Books Read in 2010

This is the list of the 114 books I read in 2010, in the order that I read them. For an explanation of my rating system, see here.

There is not much rhyme or reason to whether I review a book or not.  Some of my favorite books go without a review, like both the Kate Atkinson books I read in 2010. 

If you have reviewed any of the book I reviewed, and you would like your review listed on mine, please leave a comment on my review post for that book with a link to your review and I will add it.

2010 BOOKS

The New Confessions by William Boyd (reviewed here; 4/5)

36 Yalta Boulevard by Olen Steingard (3.5/5)

One Fat Englishman by Kingsley Amis (reviewed here; 4/5) 

The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby (reviewed here; 4/5)

A Very Private Plot by William F. Buckley, Jr. (3/5)

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (3.5/5)

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris by Edmund White (reviewed here; 4/5)

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (4/5)

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (4/5)

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (reviewed here; 4/5)

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (3.5/5)

Eden Springs by Laura Kasischke (reviewed here; 3/5)

Women, Work & the Art of Savoir Faire by Mireille Guiliano (3/5)

The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (2.5/5)

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (4.5/5)

My Life in France by Julia Child (reviewed here) (4.5/5)

Homer and Langley by E. L. Doctorow (reviewed here) (2.5/5)

New Orleans Mourning by Julie Smith (3/5)

Portland Noir, edited by Kevin Sampsell (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (3/5)

Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster (reviewed here; 4/5)

An American Map by Anne-Marie Oomen (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

Titus Groan by Mervin Peake (reviewed here; 4/5)

Trading Up by Candace Bushnell (3/5)

Three Loves by A. J. Cronin (reviewed here; 3/5)

The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips (reviewed here; 4/5)

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (reviewed here; 4/5)

City Limits: Walking Portland's Boundary by David Oates (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (reviewed here; 5/5)

Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

Second Wind by Dick Francis (reviewed here; 3/5)

Leaving Brooklyn by Lynn Sharon Schwartz (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

The Marmot Drive by John Hersey (reviewed here; 3/5)

Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake (reviewed here; 4/5)

A Year in the World by Frances Mayes (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

A Small Fortune by Audrey Braun (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain, published by Words Without Borders Anthologies (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

L'Affaire by Diane Johnson (3/5)

Whose Body? by Dorthy L. Sayers (3.5/5)

Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney (5/5)

The Farmer's Daughter  by Jim Harrison (reviewed here; 3.5/5)


Citizen Vince by Jess Walter (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

The Red Tent  by Anita Diamant (2.5/5)

Corked by Kathryn Borel (reviewed here; 3/5)

The Grail: A Year Ambling & Shambling Through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in the Whole Wild World by Brian Doyle (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (3.5/5)

Indian Summer by John Knowles (reviewed here; 3/5)

Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oats (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

On Drink by Kingsley Amis (reviewed here; 3.5/5) 

Every Day Drinking by Kingsley Amis (reviewed here; 3/5)

How's Your Glass? by Kingsley Amis (reviewed here; 2.5/5)

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (reviewed here; 4/5)

Clown Girl by Monica Drake (reviewed here; 3/5)

Under Orders by Dick Francis (3/5)

A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks (reviewed here; 4/5)

Angler Management: The Day I Died While Fly Fishing and Other Essays by Jack Ohman (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

Cover Her Face by P. D. James (3.5/5)

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas (5/5)

Lunatic Express: Discovering the World . . . via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes by Carl Hoffman (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout (reviewed here; 3/5)

McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon by Joseph Mitchell (reviewed here; 4.5/5)*

Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell (reviewed here; 4/5)*

The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell (reviewed here; 4.5/5)*

Joe Gould’s Secret by Joseph Mitchell (reviewed here; 4/5)*

A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher (3/5)

Deaf Sentence by David Lodge (reviewed here; 4/5)

Small Island by Andrea Levy (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

Down River by John Hart (3.5/5)

Invitation to Provence by Elizabeth Adler (3/5)

Valley of the Dolls  by Jacqueline Susann (reviewed here; 2/5)

This is Water by David Foster Wallace (3/5)

The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby (reviewed here; 4/5)

The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt by Rulke Langer (reviewed here; 4/5)

Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories by Scott Nadelson (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

Every Bitter Thing by Leighton Gage (reviewed here; 3/5)

Venusberg by Anthony Powell (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

Housekeeping vs. The Dirt by Nick Hornby (3.5/5)

The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien (4/5)

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Letham (reviewed here; 3/5)

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (reviewed here; 4/5)

The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham (reviewed here; 4/5)

Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child (3.5/5)

Peaceful Places, New York City by Evelyn Kanter (reviewed here) (3.5/5)

Burmese Lessons: A True Love Story by Karen Connelly (reviewed here; 3/5)

The Truth About Obamacare by Sally pipes (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike (3.5/5)

Food Lover's Guide to Portland by Liz Crain (reviewed here; 4/5)

Echoes by Maeve Binchy (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

Proof by Dick Francis (3.5/5)

The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux (4.5/5)

