Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

I've just finished this novel and I feel lukewarmly about it.

In 1942, Henry is a scholarship student at an all-white school in Seattle, the only student of Chinese descent; the only other non-white student, also on scholarship, is Keiko Okabe, of Japanese descent.  To help offset the cost of their tuition, they both help serve lunch in the cafeteria every day.  Henry's only other friend is a black street musician named Sheldon.  Through Sheldon, they become acquainted with Seattle's jazz scene.

More than 40 years later, Henry has taken early retirement from Boeing to nurse his dying wife; with a lot of time on his hands, he walks past the long-shuttered Japantown landmark, the Panama Hotel, and learns that Japanese "evacuees" left family treasures in the basement when they left Seattle for internment camps and and the new owner of the Panama Hotel would like to reunite these items with the families of their original owners.

It's a very popular book club book which was why I was eager to read it.  It's also a first novel, and I think it shows.  There are some errors in continuity which surprise me; I find myself wondering why an editor didn't catch and correct those errors.  Those errors don't really ruin the book.  They're distracting, and I find myself feeling confused as a reader.  I stop, and reread the paragraph, and the proceeding paragraph, and this happened several times during the book.  I feel that there should be some kind of rule about the revealing of information; it needs to be linear, and told "in order."

I was bothered by some other things, too.  One was that one of the characters called his Dad "Pops."  I didn't know anyone called their father "Pops" except in Charlie Chan movies.

But, sometimes, the very things that are not very literary or very elegant, seem to appeal to other readers, perhaps because they have grown up on the kinds of cliches we find in films.

The story's structure, moving back and forth across forty years, is the kind of structure I find I enjoy.  I know some readers find that challenging.  The story consists of memories, told in the present tense, of 1942, and the "present day," which in this case is 1985.  In 1942, Japanese-Americans were "evacuated" from their homes on the West Coast and interned in camps inland. The characters in this novel was interned in Montana, I believe.

I think the element that makes this story so popular with readers is that of young love.  I think that is a perennially popular subject and the story could be set in any historical period and appeal to readers.

My sense is that the author is a writer who has to work very hard at avoiding cliches in storytelling and style. Nevertheless, he is obviously a writer who knows how to tell a story that is very appealing to readers.

Inferno by Dan Brown

I always knew I would end up reading this book, although I had not read any of the other books he'd written, because I took a class on The Divine Comedy when I was in college.

My teacher was an expert on symbols in medieval art and the images and allusions that appear in Dante's poem.  He spent each class unpacking allusions. He illustrated his lectures with slides of art he'd photographed all over Italy.  Good times. No really, I loved that class.

So I'd probably like this book, I thought.

Ironically, at the point where I'd just completed the first seven chapters or so, I read a column in the Guardian or the Telegraph about the gratuitous stupidities in Brown's writing.  For instance, there is a line in the description of a young doctor, in one of the first chapters, that is redundant, clumsy, and cliched.  Of course, using cliched descriptions, hackneyed phrases, and stereotypes as a substitute for characterization seems to be a hallmark of the suspense writer.  This writer acknowledged that while Brown's style stinks, his style has actually improved greatly.  I bet that's true.

What I found was that I found the book engrossing and delightful despite Brown's frequent insertions of facts that had no place in the narrative, and chase scenes that read like travelogues.

I think I felt secretly pleased that Brown recited facts that some readers would never otherwise have any exposure to, or interest.  But, I don't think Brown unpacked very many images, and I imagine that treating Dante's work in greater depth would have hampered the narrative.

Some of the suspense was well done, I thought, and some of it seemed a little tricky to me.

I also found the ending a little contrived, and I didn't quite believe the twist.  I read the book in two days, which I certainly regard as a strong recommendation.  Really loved it.

This is another apocalyptic novel; in this case, the suspense revolves around a one-man bioterrorism plot.  I don't want to spoil the ending, but Brown raises serious issues that I suspect most readers will just ignore.

Who says art history doesn't pay?  They certainly haven't met Dan Brown.

This is quite funny, and a "spot on" parody of Brown's style:

http://bit.ly/1fvWZxy

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

If you want to know if you should read this book, I think the answer is yes.

