Dead Iron

Dead Iron
by Devon Monk
ROC, 2011.  337 pgs. Science Fiction

What better way to end Beach Reading Season than with steampunk and werewolves Out West.  First book in Monk's The Age of Steam series, Dead Iron begins the story of Cedar Hunt, a handsome and intelligent fellow who once enjoyed a university career with his family, a wife and daughter and beloved brother Wil. But those days are gone and Cedar labors under a curse which makes him a wolf at the full moon, a day before and after. Master of 'matics, Shard LaFel, whose supernatural origins are cleverly concealed behind the veneer of a railroad man, determines all kinds of wickedness against the people of Hallelujah, Oregon, but poses as their progressive friend until almost all is lost.  Cedar, the not-quite widow Lindson and her not-quite-dead husband Jeb, and the mysterious Madder brothers must all stand against the fell Lafel and The Strange or not just Hallelujah but the whole earth may be devastated by the emergency of horrible creatures from the dark places of the earth.

LW

Snow Hunters

Snow Hunters
by Paul Yoon
Simon & Schuster, 2013.  194 pgs.  Fiction

Snow Hunters has appeared on several Best Books of the Month list, and it is beautifully well written, tender, and memorable.  It is also so melancholy you may want to fall face down into a pan of brownies right after you've read it. Yohan, a prisoner of war after the Korean"conflict," elects to go to Brazil rather than be repatriated to the North. U.N. workers help him find passage and arrange work for him with a Japanese tailor, also an exile. Kiyoshi is a good man, kind and patient. As he goes about his work, Yohan meets a few others--Peixe, the gardener at a nearby church, and two street children, Santi, a young boy, and Bia, an older girl. Yohan feels drawn to become closer to these people, his friends, but is constrained by the horrors of his past--parents dead before he was sixteen, his conscription into the North Korean army, horror upon  horror after that, including the blinding and then the loss of his only friend. Snow Hunters is richly redolent of the beauty of the Brazilian coastline, of the gentle kindness of good people, and when Yohan is finally able ask someone to stay with him, and perhaps to love him, the novel finds its lovely conclusion. If you have ever wished everyone would just leave you alone, this book is a cautionary tale. No one would want to be as alone as Yohan is for way too long.

LW

The Sound of Things Falling

The Sound of Things Falling
by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
Penguin, 2013. 270 pgs. Fiction

Lots of things--and people--fall in Juan Gabriel Vasquez's extraordinary new novel about the Colombian drug trade and those who were crushed and ruined by even a tangential relationship to it.
Antonio Yammara is a young law professor in Bogota when he becomes acquainted with Ricardo Laverde, a graying husk of a man who has recently been released from prison. As they play pool together, Ricardo reveals bits of his life: his past as a pilot, the existence of a wife living in the States, whom he hopes will come back home. Though Antonio steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that Ricardo is a friend, he cares enough for him that he tries to pull him back when two black-clad men on a motorcycle race towards them on the street:  Ricardo is killed, and Antonio is gravely wounded. When he begins to recover, Antonio relentlessly seeks to understand Ricardo's life as a means for saving his own. The Sound of Things Falling is a book charged with terrible ironies, and is memorably, beautifully well-written. Juan Gabriel Vasquez has almost instantly become a brilliant light in the firmament of Latin American literature, and this book's lyrical, unsettling text should stay with its readers a good long while.  Some graphic sex and language.

LW

Life After Life

Life after Life
by Kate Atkinson
Little, Brown and Company, 2013. 529 pgs. Fiction.

Ursula Todd no sooner dies than she is reborn on a snowy day in February, 1910. Sometimes she dies at birth, during the London Blitz, or by suicide, yet her life is always reset to the beginning. Apart from the fact that she (occasionally) survives two world wars, her lives are generally unremarkable: she may marry, once has a child, frequently works for the civil service, and almost always has an affair with an admiral. As she accrues more and more lifetimes of experience, Ursula gradually becomes aware of her strange, never-ending life, which adds a depth and urgency to her attempts to find purpose.

