This week I doubled my course load and started teaching 4 sections at once, so the past few days have been a bit of a whirlwind, I’m afraid… But here is a small handful of interesting links.
Synopsis (from back cover): The circumstances of Molly Marx’s death may be suspicious, but she hasn’t lost her joie de vivre. Newly arrived in the hereafter, aka the Duration, thiry-five-year-old Molly is delighted to discover that she can still keep tabs on those she left behind…
First line: “When I imagined my funeral, this wasn’t what I had in mind.”
Review: I really enjoyed this quirky little novel — “a delight” is what first comes to mind. In fact, I immediately requested her first novel (Pink Slips) from the library as soon as I finished The Late, Lamented Molly Divine.
The premise is a initially little off-putting perhaps — the narrator is dead. Molly is able to watch her loved ones grieve and investigate her mysterious death. On one level, this novel is a murder mystery — a genre I rarely read. But in other ways, this novel is exactly what I hope to read all the time — funny, smart, fast-paced, original.
And surprising — We quickly discover that both she and her husband have been unfaithful. However, we also realize that despite this, Molly and Barry’s marriage isn’t that terrible, either. These are just two surprises in a complex, intriquing novel.
Molly is very likeable, as are most of the characters. The few characters we do not embrace (Barry and his mother) are still 3-dimensional and difficult to dismiss. In fact, second to the razor-sharp humor, the complexity of most of the characters would be what most recommends this novel. I could imagine reading a novel from the perspective of most of the characters — even the two-timing husband.
Let me end with a couple examples of Koslow’s prose:
“It was ninety-four degrees, and the minute you stepped outside you felt as if a Navajo blanket had fallen off a mule and onto your head.” (132)
Ah, summer in New York City!
“When Brie and Isadora are pissed, it doesn’t end in plates sailing across the room. They’re alpha show dogs — an Irish wolfhound and a standard poodle. It’s been almost a year now and there has never been a bit that drew blood: they express their animus through posture, attitude, and the occasional preemptive bark.” (149)
So, I thoroughly recommend this novel and look forward to sharing it! If you think you might be interested, simply leave me a comment!
I recently received an email about a beta web service that Hewlett-Packard is launching called Gabble. See what you think… Since my hubby and I are considering a move to Colorado, I could see checking it out as a way to stay connected to my two book clubs.
As a book and book clubaficionado, Gabble could be a great new medium for you to connect with your blog readers, as well as a new tool for the book club kits that your provide.
Gabble enhances the experience within a community by allowing people to feel better connected through video messages. Gabble could allow you, or book club members, to send video messages to your readers about the latest book reviews, show readers how create their own private video book groups or even share interviews with authors! You can also stay connected to your video messages while on the go with Gabble’s mobile option. Finally, people within a group can post and view videos at any time, which makes it ideal for people in different time zones.
What do you think? Would your club be interested? I would love to read your thoughts… I think the idea about including author interviews has possibilities, too — especially right now when writers are so generous about embracing the blogosphere…
Another great idea for summer reading — all those hardcover hits that have finally gone paperback. I’ve read and reviewed Olive Kitteridge and Netherland, but will now check out Lush Life and The Forever War. Any others on this list you would especially recommend?
A roundup of recipes caps these six short stories, including my favorite, “Luda and Milena,” about two aging Russian immigrants sparring for the attention of the widower in their English as a Second Language class, duking it out with food on “international feast” Fridays. Each woman develops a student coterie cheering her efforts, but the object of their affection escapes. Vapnyar, who left Russia in 1994 for Staten Island, N.Y., has a light, mischievous touch with the way food can arouse and comfort us.
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” is the Leon Trotsky observation that precedes this stirring, compact story of four citizens during the siege of Sarajevo during the 1990s Yugoslav wars. The title character sees a mortar kill 22 neighbors in a bread line and responds by carrying his instrument into the hole to play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for each victim, 22 days running. Told simply, the story unspools from four points of view — those of the cellist, a baker, a sniper and a man trying to avoid conscription.
