Last night, shortly after wrapping up the Sunday Salon, I was able to wrap up the last 100 or so pages of Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood and, as I thought I would, I enjoyed the book IMMENSELY and was tempted to write about it immediately last night but, unfortunately, by that time it was already well past my bed time! However, even the night of sleep didn’t diminish my almost-possessed level of love and desire to talk about the book!

The plot of the book is almost to summarize quickly, but I’ll do my best! As I outlined briefly in the Sunday Salon, the book has a fairly-predictable dystopian plotline to a certain extent. The society in which Jimmy (who later goes by Snowman), Crake, and Oryx live is a divided one, composed of the ‘pleeblands’, dangerous and dirty cities where the illicit pleasures of the world can be sought. This is in contrast to the Modules and Compounds where the more ‘civilized’ members of society live. It is a society where the fear of disease has become paramount and the creation of new creatures (the’pigoon’, a combination of a pig and a human, is used to grow human organs for transplants, and ‘wolvogs’ – a combination of wolf and dog – are created as weapons) made by genetic modification and splicing is common place.

At his high schoo, Jimmy meets a young boy named Glenn, who goes by Crake for the rest of the novel. The two hang out together, surfing the ‘net and playing games like ‘Kwiktime Osama’ and ‘Extinctathon’, which requires an encyclopediac knowledge of extinct plants and animals. One of this sessions of ‘net-surfing take the two boys to a kiddie-porn site, where Jimmy is haunted by the face of a young girl, who later comes in to the novel as Oryx. The two boys remain friends through the novel’s equivalents of high school and college, and Crake proves himself to be an incredible scientist who immerges out of college with a plan. SPOILERS Jimmy joins Crake at his job, where Crake is attempting to event the BlyssPlus pill which would serve as a cure against any and all sexually transmitted diseases, boost sexual energy, and prolong youth. However, it was also a one-time birth control pill, and Crake uses Jimmy to largely distriubute the pill, touted as the cure for all humanities ills. At the same time, Crake has invented the Crakers, a group of psuedo-people who are leaf-eating herbivores, are incapable of the higher brain function that would lead to feelings like faith and jealousy, and have sexual intercourse during limited breeding seasons when they are polyandrous. Also joining Jimmy is Oryx, who Crake remembered from the kiddie-porn site and had brought to him to serve as a personal prositute and to also teach the Crakers about nature.This is when the novel gets REALLY interesting. Crake has, without the knowledge of Jimmy, planted a ‘bioform’ in the BlyssPlus pills and thus literally creates a gloabl killer, a disease without a cure that ravages the planet. Crake immunized Jimmy without his knowledge so that he would remain to teach the Crakers, which is exactly what happens when Crake kills Oryx and Jimmy kills Crake right after learning of his bioterrorism and megalomaniacal plans. END SPOILERS.

The book is told in a series of flashbacks between Snowman – what the Crakers call Jimmy after he does, indeed, take them in to the woods surrounding the compound where Crake was working – describing what it is like to live in a world where disease has killed everyone but a simple-minded hybrid-human. It is here that Atwood does perhaps some of her greatest writing, and I absolutely adored the details to which Atwood gave to issues such as what it WOULD be like to live in a tree, or to fear mutant hybrid creatures who were almost created to live in the world in which Jimmy now finds himself. The other parts of the book chronicle Jimmy and his relationship with Crake and Oryx and how his world came to be. These parts basically presented the basic issue I had with the book: it’s one of those books that can be really confusing the first time you read it. Atwood is a master of releasing details only when you need to know them, sometimes not until after, and while such a tactic does an AMAZING job at creating suspense (which this book does, believe me – it’s the textbook definition of a page turner!) it can also make the book a little hard to follow. The first time you hear of pigoons, Oryx, the Crakers, or of Jimmy, it is without any kind of provided definition or explanation. This would probably be one of those books that even better on a second read!