 Life After Life can feel like a writer’s experiment, a way for Atkinson to exhaust the possibilities of a character, but it is also a deeply affecting attempt to answer fundamental questions about life. If we were to live again and again, would we eventually get it right? And what does ‘right’ mean for a given individual? Atkinson doesn’t provide a straightforward answer to these problems, but her manner of fictionalizing philosophic and religious claims proves much more thought-provoking than an extracted quote or treatise ever could. Perfect for book clubs and reading groups.

-JM

The Down and Dirty Guide to Camping With Kids

The Down and Dirty Guide to Camping With Kids: How to Plan Memorable Family Adventures & Connect Kids to Nature
By Helen Olsson
Roost Books, 2012. 254 pgs. Nonfiction

This is a great camping guide with a focus on caring for your kids in the wilderness.  It has sections on what gear you'll need, food to prepare (including recipes), hygiene and safety, as well as many ideas for crafts, games, and activities.  Each section comes with checklists so you can make sure you've remembered to pack everything, and the book is scattered with helpful "smart tips" that the author has picked up from experience - such as keeping a pair of sandals by the tent door for any midnight trips to the bathroom.  "Nobody, especially a six-year-old, wants to be tying laces in the dead of night."

I originally only intended to peruse this book and scan the sections that I was interested in.  But the author's friendly and playful voice lured me in until I ended up reading it from cover to cover, even laughing out loud a few times.  "You want the kitchen to be as far from the tent as possible (within reason), because you don't want your tent smelling like blueberry cobbler.  Bears love blueberry cobbler."  There is a lot of good insight and experience here specific to camping with kids that you won't get from a normal camping book, and it's fun to read to boot.

BHG

Far Far Away

Far Far Away
by Tom McNeal
Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.  369 pgs. Young Adult

In some respects, this is a dreadful story, grim in the manner of Grimm's original fairy tales.  And, in fact, Jacob Grimm is the ghostly narrator of the deeply affecting story of Jeremy Johnson Johnson.  Jacob is trapped at his death in the Zwischenraum ("the space between"), unable to pass on to rejoin his beloved brother Wilhelm in death, or to partake of the blessings of Heaven. He must stay because of the Thing Undone, something he still must accomplish though he doesn't know what it is.  He does know that it involves staying with Jeremy and somehow protecting him from The Finder of Occasions, an agent of evil who lives somewhere near but whose identity is unknown. Jeremy can hear Jacob--no one else can--and the interplay of their lives, Jacob's finished and Jeremy's beginning, creates many poignant moments. Interwoven with that tenderness is a terrifying suspense. The reader knows, well before Jacob or Jeremy who the Finder of Occasions is, though the depth of his evil is breathtaking even sort of knowing what is coming. Far Far Away bids well to become a modern classic, a timeless new story in the beguiling tradition of the timeless tales of the Brothers Grimm themselves.  I defy anyone to read the last page of this story without at least tearing up, and maybe crying outright.

LW

Breaking Point

Breaking Point
by C. J. Box
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2013.  367 pgs. Mystery

Joe Pickett, Box's Wyoming Fish and Game officer, heads for the hills in this story of a man apparently driven to homicide by the inexplicable and punitive excesses of the Environmental Protection Agency. Some of this narrative may seem far-fetched, but Butch Roberson's story is based on the true story of  the Sackett family in Idaho who battled the EPA to a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in their favor. In any case, Roberson is on the run and Joe is picked to head up a posse of EPA agents who don't know a stirrup from a saddle horn. Trying to track Butch, keep the greenhorns safe, and outrun a forest fire, Joe has plenty on his mind, especially when he finds his man and a different story than everyone supposes to be true. Box does his usual fine job of evoking and describing the Mountain West, as well as telling a ripsnorting but also thought-provoking tale.