Compulsively readable, this novel set during the siege of Leningrad is part do-or-die quest, part buddy story and part savage thriller. Young Lev is caught looting the body of a dead Nazi paratrooper and is dragged off to jail, certain he’ll be executed. Instead, he and his grandiose cellmate, Kolya, are given a chance at survival if they complete an impossible task: find 12 eggs in this starving city for the colonel’s daughter’s wedding cake. Author Benioff, a screenwriter, lets us see every scene he writes.
Lovers of urban crime fiction need look no further than the crack of Richard Price’s dialogue as he spins out from a fatal 2002 shooting of a bartender, a man out with friends on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The gifted Price shows the grit like Raymond Chandler and a profane urban ballet reminiscent of Saul Bellow in lifting off from a clutch of characters — the cops, the crime suspects, the father of the victim, a buddy at the scene. The youth are callow, but the ending is sublime.
This PEN/Faulkner winner got a recent sales bump when President BarackObama mentioned he was reading it, but O’Neill’s tale stands on its own, set in a New York unhinged in the months after 9/11. The narrator, an equities analyst from Holland, becomes caught up with Caribbean immigrants, the game of cricket and get-rich-quick schemes. Almost formal in tone and lyrical in its finale, its echoes of “The Great Gatsby” are audible but not overdone. For lovers of language and “voice.”
It won the Pulitzer Prize last month; it killed in my book group; and I’ve yet to meet a reader who didn’t express delight over these 13 linked stories set in the fictional Maine town of Cosby. All at least touch on the life of the title character, an acerbic retired math teacher married to the town pharmacist. Strout’s previous New England novels — “Abide With Me” and “Amy and Isabelle” — were good, but “Olive Kitteridge” is better. Pairs nicely with Sherwood Anderson’s classic “Winesburg, Ohio.”
Every summer reading list deserves a good road story, and Tremain takes the familiar device to precise and potent heights, winning the 2008 Orange Prize for Fiction. Here, an Eastern European man named Lev is displaced to London after his wife dies and his mill job ends. He has little cash and less English, and must remake himself in this strange land. Despite a contrived ending, “The Road Home” lets us root for a satisfyingly complex character. For readers who sank into Amy Bloom’s “Away.”
A sex tape. An underage girl. An elite prep school. Shreve, author of “Body Surfing” and “The Pilot’s Wife,” makes alchemy out of these base materials, crafting a propulsive story about coverups and devastating consequences. Adroitly switching perspective through a kaleidoscope of narrators, she builds authenticity and tension. Her young people even sound young. In the end, the damaged girl eludes Shreve, but Jodi Picoult should take lessons on topical fiction from Shreve. A guilty pleasure.
Sullen teens and jaded parents will find detente over this lewd, harrowing, funny and endearing story of a boy trading his decrepit high school on an Indian reservation for the white school in town. Based on Alexie’s own experiences of transferring to a predominately white high school in Spokane, Wash., the “diary” is a revelation, a glimpse into an adolescent Indian mind, made all the more fetching by Ellen Forney’s comic illustrations. A guaranteed conversation-starter.
From 1924 to 1950, a relentless Tennessee adoption operator named Georgia Tann stole or hoodwinked to get her hands on more than 5,000 children, amassing a fortune by charging to place these purloined youngsters in wealthy homes, including those of Joan Crawford and June Allyson. The author, who now lives in Lakewood, does a scrupulous job documenting the theft, locating victims and explaining official collusion. Publisher’s Weekly named her investigation a best book of 2007.
A fat military history may not seem like a beach book, but Andrei Cherny has dug up an exhilarating tale he subtitles “The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour.” That last bit may be a stretch, but this engrossing story is balm for readers weary from years of national missteps abroad. Using newly declassified documents, fresh interviews, old diaries and letters, Cherny assembles a well-written account of second-stringers and castoffs who flew repeatedly to the rescue of a starving people.