The Case Has Altered by Martha Grimes (3/5)

The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike (3.5/5)

Enquiry by Dick Francis (3/5)

I Shall Not Want by Julia Spencer-Fleming (3.5/5)

Origin by Diana Abu-Jaber (reviewed here; 4/5)

Olive Kitteridge is Elizabeth Strout (reviewed here; 3/5)

Another Way the River Has by Robin Cody (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

A Geography of Secrets by Frederick Reuss (reviewed here; 3/5)

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

The Return of the King  by J. R. R. Tolkien (4/5)

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (reviewed here; 3.5/5)

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson (4/5)

Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake (reviewed here; 2/5)

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch (reviewed here; 4.5/5)

The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken (reviewed here; 4/5)

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (3/5)

The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos (notes here; 2.5/5)

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson (3.5/5)

Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser (3.5/5)

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte (3.5/5)

The Palace Council by Stephen Carter (3.5/5)


The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society  by Mary Ann Shaffer (reviewed here; 4/5)

NOTES

* Published in their entirety in a collection called Up in the Old Hotel, which also included five additional essays and two more short stories.

Review of the Day: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

The ever-perky Juliet Ashton is in a slump after the success of her book, Izzy Bickerstaff Goes to War, a collection of her popular, London-during-the-Blitz newspaper columns.  Looking for love – and an idea for a new book – leaves Juliet torn between a post-war fling with a dashing American publisher and her first-hand investigation of the German occupation of the Channel Island of Guernsey.


The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is told through a series of lively letters among the many characters, primarily Juliet, her editor, and a group of Guernsey residents who survived the war.  Juliet is delightful and witty without being cloying, the islanders are quirky and charming, and the supporting characters do their part as straight men to the comedians.

There are a few places where the epistolary structure teeters – where an important story point or key transition too perfectly arrives in the morning post, just in time to move the narrative forward.  But the book is so short and the story moves along at such a quick pace that it is easy to rush past without noticing these minor flaws.

Mary Ann Shaffer wrote the book after years of researching the not widely known history of Guernsey’s occupation during World War II.  She includes horrific details of the war, including slave labor, executions, collaboration, and concentration camps, but telling the story from the post-war perspective provides needed distance, and the humor and cheerfulness of her characters make the darker themes tolerable.  Shaffer’s niece, Annie Barrows, finished the book when her aunt became too ill to complete it.

OTHER REVIEWS

So Many Precious Book, So Little Time

(If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

Review of the Day: Titus Alone

Titus Alone is the final volume of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy about the 77th Earl of Gormenghast. In Titus Groan, the eponymous first volume, Peake created the elaborate world inside castle of Gormenghast and introduced readers to the extended Groan family and their court of retainers and hangers-on. Volume two, Gormenghast, picked up when Titus was a schoolboy, allowing Peake to focus on the antics of a mangy band of professors responsible for Titus’s education.

This last volume is not really an extension of the glorious saga of the first two books, but its own story of Titus’s adventures after he leaves Gormenghast. It is much shorter than the first two, giving Peake less room to develop the intricate descriptions and side stories that make the others so seductive.

The plot moves forward in fits and starts as Titus tries to find his way back to Gormenghast, or at least back to surefooted sanity. There are gaps in the narrative and some characters disappear quite abruptly.  And the story is emotionally ragged as Titus and several other characters are, for no clear reason, quick to anger and violence.  Scenes go instantly from potentially humorous to disastrous, and then the story moves off in a different direction, leaving the reader struggling to catch up.   

Overall, Titus Alone lacks the polish and delightful detail of the first volumes, which makes it a letdown.

OTHER REVIEWS

Bibliofreak

See also, The Voice of the Heart: The Working of Mervyn Peake's Imagination
by G. Peter Winnington

Judging from other reviews I’ve read, I’m not alone in my assessment. But there are some fans who very much enjoyed the third volume and make a case for its literary and entertainment value.

If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

NOTES

My review of Titus Groan is here. My review of Gormenghast is here.

The Gormenghast Trilogy shows up, in whole or in part, on Anthony Burgess's list of his favorite 99 novels and on the BBC's Big Read list.

Review of the Day: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

MODERATE SPOILER ALERT

(No details, but don't read if you want to avoid even a general description of the type of crime involved.)

Because I have a general rule about avoiding books about serial killers or that involve sex crimes, I probably would never have read Stieg Larsson's blockbuster The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  But my book club picked it, so I gave it a go.

And I am glad I did.  There was plenty of sexual violence, but it was not as graphic as I had feared. And the serial killer part was all in the past, or at least the past tense.  There were no grisly scenes of murders being committed right then and there.  That is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night. I've read more vivid details about murders in newspaper stories.

The story was much more complex than I had expected from the book's popularity.  Carl Mikael Blomkvist, a magazine writer and publisher in disgrace after being found guilty of criminal libel, accepts a job from an aged industrialist to solve the mystery of the disappearance of his grand niece Harriet years earlier.  Blomkvist eventually teams up with Lisbeth Salander, an ace investigator willing to bend the rules to get her answers.  The two discover that Harriet's disappearance is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the odd and evil Vanger family.  Meanwhile, Salander has her own problems to deal with and Blomkvist wants to redeem his reputation and learn the truth of his nemesis's financial and political shenanigans.  Whew!  That's a lot.  No wonder the book is almost 600 pages long.

