A book with nonhuman characters

Title: A Sudden Light
Author: Garth Stein
Publication date: 2014

This book was a library find that I previously had no plans on reading. But there it was on the Express bookcase of my local library. ("Express" means it's a new release and you can't renew it so there's built-in pressure.)

Trevor Riddell, 14, is our storyteller. His father, Jones Riddell, takes him from their New England home to visit his paternal grandfather at the Seattle house in which the elder Riddell grew up. Trevor's mission is to repair his family and, to do so, he plans to uncover the secrets of Jones' childhood, the reason why Jones was sent to boarding school out east just days after his mother's death leaving behind a young sister, Serena, then 11.

I didn't know what I was doing. I was going by instinct; I was following my intuition. I'd read enough fairy tales to know that, if my heart was true, I'd be able to do the right thing for all of us; I could save us all. And I'd read enough Kafka to know that, if I did wrong, it might lead to the end of all things.

Grandpa Samuel and Serena live in Riddell House on The North Estate, 200+ acres of virgin forest. It is Serena's wish to convince her father to sell the land (worth millions) so she can travel the world. The problem is Grandpa Samuel doesn't want to sell. He wants to stay in the only home he has ever known, in part, because he believes the ghost of his late wife Isobel remains there.

Trevor uncovers Riddell House's secrets (hidden hallways and rooms) while discovering what created the rift within his family. He is aided in his efforts by Benjamin Riddell, his late great uncle, our "nonhuman character." Benjamin comes to Trevor via dreams, handwritten messages and even face-to-face visits.

It was impossible not to fall in love with Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain. I devoured this book in just four days (400 pages) with the same intensity that I read Racing though with admittedly fewer tears.

Some of my favorite books over the last few years (The Round House, The Goldfinch) have had adolescent male narrators. This book fits neatly into that category.

While I was able to pick up on many of the story's secrets before they were revealed to the reader, Stein kept me surprised at a handful of plot twists I did not see coming. I already miss Clever Trevor.

Four stars

Next challenge: A book with a color in the title

A book written by a female author

Title: Dept. of Speculation
Author: Jenny Offill
Publication date: 2014

Dept. of Speculation is the latest pick from my stellar book club. We'll be discussing it at our May meeting next week but I'm getting ahead of myself and blogging while the book is still relatively fresh in my mind.

Jenny Offill's slim 177-page novel is the stream of consciousness story of a marriage told through the voice of "the wife" about "the husband" and later "the baby."

I feel about this book the way many people feel about Jackson Pollack's paintings: anyone could do it. But I'm enough of a writer/reader to know that it's not actually true.

There are endearing things about Dept. of Speculation. I feel the narrator's love for her family and her hopes as well. I appreciated what a quick read it was (less than three hours for me personally). But I think it just wasn't for me.

Perhaps my book club will pull more information out of me, in which case, I'll return to this entry and expand it.

One star

Next challenge: A book with nonhuman characters

A memoir

Title: Just Kids
Author: Patti Smith
Publication date: 2010

In Just Kids, Patti Smith takes us back with her to the New York City of the 1960s. Not just to NYC but to the Chelsea Hotel, where she lived for several years with her longtime friend and long ago lover Robert Mapplethorpe. Theirs was a time of creation and art and love.

Patti tells their story with fondness and focus remembering seemingly countless conversations between herself and Mapplethorpe as well as many others within their inner circle. The writer in me wonders if she kept a journal throughout her life though she makes no mention of doing so within the book.

While reading Just Kids, I wrote myself a note: "I could get through this book faster if I didn't stop to Google a name every three pages!" This observation is both true and one of the reasons I so enjoyed this book. In his sheer determination to be a successful artist, Robert Mapplethorpe dragged Patti Smith with him night after night to Max's Kansas City in the hopes of running into Andy Warhol and making those important connections needed to keep in the game.

One of the things I find most admirable about Patti Smith after reading Just Kids is her determination and perseverance. She arrived in NYC with a dream and the address of a friend who'd moved to town before she did. She soon learns that the friend has since moved and is unable to find him for some time. She lives on the streets before a chance meeting with Robert takes them on a path together.

She tells stories of eating lettuce sandwiches and saving nickels for the vending machine, which would provide her next meal. Through it all, she shared it with Robert.

Smith won the National Book Award for this memoir. She's recently announced she'll publish a second memoir, presumably on her life with her late husband Fred Sonic Smith of the MC5. I'm sure I'll be reading it.

Four stars

Next challenge: A book by a female author

A graphic novel

Title: Maus: A Survivor's Tale (My Father Bleeds History) & Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began
Author: Art Spiegelman
Publication date(s): 1986 and 1991

The graphic novel is not a format I've explored before the reading challenge prompted me to do so. While I toyed with the idea of visiting an old friend (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), I believe I was always destined to read Maus. I was working in a library when Maus was first published back during my high school years. I remember the news stories and the buzz about it but hadn't read it until now. 