It came out in 1943, and it's set at the turn of the century .. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a time when Williamsburg is very different from how it is now.  In fact, it's set in Williamsburg a few years after the Williamsburg Bridge was built and the neighborhood experienced great change as it went from being an isolated, wealthy suburban area to being the overflow neighborhood for the immigrants of the Lower East Side.

In tone and feeling, it reminds me of a book about a Jewish family of girls on the Lower East Side that I read many years ago that was called something like "All of a Kind." It's a view of an urban immigrant experience that depicts a family that's poor but enjoys a lot of social connection, remembered fondly.

"A Tree" is a strange mixture of long narrative, brief scenes, unsentimental gaze, and something that is nostalgic or can easily be viewed that way.

Frannie Nolan, the daughter of a German mother and an Irish father, is the protagonist of the novel.  She's somewhat isolated by her father's behavior and her mother's pride, but she's a great reader, a writer, and someone who likes to cast a very observant eye over everything, and everyone, around her.

She's very close to her father, who's a dreamy and charming man.  He works intermittently as a singing waiter.  He's an alcoholic and his health collapses before the end of the novel.  Frannie's mother is a super, responsible for cleaning the building in which they receive free rent.

After Frannie's dad passes away, the loss of his income forces Frannie's mom to make some hard choices.  She decides that she will send Frannie out to work instead of sending her to high school.  Frannie is crushed; she's a very good student and she longs to go to high school.  Katie, Frannie's mother, reasons that Frannie will succeed in finding a way to get education on her own.  She sends her son to high school knowing that his interest is very low and that if she doesn't make it easy for him, he won't start high school, and he won't acquire the education later in life.

In real life, the author, Betty Smith, did not attend high school but was permitted, as a courtesy, to attend some classes at the college where her husband was a faculty member.

I asked a friend if she thought that my book group would like this book and she said "yes - it's a very romantic book."  One definition of romantic, to me, is a world in which human beings are at the center of the world and their thoughts, actions and decisions matter very much.  Frannie decides to read all the books in the library, and when she gets done she starts all over again.  This probably has something to do with her success at the clipping agency where she reads faster than anyone else and is paid the most even though she lied about her age to get the job.  Frannie has a teacher who encourages her to write.  She has a grandmother who believes that education is important.

In a flashback to Frannie's birth, we learn that Frannie's mother, Katie, despaired of being able to care for her child.  She asked her mother, Mary, how she could she care for her child, and how their condition was improved from living in Germany where they'd been very poor but no poorer than they were now.  Mary replied that the chance to get an education made life in America better and that saving was the key to financial security.  Saving and education are themes in the story.

Finally, Frannie's alcoholic father is presented as a dreamer, a romantic and a loving father - more a victim of his own weakness and their circumstances than as a guilty party.

This book was quite popular in my book group, although there was one person from New York who felt that the depiction of Brooklyn was not accurate because there was no mention of the many social services available to the poor at that time.  I find myself wondering if accepting charity - and the judgment that may go with it - is especially un-romantic, and if that is why there's no mention of it in the book.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

I loved this book.  It actually reminded me of Thomas Hardy (like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, there's a very important letter to a beloved that tragically gets very, very lost and, like Jude the Obscure, there's a tragedy that is devastating and, aside from the rising misery factor, seems to come out of the blue) in more than one way.  I also was deeply impressed by the way the author conveyed his love of medicine.

I like the idea of people loving their work.  That interests me.

There's a lot of tragedy and loss in this book, but there's also a lot of wonderful stuff like characters that are very romantic and noble and self-sacrificing.  Oh, I cried at the end!

Again, I read so much stuff about which I feel lukewarm, at best.  I'm just thrilled to have read something that I loved.

I read this book for a reading group, and while two of the others loved it as I did, one member of the group was very direct about the fact that she did not - she found it heavy.

Trying to think of what she means, exactly, reminds me that I was in another group where the topic veered off to other books and writers and someone brought up Maeve Binchy and another person said, impatiently, "Oh, her descriptions are too long - when I come to one of them I just skip it."  Wow, I said to myself.  I never thought of Binchy as a wordy writer.  I'm telling you, it's brutal out there with the readers who don't want their writers to offer them too many words!

What I'm Reading Now

For the moment, I've given up on everything but trying to finish Cutting for Stone which I love.  It has an operatic, John Steinbeck's East of Eden quality .. it is a bildungsroman/family saga, and its has a poetic and sensual view of medicine.  It makes medicine seem deeply exciting. 

