Four Books To Jump Start Your 2014 Reading

Maybe you're like me:  You take the Goodreads Challenge at a book a week.  Or maybe you only have time for one per month or one per day (yes, I do have friends who manage this!).  

Or maybe you're like me in that 2013 was a challenging year and you didn't get around to reviewing some of your favorite books.  Below you'll find my attempt to remedy that with four new (brief) reviews of books I rate as among my favorites of 2013.

Why not start January 2014 with a series of knock-outs?

I've also provided links directly to each book on Goodreads, Indiebound.org, and Amazon to make them easy to find.

1. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
Publisher's Summary:
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

My Opinion: 
Simply gorgeous. By far the most engrossing, exquisitely-crafted novel of my reading year. Ivey's deft hand with every aspect of storytelling makes this magical-realistic tale of a childless couple homesteading in 1920's Alaska one you will sink into and stay immersed in from cover to cover. And it will color your days and nights for many days after you reluctantly return it to the shelf. Recommended without reservation.

Check out others' reviews of The Snow Child on Goodreads.
Get it at your local bookseller or library, or with this direct link to it on Indiebound.org or Amazon.com.

2.  Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
Publisher's Summary:
In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.

My Opinion:
This novel from 1987, translated from the German by John E. Woods (who won the PEN translation award for it that year), absolutely captured everyone in our book group.  Surprising, creeptastic, gorgeously written, and entirely discussion-worthy, this meditation on excess and obsession - not to mention sensory gluttony - never failed to surprise me.    It's rare these days that I find myself wondering what will happen next yet savoring every sentence; Perfume shares these traits with The Snow Child, although the prose and the plots are quite distinct. 

Check out others' reviews of Perfume on Goodreads.
Get it at your local bookseller or library, or with this direct link to Indiebound.org or Amazon.com.

3.  The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
    Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic. When her master, the husband who commissioned her, dies at sea on the voyage from Poland, she is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York in 1899. 
    Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire, born in the ancient Syrian desert. Trapped in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard centuries ago, he is released accidentally by a tinsmith in a Lower Manhattan shop. Though he is no longer imprisoned, Ahmad is not entirely free – an unbreakable band of iron binds him to the physical world. 
    The Golem and the Jinni is their magical, unforgettable story; unlikely friends whose tenuous attachment challenges their opposing natures – until the night a terrifying incident drives them back into their separate worlds. But a powerful threat will soon bring Chava and Ahmad together again, challenging their existence and forcing them to make a fateful choice.

My Opinion:
What could be more enchanting than a magically-real fantasy set in my favorite city?  Fast-paced, full of period details and mythic confrontations, this novel also offers us a psychological exploration of the nature of loyalty and the (im)possibility of moving beyond our innate natures.  Choose this one first if you're looking for an engrossing page-turner that's a cut above the usual fantasy fare.

Check out others' reviews of Code Name Verity on Goodreads.
Get it at your local bookseller or library, or with this direct link to it on  Indiebound.org or Amazon.com.

4. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
Publisher's Summary:
    Oct. 11th, 1943-A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it's barely begun.
    When "Verity" is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn't stand a chance. As a secret agent captured in enemy territory, she's living a spy's worst nightmare. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution.
    As she intricately weaves her confession, Verity uncovers her past, how she became friends with the pilot Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wrecked fuselage of their plane. On each new scrap of paper, Verity battles for her life, confronting her views on courage, failure and her desperate hope to make it home. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy?
    A Michael L. Printz Award Honor book that was called "a fiendishly-plotted mind game of a novel" in The New York Times, Code Name Verity is a visceral read of danger, resolve, and survival that shows just how far true friends will go to save each other.

My Opinion:
This well-researched and compelling historical fiction was my  favorite YA book of the year.  It features dual female narrators whose varying perspectives keep you guessing until the very end.  I happened to "tandem read" this, and the readers for the audiobook (Lucy Gaskell and Morven Christie) were quite skillful and well-cast too.  After I read it, this book won scads of awards; I'm not surprised, and you won't be either!

