Book Review: An Abundance of Katherines

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had never heard of John Green until Rainbow Rowell, who is a friend, was excited that he, like she, was coming to an author panel that was being set up by another friend who runs a great independent bookstore.  "John Green is a MONSTER get!" she proclaimed.

So I read The Fault in our Stars.  I laughed.  I cried.  It was good.  Well-written, not typical, etc.  I realize writing this review that I never wrote a review, so I sure need to do that, but my problem with Fault was the contrivance of the Dutch author and how that all fit into the story.  I found it not real in a book that was extraordinarily real.

Fast forward to An Abundance of Katherine.  Contrived story line but one that felt real regardless, perhaps because I have a bright kid who some consider to be a prodigy and Colin's concern that prodigies only learn but geniuses do is something I can already see my kid contemplating.  And the question of how to "matter" is one that still echoes in my own life.

But beyond all of that, I enjoyed this book more than Fault.  Maybe it's because it didn't make me cry.  Maybe it's because I love stories that are compartmentalized to give you a sense of place (Gutshot).  Maybe it's because the set-up was so unreal, yet real, that there was nothing jarring in it that pulled me out of the story to question the contrivance.  Or maybe it was the ideas floating around in these kids' heads;

"I think mattering is a piss-poor idea.  I just want to fly under the radar, because when you start to make yourself into a big deal, that's when you get shot down.  The bigger deal you are, the worse your life is.  Look at, like, the miserable lives of famous people...there's a word in German for it...Schadenfreude."

"Son, if there's one thing I know it's that there's some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what."

"You're so goddamned scared of the idea that someone might dump you that your whole fugging life is built around not getting left behind.  Well, it doesn't work, kafir.  It's just--it's not just dumb, it's ineffective.  Because then you're not being a good friend or a good boyfriend or whatever, because you're only thinking they-might-not-like-me-they-might-not-like-me, and guess what?  When you act like that, no one likes you."

"Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you?  If people could see me the way I see myself--if they could live in my memories--would anyone, anyone love me?"

"I'm full of shit.  I'm never myself.  I've got a Southern accent around the oldsters; I'm a nerd for graphs and deep thoughts around you; I'm Miss Bubbly Pretty Princess with Colin.  I'm nothing.  The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real...the only sentence that begins with 'I' that's true of me is I'm full of shit.

"The past is a logical story.  It's the sense of what happened.  But sense it is not remembered, the future need not make any fugging sense at all."

"Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back."


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Book Review: Divergent

Divergent by Veronica Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dystopian future stories intrigue the heck out of me.  Even dystopian present stories intrigue me; stories about how the world would be if we gave in to our worst selves.  Stories like "The Most Dangerous Game" and 1984 and Anthem.

The new generation of these stories was officially kicked off with the Hunger Games trilogy, which I found to be readable and, of course, intriguing.  So of course I had to read Divergent

I liked it.  The factions were, um, intriguing.  I did question their odd names, though a Q&A with the author in the back of my edition explains, "...I did intentionally choose unfamiliar words, for an assortment of reasons.  One of them is that I wanted to slow down comprehension of what each faction stands for, so you learn as much by observing as by the name of the faction itself.  Another is that the definitions of the more obscure words are more specific, in interesting ways.  And a third is -- since I'm being honest here -- that they sound cooler."  However, moreso than their odd names was that they didn't match; Candor, Abnegation and Amity are all nouns.  Dauntless and Erudite are both adjectives.  This little "lack of detail" bothered me.  Then I got to the end of the book and realized that the "doing" factions, the ones who are the most active in trying to change the world, whether for good or bad, are adjective factions.  If that was a conscious choice, bravo Ms. Roth.

I found Roth's writing to range from passable to effective.  She's telling an action story, after all, so there isn't much room for reflection.  But the few moments of authorial insight into the human character she gave us made me wish for so much more.

When recently-removed-from-Abnegation Tris reflects, "I guess I haven't really had a friend, period.  It's impossible to have real friendship when no one feels like they can accept help or even talk about themselves."

Or after Edward's violent injury when Tris reflects, "I don't want to cry for Edward--at least not in the deep, personal way that you cry for a friend or a loved one.  I want to cry because something terrible happened, and I saw it, and I could not see a way to mend it."

