RECOMMENDATIONS

James Tiptree Jr: the Secret Life of Alice B. Sheldon* Julie Phillips
review by Sage Van Wing

As a little girl I was addicted to historical fiction. I loved to imagine myself as the honorable knight, the fearless pirate, the courageous explorer. It wasn’t until I was quite a bit older that I understood I could never have been any of those things. As a woman I would have been miserable in nearly any time before our own. Even in my dreams, is there any historical era I can imagine living in as a woman? Maybe one of those early matriarchal societies. Maybe Elizabethan England, but only if I could somehow arrange to be Elizabeth. Or I could do like Mata Hari and dress as a man [more...].

 

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner* Bich Minh Nguyen
review by Sage Van Wing

I thought my name singled me out. But try growing up with a name like ‘Bich’ in Grand Rapids Michigan in the ‘80’s. The new memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, chronicles this and other difficulties faced by Vietnamese American author Bich Minh Nguyen. Nguyen has a light, charming voice- at once funny and sad. She obviously has a great appreciation for the inherent absurdity of growing up in the 1980’s. [more...]

 

Thirteen Moons * Charles Frazier
review by Sage Van Wing

Charles Frazier’s new book, Thirteen Moons, revisits the bracing wilds of North Carolina to recount the fate of small people churned up by big history - in this case the enforced removal in the 1830s of Native American communities from their traditional hunting grounds. The geography is big too: long vistas of peak and valley, river and gorge - Davy Crockett country reimagined for a tale of epic struggle and doomed love, but still good, you feel, for shooting bears. [more...]

 

 

 

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name * Vendela Vida
review by Sage Van Wing

Vendela Vida’s newest novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, does not shy away from dark issues. While addressing such meaty topics as rape, betrayal, and what makes us who we are, Vida somehow manages to write a book that is at the same time both achingly bleak and very funny. Her lean, spare writing disguises a world of heartache in brief, matter-of-fact sketches. “If someone gave me a pile of bones and said they were my mother’s,” says Clarissa, the novel’s narrator, “I decided I would cry for a day and move on.” [more...]

 

The Echo Maker * Richard Powers
review by Sage Van Wing

Advice to all you would be novelists out there: if you’re thinking the only way to convey the deeply subtle meaning of your book is by revealing it in a character’s dream, or, worse yet, a coming-out-of-a-coma-drug-induced dream…think again. Other people’s dreams are always boring and nonsensical. [more...]

 

 

 

 

The Emperor's Children * Claire Messud
review by Sage Van Wing

The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud, is perhaps the first successful 9/11 book. Having said that, it really has nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. That, perhaps, is the measure of its success. Marina, Julius, and Danielle, close friends at an elite Ivy League university, now suffer from a sort of Post-Graduate Distress Syndrome. Danielle, a struggling public television producer, finds herself entangled in an inappropriate affair with an older, married man. Julius, a poverty-stricken reviewer for the Village Voice, finds himself settling for the mediocrity of a ‘normal’ relationship with a financial trader who has a serious drug addiction. Marina, the beautiful and much-touted daughter of respected journalist Murray Thwaite, finds herself living at home with her parents, desperately trying to finish a nearly decade-old manuscript entitled The Emperor’s Children Have No Clothes, on the thrilling topic of how changes in childhood fashions are tied to changes in society. [more...]

 

