which seemlessly move into another illustration, then text, then illustration, and so on. It is a process as natural, and as captivating, as reading an adventure story in the traditional way.
It's probably best to leave the words of this blog post behind at this point because there is a better way to give you a sense of what this lovely book has to offer. Head on over to The Invention of Hugo Cabret website and click on the link to the slide show of the opening sequence of the book to see it for yourself.
One such book is Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, winner of the 2008 Caldecott Medal and a National Book Award Finalist in 2007. Selznick explains the unusual nature of the novel on the Hugo Cabret website:
This 526-page book is told in both words and pictures. The Invention of Hugo Cabret is not exactly a novel, and it’s not quite a picture book, and it’s not really a graphic novel, or a flip book, or a movie, but a combination of all these things. Each picture (there are nearly three hundred pages of pictures!) takes up an entire double page spread, and the story moves forward because you turn the pages to see the next moment unfold in front of you.
The book jacket describes The Invention of Hugo Cabret as "cinematic", and that is really the best way to describe the reading experience of this book.
It has a relatively simple plot. Orphan Hugo Cabret is secretly living in a Paris train station. To avoid the orphanage, Hugo keeps out of sight and maintains the station's clocks, as his uncle had before him. Hugo believes that as long as the clocks run perfectly, as they always had under his uncle's care, he will maintain his freedom. Hugo has a talent for tinkering with all things mechanical, so it is easy for him to keep the clocks running. In his spare time he works obsessively to repair a broken automaton that he inherited from his beloved father. Hugo believes that if he could just get the automaton to work, then he will receive a message from his father about how he should live.
Hugo's story becomes complicated when he is caught stealing mechanical supplies from a toy maker's booth in the train station. After his cover is blown, Hugo learns that though outsiders have the capacity to destroy his carefully orchestrated secret life, there are also those whom he must learn to trust in order to unlock the secrets of his father's precious gift to him.
With a balanced blend of traditional plot narration and beautifully rendered pencil drawings, Brian Selznick has created a unique story for any reader, adult or child, who appreciates a good yarn and a good film. Here is how it works at the beginning of the book: the first 45 pages of Part 1: The Thief are told with detailed drawings that you read as if the illustrations were the words themselves. The story picks up with text on page 46 and 47, which seemlessly move into another illustration, then text, then illustration, and so on. It is a process as natural, and as captivating, as reading an adventure story in the traditional way.
It's probably best to leave the words of this blog post behind at this point because there is a better way to give you a sense of what this lovely book has to offer. Head on over to The Invention of Hugo Cabret website and click on the link to the slide show of the opening sequence of the book to see it for yourself.
Run by Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett's Bel Canto was one of my favorite reads in 2008, so I had no hesitation in picking up another of her novels, Run. The two novels couldn't be any more different in scope, style, and subject, but in spite of these differences, the reading experiences, for me, were very similar. I quickly and thoroughly got caught up in the plot of each novel and was fully engaged in the central characters' lives.
I have to admit, though, that I have really struggled with writing a review of this novel, and I'm not sure why that is. I very much enjoyed reading this book and had a lively conversation with my fellow book club members about it, but I'm befuddled about why it's so hard to get what I liked about it down in writing. I think I have plugged away at a rough draft for two weeks now!
There is so much going on in this novel...as a reader I liked uncovering each of the many small mysteries in the story as I went page by page. It would be too easy to do what John Updike did in his review of Run in The New Yorker, which is to both critique and give away every detail of the plot. I so dislike it when a reviewer gives away too much of the story when discussing a novel, and it's a very fine balance to achieve harmony between discussing a novel and revealing all of its secrets. Hence, part of my struggle with writing about Run.
Another problem with writing about Run? There are quite a few themes in the story, each of which could be an essay in its own right. Race, faith, religion, parenting, family, reaching for our full potential, class issues...this novel runs the gamut of the Big Questions. The incredible thing is that Patchett brings them all into the storyline without mucking it up or making it too obscure to sift through.
So, I think I'm giving up on writing about Ann Patchett's Run. What I will say is: read this book. Enjoy it. Think about it for a long time--it's a natural side effect of reading it. And then go and get another of Patchett's books and do the same thing.
Ah, now I can go on and read and write about something else! Whew.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Changes Coming to Too Fond of Books
Relatively soon you'll be able to view a new and improved Too Fond of Books. I've decided to move the blog to a site that will let me customize TFB more easily and will give me many more options for making navigation of the blog easier for readers.
So...stay tuned. I will post one or two new reviews (look for one on Ann Patchett's Run today or tomorrow) before I make the switch, and will warn everyone before the big day.
Exciting stuff!
So...stay tuned. I will post one or two new reviews (look for one on Ann Patchett's Run today or tomorrow) before I make the switch, and will warn everyone before the big day.
Exciting stuff!
Monday, April 6, 2009
Slam by Nick Hornby
I'm a fan of Nick Hornby and have been since I read his first novel, High Fidelity. So, I was intrigued when I learned that he had just published his first Young Adult novel, Slam. I don't know if it's a bad thing that over the years Hornby's books have been labeled as "male confessionals"--it's probably good for sales and has never stopped me before--but I wondered when I picked up Slam if I was ready to read a teenage male confessional.