I can’t really describe what it is I love about this book, other than Atwood’s plot turns and skills as a writer. I suppose its the same as what inspires my love for practically all other dystopian novels: there is something about it that feels eminently real. While I think that the world that Atwood describes is still far off (then again, who really knows just how far) there are sections of it – the huge, global fear of disease and ‘pandemics’, the money that there is to be made in even false-cures, and, of course, the desire by humans to create a more perfect world, which can often lead to the destruction of the world we currently live in – that hit home in the scariest ways.

Please go read the book! It’ll stick with you, and I’m DYING to have someone to talk to about it (my mother is working on it, but she really is an abhorently slow reader! Happy reading, and hopefully you’re enjoying the slow shift to winter as much as I am!

BookMaven

Hello, all! As this Sunday slowly draws to a close, I figured it was right about time to visit the wonderful world of the Sunday Salon! I finished Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body yesterday, the review of which is below, and since then I managed to put a good 200-page dent into Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake which is shaping up to be just as wonderful and just as creepy as I was hoping. So far, the creepiest scene is when Jimmy, the Snowman and narrator of the story, goes to visit Crake at what is, essentially, his college (called educational compounds in the book, as the idea of ‘college’ is a far antiquated one in the world in which the book is set) where the scientists are producing ChickieNobs, which are chickens that are born without beaks, feet, or heads, and are hooked up to a machine that basically grows chicken. That’s right. No more natural farms, no more animals that are actually born. Crake, Oryx, and Jimmy live in a world where questions like ‘is it real’ and ‘is it alive’ are common but relatively unimportant. Who cares if it’s real, as long as it functions?

I’m really, really enjoying the book so far. Atwood has long been one of my favorite authors, and this book just so wonderfully fits in to all the things I love about her – her humor, her irony, the sense that there is something really dark about her. I love it. Unfortunately, the love I have for this book (for all the books I’ve been reading lately, actually) may not be enough to compete with the extreme amount of homework currently staring down at me from the week ahead. As a brief preview of the list, this week will somehow have to include my getting through: Milton’s Paradise Lost, John Iliffe’s The African AIDS Epidemic: A History, Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke Down and Mumbo Jumbo, the first half of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Chris Abani’s full-length novel Graceland. That’s right, those all have to be read - in their entirety – by Friday, many before then, as papers will of course have to be written. Ah, the life of a college undergrad, right?!

All the class work considered, if we’re all lucky, this week should also see reviews of Atwood’s book, as well as of the Abani novel, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Heather Dewitt’s The Last Samuri. Lofty goals, indeed, but happy reading!

BookMaven

Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body was a book I picked up when Mary Renault’s book gets a little too historical fiction-y. You know, pages upon pages of descriptions of battle and who killed who and a whole bunch of other things I would probably care about more if I found military history at all intersting. Needless to say, Written on the Body was completely removed, and thus was a marvelous read at a marvelous time.

I should probably point out that the most original aspect of this book is that the gender and name of the narrator are ever given. The book chronicles the narrator’s experience with the women of his/her life, first their relationship with a woman named Jacqueline, who is then replaced by a woman named Louise as the narrator works pages and pages of heavily emotional descriptions of the passion he/she feels for both of these women. Winterson herself said that the reason the gender of the narrator is never given so that the maxims given can be applied to love of all kinds, not specifically hetero- or homosexual. And while I would say that this is definitely a lofty goal, and although this is generally the case, a lot of the time the phrases are just a bit to heavy-handed towards a kind of verbose sentimentality. Wonderful to read in short doses, but a bit too sacchrin for my taste after hundreds of pages (well, 190 pages to be exact). And while I would wildly recommend the book becaue of the way it reworks a possibly-cliche plot (narrator loves Lousie, Louise gets cancer, narrator gives her up so she can ‘have a better life’ with her wealthy husband who can pay for her medical treatment, narrator regrets decision) I do have to say that those with low tolerance for sentitmentality or rather gaudy word choice may want to take the book in smaller segments. Below are some favorite quotes:

“I can’t seem to get you out of my flesh. I think about your body day and night. When I try to read it’s you I’m reading.”