The story has a lot in it that makes it even more interesting than a typical, well-written mystery with a complex plot and good pacing.  For one thing, it's Swedish.  Just the novelty of a Swedish book makes it compelling.  And then there's the whole thing that Larrson died after delivering the manuscripts for the three books in the series.  Rest in peace and all that, but I admit that the finite set appeals to the completist in me.

More substantively, Lisbeth Salander may be the most interesting detective in forever.  She's brilliant, amoral, physically tiny, socially inept, and tough as nails.  She's got the sexual morals of an alley cat, but then they all do.  Maybe it's a Swedish thing.  She has a tragic childhood history that was hinted at but not explained, leaving the backstory for the sequels.  I'm willing to risk the nasty crimes to learn more about her.

I'm glad I read it.  I will read the next two, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked a Hornet's Nest.  The audio books are supposed to be terrific, but I think I will stick with the paper books because I can read them faster than I can listen to them.  That way, I can move quickly through the creepy parts.

OTHER REVIEWS

The Blue Bookcase
The Scarlet Letter
Man of la Book
Bibliophiliac

(If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

NOTES

At 590 pages, this counts as one of my books for the Chunkster Challenge.

Review of the Day: Let the Great World Spin

 

 

Let the Great World Spin is a collection of short stories that form a novel centered around Philippe Petit’s 1974 high wire act between the Twin Towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center. Petit’s remarkable performance was real and paints a bittersweet, nostalgic backdrop for the fictional stories of a dozen or so seemingly disparate characters who all, it turns out, are connected.

Colum McCann won the 2009 National Book Award for this collection, the main storyline of which concerns an Irish monk on his own sacred mission to help a group of streetwalkers in Queens. A police roundup triggers a series of events that leads to tragedy but ends, ultimately, on a happier note. The monk, the prostitutes, his brother, his lover, a pair of campy would-be artists, a group of mothers mourning their sons dead in Vietnam, a criminal court judge, nascent computer hackers, and assorted others people the cast of this 1970s New York City variety show.

The collection is a little uneven: some of the various narrators’ voices are more authentic than others, several of the hand-offs seem overly choreographed, and the significance of Petit’s tightrope act as a unifying theme is vague. But overall, Let the Great World Spin is an exuberant and satisfying book.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

NOTES

This was my National pick for the Battle of the Prizes, American Version challenge.  I read Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout -- another collection of short-stories-as-novel -- for my Pulitzer prize pick. The challenge runs through the end of January 2011, so there is still time to sign up.

Review of the Day: Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge is Elizabeth Strout’s collection of short-stories-as-novel that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. The stories are set in the small town of Crosby, Maine, and crabby Olive Kitteridge makes an appearance – even if brief – in each of them.

The stories are well executed, creative, and peopled with varied but realistic characters. Individually, many of them are emotionally striking. Strout can really get to the nub of a story.

The problem is that as a collection, the stories are exhausting. Crosby may not be the bloodbath that Cabot Cove is, but there are plenty of suicides, grisly murders, violent and petty crimes, adultery, abuse, sickness, brutal deaths, and dysfunction to dampen any reader’s spirits. None of the characters are happy and there is precious little humor to leaven the depressing tales.

OTHER REVIEWS

Caroline Bookbinder (Carin liked it much more than I did and named it her 2009 Book of the Year)

(If you would like your review listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

NOTES

This was my Pulitzer pick for the Battle of the Prizes, American Version challenge.  I read Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann -- another collection of short-stories-as-novel -- for my National Award pick. The challenge runs through the end of January 2011, so there is still time to sign up.

I am working my way through all the Pulitzer winners.  For others doing the same, please visit my main Pulitzer Prize post and leave a comment with a link to your related posts.

Review of the Day: Origin

Origin is an emotional, atmospheric mystery set in the icy winter of Syracuse, New York. Crime lab technician Lena Dawson has an intuition for danger – and a keen sense of smell – that take her out of the fingerprint lab and to the heart of a series of mysterious baby deaths.

Lena’s talents, which she attributes to her incredibly unusual infant upbringing, brought her public acclaim in a prior case, but also earned the enmity and mistrust of several co-workers. She must battle office resistance as well as baffling circumstances to find the connection among the dead babies and solve what she knows are murders. But to do so, she must also find, and face, the answers about her own past.

This is Diana Abu-Jaber’s fourth book, but her first mystery, and she combines the best of literary fiction and genre writing. The plotting and pace of the mystery are very good, but Abu-Jaber does not stint on developing deeper, underlying ideas about personal identity, isolation, and dependency.

This is an all-around great book for any reader looking for a mystery with meat on the bones.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

NOTES

Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of two earlier novels, Arabian Jazz and Crescent, and a memoir called The Language of Baklava. She was born in Syracuse, New York, and now lives in Portland, where she teaches at Portland State University.