The plot is simple: boy meets girl, girl gets pregnant, boy tries to avoid reality by running away and throwing cell phone into the sea, boy returns to face the consequences, boy alternately gets advice from and is whisked into the future by his hero Tony Hawk, who happens to be on a poster in boy's room. The end.
Did I like it? At first, no, I didn't. But it is a book by Nick Horby, so I gave it several tries, and Hornby and his lovely, bumbling character, Sam, drew me in despite myself. I think what held me back early on was the very teenage boy-ness of Sam. True to form, Hornby writes in the voice best suited for his story: a little rambling, sometimes more stream of consciousness than straighforward, prone to odd little asides.
Sam is narrating his own story, and because of this, it is easy to feel great affection for him. His is the tale of a typical sixteen year old boy. He does tolerably well at school; he's reasonably good looking; he's obsessed with skating and with his hero, skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. Sam gets along with his mom (who, incidentally, became pregnant with Sam when she was a teen) and hangs out with his friends and minds his own business. But he makes a mistake, and everything that he has known and assumed about his place in the world comes crashing down.
There is no question that Sam is a good kid in a terrible situation. He wants to do the right thing, but he is utterly confused and desperately wants his life back. Sam has spent his young life doing what he's supposed to do, living in the moment and wondering about the future, not planning it. The future was far away, a sort of dream rather than a possible reality. As he gets hurtled towards fatherhood without warning, though, Sam realizes he has to consider everything differently:
I worked out that there were two futures...there's the real future, the one you have to wait to see, the one you can't visit, the one you can only get to by living all the days in between...It had becomes less important. It had nearly disappeared, in fact. One bit of it had, anyway. Before Alicia got pregnant, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what was going to happen to me. Who doesn't ? But then I stopped. It felt like, I don't know....Alicia and I were on a ledge, sort of, and we were thinking about Roof coming (but we didn't call him Roof then), and sometimes about the first week of his life, but not much more, not much further than that. We hadn't given up hope. It was just a different kind of hope, for different sorts of things. We hoped that everything would somehow sort of maybe turn out not too bad....
In Slam, Nick Hornby again does what he does best. He offers us everyday people trying to remedy their mistakes and making the best out of the circumstances they find themselves in. In this case, the protagonists happen to be teenagers, who sometimes seem to have more common sense about what is happening than their parents do. There is tenderness and humor and humanity in this novel--all hallmarks of Hornby's stories and the love he has for his characters.
The plot is simple: boy meets girl, girl gets pregnant, boy tries to avoid reality by running away and throwing cell phone into the sea, boy returns to face the consequences, boy alternately gets advice from and is whisked into the future by his hero Tony Hawk, who happens to be on a poster in boy's room. The end.
Did I like it? At first, no, I didn't. But it is a book by Nick Horby, so I gave it several tries, and Hornby and his lovely, bumbling character, Sam, drew me in despite myself. I think what held me back early on was the very teenage boy-ness of Sam. True to form, Hornby writes in the voice best suited for his story: a little rambling, sometimes more stream of consciousness than straighforward, prone to odd little asides.
Sam is narrating his own story, and because of this, it is easy to feel great affection for him. His is the tale of a typical sixteen year old boy. He does tolerably well at school; he's reasonably good looking; he's obsessed with skating and with his hero, skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. Sam gets along with his mom (who, incidentally, became pregnant with Sam when she was a teen) and hangs out with his friends and minds his own business. But he makes a mistake, and everything that he has known and assumed about his place in the world comes crashing down.
There is no question that Sam is a good kid in a terrible situation. He wants to do the right thing, but he is utterly confused and desperately wants his life back. Sam has spent his young life doing what he's supposed to do, living in the moment and wondering about the future, not planning it. The future was far away, a sort of dream rather than a possible reality. As he gets hurtled towards fatherhood without warning, though, Sam realizes he has to consider everything differently:
I worked out that there were two futures...there's the real future, the one you have to wait to see, the one you can't visit, the one you can only get to by living all the days in between...It had becomes less important. It had nearly disappeared, in fact. One bit of it had, anyway. Before Alicia got pregnant, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what was going to happen to me. Who doesn't ? But then I stopped. It felt like, I don't know....Alicia and I were on a ledge, sort of, and we were thinking about Roof coming (but we didn't call him Roof then), and sometimes about the first week of his life, but not much more, not much further than that. We hadn't given up hope. It was just a different kind of hope, for different sorts of things. We hoped that everything would somehow sort of maybe turn out not too bad....
In Slam, Nick Hornby again does what he does best. He offers us everyday people trying to remedy their mistakes and making the best out of the circumstances they find themselves in. In this case, the protagonists happen to be teenagers, who sometimes seem to have more common sense about what is happening than their parents do. There is tenderness and humor and humanity in this novel--all hallmarks of Hornby's stories and the love he has for his characters.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)