Heir to the Glimmering World
Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick¡¦s ¡§Heir to the Glimmering World is a coming of age novel cleverly disguised as a novel of ideas. This book will satisfy both readers who love a good plot and those finicky word and style geeks who seem to be annoyed at any novel which follows a straight line. The story follows the inclusion of Rose Meadows into the Mitwisser household- a family of scholars (and Jews) escaping from Germany in the early part of the Nazi era. Rose is a feisty, bookish, orphan from a nowhere town in upstate New York who takes the first job available to her because it promises to bring her to The City.
The Pater Familias, Rudolf, is a history scholar who is so obsessed with his field of study that he finds it easy to neglect his family. He hires Rose to help with his research on an obscure branch of Jewish mystics called the Karaites. Though Rose actually spends most of her time caring for the family¡¦s mentally fragile mother, she soon becomes infected with Mitwisser¡¦s scholarly mania.
Also obsessed by the Professor¡¦s strange passion is James A¡¦Bair, a wealthy gadabout who becomes the family¡¦s patron. James is ¡§the Bear Boy,¡¨ once a model for his father¡¦s world-beloved series of children¡¦s books. Like Rose, he is also searching for his place in the world, struggling to shake off the idealized image that exists of him as a child. At first an unseen benefactor to the Mitwisser family, James eventually arrives to live with them and sow increased disorder within the already tenuous family structure.
In the quest for purpose, though, it is Rose who is the ¡¥heir¡¦ to the glimmering world, which refers, naturally, to the world of books. The refuge of literature is offered not only in the professor¡¦s scholarly tomes, but also in the novels that distract Mrs. Mitwisser from her discontented ravings, and in the reading room of the New York Public Library. This is a book about books, but it is not too clever in its literary layerings to also tell a good story. Though wry, agile and wise enough to lift us out of our own lives, this book doesn't once dodge the brutal truths of the world we live in.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Michael Chabon

This is a book Chabon's first book and is a lovely tale about the first summer after college, an improbable time dizzying and dazzling in promised freedom, a time of bright hope for the future, when many of us decide who we will or will not be. It's also a cliche, a topic written about many times, and the kind of story that in lesser hands would make for a pretty dull book. But Chabon pulls all the tragic beauty and confusion from it. In the end, you're left with a book stunning in its insight, so full of empathy that in many ways I feel it is better than it's more polished brethren. It's the kind of book a writer can only write once and I'm glad he did.

 

Slowness

Milan Kundera

In honor of the annual Slow Food conference in Turin this month, I have chosen this lovely small novel from the Czech wunderkind. This is the first novel written in French by Kundera, an expatriate since the Velvet Revolution, and both the length, and some of his witticisms suffer as a result. Nonetheless, this short novel is a gem: tender, witty, intelligent and laugh-out-loud funny in places.

Two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic in this, Kundera's lightest novel. In the 18th century, the marvelous Madame de T. summons a young nobleman to her chamber and gives him an unforgettable lesson in the art of seduction and the pleasures of love. In the same chat at the end of the 20th century, a hapless intellectual experiences a rather less successful night. Distracted by his desire to be the center of attention at a convention of entomologists, Vincent misses the opportunity to be with a beautiful stranger and suffers the ridicule of his peers.

Ruminating on how the pleasures of slowness have disappeared in today's fast-paced, future-shocked world, Kundera explores the secret bond between slowness and memory and the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. As provocative as it is entertaining, Slowness is Kundera in top form.

 

The Disinherited

Han Ong

Manila, 2000. Forty-four-year-old Roger Caracera returns to his birthplace after nearly three decades in the United States. He has come to bury the corrupt, charismatic head of the family sugar dynasty: his estranged father, Jesus. To Caracera's chagrin and pleasure, he is now viewed by his countrymen as the representative American; a local tabloid even refers to him as a General Douglas MacArthur look-alike. And when his father's will is read, Caracera is stunned to discover that he has been left half a million dollars.
Unable to live with this burdensome inheritance, he decides to give his money away. But who among the millions of needy Filipinos is he to focus on?
Traversing high and low life, societies rank and respectable, and with a cast of characters that includes a slum-dwelling boy hustler, a middle-aged American pederast, a rising Filipino tennis player, a calculating society matron, and a Peace Corps worker turned trophy wife, The Disinherited is an incisive and illuminating exploration of the impulse to do good in the world and the paradoxical harm brought on by generosity.

 

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell

At once audacious, dazzling, pretentious and infuriating, Mitchell's third novel weaves history, science, suspense, humor and pathos through six separate but loosely related narratives. Like Mitchell's previous works, Ghostwritten and number9dream (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize), this latest foray relies on a kaleidoscopic plot structure that showcases the author's stylistic virtuosity. Each of the narratives is set in a different time and place, each is written in a different prose style, each is broken off mid-action and brought to conclusion in the second half of the book. I thought David Mitchell was immensely precocious and talented when I read Ghostwritten, though not many of my friends were as taken with it as I was. Having just finished Cloud Atlas, I am thrilled to report that --in my opinion-- his promise has been realized . The book is more than an endlessly fascinating puzzle. Each of the six characters and stories interwoven here are riveting from literary, aesthetic and philosophical standpoints as well as being great narrative page-turners. You might think that Mitchell was six different writers - all equally brilliant. This is not quite like anything you have ever read before - a new form and vision for a new century.

