More Reading

Vacation for us usually includes a bag o' books. This time, going to the UK, we tried to keep it more limited. We ended up shopping for books. In spite of the bookmania, I didn't read on trains, other than a newspaper here and there, because I wanted to see the sights. Still, two ten hour flights had to be filled! The list since last time (not all on the trip, of course)...

A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby. I've liked everything Nick Hornby has written and was waiting for this to show up in paperback. This was a bit more offbeat than usual, but I enjoyed it. It's the story of four people who encounter one another, each with the intent of committing suicide, on the roof of building on New Year's Eve. They're a pretty pitiful bunch, but they reluctantly find some connection with one another and move on.

Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, by Peter L. Bernstein. I thought this non-fiction book would be a good mixture of history and overcoming great obstacles, but it was too mired down in minutiae for me even to finish it. After a few hundred pages into it, there still wasn't anyone to root for. To play off an old Erie Canal song, "Slow book, everybody down."

Third Translation, by Matt Bondurant. This fiction book sounded a lot more interesting than it ended up being. It's about a specialist in translation and decoding of hieroglyphics who gets mixed up in a plot to unravel an ancient Rosetta-stone like object at the British Museum. The mixture of geeky characters, cartoony villians, and father-daughter reconciliation mixed in didn't do much for me.

Gravesend Light, by David Payne. I really liked this book that takes place on the North Carolina shore. It involves an anthropologist, who grew up there, studying the rapidly changing culture of people making a living fishing offshore. He, of course, finds he can't stay as distanced from his subjects as he thinks, and he gets involved with a recent Yale grad doctor who was looking to escape from the hell of New Haven. Might make for an interesting read while holed up on the Outer Banks some time.

Shadows of the Sun, by Alexander Parsons. Very good book with great characters. Takes place during WWII in New Mexico, as the gummint seizes ranchland for, er, special bombing range testing. The son goes off to war and fights in the Pacific, while the families try to figure out how to keep their lives together back home after generations on the ranch. The book is split about half-and-half between the experience of the son as a Japanese POW in the Pacific and the folks back on the ranch.

Alibi, by Joseph Kanon. I've read and enjoyed a few of Kanon's things (notably, The Good German). He's got the formula down for fiction wrapped around the realities of WWII, especially the aftermath of it. This one takes place in Venice after the war is over, and centers around a socialite American and her son. He falls in love with a Jewish Italian girl who suffered in the war, and the mother ends up getting engaged to an Italian who the girl implicates as the guy who handed her father over the the Germans. It was a pretty good book, except that you just can't see yourself behaving like these people, including doing the many stupid things that are required to keep the story going.

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. I had picked this book up a hundred times. I'm a sucker for the Pulitzer Prize Winner seal on books, I'm afraid. Each time I would look at the back and decide I just couldn't get interested in a story centering around a hermaphrodite. But, hey, it was a really great story, spanning generations starting with the Greek immigrants escaping to the US, life in Detroit during the depression, growing up in the 50's, and so on. The narrator is Calliope (later Cal) who is by all visible signs a girl and raised as such, who confusedly discovers she has some messed up plumbing and the chromosomes to go along with them.

The Golden Spruce, A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed, by John Vaillant. A non-fiction story that was touted as being akin to Into the Wild (a terrific book in my opinion). It centers around a guy who ends up cutting down a giant, basically mutant, golden, one-of-a-kind spruce tree up near Vancouver. He was making a statement (and what a statement it was) about how the timber company would use its "pet tree" to help make itself look good, while just on the other side of the hill it was clearcutting old growth. Very strange guy. That part of the story was more interesting to me than the role of this tree in the native culture up there, which tended to drag on.

Until I Find You, by John Irving. It's hard to beat John Irving for original and unpredictable storytelling. This book certainly fits that description, and I enjoyed it quite a lot, but the subject matter may be weird enough to prevent you from picking it up. The main character is raised by his tattoo-artist mother and has a lot of formative experience around traveling with her to try to find his father after the organ-playing father got her pregnant and then moved on to the next great organ in various European cities' cathedrals. The kid grows up and becomes an actor, being most famous for playing transvestites. Are you hooked yet!!! Very strange, but this was one I enjoyed on vacation.

Mountains of the Mind, by Robert MacFarlane. This was one I picked up in a bookstore in Scotland. It's non-fiction and covers the history of man's fascination with mountains through history. He talks about both the why and the what. One thing I got more perspective on was the role of Mont Blanc and Chamonix in the European fascination with mountains, and the evolution of dangerous activities as something people like to do in their leisure time. It was enjoyable, with a bit of the old frozen bozo appeal mixed with introspection as to why frozen bozo adventuring is appealing.

We Need to Talk about Kevin, by Lionel Shriver. Another one picked up on the trip, and sporting the Orange Prize for literature. Creepy story about the mother and parents' perspective as they raise their child only to have him become one of those Columbine type of killers at their school. The story is told through a series of letters from the mother to the estranged husband after the fact, reliving things as flashbacks. The style was a bit offputting to me, and I'm not quite sure why I chose it to begin with. Still, it was different, and while I'm not sure "like" is the right word to use for my reaction to it, it left me a bit disturbed -- is that good?