LW

    

Cotton Tenants: Three Families

Cotton Tenants:  Three Families
by James Agee, photographs by Walker Evans
Melville House, 2013.  224 pgs. Nonfiction

James Agee and Walker Evans were commissioned in 1936 to write an article about Alabama tenant farmers for Fortune magazine. This book is that article which was not printed at the time it was written, probably because it was not the best fit for so overtly capitalistic a magazine.  Whatever the reason, it is our good fortune now that the manuscript has been rediscovered and printed. Agee is one of the great prose stylists of American literature, with a meager output because of his untimely death. In this book, he reveals the plight of white tenant farmers (blacks were even worse off) who worked themselves literally to death for the landowners for whom they did all the work and went shares or chargebacks. Walker Evans' classic black and white pictures perfectly illustrate Agee's text mostly dispassionately written so as to highlight the plight of people without decent clothing, with never enough food, with no doctor available to them or their children (seven kids dead in one family). Occasionally a bitter irony breaks through Agee's austere presentation, and one feels to agree with his "thesis statement for the work":  "A civilization which for any reasons puts a human life at a disadvantage; or a civilization which can exist only by putting human life at a disadvantage; is worthy neither of the name nor of continuance."

LW

A Serpent's Tooth

A Serpent's Tooth
by Craig Johnson
Viking, 2013.  335 pgs. Mystery

In Johnson's latest Walt Longmire adventure, a "lost boy" kicked out of a polygamous compound of the Apostolic Church of the Lamb shows up in Longmire's jurisdiction, followed closely by his bodyguard, a man who thinks he is Orrin Porter Rockwell. Both wind up in jail watching an old video of My Friend Flicka, the only movie they have ever seen, but apparently they are there on the revolving door plan because they keep leaving and getting recaptured or moseying back on their own.  In the meantime, the neighbors and the Sheriff's Department are having run-ins with Cord's church folk until bit by terrible bit it becomes clear that the Apostolic Church compound is mostly a front for something much more grim and deadly. Johnson takes no particular pains to separate actual Mormon theology from offshoot dingbattyness, but if you can divide the wheat from the chaff as you go along, this is a really good story.

LW

Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

Italian Ways:  On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo
by Tim Parks
W. W. Norton, 2013.  261 pgs.  Nonfiction

Tim Parks takes to the rails in search of the Italian character in this entertaining, thought-provoking travel narrative. A British expatriate who has lived and taught in Italy for over thirty years, Parks has just enough distance to see his adopted country clearly, from the outside in, as it were, but also to share his love for (most of) the characters he meets.  And characters they are, from the train conductor (capotreno) who refuses to accept an online ticket because it isn't printed out, to the elderly pensioner who claims to have lost her ticket to Rome and leaves the train screaming, only to climb aboard the next train and work the same trick until there she is--Roma.  Italian Ways is a rich and revealing delight of a book.  What a great way to travel--Mr. Parks endures the heat, the crowds, the broken ticket machines and incomprehensible schedules, so that we armchair travelers can enjoy a great book in peace and quiet.

LW

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
by Neil Gaiman
William Morrow, 2013. 181 pgs. Fiction

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a beautiful piece of storytelling that feels as much a dream to the reader as the narrator. An unnamed man finds himself driving to the end of his childhood home’s lane and staring into a duck pond he also knows is an ocean. So he begins to remember his long-ago encounter with the Hempstock women, who have lived longer than the earth and can snip time out of reality with sewing tools.

Neil Gaiman is masterful at creating an atmosphere inside the reader’s mind by carefully manipulating every detail of language, plot, and setting. It is one of those books that you can’t even remember having read afterwards, you can only remember the feelings and images that floated through your head. The book leaves the impression of almost reachable magic and a reality old, fragile, and malleable. Highly recommended.

-JM

Reboot

Reboot
By Amy Tintera
HarperTeen, 2013, 365 pgs. Young Adult

Wren rebooted after being dead for 178 minutes. The reboots are controlled by HARC and used as soldiers to keep the humans under control. She is one of the strongest and most ruthless reboots and has never questioned all the people she has had to capture or kill over the years. But that all changes when she starts to train Caleb-22, a reboot that was dead for such a short amount of time that he still has many of his human traits and doesn't want to accept the way things are.

