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

Linda Furiya’s memoir is a collection of roughly chronological stories about growing up in the only Japanese (and for a long time, only Asian) family in the tiny farm town of Versailles, Indiana, interspersed with family recipes related to each chapter. Two main tensions tie the stories together: Furiya’s attempts to reconcile Japanese and American culture; and her desire to explore the world, while her parents wish to keep her close to small-town life.

She’s also a newspaper food columnist, and her journalistic style serves the stories well: though told in the past tense and through the filter of age, each reminiscence is immediate and immersive.  Trips to visit far-off relatives in New York and Tokyo are some of the best parts of the book; the descriptions of these new places sparkle with possibilities.

My only small complaint: a printing error with the book. When she described her love of okonomiyaki, I was impatient for the end of the chapter, thinking I’d get a homestyle recipe for a dish I’ve only seen in restaurants. But alas, it was a duplicate page, with the gyoza recipe from the first chapter. (Though it turns out her web site has the recipe, so my disappointment was fortunately short-lived.)

Now, on to book two.

I actually live near Harrisburg, PA, and I paid half-attention to the case, though mostly to know which days traffic near the courthouse would be abominable. My background understanding had come in large part from scientist bloggers, so Lebo’s journalistic focus on completely different aspects of the situation (like the two local journalists who covered school board activity were accused of lying in their reports) added depth as well.

Interspersed with the facts of the case are sktches of the players, explanations of some curious aspects of central PA life, and ongoing tensions between the author and her devoutly fundamentalist father. While much of the science-versus-religion debate has little chance of meeting in the middle, Lebo holds onto the one fact that she hopes she can make her father see: the wrongness of a flat-out lie told by school board members. When the school board’s desire to alter the science cirriculum was still known only locally, religious sentiment and the name Jesus Christ were openly invoked at school board meetings as the purpose for the change, but once legal counsel was involved, the board members claimed they never said such things, and nearly cost two reporters their credibility and jobs.

The local angle had some elements I liked and others I didn’t. Descriptions of places that I recognized felt strange in a book (especially the description of the jogging route taken each morning by one of the lawyers; Harrisburg is small enough that I know exactly which apartment building he lived in, and that seemed invasive). On the other hand, I was thrilled to read such detailed descriptions of the local people who defended science. I can only hope this will put a small dent in our image as a state full of backwater, narrowminded hicks.

So, two good, interesting books, both enjoyable and recommended for anyone with interest in the subjects.

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.

Our narrator is one Noah York, son of a famous poet mother and recently dead father. In an attempt to move past their loss, Mom moves them from Chicago to a small town in New Hampshire, where they spend the summer before Noah’s senior year renovating the old Victorian house they’ve purchased. Two complications develop in short order: the discovery of strange objects and messages hidden in the walls of the house, and Noah’s increasing complicated feelings for his first friend in his new home, J.D.

Here’s where the BAM Challenge theme finally ties in. While unraveling the mysteries behind the bottles inside the walls, Noah and J.D. end up learning much more: who their real friends (and true family) are, and secrets from their parents’ generation that shape who they are today.

J.D. makes for an interesting choice of character name, as comparisons between Noah and Holden Caulfield are pretty obvious (to the point where it’s mentioned in the book jacket reviews). I may not be qualified to say so, having never actually finished Catcher in the Rye, but I think Noah’s the better of the two. He’s more self-aware, willing to examine his emotions, and able to admit when he’s being a total ass. The narrative style is very natural and conversational, no matter how introspective the subject.

The events of the story are by turns touching and gruesome, but the telling never falters. I’d recommend this one to anyone interested in serious and thought provoking coming-of-age novels, from older teens to adults.

*Other system libraries have copies (which we can easily obtain for someone if they request one), and their copies get checked out, by the way. I’m not depriving anyone of gay white men novels; I’m making room to shelve things my patrons actually read.

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.

But life can’t stay quiet and idyllic forever (else we’d have no story). The king’s favorite mistress has been poisoned, and someone has tried to make it appear the queen is to blame. The miseries of the civil war between King Stephen and Queen Matilda are within living memory, and Rowley is desperate they should not be repeated. So Adelia’s skills as a “doctor to the dead” are called into service once again.