 

The Time Traveller's Wife

Audrey Niffenger

Not usually the sort of book I read, this clever and inventive tale is just the thing for a long plane ride or a slow afternoon at the beach. This book works on three levels: as an intriguing science fiction concept, a realistic character study and a touching love story. Henry De Tamble is a Chicago librarian with "Chrono Displacement" disorder; at random times, he suddenly disappears without warning and finds himself in the past or future, usually at a time or place of importance in his life. This leads to some wonderful paradoxes. From his point of view, he first met his wife, Clare, when he was 28 and she was 20. She ran up to him exclaiming that she'd known him all her life. He, however, had never seen her before. But when he reaches his 40s, already married to Clare, he suddenly finds himself time travelling to Clare's childhood and meeting her as a six-year-old. The book alternates between Henry and Clare's points of view, and jumps from one time period to the next throughout their lives. Clare's chapters expresse the longing of the one always left behind, the frustrations of their unusual lifestyle, and above all, her overriding love for Henry. Likewise, Henry's passages evoke the fear of a man who never knows where or when he'll turn up, and his gratitude at having Clare, whose love is his anchor.

 

The Emperor of Scent

Chandler Burr

It's unusual to find a book on science that is so highly, compellingly readable. The Emperor of Scent weaves together stories of science in theory and in practice (amazing discoveries, long years of research, stubborn hidebound resistance) and both the allure and industry of perfume, through the figure of Luca Turin, a PhD in biology and a self described "Bio-physicist" who has been practically obsessed with smell all his life . Turin is a scientist out of the mold of Richard Feynman: fun loving, entertaining, intense and monomaniacal. His personality is so compelling and his obsessions are so intense  that together they drive the narrative of the book at an unrelenting pace.

Burr is a reporter: his work is well researched and well written. I would never have guessed I could be so curious about smells and perfumes, especially knowing nothing about either from the start. By the time I put down this book I was ready to go out and buy some expensive perfumes. I didn't, but I was ready to....

 

The Time of Our Singing

Richard Powers

You know that lovely, tantalizing sensation which trickles down the back of your tongue as you fall in love with a book by an author you’ve just discovered, and you suddenly realize that you may have an entire new oeuvre to work your way? That blissful sensation of knowing you rest in the hands of a master, and there’s a heck of a lot more where that came from? That was exactly my feeling upon picking up the latest novel by Richard Powers: In the Time of Our Singing .

While In the Time of Our Singing could most easily be summed up as a novel about race and music, it is somehow about neither music, nor race. It is, most simply, the story of an American family. Richard Powers has populated his book with an engaging cast of characters, thrown them into a period of US history full of upheaval and foment, and written about them with as much elegance and lyricism as any of the best American novelists.

The story unfolds in two time periods at once: In the mid 1940’s when Delia Daley, a young black woman with a talent for singing meets and falls in love with David Strom, a German Jewish Refugee and theoretical physicist. Delia faces the problems of communicating with someone who not only speaks a different language, comes from another culture and nationality, but is also so ensconced in his theoretical physics that he can barely see the world in front of him. Sometimes it seems that racial differences are the least of their problems.

The second story follows their children: the luminous Jonah, whose voice “could make heads of state repent”; little Ruth, who, out of frustration with the nearsightedness of her family, becomes a Black Panther; and dedicated Joseph, who tries desperately to bring his life into focus by following the path laid out by first one and then the other of his siblings.

Though the book is an elegiac meditation on the nature of time, the pleasures of music, and the social construction of blackness and whiteness and everything in between, the real strength of this novel is the richness of the characters. They're all deeply flawed individuals whose wounds are so familiar that through the course of the novel, they begin to feel like that part of yourself you always wish was better, kinder, happier.