There were some elements of the story that didn't really add up and the writing had some flaws but it was a quick enough read that I was able to overlook a lot. It was also pretty violent so if that bothers you, you may want to steer clear. Readers who enjoyed Divergent may like this book, just be prepared for it to focus more on the inexplicable romance between the two main characters; mixed in with a lot of blood, pain, broken bones, and death.

AL

Wool 1-5

Wool 1-5

by Hugh Howey

Simon and Schuster, 2013. 508 pgs. Science Fiction

 

Whenever anyone talks about successful self-published books the ubiquitous Shades of Grey comes into the conversation, but its time another self-published title took over: Wool by Hugh Howey. In Wool’s post-apocalyptic world humans live in underground silos, controlled by the fear of being sent outside into the toxic air for committing minor crimes. Howey opens with the first rule of the silo: anyone who expresses a desire to go outside gets their wish. The silo’s Sheriff wakes up on the third anniversary of his wife’s death and calmly states that he’d like to leave. As he waits, he wonders whether he will clean the Silo’s only window before his oxygen runs out… but those sent outside always clean.

Wool is a dark, thought-provoking dystopia, perfect for those who loved The Giver as a kid but who’ve found new-fangled YA hits like Matched or Uglies too perky and swift. Howey creates the perfect grimy, grungy atmosphere by centering his work on the worn, winding 140-floor staircase that connects the Silo’s stratified society. There is something deeply compelling and metaphoric about how his characters trudge up and down these stairs, trying to pull together their society. A highly recommended read for adult dystopian fans.

-          JM

As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
Modern Library, 2012. 231 pgs. Fiction

Anyone planning on seeing James Franco's movie version of Faulkner's classic ought to read the book first because so much of the richness of the narrative lies in the internal dialogue of its characters. Anse Bundren has promised his wife Addie that when she dies, he will carry her body back to her homeplace in Jefferson, Mississippi. Sons Cash, Darl, Jewel, and Vardaman, along with daughter Dewey Dell join Anse in a misbegotten odyssey to take their mother home. A flooding river, the death of their mules, the putrefaction of the deceased, which draws vultures by the score, all combine against the Bundrens as they also fight their own natures and their own blood to find some meaning in what they are doing. Blackly humorous and tragic, richly drawn, this stream-of-multiple consciousnesses novel deserves the classic place it occupies in our literary pantheon.

LW

The Clockwork Princess

The Clockwork Princess
By Cassandra Clare
Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2013.  570 pgs. Young Adult

There is great unrest at the Shadowhunters London Institute. Jem has run out of his medicine and is dying. Will is hiding his true love for Tessa, who happens to be engaged to Jem. Charlotte, who is head of the Institute, is fighting the Shadowhunters hierarchy to maintain control. All the while, Mortmain is determined to destroy the Shadowhunters with his ruthless army of automatons and kidnap Tessa to use her shapeshifting talent for his gain.

It could have been I was just in the right mood for this type of book and it could also have something to do with Daniel Sharman’s narration that sweeps you into the story, but this has been one of my favorite books this year. It has action, humor, and romance— pretty much everything I hope for in a book.  Clare’s Infernal Devices trilogy is far superior to her Mortal Instruments series. I just wish this was the series picked up for film rights instead of the other.


KK

His Majesty's Hope

His Majesty’s Hope 
by Susan Elia Macneal
Bantam Books, 2013. 354 pgs. Mystery

Maggie is off on her first foreign mission for MI5, right into the heart of Berlin during WWII. Her objective: to plant a bug in the home of a high society Nazi supporter Clara Hess. The story also follows Elise, a German nurse, who just happens to be Clara Hess' daughter.

Maggie’s personal and family life is just as complicated before and at times can be a bit frustrating, but I guess that is how relationships normally are. The addition of Elise’s character allows the reader a snippet of the German home front and the struggles they went through. And once again Macneal throws in that one little extra plot twist at the end that leaves you wanting.  Not a perfect read, but an enjoyable one.