Check out others' reviews of Code Name Verity on Goodreads.
Get it at your local bookseller or library, or with this direct link to it on Indiebound.org or Amazon.com.


MFB, with best wishes for a fabulous year of reading,
L

Wild by Cheryl Strayed : Book Group Books

I so hate to gush over anything that Oprah gushes over.  Which makes me so mad that I like - no: admire, respect, and feel grateful for - Cheryl Strayed's Wild.

You don't need me to give you the details; because of Oprah, you already know them by now.

All you need to know is this:
a.  You should read this book.  It's carefully and skillfully written, and it tells a story that most of us won't ever experience but can see ourselves in.
b.  You will be glad that you invested your precious time reading this book.  You get plenty of prose for your investment too, and many minutes of profitable diversion.
c.  Your book group will find much to talk about in this book.

The Verdict:  Absolutely.  A great Book Group Book.

'nuf said.

MFB,
L

p.s.  For book group enrichment, or if you are one of the few who hasn't been introduced to the basics of the book, you can find photos and more information about Wild at Strayed's website.

p.p.s. In other words, from my Goodreads review:

Impressive. If you're studying memoir, read this.

Gripping, earnest, and fast paced. And if you've ever (or never) travelled the West Coast of the US, Strayed's hike up the PCT will goad you into sampling at least a small stretch of it sometime in the near future. Summer plans just shifted, y'all.

I'm not one to come around easily to anything that gets the gushy press that this book did and that sports an impossible-to-remove Oprah sticker on the cover to boot, but I got over my skepticism by the second chapter and never turned back.

The Dirty Life : Book Group Book Review



In keeping with the book's ethos, why not
get it at Indiebound or your local bookseller?

Do you harbor a secret desire to live and love out in the country, to grow the food you eat, to simplify your life, or to draw closer to the cycles of the natural world?

The women in our book club clearly do.  Which is one reason we all enjoyed The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball and that our conversation at dusk on D's back porch grew so warmly animated and earnest, punctuated by broad smiles and quite a few guffaws. 

This memoir of how Ms. Kimball's love affair with an organic farmer named Mark drew her quickly into his lifelong plan to run the "full diet, free choice" CSA Essex Farm in upstate New York proved to be a quick read with just the right amount of fascinating detail to keep the narrative in focus and their lifestyle dimensional without veering off into how-to manual minutiae.  For these traits, we all applauded the book.  Driving huge plough horses, learning to craft all manner of dairy delights after milking Delia the Jersey cow, harvesting heritage piggies and potatoes, wrangling a herd of runaway Highland cattle:  What's not to enjoy about vicariously experiencing the joys and challenges of the novice full-time farmer? 

And what did we conclude, after hours of great potluck food and relaxed, thoughtful conversation while watching the sun descend?  No way could we live the farming life.  But thanks to Ms. Kimball's sure-handed prose, it sure was fun to visit.

For book groups:  Recommended.

MFB,
L

p.s.  Kimball hosts her own nifty website and blog with plenty of photos to give the book's various and many beings visual life.


Looks like Kristin and Mark and a Jersey cow to me.

A Dog's Journey : Book Group Book Review

Why does that Alaskan malamute always escape from her yard to wander miles from home?  Why is that Chihuahua so fiercely aggressive toward strangers?  Why does that mixed breed down the street always cower and shrink away when I approach?

You could seek the answers to these questions from animal behaviorists, breed specialists, or dog whisperers.  Or you could get inside those dogs’ heads.  If the latter option seems a lot more interesting and a lot less costly to you, A Dog’s Journey by Bruce Cameron might be the book you’re looking for. 

This is Cameron’s second novel written from the perspective of a dog.  His first, A Dog’s Purpose, led the best-seller lists for weeks at a time.  In that novel, Cameron’s unnamed protagonist lived and died many times, being reincarnated into a variety of dog bodies and learning from each experience to become a better dog, until he (or sometimes she) fulfilled his ultimate purpose by returning to Ethan, the boy he loved, and shepherding him through his old age, rekindled love, and eventual death. 