Review of the Day: A Geography of Secrets

Although called a novel, A Geography of Secrets by Frederick Reuss is really two separate novellas with common themes. The stories twine around each other but never really connect. Both are enticing character studies, with layered ideas about family, marriage, friendship, and responsibility.

The first story concerns an unnamed mapmaker seeking to discover the secrets of his father’s professional history. He delves into government archives and travels to Switzerland to learn if his father was a CIA operative undercover in the diplomatic corps. His search takes a personal turn that leads to a melancholy ending.

The second story follows a government defense analyst, Noel Leonard, facing  demons after his error causes the bombing of a school in Afghanistan. Wrestling with his conscience, but unable to discuss the situation honestly with his wife, supervisors, or his priest, Leonard’s marriage and career break under the strain. Whether they can be repaired is left uncertain in the end – which readers may find either tantalizingly or frustratingly ambiguous.

Comparisons to Graham Greene are justified as Reuss captures a similar sense of moody isolation and human frailty. His writing is elegant without getting in the way of the ideas. Some of his descriptions are particularly captivating:

I felt a pang of shame for the seedy atmosphere that had overtaken the room. . . . It was also Nicole, distraughtly puffing away at her cigarettes, the disorder of the apartment, the dreary winter weather, the shabbiness of lives foreshortened by cocktails and weltschmerz.

That is terrific. "Lives foreshortened by cocktails and weltschmerz" is a novel in itself.

Some readers may be disappointed with the soft landing of the ending, or that the two stories remain separate. But for the writing and the levels of insight plumbed in the stories, the book is well worth reading.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

Review: Another Way the River Has

To say that Another Way the River Has is a collection of essays inspired by the Pacific Northwest is both an overstatement and inadequate. The essays are inspired by the northwest corner of one Northwest state, Robin Cody’s Oregon, but they are broader in scope than their geographic setting.

Cody writes about gyppo loggers, boat builders, Coast Guard rescue crews, sheep farmers, rodeo cowboys, Indian fishermen, birders, and his own experiences as a coach, umpire, and school bus driver. The stories are fascinating in and of themselves. And Cody uses them to mull on larger topics, such as man’s impact on the natural world – and vice versa – and how people and nature adapt to life’s unfairness.

Many of the pieces were previously published in Northwest Magazine in The Sunday Oregonian and other regional publications, although several appear here for the first time.

Because they were written over a span of 25 years and for different audiences, the collection has a bit of a hodgepodge feel to it. It is easy to stumble over some of the transitions, such as the one between “Deaf Basketball,” a quirky story about refereeing a game for the Oregon State School for the Deaf, and “Hideaway Slough,” a mystically personal reflection on solitary boat camping in a sleepy Columbia River backwater. Perhaps the contrast is intentional, but it can be a little distracting.

Cody is probably best known for his popular coming-of-age novel, Ricochet River, and he won the Oregon Book Award for Voyage of a Summer Sun. The essays in Another Way the River Has further showcase Cody’s keen awareness of what makes his corner of Oregon endlessly fascinating.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

NOTES

Published by OSU Press.

Review: Food Lover's Guide to Portland

 

Liz Crain tapped into Portland’s do-it-yourself ethic and agricultural abundance to write her Food Lover's Guide to Portland, an informative and inspiring handbook on the bustling food scene in this corner of the Pacific Northwest.

Because several print and on-line sources cover Portland’s restaurants and bars, Crain focused, for the most part, on the many producers and purveyors who supply the food and beverages so enjoyed by Rose City’s food lovers. She covers food, drinks, and general resources, providing the inside scoop on bakeries, cheese makers and mongers, chocolatiers, ethnic markets, brewers, coffee roasters, distillers, cooking classes, farmers markets, and much, much more.

While not concentrating on restaurants and bars, Crain does follow some of her favorite ingredients to the tables where they are served, providing lists of recommended “Go To Spots” for certain categories, such as cheese service, noodles, food carts, spicy food, vegetarian, brewpubs, and cocktails.

She also includes several “sidebar” pieces focusing on the people and products that make Portland unique. She introduces bartenders who infuse their own flavored spirits, chefs who butcher their own meat, pickle fanatics, miso makers, and others who she describes as having “a passion for food made the hard way.”

There is a lot packed into this small volume. If you live in Portland, are planning a visit, or just like foodie books, this is the one for you.

NOTES

My review of Liz Crain is here.

OTHER REVIEWS

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Review of the Day: The Truth About Obamacare

In The Truth About Obamacare, Sally C. Pipes examines the details of the new health care law and tries to show what its implementation will mean for individuals, doctors, and the country. She argues that, contrary to supporters’ promises, the new program will make health care more expensive, limit options, lead to deteriorating medical care, and weaken America’s already frail economy.

Pipes is the president of the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank based in San Francisco. In the debate over health care, she has definitely chosen her side, championing market-based reforms such as allowing the interstate purchase of health insurance and revising the tax code to encourage individually-purchased, instead of employer-provided, insurance. But Pipes is no ranting demagogue. She bases her arguments on the language of the bill and lots of research rather than emotional rhetoric.