“Louise, in this single bed, between these garish sheets, I will find a map as likely as any treasure hunt. I will explore you and mine you and you will redraw me according to your will. We shall cross one another’s boundaries ad make ourselves one nation. Scoop me in your hands for I am good soil. Eat of men and let me be sweet.”

“On a molecular level success may mean discovering what synthetic structure, what cemical, will form a union with, say, the protein shape on a tumor cell…but molecules and the human beings they are a part of exist in a universe of possibility. We touch one another, bond and break, drift away on force-fields we don’t understand.”

“No-on can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is one thing stronger that desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.”

“I don’t want to be your sport nor you to be mine. I don’t want to punch you for the pleasure of it, tangling the clear lines that bind us, forcing you to your knees, dragging you up again. The public face of a life in chaos. I want the hoop around our hearts to be a guide not a terror. I don’t want to pull you tighter than you can bear. I don’t want the lines to slacken either, the thread playing out over the side, enough rope to hang ourselves.”

“Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In place the palimpset is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story.”

“Dear Louise, I love you more than life itself. I have not known a happier time than with you. I did not know this much happiness was possible. Can love have texture? It is palpable to me, the feeling between us, I weigh it in my  hands the way I weighed your head in my hands. I hold on to love as a climber does a rope. I knew our path would be steep but I did not forsee the sheer rock face we have come to. We could ascend it, but it would be you who took the strain.
     I’m going away tonight. I don’t know where, all I know is I won’t come back…you are safe in my home, but not in my arms. If I stay it will be you who goes, in pain, without help. Our love was not meant to cost you your life. I can’t bear that. If it could be my life I would gladly give it…I shall think of you everyday, many times a day. Your hand prints are all over my body. Your flesh is my flesh. You deciphered me and now I plan to read. The message is a simple one; my love for you. I want you to live. Forgive my mistakes. Forgive me.”

“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. When then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make yse of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call.”

As you can see, Winterson does definitely have a way with words. I really, really did enjoy this book, despite the parts that seemed to make my head hurt with just too much…beauty, I guess. Dehibilitating metaphor, basically, I guess. I’ve already cracked open Orxy and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and I’m LOVING it (I seem to be on a roll in terms of finding nothing but good books lately!) which doesn’t surprise me considering how much I loved the Handmaid’s Tale. Other than that, it’s still plowing away at the Mary Renault and I finally picked up a copy of Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet to read (although how said is it that I had to go to FIVE bookstores, two of which were local, before I found a copy? Why aren’t more people reading Rilke?!  ) Anyway, I’m back to the Atwood and the absolutely gorgeous grey fall day! Happy reading!

BookMaven

“Life is too short to read bad books.” I’d always heard that, but I still read books through until the end no matter how bad they were because I had this sense of obligation. That is, until this week when I tried (really tried) to read a book that is utterly boring and unrealistic. I had to stop reading. Do you read everything all the way through or do you feel life really is too short to read bad books?

I will say that, generally, I completely agree that life is too short to read bad books (or to watch bad movies, eat bad food, drink bad wine, date bad people) and so, unless it’s for an assignment or something I feel I really need to read, I’ll usually give a book 50 pages (a length my grandmother always insisted was owed to any book) and if it doesn’t have me, I’ll give it up. Now, this is not to say that there are not books I’ve returned to (it took me four attempts at Gone with the Wind and I still have yet to find a way to make Catch-22 interesting in any way) and loved after more than one go round. I also believe, as most do, that readership and readers change, and that the books that speak to us will also be subjected to changes. So, to paraprhase that oh-so-fitting cliche, ”if at first you don’t succeed, read, read again.”

I’ve started on Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body and amout 10 pages in. It’s already hooked me, so I know it won’t take me long to finish, and I’m hoping that means I can also make the last push to finish Mary Renault’s Fire From Heaven so that I can give it a proper review - I still have so much more to say! Happy reading and Happy Thursday!

BookMaven

Now, usually I would try to avoid the whole double-posting-one-day thing, but I just finished my twelfth cup of coffee for the evening and, conicidentally, was able to completely plow through Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail: A Novella, which I basically demolished in less than an hour. I should probably be wary of using too many ‘destroying’ verbs, however, because although I read it quickly, the book itself was a pure treat.