Two things of note are different from the previous book: the author’s real name is in the back flap (she’s British journalist Diana Norman) and the in-text use of historical detail is much greater. As Adelia came to England from Salerno only a few years before, she’s totally unaware of things like the Stephen and Matilda war, and other characters will on occasion lecture her on the significance of past events. The author’s note at the end is this time less focused on the bits that have no historical basis: except for the apologies to the real people whose names and titles were appropriated for the villains, the note is about the bits that seem anachronistic but could have actually occurred. As an incurable trivia geek, this was a great addition.

I listened to the first book on audio, and did this one half audio and half print. (There was a waiting list for the audio, so I had to take it back to the library and switch.) A different actress read the second book, though once I got used to a new voice I liked her just as well, if not better. She gives each character a distinctive cadence in their speech, and does well with Adelia’s internal monologues, where emotions can fly all over at short notice.

This is a thoroughly entertaining mystery I’d recommend to fans of both the historical and women detectives genres. While there is some violence and gore, it’s filtered through our physician narrator, and so recounted in a calm, clinical manner, with no attempts to overwhelm or gross out the reader. Sex is referenced, mostly delicately. That said, I’d still recommend this book for adult but not necessarily teenagers: the writing style does take a little more focus than the average “potato chip” series mystery, and I don’t know whether the story would interest the younger set, especially now that much of Adelia’s mind is taken up with motherhood. Otherwise, a solid addition to a fun new series.

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.

Miss Leavitt was a Harvard “computer”, women paid to record and calculate data from enormous photographic plates taken by the observatory telescope. Despite assumptions about her gender’s supposed natural limitations, she also analyzed what she saw, creating the foundation of a new system for figuring out the massive distances between the stars.

And while that story is fascinating, it’s also not long enough to actually be a book. Existing records give but a teasing glimpse of this woman and her short life. As a result, only slightly more than half of the book’s narrative occurs while Miss Leavitt is still alive; the rest feels like padding, research done for the original book idea tacked onto the end to bring the book up to its already scant 150 pages.

So - short book, short review. It was a fun read, and the author certainly excels at making the major ideas in astronomy accessible to the layperson, but don’t expect enough material to write a report.

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.

Dr. Henry Lee one of my favorite authors of the genre. He approaches each case with a focus on truth, not on telling either the prosecution or the defense whatever they wish to hear. Even when the only truth available is “analysis of this evidence is not sufficient for a conclusion”, he doesn’t gloss over the lack of definitive answers.

That attitude is what makes this book so outstanding: each case examined is full of flaws, gaps, and human error; at least one is a start-to-finish disaster. Dr. Lee acknowledges these shortcomings, providing a clear picture of what science can and cannot prove from the evidence given, and what modern science could have done with mysteries of the past. (In addition to the two in the title, the Lindbergh kidnapping, Sam Sheppard, JFK, Vincent Foster and JonBenet Ramsey cases are examined.)

While Dr. Lee and writing partner Dr. Jerry Labriola are not exactly masters of prose (see the “I couldn’t finish this” list for their dreadful first novel), the departures from straight science they make in this book suit it perfectly. Instead of a backwards-looking recitation of known facts, Dr. Lee imagines himself whisked back through time to watch the trials firsthand. Throughout his travels, meets the curious Sam Constant: gaudily patriotic and irrationally prejudicial, he represents the voice of public opinion in the eras surrounding the trials. In several cases, his opinion appears to outweigh the actual evidence in determining the verdict.

This is an ideal popular-level book on the intersection between the hard and social sciences - exemplified by situations where that juxtaposition can result in life or death for the accused. The crimes are not described in particularly graphic detail, and the photos and sketches are all black and white (only two involve actual corpses), so reading level alone makes this one late teens and up.

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.

I read Storytime a year or two ago (also highly recommended, especially to librarians), but since Bloor’s other novels weren’t set in and around libraries, I wasn’t sure then if anything else would have the same appeal. So I didn’t pursue his other works until a co-worker all but insisted I try a certain novel she had to read for her YA lit class. Behold… Tangerine.

Tangerine is the town in Florida in and around which the story takes place; an area once full of citrus groves and now made up mostly of bland housing developments like Lake Windsor Downs. Our hero is a new arrival in Lake Windsor Downs named Paul Fisher, a 7th grade student, a soccer goalie - and legally blind. Despite this distinction, Paul insists he can see - things that other people can’t. He observes what things are really like; he’s the only one who sees there’s something really wrong with the people around him, and with the town itself. Because between the daily lightning strikes, flash floods, and disappearing koi, something is definitely wrong.