Maus and its sequel Maus II are the biographical stories of Vladek Spiegelman told and illustrated by his son, cartoonist Art Spiegelman. Vladek begins his story during his days as a young man in Poland in the 1930s. During a series of visits between father and son, Vladek tells Art of meeting and marrying Art's mother in pre-war Poland, of the successful businesses he built up and of Art's maternal grandparents' wealth and opulent lifestyle and then the war ... 

The cartoonist draws the Jews (including Vladek and Art) as mice, the Nazis are cats and the non-Jews Poles and Germans alike are pigs.

The first book details Vladek's efforts to shield his wife Anja and her family from the worst of the early years of the Polish invasion. The family hides for many months before they find themselves at the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp. In one particularly powerful panel, Vladek begs his wife to carry on:

"No Darling! To die, it's easy ... but you have to struggle for life!"

 I raced through the first book in just a few hours and found myself needing to know the rest of the Spiegelmans' story. How did they come to be in Rego Park, New York in the 1970s? 

The second book picks up where the first ended. Vladek tells the story to his impatient son who is

eager to capture it all in the comic. During the telling of the story, we also come to understand the relationship between father and son. Vladek is remarried (having buried Art's mother following her suicide many years earlier) and has a difficult relationship with his second wife, Mala, also a Holocaust survivor.

I found myself feeling sorry for the elder Spiegelman who seemed to want nothing more than to spend time with his adult son. But Art was bothered by his father's requests of his time (help him put in the storm windows, balance the checkbook, do the marketing) and seemed to want nothing more than to pry the story of war from his father. It was quite heart breaking in fact. 

I've read four books during the challenge that deal with different aspects of World War II (three of which were memoirs from Holocaust survivors). It still shocks and outrages me. Though it took me nearly 30 years, I'm glad I finally found time for Mr. Spiegelman's story. 

Three stars

Next challenge: A book by a female author

A book set in the future

Title: Station Eleven
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Publication date: 2014

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

The premise of Station Eleven really intrigued me: dystopian world, traveling Shakespeare troupe, all taking place in and surrounding my home Great Lakes State. Somehow these things were not enough for me. I wanted more and in the wanting, fell disappointed with what I received. 

Emily St. John Mandel weaves a story connecting a hodgepodge of characters during a time of great sadness and desperation. The story begins in presumably present day Toronto at a theater performance of King Lear. Within hours, the city is thrust into a pandemic flu and survival takes on a new meaning.

The story fast forwards 20 years ahead after the so-called Georgian Flu has wiped out most of the population. We are introduced to a number of characters including Kirsten, a young actress with the Traveling Symphony who happened to be on stage for that performance of King Lear two decades earlier. 

Station Eleven forces the reader to think about the not-so-romantic dystopian future. The one without electricity, mass transit, communication systems and stocked food stores. Before reading Station Eleven, I didn't know that auto gasoline goes bad after three years. (My husband, who knows of such mysteries, assures me this is true.)

Perhaps my dystopian stories are too tied up within trilogies (Hunger Games, Divergent, Matched) for me to willingly say goodbye to the characters after a single installment. What I wanted after reading Station Eleven was more. But just as the finale of The Sopranos what I learned is that life, inevitably, goes on. 

Three stars

Next challenge: A graphic novel

A book with antonyms in the title

Title: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Author: Jamie Ford
Publication date: 2009

The truth is I had some anxiety about this prompt. And when Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet popped up on a list of books available as a Book Club in a Bag from my local library, it seemed perfect. The fact that one of my fellow club members was reading the book when I suggested it and a second had read it a few months earlier, sealed the deal.

I've read several books about World War II (including one for this challenge) but I've never read a story about the Japanese-American experience of internment. It's certainly not a proud part of American history.
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Our story centers around Henry Lee, a Chinese-American man living and raised in Seattle. The story flips back and forth between present time (in this case 1986) and the past (1942-1945). Young Henry is surviving in two worlds: that of his Chinese parents' traditional household and the white prep school he's been granted a scholarship to attend. With anti-Japanese sentiment at an all-time high, and Americans happy to pass that discrimination on to all Asians, Henry is taunted and traumatized by schoolyard bullies daily.

One day, a second scholarship student arrives at the school. Henry befriends the Japanese-American girl Keiko and their relationship make for the flashback chapters of the book.

The book draws its name, in part, from the Panama Hotel, in which many families stored their personal possessions when the "evacuation" to internment camps began. Years later, the hotel gains a new owner who discovers a basement full of memories of a time forgotten by many ... but not forgotten by Henry Lee.

As he left the hotel, Henry looked west to where the sun was setting, burnt sienna flooding the horizon. It reminded in that time was short, but that beautiful endings could still be found at the end of old dreary days.

While I enjoyed this book, I've read so many wonderful books in recent weeks that I find myself holding my reading to a high standard. In another time, I might rate it higher. But I would certainly recommend it.

Three and a half stars

Next challenge: TBD