The book is about a young girl, Abigail, who is named for her mother, who dies during childbirth. Abigail comes from a Nigerian family, a highly patriarchal culture, and her father is completely distraught over his wifes death. His pain is made worse by the fact that Abigail looks just like her mother, causing her father to see only his dead wife in her. Abigail also suffers from bouts of insanity, spurred by her search for identity – she is compared to her mother so often by her father that she begins to loose sight of her own self, which she attempts to document by literally branding phrases, poetry, and memories of her mother on her skin. As a teenager, Abigail’s cousin Peter comes to take her to London, where he forces her in to a sort of home-based prostitution, in which he brings in paying customers to accost Abigail in her room at night. Although Abigail ends up getting her (rather fitting, albeit it rather disturbing) revenge, the pain she has to go through is almost incomprehensible. After the culminating incident with Peter, Abigail meets her social worker Derek (which is one of my favorite names EVER) and the two fall into a passionate but completely illicit affair, for which Derek is inevitably arrested. The ending of the book I won’t reveal, but let me just say that the plot of the book is remarkably touching for clocking in at under 150 pages.

Perhaps one of the greatest things about this book, however, is it’s style. Chris Abani is an amazing man, a published writer since the age of 16, imprisoned three times by the Nigerian state, sentenced to death once, who is an amazing novelist, poet, and social rights activist. He’s coming to give a lecture at my University in less than a week, and I can’t believe that I have been given the opportunity to have a special honors luncheon with a man who crafts beautiful, poignant work. I could write volumes and volumes if I had to, but I would rather just let the work speak for itself:

” Sometimes there is no way to leave something behind. Something over. We know this. We know this. We know this. This is the prevalence of ritual. The remember something that cannot be forgotten. Yet not left over. She knew this. As she smoked. She knew this. This. This. And what now?”

One of the best descriptions of rain I’ve ever read: “There was a time, it seemed to her, that she lived purely for the pleasure of rain. The way it would threaten the world gently, dropping dark clouds over the brightness of an afternoon, wind whipping trees in dark play. Then the smell; carried from afar, the lushness of wet, moisture-heavy eath, heralding the first cold stabs of water that seemed to just be practicing for the torrent that was about to come. And she, sitting on the dry safety of the veranda, wrapped in a sweater, watching the world weep as the Beatles in the background tinny and small in the soundscape, asked, Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play?”

A description of all the things I, too, love about London: “She would find out later that it was an old untidy sprawl of rivers and canals, beautiful parks, old cobbled streets that still held the echo of horse drawn carriages, tired crumbling walls built by Caesar, and modern plazas of glass and chrome. There was the open pleasure of Covent Garden with its flower shops, vegetable stalls, colorful barrow boy calls, the new market with with stall after stall selling trinkets that nobody needed to people who should know better. There were street musicians everywhere filling the hallowed halls of the Underground with their melancholic worship.”

“So much of love is memory.”

” ‘A human being alone is a thing more sad than any lost animal and nothing destroys the soul like aloneness.”

“Why did these people know nothing of this? Of the complexities of life and how you can never recapture the way a particular shaft of light, falling through a tree, patterned the floor in a shower of shadows. You just opened your heart because you knew tomorrow there would be another shaft of light, another tree, and another rain of shadows. Each particular. Not the same as yesterday’s. Not as beautiful as yesterday’s. Only as beautiful as today’s.”

“Destiny isn’t a deck of cards stacked up against you. It is the particular idiosyncrasies of the player, not the deck or the dealer, that hold the key. Personality always sways the outcome of the game.”

If these little tidbits haven’t made you want to read, I’m not sure there is much else I can do to convince you, other than to say that this is quite possibly one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I was able to finish it in under an hour. Take the time. Open the book. Be changed. Below is a video of Chris Abani giving a lecutre on African Narrative, and although it’s a long video, I urge you all to check it out because of just how amazing a public speaker Chris Abani is, and the great things he has to say about the way we view ourselves as human beings, and just how crucial language is to this view. Happy reading!