The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

This is a suspense novel, set in Denmark.  It was written by two Danish women who were already published authors in other genres, and, being friends, decided to work together to write this book.

The plot revolves around a three-year old Lithuanian boy who has been kidnapped - he's the boy in the suitcase.

Initially, one focus is on the boy's mother who was attacked by the kidnappers and who awakens in the hospital disoriented and unable to convince anyone that her child has been kidnapped.

The other thread of the narrative is on a nurse who works with abused women.  She finds the child in the suitcase, and her efforts to save this child form the other major thread of the narrative.

Eventually, we meet the couple who kidnapped the child and the two narratives merge in climax at a Danish home.

The reason for the child's kidnapping is horrific.

I liked this book because it was very well plotted and the characters, although not equally developed, did not seem flat.  It worked as a general novel as well as a suspense novel

It was easy to read and held my interest; I read it in one sitting.

5/11/14

My book group read this book and to my surprise, everyone liked it.  They really liked Nina.  And, we all agreed that the characterization was rich.  One thing several people mentioned was the fact that they kept feeling afraid for Nina and wanted to know why she just didn't go to the police?  and, what was she thinking, leaving a child in hot car?  The child could have died!  (One or two former nurses in my book group.)

I posited that Nina was feeling mistrustful of the "authorities" because of her inability to protect the Ukrainian girl who was picked up by her abuser at the Nina's workplace at the beginning of the novel. The man engaged in an sexual display that was designed to make Nina feel uncomfortable and helpless, which it did.  That was my explanation for why Nina didn't call the police.  But no one in my book group was persuaded by that explanation.

I really liked the book even more after hearing all of the others in my book group talk about how much they liked it.

The second book in the Nina Borg series is Invisible Murder; the third book in the series is Death of a Nightingale.

What I'm reading now

I have four books on my docket, and I wonder if I will get any of them read:

Sutton, by J.R. Moehringer, for a book group; Cutting for Stone, for a book group; Inferno by Dan Brown, and Five Days at Memorial:  Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital   by Sheri Fink.

For a book group, I recently read The Boy in the Suitcase, a suspense novel which I honestly enjoyed; I thought it was well-crafted.  

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

This book was another debut novel, one that was hugely popular in Britain and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.  The author, Rachel Joyce, wrote it while her father was dying and it's easy to see how the long walk of the protagonist, who believes that it will prevent his friend from dying until he can arrive to see her, was inspired by the deals and wishes we irrationally make when our loved ones are dying.

I did not finish this book, and perhaps I would have loved it if I had.  As it was, it seemed to me a strange combination of whimsy and despair.  I simply never felt really engaged; again, I thought the mild-mannered, hen-pecked husband who rebels by doing some eccentric is a cliche and while I felt that the novel obliquely raised serious issues like grief and mental illness it didn't seem to me to say anything new or profound - nothing that would gave me that sense of immediate recognition.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

This is a combination dystopian/coming-of-age novel.

The story is told by an adult who is recalling the year she was 11, when the earth started slowing.  That is, the days became longer until they were finally about 48 hours long and many animals and plants died.  Food production was moved into greenhouses, and the additional energy consumption of these greenhouses led to electricity shortages and rolling blackouts.

A lot of folks, including folks in the book group I read this with, really liked this novel.

I didn't like this novel.  I found the characterizations flat, or perhaps simply not original enough.

For instance, the one commenter noted that the California setting was informed by the author's own California childhood.  I didn't derive a strong sense of place from this novel.

During the first year of the slowing, the narrator falls in love and observes her mother's illness and the stress it places on her parents' marriage.

I think I felt that the novel was full of recycled elements:  I'd call it To Kill a Mockingbird meets Nevil Shute's On the Beach.

This is this author's debut novel, and I thought the prose was well written.  I understand that she wrote the novel at home in the mornings before she went to work and on the subway.  In short, it's a tremendous achievement that she was able to finish the novel.   She says that it was inspired by learning the 2004 tsunami slowed the earth's rotation by a few microseconds.  Of course, as global warming creates ever more extreme weather, it seems likely that something like that could happen again, perhaps periodically.

She says that she did not write the book about global warming and that it was not inspired by global warming, but it reminded me of the very great fear I have that we are not doing anything yet about global warming and there is no advantage to waiting.