Pipes's prognosis of health care under the new rules is grim.  However, she closes the book with an optimistic section on alternate proposals for solving America's health care problems.  She argues for repealing the recently-enacted statute and then focusing federal policy on encouraging increased individual purchase of health insurance, expanding Health Savings Accounts, and establishing a voucher system for the uninsured who cannot afford insurance and who do not already qualify for existing government programs.

The book is aimed at a general audience and, although dependent on some pretty dry statistics and detailed research, is readable and accessible. Those opposed to the new health care laws will definitely want to bone up on the subject with Pipes’s book. Proponents also may want to read the book to better understand some of the rational arguments against the new system.

OTHER REVIEWS

David Bandow's review from the Washington Times

Here is my review of The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen's Guide, also by Sally Pipes

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Review of the Day: Lunatic Express

Lunatic Express: Discovering the World . . . via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes by Carl Hoffman.  (This review was first published here, in the Internet Review of Books.)


Carl Hoffman is a travel junkie. He hits the road like some men hit the bottle. His career as a journalist and author had taken him to the far edges of the world, writing about life aboard a chemical tanker in the Atlantic, flying missionaries in New Guinea, reindeer herders in Siberia, and driving the Baja 1000.

Hoffman came to crave these adventures the way any addict craves his drug of choice. As he describes it:

Home became even more strange to return to. The two lives were jarring[,] but I didn’t tell anyone how difficult it was becoming to straddle these two worlds. I was ever more open to the world and ever more closed at home . . . until the time that I looked forward to most was walking down that Jetway, rather than coming home.

Finally, what looked like a typical mid-life crisis blossomed into full-on travel withdrawals -- Hoffman became physically ill, but with no diagnosable malady. After a year of feeling as if he had “a simmering flu,” he was finally cured by spending two months on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, writing about the search for Amelia Earhart.

Not surprisingly, Hoffman’s travel jones took a toll on his marriage. Back from the Earhart assignment, now separated from his wife, he was “conscious for the first time of a deep unhappiness, profoundly disconnected from the life I’d thought unshakable.” He decided that a real blowout of a travel bender was the answer to his problems, and the idea for The Lunatic Express was born. Hoffman wanted to travel around the world using only the most perilous means of public transportation -- the statistically most dangerous airlines, overcrowded ferries, treacherous buses, and perilous trains -- and write a book about his journey.

He sought to experience travel not as a holiday but as the necessary evil that most of the people in the world experienced.  Hearkening back to the French roots of the word travel, he described this necessary evil as “a simple daily act of moving from one place to another on the cheapest conveyance possible” but “still a punishing, unpredictable, and sometimes deadly work of travail. ” Hoffman spent five months traveling from his home in Washington, D.C., on a route that took him to Havana, then to South America, Africa, Indonesia, India, Afghanistan, China, Mongolia, and Russia, before a final leg on a Greyhound bus from Los Angeles back to home.

Each chapter opens with a snippet of a news story about a travel disaster -- airplanes crashing into mountains, ferries sinking, buses skidding off cliffs -- elated to the place or particular conveyance featured in that section of the book. Obviously, Hoffman survived to write the book, but the very real risks associated with his trek make his descriptions even more riveting. It is interesting enough to read about a rickety, overcrowded bus driving overnight through the Andes. But the tale becomes harrowing after reading of other buses along that route that plunged into 1,600-foot-deep gorges, killing everyone on board.

Hoffman’s clear, journalistic style is immediately engaging, depending as it does on descriptive details instead of purple metaphor. Readers feel the muggy heat of the Amazon; the smoky grit of the Indian train; the bone-jarring jolt of a propane truck driving off-road across the Mongolian steppe; and every rock hard, joint-numbing, third-class seat, bench, platform, and floor Hoffman tried to sleep on. Experiencing Hoffman’s travels second-hand will be uncomfortable adventure enough for most people.

The book concentrates on transport, as Hoffman rushes from train station to taxi to ferry dock to auto rickshaw to bus terminal. But his descriptions of the world beyond this series of conveyances are some of the best parts, including stories of his visits to a Brazilian gold mining barge, a bird market in Kabul, and this “Dickensian” auto garage in Nairobi:

Block after block of mud passageways littered with garbage and upended vehicles and men sleeping on piles of tires and the sparks of welders and the smell of smoke and oil and diesel and Bondo. It was one lane wide, with two-way traffic. It was hot and glaring, a place of burning fires and braziers and hammering and music, and the mud was so dark, so black, so viscous, it was like oil. It was the worst and the most compelling place I had ever seen.

Hoffman would have done better had he stuck to writing about the world outside his bus windows and spent less time gazing at his own navel. No matter how compelling his personal quest seemed to him, whether he was going to patch things up with his wife and learn to be content at home or continue roaming the world in search of distracting escapades is the sort of banal, existential conflict that is only interesting to the person conflicted.