BookMaven

I can’t offer enough apologies for my complete and total absence from the blogosphere for so long! I have little excuse, other than being a student leaves me plenty of time for reading but very little time to write about it! So let me begin by getting caught up on some LONG overdue matters of business.

First, a HUGE thank you goes out to Jeane, a friend of mine over at DogEar Diary that was kind enough to (a very, very long time ago I may add, and my dearest apologies for taking so long to recognize it!) award me the Lovely Blog Award, an award I’m not sure I deserve, considering my often frequent absences! This is an award that needs to be passed on to 15 people, which I gladly do now!

1.) A Striped Armchair
2.) Book Haven
3.) Musings from the Sofa
4.) Naked Without Books
5.) So Many Books, So Little Time
6.) Stuck in a Book
7.) Things Mean A Lot
8.) A Fondness for Reading
9.) A Guy’s Moleskin Notebook
10.) Bending Bookshelf
11.) Book Nut
12.) Books on the Brain
13.) Citizen Reader
14.) Eloise by the Book Piles
15.) Sophisticated Dorkiness

All of these bloggers have never steered me wrong in my search for great books and what is perhaps even more amazing is that they always manage to steer me in a way I would have never expected, always with wonderfully delightful results.

Alright, now that that little matter of business is all wrapped up, I’m absolutely DYING to talk about Mary Renault’s Fire From Heaven, which I recently dived in to on the recommendation of my Yalie friend Jesi Egan. The book is the first in Renault’s Alexander trilogy, and as the first volume, focuses on the life of Alexander the Great up until his 20’s.

The novel is absolutely AMAZINGLY written, and I’m not even half way done withthe first volume and already I’m dreading the end of the entire trilogy. I can see what my friend Jesi was talking about when she said that this is the book that makes you fall in love with Alexander. And not in that ‘we love him because he was part of history’ way but love as in an overwhelming attachment to what happens to him. And even though Renault makes it fairly clear from the get-go that she’s part of the whole ‘Alexander liked boys’ philosophy, he is still possibly one of the most attractive literary creations of the actual man that I’ve ever read.

I think part of my love for this book stems from a childhood fascination with everything Greek, and in that light it doesn’t disappoint. The book speaks of Alexander’s witch-mother Olympias, who is described as being absolutely beautiful, but complete terrifying in that beauty. She is constant defiance of her husband, King Phillip II of Macedon, who is also described as an almost tyrranical leader, and the two seem to be waging almost silent but constant war over how to raise Alexander. Even with this tension in the background, the book outlies the many ways in which Alexander becomes known as the King of Asia, and one of the greatest Greek kings. He kills his first man in hand-on-hand combat at age 12, years before even his father had, and he is placed under the tutelage of Aristotle in his early teens, which is when he also forms a solid friendship with Hephaistion, the young son of an underlord, who participates in Alexander’s education with him.

This is as far as I’ve gotten in the book, and it’s heartbreaking – the passages where Hephaistion describes his budding (non-friendly) love for Alexander, with the knowledge that taking a bed-boy may be common practice, but love between men seldom was, are enough to bring you to tears. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the book, however, is that it immediately takes you to ancient Greece, envelops you in the world that existed there. It doesn’t necessarily matter that my Greek political/military history is pretty much non-existent, or that the names are pretty much totally confusing (a problem I also, funnily enough, had with Tolstoy), it speaks to the power of the book that I am able to open its pages and forget that I’m riding a smelly old bus to campus to take a test I haven’t studied for – I become a member of Philip’s court, watching this beautiful, strong, headstrong and talented boy grow up in to what will be (with the beauty of hindsight) an absolutely legendary military leader! I can’t say enough for the book – literally, I’m out of time at the work computer – but please, please, PLEASE read it. You won’t regret it! Happy reading, and I’ll see you all again soon – promise!