Or when she's falling in love and she thinks, "And even though it seems impossible that he could feel something for me, given all that I'm not ... maybe it isn't."

I'm eager to continue this story.  I'm hopeful that there will be lessons about how human nature must contain portions of all these factions, and many more, in order to create individual balanced lives, which creates a balanced society.  I'm hopeful that lessons like the one that sticks with me most from the Harry Potter books ("We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.”) will be the overarching moral of the trilogy.

But if this does not come to pass, at least I know it will be a darn good adventure read.


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Book Review: Stardust

Stardust by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this book because of Buzzfeed.  No really. I did.  Yes, I'm getting my book recommendations from a website with questionable editorial acumen but unquestioned purview and influence in our increasingly uncurated world; a place in which any schmo can write a review, or even make a suggestion that I might like this book because I liked Phantom Tollbooth and I say "Hmmm.  Maybe.  I'll try it." Heaven help us all.

But finding books in unlikely places allows one to find books you might not have found otherwise.  This can be good.  This can be bad.  In the case of this particular book, it was somewhere in between; in that middle-ground country occupied by a feeling of ambivalence, a shrug of the shoulders and exhalation that sounds something like "Eh...."

A fairy-tale for grownups.  Which just means that you are lured into that safe place of a tale for children, then someone has sex.  Or a fallen star whispers "fuck."  Jarring at first but either Gaiman, after the job of reminding you ever-so-not-gently that this is, indeed, meant to be for adults ("nipples") he got back to the work of telling a story.

And it wasn't a bad story.  I found myself wanting to get to the end of it so I could find out if the connections I made were the right connections. And they were, of course, because there wasn't much magic to the story in the end.

There was potential, for sure.  Like the idea that the lands of Faeire were bigger "than the world (for, since the dawn of time, each land that has been forced off the map by explorers and the brave going on and proving it wasn't there has taken refuge in Faerie; so it is not, by the time that we come to write of it, a most huge place indeed...)"

Or this throw-away moment;

"A fieldmouse found a fallen hazelnut and began to bit into the hard shell of the nut with its sharp, ever-growing front teeth, not because it was hungry, but because it was a prince under an enchantment who could not regain his outer corm until he chewed the Nut of Wisdom.  But its excitement made it careless, and only the shadow that blotted out the moonlight warned it of the descent of a huge grey owl, who caught the mouse in its sharp talons and rose again into the night.  The mouse dropped the nut, which fell into the brook and was carried away, to be swallowed by a salmon.  The owl swallowed the mouse in just a couple of gulps, leaving just its tail trailing from her mouth, like a length of bootlace.  Something snuffled and grunted as it pushed through the thicket---a badger, thought the owl (herself under a curse, and only able to resume her rightful shape if she consumed a mouse who had eaten the Nut of Wisdom), or perhaps a small bear."

But Gaiman never went the direction I wanted him to go.  He overviewed when I wanted him to dig deeper.  He dug deeper when I wanted him to overview.  And, meanwhile, the story lost its meaning.  Then the ending snuck up on me, ridiculous and unreal as fairy tale endings always are.

I rather enjoyed moments of Gaiman's prose.  Like the evil witch who declaims, "The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe who will grow to slay me."  Or the character that says, "There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of unhatched chicks."

But, unlike Phantom Tollbooth, those moments were not woven tightly into the tapestry of the adventure.  They were clever bits, followed by some storytelling, followed by another clever bit.

You know, I should have realized that Buzzfeed should not be entirely trusted when I picked up the book and saw that the hero is named Tristran, not Tristan, as Buzzfeed suggests.  But fool me once, and I pick up another book from the same list, recommended because I liked Ramona Quimby when I was a kid.  Stay tuned.





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Book Review: Counting by 7s

Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is always so lovely to return to literature for young people after slogging through philosophical tomes aimed at adults.  Invariably, I learn more from kid lit fiction than I do from adult self-help books.  Makes me want to go to the self-help section of the bookstore and reorganize a bit.

I'd put this book in the section about how to deal with grief.  But also in the section about how to create meaning in life.  And in the gardening how-to section.