KK

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

Walkable City: How Downtown can save America, One Step at a Time

By Jeff Speck

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. 312 pages.  Nonfiction

In Walkable City Speck lays out what it will take to make our cities walkable.  At the outset the author states that for people to really take to the streets with their feet their walks must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting. He explains what he means by each of these qualities and demonstrates what how each these qualities affects the walkability of an urban environment. Then he lays out 10 steps to achieving walkability. The steps involve automobiles, parking, mixed use neighborhoods, public transportation, bicycles, sidewalks, and roads.

Speck illustrates his arguments with statistics, studies, and anecdotes. While some of the arguments seem a bit strained, overall the author’s proposals are compelling. There are quite a few counter-intuitive lessons taught in this book including more and bigger roads causes congestion, free parking is really expensive, and putting bicycles into the traffic makes streets safer. Interesting and informative.

Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

Revolutionary Summer:  The Birth of American Independence
by Joseph J. Ellis
Knopf, 2013.  219 pgs.  History

Most of us have a few bright sparks of knowledge in a sea of gray, with regard to the American Revolution.  We know Paul Revere's ride, Washington crossing the Delaware, the Battle of Bunker Hill.  In Joseph J. Ellis' latest book, we get specific and fascinating detail about the rise and near fall of the Continental army in the summer when the Declaration of Independence was signed. Even the indispensable George Washington made enormous mistakes which might have led to the early demise of the Patriot cause, but the lingering desire of  the British generals for a peaceful resolution and the insistence of General Nathanael Greene that General Washington set his pride aside and make a run away from the water and the world's greatest Navy, to give the Continentals a chance.  Joseph J. Ellis has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his work on the founding fathers, and Thomas Jefferson in particular.  In this book, he gets right to the  heart of the grit, and sorrow, suffering and glory of the beginning of the United States of America.

LW

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen
By Lucy Knisley
MacMillan Children's Publishing Group, 2013. 192 pages.  Nonfiction Graphic Novel

This graphic novel portrays a series of vignettes of important moments in the author's life involving food.  Like many of us, food shaped certain memories, suffused them with the recollection of flavors, aromas, and all sorts of tastiness.  Each vignette ended with a fabulous graphically rendered recipe of significant importance to the stories she tells.

This is a simple enough memoir of the author's formative years, but filled with humor and appreciation for the way food can knit together friendships and the significant moments of our lives.

BHG

The Riddle of the Labyrinth

The Riddle of the Labyrinth:  The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
by Margalit Fox
HarperCollins, 2013.  363 pgs.  Nonfiction

The decipherment of Linear B, the language of ancient Crete, has never had the same press or romance as the cracking of the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics (thanks to the Rosetta stone). But, the greater difficulty, and even seeming impossibility, of the task gives this story an intellectual vigor and sense of urgency that makes it a great puzzle book for summer reading. Although Fox gives attention to each of the three principals--the archaeologist who discovered the Linear B tablets, the scholar who laid all the groundwork, and the amateur linguist who finished solving the puzzle, the book's main character is Alice Kober, a professor of classics at Brooklyn College who devoted every spare minute, and ever scrap of rationed paper (during wartime) to decoding Linear B.  Largely overlooked in linguistic history, and overworked and neglected in her time, she died at an early age before she could finish her life's work. One may learn much about the nature of language from this text, but also the nature of hard physical and intellectual work in pursuit of a transcendent goal.

LW

Crewel

Crewel (Crewel World, #1)
By Gennifer Albin
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. 368 pages. Young Adult

Adelice Lewys has the ability to weave the very fabric of reality, and her parents have painstakingly trained her to hide her talent for her entire life.  If Adelice's abilities are discovered, she will be ripped from her family and taken away to become a Spinster, an elite woman who weaves the reality of their world and keeps the rains coming, the crops growing, and the people living and dying.  While it may sound like an idyllic fantasy, the truth is that it's hardly more than a prison.

This has a great premise and an interesting world. I thought how reality was a fabric that could be manipulated was very cool and well-imagined. There is even some romance and an interesting ending that will leave you hungry for more from the next book.  I did find the flow of the writing in this book to be a bit choppy at times, but the plot moves quickly enough that you will still have a hard time putting it down.

BHG