BookMaven

This behemouth of a book took me a little over two weeks to finish, so I thought that it would be a a good idea to let some thoughts stew before writing the review. Also, this review serves as a wonderful distraction from having to write my Children’s Literature paper thats due in less than 12 hours. And so, on to the review!

I Know This Much is True, written by Wally Lamb, clocks in at just under 900 pages (like, literally, at 899) and has a pretty epic story, but one of the things I like most about it is that it doesn’t feel like a 900 page book. The story revolves around a pair of identical twins, Dom (Dominick) and Thomas. At the very beginning of the book, the reader learns that Thomas has cut off his own hand in an attempt at political protest, hoping that this action, in all of its severity, will draw media attention to the act and hopefully stop the impending war in the middle East. Also, Thomas is a paranoid schizophrenic, which takes on new importance throughout the book as Dominick struggles with the fact that he looks the same as his brother, but is so inherently different.

* SPOILERS TO FOLLOW*

Dominick’s life, as we come to understand throughout the book, is reflected on as a life of losses. He loses the chance to have a real life independently for himself when he promises his mother on her death bed that he’ll look after Thomas. He looses his wife after their infant daughter dies of SIDS and Dominick loses himself in his grief and anger. He loses his sense of self when Thomas dies, and when he discovers some less than appealing aspects of his family history. All in all, the book is not what one would consider an ‘upper’, but it has its moments of beauty and simplicity woven throughout.

Perhaps one of my favorite aspects of the book is just how wonderfully Lamb intermingles his stories to give a full 360 degree view of the life of one man, a life of both personal tragedy and, ultimately, a life of hope. A friend of mine who is now reading the book described it as “everything bad that could possibly happen to a person” and while a lot of bad things do happen to and around Dominick, that’s not what the story ultimately is. Lamb does a wonderful job with Dominick’s grandfather’s manuscript describing how the family immigrated from Italy and how the family set down roots. It’s also amazing how well Lamb is able to portray the descent from Thomas’s normal life in to deeper and deeper schizophrenia.

The book is sad. I’m just going to put that out there so that there are no surprises. However, by the end of the book, there is more going on than just the sadness. There is a kind of redemptive hope, the idea that despite a person’s history and family, success is still ultimately up to the person at hand. Along the same lines, happiness is also portrayed as a choice. Dominick has every right to live his life as a bitter and angry person – he’s had horrible things happen to both he and his family. However, by the end of the novel he realizes that there is no reason to live a bitter and angry life. It’s a lesson that’s important to learn, and one that a lot of people never do. It’s still not one I’ve mastered, and I’m hoping that the full understand will come along eventually.

I Know This Much is True is a powerful book, and a longer one to undertake, but it’s especially good because it is one of those books that can also be read in the background of other reading. The story is gripping and the characters are rounded, and although it may not be the best reading if you’re looking for laughs, I can’t NOT recommend it! On the nightstand now is The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and The Canon: A Whirling Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science which are ENTIRELY different and wonderful in their own ways. Reviews to come! Happy reading!

As Nymeth so kindly pointed out, I am indeed alive! And living in my own apartment sans cable has inspired quite the boutof reading lately, so the blog is back with a vengence, at least for now!

Shortly after finishing The Time Traveler’s Wife I picked up and powered through Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida. The book focuses on a girl named Clarissa who, shorlty after her father’s death, learns that he wasn’t, in fact, her birth father. This send Clarissa on a trip around the world, back home to her mother’s old hometown in Eastern Europe, an area known as Lapland that is essentially a mixture of Russia and Sweden.

Clarissa’s mother left her at a young age, and on this trip to find her birth father, she also comes to some shocking revelations that make Clarissa see that she perhaps had more in common with her mother than she ever would have hoped to have. It’s a book that fills you qith more questions than answers, and I have to give credit to the wirting for creating a story that, while short, carries quite a bit of punch with it. That being said, I will say that one of the best things about the book was that it didn’t take long to get through.