This one’s a “sports novel”, the first I’ve ever read, actually. But don’t let the theme scare you off - jargon was pretty scarce, and always accompanied by either context clues or narrator explanation. Those narrator asides were something I loved about this book; Paul is obsessed with sports, especially soccer, but he realizes that you, dear reader, might not be. Unlike some books set in particular subcultures, where the jargon is heavily employed to draw a circle around “us” (leaving many a confused reader outside among the “them”) the narrator here is more interested in telling his story to everyone than in stroking the egos of the few readers who share his interests.

Bloor’s style is a bit difficult to describe; like the narrative voice and the plot pacing, it just is. I personally ended up reading in spurts, devouring a section to find out what would happen, then setting the book down for a few days, because what in fact happened was too much to take in all at once. Despite the strangeness, the story was always satisfying, and I never felt like the plot was left hanging, or that additional weirdness was shoehorned in. This was an excellent book, for anyone who likes stories a little on the strange side.

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.

I’ll spare you a rehash of the basic premise, as the endless droning about the movie when it was in theaters more or less covers it. It appears the only changes were made to force the story into a more typical Hollywood mold: Clive Owen is awfully young for a retired college professor, so the character’s intellectual aspect is out the window; the ex-wife is given Julian’s name and raised considerably in importance, while the person who is actually pregnant is invented whole cloth, and had no other role to play except “be pregnant”. Because god-for-effing-bid a woman in a leadership role is also carrying a child. Also, “blame” for mass infertility is placed entirely on woman in the film, while in the book it’s shared by both genders (though the men to seem to take more of the burden). Maybe I’m being paranoid, but to take a book written by an intelligent woman, then dumb it down and throw in a dash of misogyny, just doesn’t sit well with me at all.

The book is divided into two distinct section: the thinking half and the acting half. The thinking half creates in fine detail a society with no youth and no future. Without naive idealism to balance against world-weary fear, laws become increasingly merciless and unnecessarily brutal. The last generation (now 25 in the novel) were raised with complete indulgence, under a desperate expectation that in return for this slavish devotion they’ll somehow breed. When they turn out to be no different than their forebears, the sense of failure, and the burden of being the very last, combine with their spoiled upbringings to create violent, incomprehensible monsters.

Theo spends much of his time observing and reflecting, without ever trying to make an impact on the world. It’s not until he’s contacted by former student (and current revolutionary) that he begins to consider the possibility of doing something to fix the mess he’s watched for so long.

Which is where the book pretty much goes to crap. He considers taking action only in small part because of the horrors of their society: the main force behind the change is a romantic interest in Julian, the ex-student. Theo is not an action hero; he’s one of six small people in desperately over their heads, trying to combat one of the most powerful governments in the entire world. Scenes that ought to be brimming with tension are left flat by Theo’s detached narration, and the resolutions of these scenes are glossed over because Theo can’t bring himself to care long enough to ponder them. The pacing becomes increasingly arbitrary, and the personalities forged so carefully in the first section of the book are altered on a whim within the last thirty pages.

Ultimately, I can call my feelings on this book nothing more than ambivalent: I like the first part so much and the second part so little. If the premise interests you, read just that part; if you’re interested in action and adventure, watch the film and be done with it.

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.

The text is embellished throughout with the work of the Zenzen-sensei, the calligraphy master, which was created by the author’s wife, an artist and calligrapher. Sidebars contain samples from the Zenzen instructional manual (along with Tina’s notes from neuroscience classes), while the sensei’s agraphic abstracts are reproduced on entire pages. Since the movement of the story relies so heavily on the visual, the inclusion of the art connects the reader to the characters more than any description of the calligraphy could.

This connection is vital, because the characters are many, and range over place and time. Events in both California and Japan, and nearly four hundred years in the past, all have roles to play. Longest ago are the two disciples of the Daizen school master; his death (without naming either of them as the new master) sets them on starkly different paths through life, leading to a rivalry that reaches to the present day.

Though this history forms the foundation of the story, my favorite character has a much less significant role. Kando-san, a private investigator in Japan, is of secondary to the other characters (both now and 30 years past, when his role in the tale begins), but acts as a deus ex machina, making sure that justice ultimately is done, depsite the efforts of the greedy and the vengeful. He’s great as classic detective character as well; he’s cool under pressure, fantastically clever, and is completely dedicated to the truth. While it looks unlikely that Shimoda would ever write series mystery, I’d read more Kando-san any day.