Trying to make his personal angst relevant to the larger story only made things worse. The more Hoffman agonized over his feelings of isolation, his inability to bond with his friends, and his marginalization of his family, the more his anxieties seemed petty in comparison to the daily efforts of the people he traveled with. His conclusion -- that “I had to forgive myself and start again” -- is a particularly awkward way to wind up a book supposedly about the millions of people who face danger daily and who do not have the luxury of a fresh start.

But when Hoffman isn’t fretting about himself, The Lunatic Express is a terrific ride.

Review of the Day: Burmese Lessons

Burmese Lessons: A True Love Story  is Karen Connelly's very personal story of traveling to Burma and working with Burmese refugees in Thailand. She starts out with the idea of writing some articles about artists and political prisoners in Burma, then broadens her scope to write a book.

While in Thailand, Connelly fell in love with a Burmese dissident leader. She uses their personal relationship as the framework for her larger story about the struggle for democracy in Burma and the hardships faced by the refugees. But her book is still personal.  It is the story of a Western woman's adventure in Burma and what she learned -- as much about herself as the Burmese people.

The only weakness to this fascinating story is that it lacks defining context early on. What I knew about Burma is written on the menu at Burma Super Star, but I don't think I am alone in my ignorance.  Burma, its history, and even its geography are not commonly known to most Western readers.  The book would benefit from a map and a brief explanation early on of Burma's political history. Connelly includes just such a paragraph eventually -- but not until about two-thirds of the way through the book.

Likewise, the book lacks temporal context. Connelly never explains that the story takes place in 1996 and she further obscures that fact by writing about most of the action in the present tense. This makes the book more immediately engaging, but is less historically honest.

This lack of context does not detract from Connelly's writing or her story, but it is distracting. 

Connelly is a poet and novelist, which shows in her eye for beauty and drama.  While not a thorough analysis of Burma's history and politics, Burmese Lessons is an absorbing memoir.

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NOTES

I got this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers' program.  One more I can cross off that list.

Review of the Day: The Fortress of Solitude

 

The Fortress of Solitude is the story of two friends, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude, growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s. Dylan is white, Mingus is black; both are growing up without mothers. Dylan’s father is an abstract artist who views himself as a sellout for painting cover art for sci-fi novels. Mingus’s father was the front-man for a Motown harmony group, but spends his days getting high and dreaming of a comeback.

Jonathan Lethem packs so much into the story that there are times reading it is like trying to drink from a firehose of 1970s culture. Dylan spends his days collecting comic books, perfecting street games, being “yoked” by older kids for his lunch money, and trying to hold his own with graffiti taggers, including Mingus. Drugs, sex, race, music, gentrification, crime, art – its all there, but all through the eyes of a kid.

The book has the multiple storylines and hard edge of a Don DiLillo novel, but without the unrelenting grimness because it is told from the point of view of a child who still has some optimism. The best thing about the book is how Lethem perfectly captures the half-perceptions and half-understandings that make a child’s memory.

In the second half of the book, the story flags. It is 1999 and Dylan is living in Berkeley. Mingus is in prison, where he has been off and on since turning to crack. Dylan fills in the details of the years gone by, but this part of the book all builds to a harebrained scheme to get Dylan out of prison.

Unfortunately, where the first part of the book is incredible in the sense of being amazing, the second part is incredible in the sense of not being believable. Dylan uses a “magic” ring he had since childhood to sneak into the prison, with tragic consequences. The ring made sense in the first part, where its magical powers could be explained as the alcoholic delusions of the derelict who passed it on to Dylan, or the fantasies of Dylan and Mingus who wanted to be superheroes. But when Dylan actually uses the ring to become invisible, the story takes a jarring turn to magical realism.

For readers willing to take whatever a story dishes out, the second half could be as entertaining as the first. But for those not willing to suspend disbelief to the point of accepting magic rings and invisibility, the ending will be a letdown.

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NOTES

I listened to the unabridged audio version of this book, which I suspect made me like it more than I would have had I read all 500+ pages. The narrator did a terrific job with all the voices and brought the kaleidoscope images into focus.

Review: Rebecca

Rebecca is a book that I had to give myself over to completely in order enjoy it. The whole experience depends on buying into the moldering, gothic suspense of it all.

Unfortunately, this requires putting up with the unnamed heroine being a hopeless ninny for the first two-thirds of the story. But once I set aside her fear of every person she encounters and her inability to talk to her own husband and went with the flow of the story, I was eventually swept away.

At the center of the story is Manderley, the seaside mansion of Max de Winter. The house is as much a character in the book as the people, providing atmosphere and an elaborate setting with closed-off wings, back passages, dark woods, and hidden coves. The house and all it stands for also motivates the characters and leads, eventually, to their undoing.

When brooding Max brings his new young bride to Manderley, both are haunted by his beautiful, vivacious first wife Rebecca – he in memory, the bride in imagination. By the time both shake loose from Rebecca’s beyond-the-grave grip, it is too late.