I will say that I did enjoy the book, but it was one of those books that just kind of filled the time gap between the other books I was reading. The story was well plotted, if not a bit forced at timess, and there are probably other common ties I would’ve established between Clarissa and her mother, but those weren’t my choices! All in all I think that it’s one of those books that, while you probably wouldn’t regret readign, it’s also not necessarily the book you should run out immediately to read. There are some adult themes throughout, so if that’s something that bothers you, you may want to steer clear, but all in all, not a bad book if you’re looking for something quick!

Next on the list of reviews is The History of Love by Nickole Krauss, who is married to one of my favorite authors of all time (Mr. Jonathan Safran Foer) and whose book was lovely in that haunting way that I love so much. And then, if I can power through it over the long weekend, there should be a review of This Much I know is True  by Wally Lamb, which at 900 pages is presenting quiet the beast of a book to get through! And if you’re wondering where all the wonderful new book acquisitions came from, the answer is simple – a wonderful new roommate with wonderful literary taste and a penchant for sharing! More to come!

Before you ask, no, this was not the first time I’ve read this book and yes, I probably should’ve devoted the time to reading something new, but I can’t help it! I just LOVE THIS BOOK so much! It’s almost to hard to describe why, but if its important enough to read more than once, it’s sure as hell important enough to try and describe!

The Time Traveler’s Wife is a love story spanning the lives of Claire Abshire and Henry DeTamble. But as if they don’t have enough to worry about (as all couples occasionally do) Henry is also a time traveler, who in his later years – after he and Claire marry – goes back in time to visit his wife as a child. Claire, however, doesn’t time travel and thus lives her life lineraly, with Henry jumping back and forth. It’s at times saddening, at times thrilling, and always working towards what is established early on as a less than happy ending.

This is perhaps the thing that I love most about this book. While I’ll never turn up my nose at a love story, its entirely too difficult to find one that makes love real. Not sweeping, not always romantic, not always well spoken, and never always easy. Henry is flawed – he can be stubborn, sullen, and a little controlling. And Claire isn’t perfect either – headstrong, a little selfish, perhaps with a few too many regrets. But that’s what makes the love between them so powerful. It not only spans time and separation, but the flaws of both people.

Another thing I loved about this book is that Henry and Claire live the life I could see myself living one day (granted without the time traveling). They’re artists and librarians respectively, and their best friends are fellow artists and anarchists. They recite German and French poetry, know the names of famous artists and discuss foreign affairs the way that only those born of a higher education can. It’s a world of academia, and the book opens that world up, if only for a second.

Don’t get me wrong. This book isn’t necessarily all that easy at times. While straightforward in its language, the concept of time travel, and the trying to wrap your head around how Henry can be simultaneously 42 and 12 while Claire is 19 and hasn’t technically met Henry can most definitely give one a bit of a headache. But its worth it. For the writing, yes, but more importantly for the two amazing characters who welcome the reader in to their lives, as messy and disrupted those lives may be.

As you can see, my love for this book is quite possibly never ending, and is renewed with each new reading. PLEASE read it. You won’t regret it.

Needless to say, I’ve been a little MIA these past few months! I wish I had a better excuse than life, but I don’t! But I’m busting back on to the scene with a vengence and putting three whole book reviews into one. So, without further ado, I give to you my reivew for Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans.

The Reader is a book that I literally just picked up and finished within a day. It was one of the most moving stories I’ve read in a long, long time. The story, for those of you who haven’t heard about it (or seen the movie, which I hear is also absolutely phenomenal) is the story of Michael and Hanna. Michael is a young German boy who meets and begins to conduct a passionate love affair with Hanna, a woman almost twenty years his senior. The two fall in love until one day Hanna leaves. Years later, when Michael is a law student covering the trial of female guards responsible for inmate death Auschwitz, Michael sees Hanna again, this time behind the defendant’s bench. Hanna is found guilty and spends years in prison. While she is there, Michael comes to the realization that Hanna is illiterate and this is why she enjoyed their old ritual of him reading to her. He begins to read to her on tape, sending her the cassettes and one day Michael recieves a letter from Hanna. She has learned to read and write, thanks to the help of his tapes, and she is facing release from prison soon. The events that follow, which I won’t spoil here because of how beautiful they are, make the last 50 pages of the book some of the most impactful. (5 Star)