Raised in Cleveland’s King-Kennedy Estates, the author took the No. 14 bus up Kinsman Road to Hawken School in Gates Mills for her final three years of high school, a recipient of a “Better Chance” scholarship. Lyles straddles multiple worlds as she comes of age, and her longing for the attention of a feckless father registers on every page. Her clear, detail-rich memoir shows how she constructed an identity — before graduating from Smith College and eventually returning to Cleveland.
“There were these stories going around about the suicide bombers,” begins Chapter 10. “Just rumors, of course.” Filkins, a New York Times reporter in Iraq and Afghanistan, seems to lean across the bar to deliver unfiltered, hallucinogenic jolts of war. His short, surreal chapters paint an American war on terror that will remind aficionados of the combat journalism of Michael Herr’s “Dispatches.” Deserved winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
For misfits, what better medium than music? The boys have Nick Hornby and “High Fidelity”; now the girls have Greenlaw and this mix-tape memoir to remind us of sweaty nights of dancing wildly in one’s bedroom, flinging hair to air guitar. Born in 1962 in London, she was a precocious appreciator of Leonard Bernstein, Bob Dylan and Donny Osmond. Sometimes blasting the car radio is just raucous fun, but sometimes the songs we love rise through the noise to define us.
If self-conscious about guffawing in public, skip these collected writings from the humorist who grew up in Hudson but now lives in New Jersey. If you can, however, use a lift, “Ian Frazier is an antidote for the blues,” as the Boston Globe puts it. A few of these 36 essays are clunkers, but this New Yorker writer can be biblical, he can be Laura Wilder-esque, and he can channel a “cursing Mommy” in ways that will subvert your sensibility forever. Smart and fun.
A surprise best seller, this hour-by-hour depiction of the Cuban missile crisis is as gripping and disturbing as horror fiction. Dobbs digs up fresh archival evidence and interviews the Soviet veterans who physically handled the nuclear warheads and targeted them on American cities. “The plot of the story is simple enough: two men, one in Washington, one in Moscow, struggle with the specter of nuclear destruction they themselves have unleashed,” he writes. But the drama is in the subplots, which came close to lethal.
A half-century before adults fretted over video games, parents and psychiatrists feared comic books as avatars of juvenile delinquency. Hajdu does a bang-up job reconstructing the rise of comics and the backlash, an early culture war and a foretaste of the flap over rock music. Censorship and fear-mongering led to ruined careers, comic-book burnings and a Senate committee hearing that culminated in the chief of EC Comics attempting to justify depicting a severed head. Fascinating, well-written stuff.
In 1984, the author adopted an injured 4-day-old barn owl brought to the Caltech laboratory where she worked. The bird and the biologist formed an intense bond, one that lasted 19 years — an immense age for this species — and required buying rodents in bulk, 28,000 over Wesley’s lifetime. This fascinating, quirky memoir makes a good family read-aloud with its Hogwarts-like integration of an owl into daily life and its surprising science: These predators can detect mice under 3 feet of snow.
Synopsis (from back cover): Provocative, personal, and inspirational, The Green Collar Economy is not a dire warning but rather a substantive and viable plan for solving the biggest issues facing the country — the faililng economy and our devastated environment. From a distance, it appears that these two problems are separate, but when we look closer, the connection becomes unmistakable.
First line: “First, the bad news: the pain at the gas pump is just the beginning.”
Review: I found this book courtesy of Ideal Bite, a daily newsletter I receive about practical, easy ways to be more environmentally aware and friendly in my every day life.A few weeks ago the newsletter announced they were starting a book club and this was the first title selected. Since I love my daily Bite, I thought I would give the book – and the book club – a try. I try to stayed informed regarding the environment – have read and reviewed Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded and Pollan’s In Defense of Food – but do tend to read these works with apressure in my chest and sense of fear.
That the environment needs to be our focus – practically, ethically, economically – is self-evident.However, I am fortunate to have a diverse collection of friends and family members, politically as well as ethically, and many still do not believe or comprehend the current environmental crisis, so I do feel a responsibility to be well-informed whenever the topic arises.