In this sequel, the same dog-spirit doesn’t so much evolve as apply what she/he has learned to each new situation and time period faced by his new human CJ, Ethan’s granddaughter.  CJ has a troubled life, influenced by her vain, careless, and treacherous mother, Gloria, so our dog must remain ever vigilant while bearing the brunt of Gloria’s wrath.  In this book, the dog intentionally wishes to come back after each death in order to protect and guide the self-injuring and groundless but equally warm-hearted CJ.  Supported by CJ’s loyal friend Trent, the dog (Buddy, then Molly, then Max) rescues CJ from repeated traumas through his fiercely devoted love and courage.

As one might guess, the most dominant feature of this novel is its use of perspective.  You either buy into the notion that you can hear all the human dialogue and the dog’s thoughts, or you don’t.  If you don’t, you may as well walk away from this book.  True, it’s quite a contradiction to be reading the dog’s thoughts in English, a human language that he/she doesn’t understand, but once you get used to this conceit, the characterization of our protagonist offers quite fascinating and heartwarming opportunities to empathize with another species. 

Try this sample on for size and see if you feel you could suspend your disbelief. 

Here, teenage CJ is escaping from her mother, who has illegally and surreptitiously spent nearly all of the million-dollar trust fund left to CJ in her father’s will.  As CJ angrily flees cross-country, “Molly” – at this point a poodle mix – narrates:

    We took a long car ride.  I elected to curl up on the front seat with my head within easy reach of CJ’s hand, and she’d touch me every so often.  The love flowed through that hand and eased me into untroubled slumber.  It was so much better than being in the place of the barking dogs.  I hoped I would never have to go there again.  I just wanted to be right where I was, a front-seat dog with my girl, CJ.

    We stopped at a place with outdoor tables and wonderful food smells.  “It’s not too bad out here if I keep my coat on,” CJ said as she tied my leash to a table leg.  “You’ll be okay, right, Molly?  I’m just going in there for a second.  Don’t look at me like that; I’m not leaving you.  You’re a good dog.”

    I understood that I was a good dog.  I made to follow her as she turned, but the leash stopped me.  I strained against it as CJ went through som glass dorrs and into the building.  I didn’t understand, and whimpered.  If I was a good dog, I should be going with CJ!

   “Hello, Molly.”

   I looked around and there was Shane.  I did not wag.

                                                                                    (Cameron, 161-162)

So, if you can enjoy inhabiting Molly’s perspective and accept that a dog can think in English but not understand when people speak it, you’ll be fine. 

And for me, personally, it’s worth suspending disbelief.  As is evident in the above quote, diction and syntax should be no obstacle to most readers.  The eventfully episodic plot also keeps us moving along at a breezy pace, while experiencing sensory details from a dog’s nosy perspective brings readers the opportunity to enjoy unique description too. 

Anyone who loves dogs and wonders what goes on in their heads will enjoy this book, and any mature, balanced middle school student should be equipped to encounter the delicately indicated issues of bulimia and psychological abuse – not to mention the problem of pet overpopulation and its attendant euthanasia rate in the U.S. – that form a backdrop for the plot.

My verdict?  For those seeking a light, fast-paced, and heart-warming read, I give A Dog’s Journey two paws up.

MFB,
L

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller : Review (in brief)

The Dog Stars is one of those rare novels that literally recalibrated my vision. 

I read the final fifty pages on my front porch, accompanied by the shrill intermittent grinding of a power saw and the sudden shrieking of a bay window slipped from fingers, exploded on the asphalt amid exclamations of surprise and anger and frustrations and forgiveness.  It was the dimming of a grey, drizzly day, and clouds shredded apart into salmon on dusky purple.  Then the sweeping of shards, disbursement of the neighbors' remodeling work party, a deeper purple above, shaft of yellow-green sunlight almost perpendicular over the crest of our high hill, and silence.  Stutter of sparrow's wings.  Flicker's final white flit.  Homeward.  And the closing of the story.

