Dear Life

Dear Life
by Alice Munro
Knopf, 2013. 319 pgs. Fiction

The Nobel Prize Committee for Literature has made it abundantly clear that the prize is unlikely to go to an American in the foreseeable future, shallow and self-serving as we are. Fortunately, they did not exclude Canadians and Alice Munro won this year's award to great and well-deserved acclaim. Though this collection sounds and looks like it might be a sentimental collection about the joys of living, it is anything but. "Dear" in this title often means costly - almost more than one can afford. Again and again her low-key, commonplace characters manage to destroy their own happiness or avoid it instinctively, for fear of the responsibility or for fear of losing the lives they know, happy or not. In "Amundsen," a young woman travels to a tuberculosis sanatorium where against all odds she may have found her true love--or not. "Haven" recounts the miserable life of a woman whose husband makes their home anything but a haven. The last four stories of the book are reflective of, and perhaps derived from, Munro's own life. A sort of benediction, since she has announced her retirement from writing. But maybe not--though tired of the solitary writer's life, she still gets "ideas."

LW

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
by Eric Schlosser
Penguin, 2013. 632 pgs, including notes and indexing. Nonfiction.

When I was a kid we trooped out into the halls of our elementary school several times a year, and crouched against the wall with our faces on the floor and our hands over our heads to practice saving ourselves in the event of a nuclear blast.  As if.  The same false sense of security that our bomb drills gave us then seems to have suffused the American public.  Little did we know that we were probably safer from a Soviet attack than we were from our own munitions. Eric Schlosser's encyclopedic, extraordinary new book shows us how much danger we were in then, and how scary things may still be, here and in countries like India, Pakistan, China, North Korea, and Iran. Focusing on the deadly accident at a Titan II missile silo in Damascus, Arkansas, Schlosser explains in chilling detail how terribly things can go wrong, and how quickly. The entire development and dispersion of nuclear armaments as part of the Cold War is laid out here in fascinating, frightening detail. Schlosser, as the New Yorker magazine reviewer suggests, "writes nonfiction as it ought to be written."  Amen.

LW

Twerp

Twerp
by Mark Goldblatt
Random House, 2013.  274 pgs. Young Adult

When Julian Twerski (aka "Twerp") returns to school after a week-long suspension his English teacher gives him an interesting proposal: write a report about Shakespeare, or, a journal about the incident for which he and his friends were suspended. Twerp is such a likeable young narrator, and he and his friends are so funny in the way of goofball tween boys, that the reader begins to think, like Twerp, that he didn't really mean to do anything wrong, that things just got out of hand, etc. But when the act of bullying is finally revealed, it is devastating. Please, please don't do that, you think.  But the boys don't stop. There is some redemption at the end of this sorrowful, funny story. And what a great cautionary tale for young people who may not yet know how quickly things can go terribly wrong.

LW

Cinnamon and Gunpowder

Cinnamon and Gunpowder
By Eli Brown
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013. 318 pgs. Historical Fiction

Owen Wedgwood, famed chef, has been kidnapped and is being held aboard the Flying Rose, captive of the notorious captain Mad Hannah Mabbot. Mabbot informs him that he will cook a sumptuous meal for her each Sunday or he will be killed, a dismaying challenge considering the pirate ship's meager, weevil-infested stores. Dreaming up ways to escape, Wedgwood works wonders in the kitchen while the ship hunts for the notorious Brass Fox and flees from a deadly privateer. Wedgwood comes to rely on the gruff crew he once feared and begins to see something softer behind Mabbot's swagger and threatening power.

I loved this book. It's a swashbuckling adventure that doesn't gloss over the grim reality of life on a pirate ship. Told from Wedgwood's perspective, the story is sprinkled with delectable descriptions and metaphors drawn from his culinary experience; food is the dialect by which he speaks. The plot is fast-paced and action packed, and you come to love some and fear other characters through the course of their adventures. The real star is Wedgwood himself, a likable and talented fellow whose expertise and lifetime of experience still hasn't quite prepared him for all that he is about to face. Overall, pretty much enjoyable in every way.