In The Time of Our Singing is a long, slow, sumptuous read. It offers a compelling and unique portrait of a moment of American history we all think we know by heart. If anything the book is too slow. Powers is entranced by the genius of his own central motif about the nature of time and returns to it one too many times for my own taste. By the time he comes to his stunning revelation about how the past and the present collaborate each other into existence, I was so steeped in temporal theory that the final moment lost some of the power I’m sure he was intending. Still, it is hard to complain about having too much of a good thing. Indeed, these next months will surely find me luxuriating my way through everything else Powers has to offer and I feel confidant that most folks would be happy doing the same.

 

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson  

As someone who usually consumes books at the rate of 2 a week, this book turned the tables: it consumed me and I've been haunted by it ever since.

The language - exquisite and clear as crystal - is perfectly married to chronicling the interior worlds of loss and longing, rendered with such precision and depth that you recognize them as your own. I'm not a sentimental person in the least, but I was unexpectedly moved to tears by the poignancy of passages which express, better than anywhere else in prose, the human search to be known and understood. I found myself reading slower and slower - not merely to postpone the inevitable, but because the writing is so densely beautiful that each sentence is worthy of marvel, so effortlessly poetic and precise as to be almost supernatural.

Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience.

 

The Botany of Desire

Michael Pollan

Erudite, engaging and highly original, journalist Pollan's fascinating account of four everyday plants and their coevolution with human society challenges traditional views about humans and nature. Using the histories of apples, tulips, potatoes and cannabis to illustrate the complex, reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world, he shows how these species have successfully exploited human desires to flourish.

I don't normally recommend non-fiction, but this book is so well written and so engaging that it trancends my normal prejudice. Pollan's polished style and easy wit holds your interest throughout and his research and anecdotes reveal fascinating nuggets of historical and scientific truths. Whether or not you've ever gardened for fruits, vegetables or flowers, you will be captivated by these offerings.

 

Brick Lane

Monica Ali

Monica Ali's gorgeous first novel is the deeply moving story of one woman, Nazneen, born in a Bangladeshi village and transported to London at age eighteen to enter into an arranged marriage. Already hailed by the London Observer as "one of the most significant British novelists of her generation," Ali has written a stunningly accomplished debut about one outsider's quest to find her voice.

The immigrant world Ali chronicles in this penetrating, unsentimental debut has much in common with Zadie Smith's scrappy, multicultural London, though its sheltered protagonist rarely leaves her rundown East End apartment block where she is surrounded by fellow Bangladeshis. The great delight to be had in Brick Lane lies with Ali's characters, from Chanu the kindly fool to Mrs. Islam the elderly loan shark to Karim the political rabblerouser, all living in a hothouse of Bengali immigrants. Brick Lane combines the wide scope of a social novel about the struggles of Islamic immigrants in pre- and post-9/11 England with the intimate story of Nazneen, one of the more memorable heroines to come along in a long time.

 

A Heart So White

Javier Marias

"My hands are of your colour; but I shame/To wear a heart so white"—Lady Macbeth

A Heart So White is a breathtaking novel about family secrets which chronicles with unnerving insistence the relentless power of the past. Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know. Secrecy—its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility—hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence: Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into shadows— and on to the costs of ambivalence.

Javier Marias writes with a style wholly his own, a liquid use of words that create not only rich images, but experiences in time travel, in plumbing the soul of relationships, of the importance of our individual pasts, of the myriad ways a single instant of time can be metamorphosed by a variety of observors. He is able to write a theme and variations, a prelude and fugue, a sentence so musical that its incredible length serves only to endear us to his luminous mind.

 

My Life as a Fake

Peter Carey

Using a notorious Australian literary hoax of the 1940's and Mary Shelley's gothic novel "Frankenstein" as a springboard, Peter Carey turns on the power of his creative imagination to produce an extraordinary modern literary horror story. Stylishly written, with a wildly inventive, fantastical plot and wide-ranging settings across continents from London to Australia to Malaysia, My Life As A Fake is a distinctive addition to the fictional world of Peter Carey (if you've never read The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, you have indeed a great treasure awaiting you).