Even when the book is frustrating, it is admirable in its relentless adherence to the genre. Every detail layers on the suffocating suspense, from the spooky skull-headed housekeeper, to the relentless summer heat, to the rat-gnawn day bed in the boathouse. Daphne du Maurier created a perfect neo-gothic thriller in Rebecca.

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NOTES

Rebecca is on the Radcliffe Top 100 list. This was the first of three book I read for theDaphne du Maurier Challenge hosted by Chris at book-a-rama.

Review of the Day: The Farmer's Daughter

 

In The Farmer's Daughter, Jim Harrison returns to his signature three-novella format. In addition to the title story, this volume includes Brown Dog Redux, the fourth Harrison novella featuring his iconoclastic hero, and The Games of the Night, a gothic werewolf tale.

The Farmer’s Daughter is the weakest of the three, which is too bad because, creatively, it is the most courageous. Harrison takes his usual themes of rugged, outdoorsy, animal-loving individualism coupled with an auto-didactic appreciation for literature and applies them to the story of a 15-year old girl in Montana. Harrison pulls it off better than most would, but a little too much of the septuagenarian curmudgeon shows through to make Sarah’s character completely believable.

Brown Dog Redux picks up the story of B.D. in Canada, where he has fled with his stepdaughter to keep the girl from the soul-killing state school in which she was enrolled because of her fetal alcohol syndrome. B.D. is always half in trouble and completely charming.

The Games of the Night is an old-fashioned sort of horror story about a man who, as a young boy, had been infected with “zoonotic” diseases when bit by a wolf pup. Trying to live with his monthly “spells” involving ferocious appetites, strength, and sleeplessness, he wanders through Europe before seeking solace in the arms of his first love. It is quite a yarn and one that Harrison handles with dramatic elegance.

NOTES

Jim Harrison is one of my favorite authors. I have read all his prose books, fiction and nonfiction. He is one of the few authors whose books I reread.  His novel, The Road Home, is on my Top 10 list.

This review was first published in the Internet Review of Books. 

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Review of the Day: Venusberg

Anthony Powell is best known for his 12-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, which follows a loose group of acquaintances from school days on the eve of WWI, through service in WWII and subsequent careers. The plots of the individual novels are less important than the entwining of these characters as they move in and out of each other’s lives over the years.

The shape and ideas of Dance, and Powell’s dry humor, are visible in his earlier novel Venusberg. Although the plot is different – a young journalist is sent to cover the political unrest in a newly-minted Balkan state – the book similarly depends more on characters than action. Lushington’s circle includes an old school chum who stole his lover, a penniless Russian count, the seductive wife of an eminent professor, a fake count selling beauty products, a grandiose and loquacious valet, and a dozen others swirling around the diplomatic and political scene in the new capital.

Powell is content in Venusberg to observe the antics and misfortunes of this crowd of characters, while in Dance he shows more sympathy in fully developing each storyline. Still, his descriptions can by pithy masterpieces, summing up whole lifetimes in a few, deft sentences, such as his description of Lucy, Lushington’s former love:

Not long after the [divorce] decree was made absolute it became apparent that she was more than remarkably good-looking. She showed signs of becoming a film star. But she was a girl who felt that life should be full of meaning and she broke with her second husband, a film producer, because he adapted one of the minor classics too freely.

The story arc in Venusberg is none too steep – the plot is bracketed by Lushington’s arrival in and departure from the Baltic capital and pretty much confined to a series of comic scenes and character sketches. It is a book probably most appreciated by Powell fans, but could serve as a quick introduction to this great author.

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Review of the Day: Every Bitter Thing

Every Bitter Thing is the fourth book in Leighton Gage’s captivating mystery series featuring Chief Inspector Mario Silva of the Brazilian Federal Police. In this book, Silva and his team are faced with a series of brutal murders with the same m.o. – the victims were all shot once, then beaten to death. Despite the creepy cover, it is a fast-paced who-done-it, not a scary thriller.

Solving the mystery requires Silva to first find the connection between the victims – not so easy, since they range from a respected professor who writes popular “scientific” books about sexuality, to a violent thug recently released from prison, to a flight attendant laying over at an airport hotel. The search takes the team to several Brazilian locales, including Rio de Janeiro and Holambra, a city of Dutch immigrants famous for its lavish cut flower exposition.

Leighton does an excellent job of blending factual information about Brazil into the story. His touch is light, so the reader gets a good idea of the cultural and geographic setting without being distracted by travelogue.

He has also built a great cast of characters who all add to the narrative. There’s a hard-boiled sidekick, a good looking younger cop they all call Babyface, a medical examiner who is the girlfriend of one of the detectives, an unlikeable climber of a supervisor, and even a Miami policeman buddy willing to do stateside legwork. Gage alludes to the backstory about these people just enough to pique interest in reading the earlier books in the series, but without confusing the present story.

Gage's writing is lean and crisp.  He describes enough to set the scenes, but depends mostly on dialog to move the story ahead at a good, steady clip.  He has a good ear -- the characters speak realistically, but with individual voices.