BHG

The Tenth Witness

The Tenth Witness
by Leonard Rosen
Permanent Press, 2013.  284 pgs.  Mystery

In this prequel to Rosen's exemplary 2011 title All Cry Chaos, we meet Henri Poincare as a young man, a newly-minted engineer who has helped design and build a diving platform to recover gold from a ship sunk in 1799 off the coast of Holland. While there he meets a beautiful young woman, falls in love--then meets her family.  The Krauses are steelmakers, among other things, and began their rise to great wealth as suppliers to Hitler's Third Reich. The company managed to prosper beyond those dark times because ten of the Jewish workers at the Kraus factory signed an affidavit to the effect that Otto Kraus was a benevolent boss who cared for his workers and saved many lives. Now the survivors among the ten are dying at an alarming rate--some from apparently natural causes, one from a fall from a window. As Henri investigates he finds himself imperiled and then devastated by horrific acts of violence past and present. The Tenth Witness is a thoughtful, literate thriller, characters well established as the suspense begins to build. One of Henri's worst moments is when he finds in his own heart a bit of the terrible darkness he is beginning to see in others. One of his best is when he risks his own life to bring a monster to justice. Rosen's Henri Poincare books are so well-written and memorable, one  earnestly hopes he will write many more volumes filling in the blanks between Henri's younger self in this book, and the older man of All Cry Chaos.

LW

When She Woke

When She Woke
by Hilary Jordan
Algonquin Books, 2012. 344 pgs. Fiction

Jordan (Mudbound, 2009) continues to write socially conscious fiction, this time setting her story in a dystopian future instead of the Deep South.

Hannah Payne awakes to find her skin a bright, garish red. She’s been branded a murderess for the next sixteen years of her life, but before she can even get to that point she must survive thirty days of confinement with no entertainment but her daily shower and a bible. She reflects on her scandalous, seductive affair with Reverend Aiden Dale and the circumstances which necessitated her secretly contacting an abortionist. In Hannah’s society, women’s rights have been stripped away as a result of a sterilizing plague that swept the world, and abortion is no longer viewed as a choice, but punished as infanticide.
After her initial incarceration, Hannah is released into a halfway house for non-violent female Chromes, falling under the power of the sadistic Mr. and Mrs. Henley. The extreme measures this couple goes through to bring their charges back to the path of God helps Hannah begin to question whether she deserves such treatment. Her questioning takes her and her newfound friend, Kayla, to a sect of underground of feminists seeking to assist female chromes accused of abortion. As interesting as they may seem, the intricacies of chroming and the plague become a mere backdrop midway through the book as the story of Hannah’s journey towards empowerment takes hold. Jordan’s willingness to tackle women’s rights issues makes When She Woke an important and relevant work, but the overt way she inserts her pro-choice politics into the storyline can be distracting.

Reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Scarlet Letter, this story treads familiar ground, but Jordan’s modern take and lush prose are well worth reading.

-JM

Muck City

Muck City: Winning and Losing in Football's Forgotten Town
by Bryan Mealer
Crown, 2012.  321 pgs. Nonfiction

Belle Glade is an agriculturally rich but every-other-way poor town in southeastern Florida that has cranked out thirty NFL players since 1985, five of them drafted in the first round. Some of the boys on this team have parents in jail, or dead from gang combat or drug use. Some of the boys on this team have themselves been killed or wounded on the violent streets of Belle Glade, and most would seem not to have a raindrop's chance in Hades of making it anywhere except to the life of a migrant agricultural worker or to an early grave.  And yet . . .   family and extended family, coaches, teachers, educational administrators, the guy who runs the bakery, all do their best to help these kids.  And many of the kids help themselves to heroic degrees.  In any case, Muck City is a beautifully well written story of an often terrible place which is redeemed by the strength and hope of youngsters and their supporters who have no real basis for being strong or hopeful.

LW

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