"It has been my experience that rewarding and heartbreaking often go hand in hand."

"I have seen trees that survive fire.  Their bark is burned and their limbs are dead branches.  But hidden under that skeleton is a force that sends a single shoot of green out into the world.  Maybe if I'm lucky, that will one day happen to me.  But right now, I can't see it."

"...almost everything I pursue is for my own understanding or amusement.  I believe having an audience naturally corrupts the performance."

"I realize now that I'm worrying about all of them.  It's better than worrying about myself.  This is one of the secrets that I have learned in the last few months.  When you care about other people, it takes the spotlight off your own drama."


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Book Review: Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I so wanted to like this book more than I did.  Maybe I am too saturated with Holocaust stories because of the work I do.  Or maybe I am just in a mental place where I am not as open to these ideas.  Or maybe these ideas about how to live and be are known to me, even when they are hard to live by.

That said, I still dog-eared several pages and have these take-aways and reminders;

You can't control things.  But you can control your reaction to things.

Suffering fills the soul and the conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is big or small. Frankl says, "man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas.  If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber."

No one has the right to do wrong, even if wrong has been done to them.

Frankl's discussion of existential despair in the second portion of the book made me wish he were alive today to comment and guide, in a time when we are busying ourselves with screens and inflated but tenuous indirect connections that boil down to very little of substance.  Of meaning.  In a day when we are more often medicated instead of being encouraged and supported while we explore and try to conquer the demons.  "A man's concern, even in his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.  It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs.  It is his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crisis of growth and development."

But as Nietzsche said, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."  So off I go to post this review on Facebook and hope that it receives some likes to give my reading a book about meaning some meaning.


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Book Review: Difficult Conversations

Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Let me 'splain.  No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Empathize.  And Listen in a way that makes the listener feel heard.

The end.


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Book Review: Little Bee

Little Bee by Chris Cleave
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The back cover blurb claims that the magic of this story is not what happens, but how the story unfolds.  I disagree.  I think the magic is not in the story or the plot.  The magic is in the moments, the small worlds within the larger world of the novel, that Cleave creates with his prose.

Cleave paints a complex tale of interior conflict arising from a tale of exterior conflict.  And while the exterior conflict of Cleave's characters is intense, dramatic and highly political, the interior conflict is what drives the book forward. The politics of Cleave's book become secondary because Cleave chooses interior over exterior.  He studiously avoids painting the blatant swath of a morality tale; instead, he invests in the smaller story that trickles out like a tributary from a powerful river.

And somehow when Cleave, a white, privileged male, channels a black, African teenage girl, he is at his best.  When he puts himself into her world and her thoughts, his prose resonates with meaning and thoughtfulness;

"I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly.  That is what the scar makers want us to think.  But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them.  We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret.  Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying.  A scar means, I survived."

"This was always my trouble when I was learning to speak your language.  Every word can defend itself.  Just when you go to grab it, it can split into two separate meanings so the understanding closes on empty air.  I admire you people.  You are like sorcerers and you have made your language as safe as your money."

"In your country, if you are not scared enough already, you can go to watch a horror film.  Afterward, you can go out of the cinema into the night and for a little while there is horror in everything...For one hour you are haunted, and you do not trust anybody, and then the feeling fades away.  Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it."

"I do not know why the small puddle of urine made me start to cry.  I do not know why the mind chooses these small things to break itself on."

Cleave doesn't do as well with the white Brits of his tale, though there are a few moments;

"I'm so sorry, Charlie.  Mummy is too grown up to feel very much anymore, and so when she does, it catches her by surprise."

"There's eight million people here pretending the others aren't getting on their nerves.  I believe it's called civilization."

But despite the gorgeous prose Little Bee was somewhat of a disappointment.  Look past some of the more beautiful writing and it becomes simply the story of three unlikeable adults, one loosely-drawn and mostly annoying child and a girl who we only get a chance to know through her story of personal tragedy.  Add a nebulous ending and you get one of those books that you finish and throw aside in disgust.  But you aren't sorry you read it.  And parts of it stick with you long after you've returned it to the shelf.