I really zipped through this book, and part of the reason for that was because it’s not very long to begin with (its just over 200 pages) and the other part is because Schlink creates an external and internal world that is a joy to walk around it. Not only is the German countryside beautiful, but the mental processes that are required for Michael to accept some of the negative aspects of Hanna’s life are described in prose that walks the fine line between psychoanalysis and beautiful, beautiful self-exploration. Perhaps it’s difficult to explain, but I have this feeling that, because the work is a translation, orginally written in German, that the English verison had to do something a little extra to make up for whatever might have been lost in translation. Either way, if you have the time – and trust me, you have the time! – I would recommend picking up The Reader and letting the world overtake you for a few hours.

Purple Hibiscus was the book I finished right before I powered through The Reader. The worlds of the two novels are so entirely different it’s almost laughable. Kambili Achike is a 15-year-old Nigerian girl whose father is, essentially, the head of the local church. Along with her brother and mother, the family lives in an almost constant state of fear because, in addition to being devotedly pious, Kambili’s father is also emotionally and physically abusive. For a period of time, Kambili is sent to live wither her aunt who is a university professor and who, along with her three children, teach Kambili what it means to laugh, to love, to have fun and to, most importantly, realize that social and political involvement isn’t a sin. Kambili has lived her life in the fear that she will never be good enough, either for her father or for God, a fear that was instilled in her by her father. Her stay with her aunt makes her realize that this may not, in fact, matter as much as Kambili once thought it would have.

The thing I love most about this book is the relationship between the family of Kambili’s aunt, Ifeoma. The family is poor – very, very poor, especially compared to Kambili’s family – and yet they spend their days in song, laughter, hard work and prayer. The lessons they teach Kambili seem to jump right off the page, so much so that when Kambili finally starts to come around to their way of thinking I could feel myself cheering for her, wanting her to learn that she is good enough for so many things in life. In addition, the prose is sparse but provides a look at Nigerian life that is eye-opening. African literature is slowly becoming more and more a favorite genre of mine, and this book only increases my growing affection for such. It’s a powerful book about women who learn to become powerful in and of themselves. (5 Star)

When We Were Orphans yet again takes the reader to a completely different place (it seems like my geographical adventures are becoming more and more broad lately – Germany, Nigeria and, in this novel, Shanghai) and a completely different time period! The book focuses on Christopher Banks, a detective whose parents were abducted at a young age for fighting against the import of Indian opium in to China. Christopher grows up and, after making a name for himself as a detective, decides to side his most important case ever – what precisely happened to his parents when they were abducted years ago. The case sends him back in to the streets of war-torn Shanghai and forces him to choose between the woman he loves, the life he has created for himself in England, and the world he has always known. He gets answers, but not necessarily the answers he (or the reader) expects.

My biggest problem with this book was the ending. All of the strings are tied up, so its not one of those novels where the ends are left loose and the reader is left with questions. To the contrary, all questions are answered – I just didn’t like the answers provided! This is merely a matter of taste, but the book had an ending that just left me feeling a little – gilted. I wanted there to be a bit more, and the explanations given to some of the issues aren’t as satisfactory as I could have desired. Specifically, the ending of the relationship between Christopher and his childhood friend, a Japanese boy named Akira, left much to be desired in terms of satisfaction. Other than my issues with the quality of the ending, the book really is a beautiful trip back in time to the era when China was ruled by Chiang Kai Shek and when opium ruled the streets. I’m not the biggest fan of detective or mystery books, but I thought that Ishiguro did a wonderful job of blending the detective-narrative along with the other issues in Christopher’s life – his love affair with a climbing socialite, his paternal instincts towards the girl he adopts, and the internal struggle he will always face over why his parents were taken. Of the three books, When We Were Orphans was probably my least favorite, but that doesn’t make it a bad book in any way! Take my word for it – its a joy to read! (3 Star)

Next up on the list? Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, volume 1 in The Cairo Trilogy and, of course, more blog posts! Happy reading! – BM