The story harrowing and beautiful and surprising and inevitable and fleetingly hopeful at once. 

Stylistically impeccable, clipped phrases inextricably linked to the stuttering, moment to moment acumen of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. 

The pacing sure-handed, the characters singular and solid, sometimes satisfyingly surprising.

And the natural world proceeding inexorably on in its specific beauty and fell fierceness, unsentimentally celebrated in reverent detail - and in contrast to the appalling violence of the few humans left behind after the one-two cocktail of flu pandemic and blood disease extinguishes most of us homo sapiens.

And the narrator, our window to this world, the pilot Hig, worthy of due consideration.  Impossible to be good in this kill-or-be-killed world.  And yet.

And yet there's a dog.  Jasper.  Perhaps the most honest representation of a man-dog relationship I've ever read, and believe me, as a young one and in recent years too, I've read quite more than my share.

I had to set this book aside at regular intervals, so intense was the action and the emotional content.  And the loss.  Yet I am so glad that I persisted. 

This one will find a place of honor on my favorites shelf.

If you love this, our entirely imperfect, entirely real world, or you would like to remember to love this world, you might want to pick up this book. 

MFB,
L

In case you've not encountered reviews of this book yet (it debuted in August) here's the blurb from Peter Heller's website, on which you can also find more articulate reviews than mine and myriad means to buy the book.  Which you will do now, please.

Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life–something like his old life–exists beyond the airport. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return–not enough fuel to get him home–following the trail of the static-broken voice on the radio. But what he encounters and what he must face–in the people he meets, and in himself–is both better and worse than anything he could have hoped for.

Book Group Books : Best American Short Stories 2011



Find it at Amazon or Indiebound.


It's pretty dark down there.  But groping through the darkness and into the light together can be just the challenge to ignite a stellar book group conversation.

In fact, that's what just happened when our local book group got together over appetizers and The Best American Short Stories 2011.  Although we all agreed that this was a rather bleak collection - with occasional and welcome rays of light - we had so much to talk about (twenty stories, to be exact) and the content was so diverse that our conversation soared. 

Our favorites in this collection included Irish writer Claire Keegan's gentle, affecting "Foster", the tale of a poor young girl sent to spend a summer with a couple who've recently lost their own young son; George Saunders' speculative "Escape from Spiderhead" (think "Harrison Bergeron" set in a human testing lab for psycho-active drugs); "To The Measures Fall" by Richard Powers, a piece about how one's shifting responses to the same novel over the course of one's life reveal more about who we are than about the story itself; and Caitlin Horrocks's "The Sleep", which intrigued the English teachers in our group with its third person plural perspective and provided plenty of grist for the conversational mill with its core premise: a town so depressing in winter that its citizens begin to hybernate from Thanksgiving through Easter.

And then there were the stories that stymied one or all ("Gurov in Manhattan" in particular); these, in fact, led to some of the most animated and thought-provoking discussions of all.

Even with its somewhat sobering overall tone, I would heartily recommend this collection - or others in this series - to book groups.  Most of our members noted with enthusiasm how much they enjoyed exploring this genre, one they don't usually indulge in, but we all agreed that the best way to read a grouping like this is to ration: read one per day and let it "sink in", percolate through your consciousness a bit, before moving on to the next.

I give this a five-star rating for book groups who welcome a diversity of opinions to match varied but high quality content.

MFB,
L

p.s.  My action on this one is actually creating this review and posting it on Goodreads and Amazon, because I hadn't planned to do so yet I do believe that other book groups will enjoy it.

And for, It's Monday, What Are You Reading blog hop at Book Journey, right now I'm 3/4 of the way through the light and fluid international romance Random Placement (I realized too late that it would be a terrific read for a plane trip, so I forced myself to stop until tomorrow's trip to ABQ), re-reading sections of Danny Dreyer's Chi Running for my second week of C25K training, and starting Michael Chabon's latest Telegraph Avenue for the read-along at As The Crowe Flies and Reads that begins tomorrow.