The "age of miracles" to which the title refers is the onset of adolescence.

The Cooked Seed by Anchee Min

I just loved this book; I didn't really have time to read it but I made time.

I have so much to say about this book although my thoughts are disparate and disjointed.

Anchee Min owned a four-flat in Bridgeport with her husband.  Her tales of fixing up her building are really scary and inspiring.  And, yes, if you're angry at your spouse but you want to feel better about him/her by reading about someone else who's worse off, then yes, this is the book for you.  Her husband is now a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where they met), but she found fault with the way that he handled managing their apartment building and the way he parented their child.

(It's an interesting commentary on the immigrant experience; Anchee could not get a job because her English wasn't good enough and she had to remain a student in order to keep her visa.  This is why she and her husband wanted to own real estate; they hoped it would be a source of income.  (Their experience was that maintaining the building ate up all the rent income.)

As much as I have always wanted to read a "real estate memoir," the last few chapters of the book are the ones that I like best.

The significance of the title is that cooked seed is what her colleagues at the film company she worked for before she left China used to call her.  Her parents were teachers and victims of the Cultural Revolution; at the age of 17 she was given a job as an actor in a film company run by Madame Mao.

When Mao died and Madame Mao was denounced, Min was tainted by the association and her colleagues jeered her by calling her "cooked seed" which meant washed up, finished, "stick a fork in her, she's done".  After working very hard to keep her job for several years, she finally decided that she had to leave China.

Toward the end of the book, she gives her daughter a lecture about "gaming the system."  Of course, she herself gamed the system:  she lied about being able to speak English when she applied for her visa from the American consulate (another story that I love:  a Chinese worker there, with haughty disdain, informs her that she got lucky:  the consular official who interviewed her realized that she could not speak English but greatly admired her pluck and said "yes").  She goes on to struggle to explain the real cost of poverty, the poverty of spirit that envelops those trapped in it.

The real appeal of this memoir is Min's "grit."  I thought that she was just as determined as the heroine of "True Grit" and thought that that might make a very nice alternative title to this book.  I was so impressed by her strength. Interestingly, I don't think she saw herself as strong but as desperate.  And, she's very candid about her doubts and about how they affected her relationship with her mother.

In fact, I'm not sure I fully understand everything that she has to say about her relationship with her mother, but I felt that she felt hurt that she could not be honest about her struggles in America because it was important to her mother that she be a "success."  At the same time, I think that she judged her parents for how they struggled when she was a child and, of course, I think anyone confronting the harsh conditions of the Cultural Revolution was lucky to survive but probably wouldn't feel lucky.  And one of the delights of the book is her gift to her mother of a toilet.

One of the other delights of the book is her account of how she met her husband. I won't spoil it for you by telling you the story, but I found it not just affecting, but expertly told.  Min writes that she had struggled as a writer in English, not just to master the mechanics but to create prose that flowed as the best prose does.  I congratulate her; while her prose is spare it is excellent and serves her narrative well.

Min writes that her daughter prompted her to write this memoir, saying that it would inspire women in a similar situation.  She closes the book with a quotation from Jane Eyre:

What I'm reading now

It is an eclectic group of items, and anybody's guess as to whether I'll finish them all, ever ..

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (some beautiful prose)

The Age of Miracles (middle school, when puberty suddenly kicks in)

The Cooked Seed by Anchee Min (she left China; she came to live in Bridgeport)

Six Years by Harlan Coben

Page turner, although for me, not as much of a page turner as And the Mountains Echoed.  

Whether deliberately or not, there was a lot of "echoing" in this book as well; the protagonist, in his investigation, visited the same places repeatedly.

Interesting to choose a poli sci professor as a protagonist.

Interesting to read a book that seemed to be a guy's book.

Two escapes from a window in this book.

I did think that the book dragged toward the end.  I found myself thinking it could be, perhaps should be, 50 pages shorter.

Characters were not well developed, I thought; you don't learn anything about the protagonist's childhood and life before the events of the novel are set in motion.

The "mystery" surrounding so many characters tended to ensure that there wouldn't be much in the way of characterization.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

I really enjoyed this book:  thought it grabbed your attention right off, was a quick read, had an interesting and engaging narrative structure, and had some interesting things to say about caretaking.