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Book Review: Eighty Days

Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love history books that expand outside the main story and provide tangents to enrich my reading experience AND give me random trivia to blurt out in a Cliff Clavin-like way.  This is one of those books.  The original story was intriguing to me, as I had never heard of the race between these two women, but then Goodman adds things like;

The Statue of Liberty was originally supposed to stand at the mouth of the Suez Canal, dressed in the veil and dress of an Egyptian peasant, holding a lantern, representing the light of Egypt bringing progress to Asia.  But Egypt's leaders thought it was too expensive, so it was re-imagined as liberty and shoveled off to the US.  But it was too expensive for us, too;  Congress refused to allocate funds to build a pedestal.  So the centennial came and went and Lady Liberty was sitting in a warehouse somewhere.  They put her right arm outside Madison Square Park to try to bring attention to her plight.  It was there for 7 years and the money was still not raised.  Finally, Joseph Pulitzer issued a personal appeal for funds in the pages of his paper, The World and the paper's working class readers, sent pennies and nickels.  Five months later, the 100k needed was raised, 80% from donations of less than a dollar.  And Lady Liberty took her place in the harbor.  Crowd-funding before the word existed.

Did you know until the latter decades of the 19th century, communities had the power to establish their own time zones?  Local mean time, they called it, determined by the position of the sun as it passed overhead.  Illinois had 27 different time zones, Wisconsin, 38.  The train station in Pittsburgh had six clocks and each one showed a different time.  When it was noon in Washington, D.C., it was 12:08 in Philadelphia, 12:12 in New York and 12:24 in Boston.  Of course, trains that could traverse a mile a minute made local mean time untenable.  So in October 1883, the largest railroad companies had meeting and declared that the country would be divided into four time zones, corresponding to the mean sun time at the meridians near Philadelphia, Memphis, Denver and Fresno. The president, the Congress and the courts had nothing to do with it but it became the law of the land.  On November 18, 1883, clocks were changed.

Otherwise, this book highlighted the amazing strides in travel in only 120 years.  Elizabeth Bisland believed that humans were not made to travel a mile a minute.  "She wondered how coming generations, who would surely travel one hundred or even one hundred fifty miles and hour, could possibly handle the strain of it.  Some process of adaptation to the new environment would doubtless take place: humanity, it seemed, always found a way to bear what had previously seemed unbearable."  What would she think now?

And Nellie Bly despised the British (whose transport she was forced to use as they had developed it in pursuit of their empire)  Goodman writes, "As she traveled among the English, Nellie Bly was becoming increasingly conscious of the peculiar privilege that imperial power conferred upon its citizens; the privilege of insensitivity.  They could, if they chose to, carry the empire along with them on their travels, as they sailed on English ships, slept in English hotels, ate English meals, taking little notice of the specific characteristics of the countries through which they passed..."  Huh.  That's exactly the complaint I have about American tourists now.  And cruise ships.  And tour buses, that allow people to wander through a country without having to touch, smell or taste it.  The more things change...

In 1910, Elizabeth Bisland returned to Japan with her husband.  She was looking "for the Japan of the Japanese, 'light, fine, frail, with a touch of whimsey; of gay fancifulness; of soft delicate fairness and flowery quiet.'  That Japan, though, was becoming increasingly difficult to find; the new trains brought swarms of tourists, and the streets were lined with the modern hotels and teahouses that catered to them. 'One wouldn't begrudge the tourist so if he seemed to enjoy it, but his perspiring pervasiveness apparently derives nothing but fatigue from the effort, and one can't but wish he'd leave the places of beauty alone to the few who do get comfort out of them.'" Bisland considered the world "utterly destroyed by our loathsome Occidental 'improvements.'"

And as the ladies traveled, they asked questions like, "Why do Chinese women bind their feet?" only to receive the non-answer, "Why do European women wear corsets and pinch their waists?"  World travel makes you question your own fashion, customs and ideas in ways that these women had never had the chance to experience.  In our internet-laden present, the world is smaller.  But are we paying attention the way these wide-eyed, intellectually curious ladies did in the late 1800s?  Or has the world shrunk so much and become so universal (with our loathsome Occidental improvements) that the common ground has overtaken the differences?



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