reviews and opinions of a lowly library employee
Both of these books are rather short and badly overdue, so rather than attempt any real analysis, I’m caving to the big internet stereotype and going the “zero attention span” route. Two books in about 200 words apiece, go!
Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America: a food memoir
by Lind Furiya
The Devil in Dover: An Insider’s Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America
by Lauri Lebo
Leave Myself Behind
by Bart Yates
When your job includes both ordering new books and weeding old ones, and you’re paying any attention at all, you learn something not everybody realizes: you can’t force your tastes on your patrons. Or use fiction selection to foist your political or social views on them. We had a long-ago manager who just refused to believe this, and felt you could change people by force of will.
Which leaves me, now, at a library with about 50% minority patrons, and maybe 40% religious patrons, weeding books about gay white men by the truckload.* And while the purchasing seems to have been indiscriminate (short story collections full of poorly written “erotica” abound, along with bubble-headed chick lit in drag) I’ve tried to sort out real literature from the crap.
Which is where Leave Myself Behind comes in.
The Serpent’s Tale
by Ariana Franklin
May’s theme was, of course, mothers. I decided to stretch the idea a bit: while the main character’s relationship with her child is an important feature in the book, it’s by no means the central element.
This one is a sequel to the author’s first novel, Mistress of the Art of Death. There have been a few small changes to the cast: Gyltha’s grandson Ulf is away at school, and Adelia has a little one of her own, named Allie. In the year and some since the close of the previous book, Adelia has set up practice with Mansur (times being what they were, they pretend he is the doctor and she the assistant) among the tiny villages in the far countryside. Adelia is happy staying far away from the people of wealth and power with whom she dealt in the previous book, not only for her own sake to avoid the suspicions people had of a learned woman, but for the safety of her child and former love: Allie’s father, Rowley Picot, also happens to be a bishop.
Miss Leavitt’s Stars: the Untold Story of the Woman who Discovered how to Measure the Universe
by George Johnson
Yes, I know, I’m grossly behind on these things. That’s because I keep picking books for the themes that I don’t end up actually liking. Thus, procrastination city.
This month’s theme was beauty, so I read about the most remote and lovely of worlds: the distant stars.
This particular book features an interesting paradox: as it’s non-fiction, the title gives you a pretty clear picture of the material covered, but in reality Henrietta Swan Leavitt isn’t the subject of the book. The introduction states that this book was originally meant to be a collective biography of astronomical discovery in the early 20th century, but that Leavitt’s story was too interesting to ignore. Read the rest of this entry »
Famous Crimes Revisited: from Sacco-Vanzetti to O.J. Simpson
by Dr. Henry Lee & Dr. Jerry Labriola
Okay, I confess: I read way too much true crime as a teenager. I loved the gruesome details even more than I loved the science and psychology. Now that I look back as an adult, I realize part of the appeal was in reading about a more orderly version of the real world, where the monsters were captured and punished.
Of course, life as a grownup shows the world to be considerably more complicated than that. So while I’m no longer a fan of the lurid-crime-details style of Ann Rule and assorted copycats, I enjoy memoirs and reflections by forensic scientists; I feel more confident in humanity knowing that there are people taking a logical look at the most chaotic parts of life.
Tangerine
by Edward Bloor
Edward Bloor is one of the most unusual authors I’ve ever read. More goes on under the surface of the story that in other YA novels (heck, more than many adult novels too), but it never feels like he’s going out of his way to try and be clever. No puns, no codes, no dreadful allegorical naming; the story just is what it is. The narrators of these tales are more than capable of showing the reader around the strange world where they reside, equally easy and matter-of-fact about matters from the quotidian to the surreal. Read the rest of this entry »
The Children of Men
by P.D. James
If you haven’t guessed it yet, I’ll come right out and say it now: I’m a book snob. I generally end up liking the book better than the film, and I go to great lengths to make sure I read the book first wherever possible. So, people keep recommending this to me, and I’ve enjoyed other things by the same author - and on a particularly shriek-filled afternoon on the desk at work, a world without children seemed like the perfect lunch break reading.
The Fourth Treasure: a novel
by Todd Shimoda
with illustrations by L.J.C. Shimoda
So, for this month’s theme, craft, I went with a book straight off the list that I knew my library owned. Much more in line with the group, and unlike February’s disaster, I really enjoyed this one.
Tina Suzuki is a neuroscience grad student at Berkley who stumbles across the ideal research project: a local Japanese calligraphy master has suffered a stroke, leaving him with agraphia. As Japanese kanji stand for meanings (as opposed to our alphabet, made up of symbols for sounds), observing his recovery could lead to an enormous breakthrough in understanding how the brain tries to heal itself. As Tina begins her study, she finds her interactions with the elderly calligraphy master create ripples in her life outside a school, leading her down new paths and through unexpected changes.
Read the rest of this entry »
Now that that’s over with, I can review the backlog of things I read in between chapters and while avoiding the BAM challenge review. We’ll start with After Dark, by Haruki Murakami.
This reading choice began as a New Year’s resolution - I would spend 2008 reading 50 fiction titles from the New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2007” list. (Since that works out to about a book a week, I’m already ten behind, and it’s become increasinly clear that this is yet another resolution failure.) I’d already read Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and enjoyed it, so it seemed like another of his books would be a good starting point on the list.
Yeah, yeah, I know: this BAM challenge review is heinously late. I put off choosing a book, because the “Heart” theme wasn’t doing it for me: I’m not a mush-and-smush reader; in fact, the whole month of February and its attendant holiday themes just make me cranky. (I think good relationships take more communication and self-perception, less ‘expensive gift in exchange for sex’ crap.) As nothing non-fiction related to the heart jumped out at me, I took the route of the Valentine’s Day equivalent of Scrooge - I finally threw “Heart” in title keyword and “horror — fiction” in subject, and went with the one and only result in the library catalog. The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison.