This work — while not as comprehensive as Friedman’s (it is one-third of the length after all) or quite as readable as Pollan’s — does an excellent job integrating the connections between the environmental crisis in the world, the socio-economic disparity in our country, and the opportunity our government and citizens have to solve both issues.Jones uses Hurricane Katrina as a unifying metaphor for how these issues have converged – how global warming contributed to the force of the hurricane, how the neglected infrastructure of our country exacerbated the devastation, and how a political climate of neglecting and even ignoring our neighbors resulted in a tragedy still hard to fathom years later.
Fortunately, Jones uses this tragedy as a blueprint for how to avoid future situations and raise our country out of its current malaise.
The forward begins by comparing our current fears of turning from finite, dirty, expensive fuels to renewable, clean, free fuels to how, 200 years ago, Britain hesitated to abolish the slave trade out of a fear of a “financial apocalypse:”
As “slavery’s abolition exposed the debilitating inefficiencies associated with zero-cost labor, creativity and productivity surged, launching the industrial revolution and inaugurating an era of the greatest wealth production in human history… Today, we don’t need to abolish carbon as an energy source in order to see its inefficiencies starkly or understand that the addiction to it is the principal drag on American capitalism… The practice of borrowing a billion dollars each day to buy foreign oil has caused the American dollar to implode…Carbon dependence has eroded our economic power, destroyed our moral authority, diminished our international influence and prestige, endangered our national security, and damaged our health and landscapes.It is subverting everything we value.”
Jones’s thesis for salvaging our economy can be summarized in the following problem-solution equation:
“Our economy is powered almost exclusively by fossil fuels, a nonrenewable resource.That means the supplies are limited – by definition… The solution for the economy is simple: deliberately cut demand for energy and intelligently increase its supply.Those two steps will bring supply and demand back into balance, stabilizing energy costs and eventually lowering them.When energy prices settle and come down, all prices settle and come down – and we can begin to grow the economy again… It is true that we cannot drill and burn out way out of our present economic and energy problems.We can, however, invent and invest our way out.” (2-4)
Jones’s belief is that our economic (and environmental) salvation can be achieved through Green-collar jobs: “a family-supporting, career-track job that directly contributes to preserving or enhancing environmental quality… Today, green-collar workers are installing solar panels, retrofitting buildings to make them more efficient, refining waste oil into biodiesel, erecting wind farms, repairing hybrid cars, building green rooftops, planting trees, constructing transit lines, and so much more” (12-13).
Now, while Jones admits that “most of the economic power we need to green the Earth is still in the hands of people with a ‘pillage and pave’ mentality” (61), he also provides many examples of major cities (Milwaukee, Chicago, Los Angeles) and entire states (South Dakota, Pennsylvania, California), who recognize the economic advantage of ethically and environmentally sound businesses and are benefitting already.In my own life, my husband and I recently spoke to a builder in Colorado and expressed our desire for using renewable energy (specifically solar and geothermal energy) and the builder replied, “That’s basically standard around here.”Hallelujah!
So, for my readers who, like me, do not need yet another frightening history lesson is why using finite, dirty, expensive fuel is…bad…then let me recommend this book as a lesson in hope and as an example of how many, many countries and even segments of our own country are finally getting it.
For example, Jones discusses countries like Sweden, Iceland, Brazil and Costa Rica who are ahead of the environmental curve, ethically as well as economically, and whose economies have exploded ever since they recognized how beneficial energy independence is. He also provides a nice history lesson of Americans who have understood why trashing one’s home is not a good idea – from indigenous people to Thoreau and Emerson to Teddy Roosevelt to 1970’s regulations to our most recent attempts.In fact, did you know that at the end of the ‘70’s the White House actually had solar panels installed on the roof?I didn’t!
So, while I did read this with a tight throat and sense of impending doom at times, I ended with a small sense of hope.
And the book club experience was quite fun, too! Since the organization is focused on the environment — and not on evaluating the work’s merits — the discussion was different and quite a bit more focused than book club discussions tend to be. I must admit, I sure learned a lot about the environment!
By the way, at the end of his work, Jones provides a great resource list – here’s a selection:
www.greenforall.org – up-to-date information on currently pending legislation