This book works both on the level of the story it tells, and on the level of the issues it raises about the relation of art to its creator. Not only that, but the novel is also a genuine page-tuner. My heart thumped in my chest as I raced to uncover the truth as I neared the end of the book.

 

Empire Falls

Richard Russo

This is, of course, the book being read by your own local, on air book club: The Sunday Book Salon on KWMR (90.5 Point Reyes Station, 89.3 Bolinas).  There's nothing like double advertising...

To read Richard Russo is to understand why country music is such a commercial success.  Passing through his depressed little upstate New York and Maine towns proves that the South has not cornered the misery market. These are country music towns populated by losers and scrimpers and hard luck cases. The surprising thing about Russo’s novels is that despite all the divorce and debt and car trouble, they’re drop-dead funny, not to mention poetic, complex, and smart.

Russo’s Pullitzer Prize winner, Empire Falls, takes its name from the Maine nowhereseville that is its setting. In its review of the book, The New York Times said that the author “movingly dramatizes an older, innocent way of life.”   Which is true if by “innocent” you mean: the mistake of falling in love with your favorite cousin’s husband, the grim fact of folks out of work then the paper mill shuts down, a skyrocketing cancer rate thanks to said paper mill, or the main character's gnawing frustration with the path of his life.   Russo’s novels offer a lovely, resonant, almost aerial view of the towns in which they take place- in many ways the place itself is the main character. He offers everything you’d ever want from an American novel: humor, grace, intelligence, sociology, and redemption.

 

The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri

One of the most anticipated books of the year, Lahiri's first novel follows elegantly in the footsteps of 1999's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of short stories Interpreter of Maladies. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail -- the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase -- that opens whole worlds of emotion.  Her simple, sensitive prose draws you into the story of Gogol, the son of immigrants from India named after the Russian author. The Namesake is about the gap between Gogol and his family -- he born into America and wanting to fit in with our society, his parents unable to let go of the land they knew and the customs they grew up with. Gogol spends his life distancing himself from them and their ways, somewhat desperately trying to assimilate himself to the American way of life. There's no cleverness or showing-off in The Namesake , just beautifully confident storytelling. Gogol's story is neither comedy nor tragedy; it's simply that ordinary, hard-to-get-down-on-paper commodity: real life.

great sensitivity.

 

The Piano Tuner

Daniel Mason

A debut novel from Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner is an ethereal and descriptive tale of Burma and the British Empire in the 1800's.  The story follows Edgar Drake, a tuner of Erard grand piano's as he is given the unlikely mission of tuning a piano which has been sent to the outer reaches of the Burman empire to please the mysterious and eccentric Surgeon-Major Carroll.  This is not only a story of  culture and empire, it is also a mystical meditation on the many truths in the world and the discovery of the heart's true desire.  Though it is clear that this novel owes much to John Fowles', The Magus, and is at times overly melodramatic, the plot is thoroughly mesmerizing, and the prose is extravagant in its detail.  This book will not disappoint.

 

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“And we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”   And there ends a most brilliant, intensely poetic novel.   If you have already read it, read it again.   The Great Gatsby is startling in its portrayal of Americanness, in its simplicity of observation, in its overwhelming honesty of place and person.   Fitzgerald renders these characters with a flesh of foible and epiphany, of pettiness and honesty.   There are no heroes, only players.   No triumphs that do not fall prey to an inevitable humanness.   Gatsby is the embodiment of the American man consumed by his own myth; he uses the trappings of wealth to lure a love, “her voice full of money.”   Fitzgerald gives us a tale caught between crumbling illusions and the greater tragedy of illusions that remain regardless of force, of reality.   This novel is wise and essential; and as precise as it is epic in its overwhelming simplicity.   It is a love story, a tragedy, a metaphor, a triumph.   The Great Gatsby inspires you to “run faster, [to] stretch out [your] arms farther.”

 

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

J.K. Rowling

I believe my eleven year old brother would never speak to me again if I did not list the new Harry Potter book as July's Book of the Month.  If The Order of the Phoenix is worth its weight in gold, it is certainly one valuable book- it has taken some avid fans as long as two days to finish this massive tome! 

Seriously, though, the fifth installment of this series is unique because it is more than just a fantasy adventure story, it is a character study.

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