Other characters thrilled me considerably less; in particular, Tina’s boyfriend is hard to take. He’s a perfect cultural interloper, a midwesterner named Robert Smith, of all things, who seems to be dating Tina only because she’s Japanese. A walking fountain of facts on the tiniest minutiae of the traditional Japanese arts, he’s smug and snobby about the inherent better-ness of anything related to Japan. Yet the qualities he embodies are those for which Japanese society is most often criticized: emotional reticence and an unthinking devotion to conformity and hierarchy. Outsiders with an interest in Japanese culture (or really, any white American who professes to love some other ethnic culture exclusively) should be prepared to see their own poor qualities reflected in Robert.

Moments of horrible self-realization aside, I loved this book. The characters are vibrant and each unique (even Robert), the various settings fully realized, the dialogues and interactions offering each tiny pieces of the whole story. Anyone interested in the ways that art, thought, history interact to create our lives here and now will find something here to think about, and something to enjoy.

Please note: this is the first time I’ve actually sat down and ‘reviewed’ a CD. We’ll see how it goes, okay?

Hourglass is the second solo full-length album from Dave Gahan, the lead singer of Depeche Mode. My background with Depeche Mode is limited; I own two CDs and have heard a few other’s at friends’ houses. The biggest draw for me was the fact that their lyrics are written by keyboardist Martin Gore — meaning Gahan’s distinctive voice, which I’ve always associated with a certain lyric style, may be engaged in something entirely different when the words are from his own pen.

Some similarities are there - Gahan often employs the same contemplative themes with which his voice is already linked. But the whole feel of the album is that of a sharper edge than I’m used to; in particular tracks like “Deeper & Deeper,” where Gahan’s voice takes on a sneering nastiness and is coupled with a more aggressive rhythm. (The implied violence embedded in the lyrics is a bit creepy too; not my favorite track on the album.)

As far as lyric quality, there isn’t much difference between Gahan and Gore’s work that I can find objectively. The same metaphoric elements are there, as well as the simple couplet rhyming and the balance between sensation and emotion. The choice of tone and melody on this album, on the other hand, stand in stark contrast to to the sound in Depeche Mode’s work. This is partly the aggression of the music, as mentioned earlier, but there’s also a certain thinness to the vocal sound. The softness of older tracks by the band (I’m thinking things like “Blue Dress” here) is stripped away, but there’s isn’t enough else to really replace it.

While it’s hard to put my overall impression into words, the sound on Hourglass just didn’t grab my attention the way albums by the full band do. Depeche Mode has the right combination of strengths among it member, and the result is an emotional charge to the music that this solo effort lacks. Generally listenable, but I’m returning the library’s CD today, with no intention of obtaining a copy of my own.

The details:
Artist: Gahan, Dave
Album: Hourglass
Category: Electronic
# of times listened to before conclusions made: about 4

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.

The basic premise is one of paired opposites. Eri is a legendary beauty, who has been modeling since childhood; her only path to success in life is created by her face, and she knows this. Her sister Mari is plain looking, but bright and hardworking. She’s fluent in Chinese and pours her entire self into reading and studying. Then there’s another opposition between them: Mari is kept awake all night by an unidentifiable restlessness, while Eri has been asleep for the past three months.

Chapters alternate between between Eri’s still, small room and Mari’s long, wakeful night, where she encounters a number of odd characters. They include a jazz trombonist, practicing (for perhaps the last time) until dawn; a manager of a seedy love hotel and the two overnight maids; a foreign-born prostitute who’s little better than enslaved; and the prostitute’s cold, violent client, who is tied in some way to Eri’s endless sleep. Each one exists in their lonely nighttime world for a different reason, some choosing the dark out of hope or fear, others forced there by their unacceptability to the daylight masses.

As with Kafka, both the author and translator’s strength lies in the ability to deliver both day-to-day moments and wildly surreal tangents in the same manner: the focus of the narrative eye on each scene is intense, but what is seen is always reported in the most matter-of-fact manner. The story moves seamlessly from Eri’s dreams to Mari’s reality, through the bizarre and the humdrum moments of each. The narrative watches all with a calm bordering on indifference, and yet manages to provide the tiny, incidental details that make characters and scenes feel real and whole. No opinion or interpretation is given, because none is needed; the observations provided by the narrative voice complete the scene without any “dear reader” intrusions.

This one is readable by older teens to adults (fair warning: unlike most novels written for teens, you’re left with a handful of story threads to tie together yourself, so don’t expect a ton on finality from the ending) and an accessible starting point for someone interested in modern literary fiction.