One letdown is the plotting, which is pretty straightforward. Silva and his cohorts go from one murder scene to the next and carefully piece the clues together until they solve the mystery. There is a bit of a twist, but overall the story would be more exciting with a few more blind alleys, false leads, and conflicting theories. For example, no one ever wonders why the victims were shot first and then beaten. Were they tortured for information? Was this method the signature of a psychotic serial killer? No one on Silva’s team asks these kinds of questions. They just march forward, connecting the dots.

Also, no one on Silva’s team is ever really in any danger. They are police facing bad guys, but there are no immediate threats or near misses. The book would benefit from a couple of nail biting scenes.

At fewer than 300 pages, the story has room for fluffing to address these minor weaknesses.  Still, Every Bitter Thing packs quite a bit of entertainment between its covers.

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Review of the Day: Saving Stanley

Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories by Scott Nadelson is a terrific collection of eight interrelated stories about Daniel Brickman and his family. The stories move back and forth in time and focus on different family members, eventually piecing together a family history from the grandfather’s Communist youth in Leningrad, the parents’ early years of marriage, and Daniel’s adolescence, to Daniel’s own marriage.

The stories that focus on Daniel’s mother Hannah are the strongest, starting with the title piece in which she fanatically nurses the family’s old, sick cat Stanley. Making Stanley the temporary but absolute center of her life causes Hannah to reconsider her relationships with academic colleagues, her husband, and her children. The later stories, “Why Not?” and “Hannah of Troy,” fill in details of Hannah’s years as the young, sometimes overlooked, wife of a scientist.

Many of the stories deal with Daniel’s troubled relationship with his older brother Jared. The best is “With Equals Alone” in which Daniel panics about starting high school with Jared off at college and Jared, uninterested in his own pending high school graduation, spends all his time and energy preparing for a local body building contest. The strain between the brothers is palpable, typical, and humorous – at least to outsiders.

“Kosher” and “Young Radicals” are the funniest of the stories. Daniel is a young adult in each, busy rebelling against his parents’ suburban life. In “Kosher,” he gets a shady job fundraising for the Robowski Fund for the Disabled – a charity benefiting only Helen Robowski and her sole employee. In “Young Radicals,” Daniel reconnects with his grandfather with vague plans for a college thesis on early Soviet history. His plans go awry when faced with the reality of his grandfather as a Florida retiree clash with his image of a fiery Russian laborer.

One weakness in the collection is that Nadelson does not elaborate on how the brother’s got along after they grow up. Also, the adult brothers, as characters, started to conflate. They were totally different people when they were young, and they remained factually different as adults, but what went on in their heads started to look the same. In “Anything You Need,” Jared and his girlfriend are having difficulties and he ponders what she wants that he can’t provide. In “Hannah of Troy,” Daniel has pre-wedding jitters and wonders what his fiancée wants that he can’t provide. With only eight stories in the collection and only one featuring Jared as an adult, it is a shame there wasn’t a broader range.

But that minor quibble shouldn’t keep readers away. Nadelson’s writing is fresh and clear and brings the Brickman family to life. Although only 212 pages, Saving Stanley packs the wallop of a long novel.

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NOTES

Saving Stanley won the Oregon Book Award for Short Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Scott Nadelson teaches creative writing at Willamette University and lives in Salem, Oregon.

Review of the Day: The Idea of Perfection

There is a small irony in the fact that Kate Grenville won the Orange Prize – awarded to the “best” novel in English -- for a book that celebrates the imperfection in all things. The Idea of Perfection examines how people cope with their own imperfections and handle the imperfections in others.

The story focuses on Harley Savage, a part-time curator and textile artist who comes to Karakarook, New South Wales, to help the town starts a Pioneer and Heritage Museum. The seams in her art quilts are intentionally askew, reflecting, perhaps, her views of how people relate and life works.

Harley fancies she has a “dangerous streak,” so has walled herself off from relationships with other people, including her own children and even the stray dog that follows her home. Readers learn early on that her husband’s suicide turned her reclusive. But when the grisly details emerge, social seclusion seems like a mild reaction – it’s a wonder she wasn’t institutionalized. Grenville did not have to go quite so far to make the story work.

With other points, Grenville has a lighter touch. Douglas Cheeseman is the sympathetic anti-hero of the piece. An engineer sent to Karakarook to replace the old, Bent Bridge (there’s the imperfection idea again), Douglas bumbles through every social encounter, barely able to talk, consumed by his self doubt. He is drawn to Harley but, in the awkwardness of their meetings, is all but incapable of moving the affair forward.

Side stories amplify the theme of imperfection. Primary among these is the mesmerizing story of Felicity Porcelline and her relationship with the town’s butcher. Felicity is obsessed with perfection – keeping her house spotless, her face unmarred by wrinkle or freckle, and her interactions with the townsfolk above reproach. Things are definitely not what they seem, however, and it turns out that this seemingly perfect woman is the least perfect of all.

Felicity’s story and some of the other digressions do not mesh with the overall plot. They seemed tacked on or laid over the top. Rather than lessening the quality of the book, these misalignments underscore Grenville’s theme that perfection is impossible and imperfection should be embraced.

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