The Best We Could Do

Sometimes I'll Google phrases like "best diverse comic books" and come across titles I've never heard of, such as this gem by Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do.  Thi Bui was born in Vietnam and left the country with her family as a refugee during the war.  They eventually made it to the United States, where Bui met her husband and they started a family.  While raising her son, Bui reflected upon her relationships with her own parents and how little she knew about their lives before she entered the world.  This graphic memoir is her attempt to tell their story and her own, and it's a beautiful one.

As I get older, it becomes more and more clear to me that my parents are human, and that they are humans who age.  As I see my friends with their (still quite young) children, I can also see just how exhausting parenthood can be.  There are few relationships in life that can remain as inherently selfish and self-absorbed as that of a child towards its parent.  Even now, as an adult who is capable of doing adult things like cooking her own dinner and doing her own laundry, every time I go to my parents' house, I regress 100% and expect there to be food waiting for me when I arrive, and food ready for me to take back with me when I leave.  I call my dad and complain of medical symptoms so that he will call in prescriptions for me.  I call my mom and ask if she'll come over to oversee work on my house so that I don't have to take a day off of work.

Bui reflects upon this as she takes care of her son and compares her childhood to those of her parents' and her son's.  Her parents came of age in vastly different circumstances; they met in college, got married, and then their world imploded.  They raised children in the midst of war, and then left the country on a boat (while Bui's mother was eight months pregnant) to get to Malaysia.  They arrived in America, still chased by their personal demons, and raised a family the best way they knew how.  Bui struggled with her relationship with her parents, particularly her father, and only began to understand why when she learned more about their childhoods.  The empathy that comes through in the way she describes her family history is so moving, and the title of the book works so well.  Her parents weren't perfect, and they made mistakes.  But they did the best they could do, and their children grew up with better lives, and their grandchildren grow up with even better ones.

The Best We Could Do is a beautiful story, particularly at this time when so much of the world is turning away refugees.  Accepting refugees not only changes the lives of the refugees, but of generations to come.  The book is also a truly heartfelt memoir about family and the deep love that you can have for people you don't always understand and who are far from perfect.

Rolling Blackouts, by Sarah Glidden

I heard about Sarah Glidden's Rolling Blackouts:  Displatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq on NPR's Book Concierge.  Glidden traveled to the Middle East with some friends who work as independent journalists.  They spent several weeks talking to displaced Iraqis and other individuals and trying to think of ways to pitch stories to news organizations back home.  They work on two main stories - one about Dan, an Iraqi veteran who is returning to the region for the first time and wants to talk to Iraqis who lived through the war, and one about Sam, an Iraqi refugee who found his way to Seattle with his family, somehow ended up in the 9/11 Commission report, and was deported back to Iraq.

Much of Glidden's story, though, focuses on her journalist friends, and the work they do.  It's no secret that news organizations have significantly reduced their foreign staff, and that reporting has suffered as a result.  There are very few reporters abroad with long-term contacts, and so they cannot report on longer-term, slower burn stories.  We understand the world less because of it.  Governments are more corrupt because of it.  Reporters are less safe because of it.  We are all less accountable to each other, from individuals to governments to multi-national corporations, because of it.

Glidden's book highlights some of this loss to us.  She shows us an Iraq that suffered through war but still has culture, friendship, delicious food, and beauty.  Some Iraqis are happy that Americans came, mostly because they suffered deeply under Saddam Hussein.  Others hate Americans for ruining their way of life.  I really enjoyed the way Glidden's friends shared stories of Iraqis in multiple countries to provide a broader perspective.  I also liked the way Glidden used light, bright colors in her art to humanize the experience of so many people whose lives have been upended so completely.  Not only the Iraqi refugees themselves, but the lives of the Turks and Syrians as well.

It was particularly chilling to read the Syrian section of this book, as I was reading it while the US bombed Syria after Assad used chemical weapons on his own people.  The book is set some years ago, I think before the full horrors of the Syrian war.  Now I realize just how much the world missed by not having reporters in Syria to cover Assad, so that it felt as though the whole war came out of nowhere.  (At least, it felt that way to me.  No doubt others were better informed.)

I was less enamored with the story around Dan, the Iraqi war veteran.  I feel like his return to Iraq and his opacity in sharing his feelings and whether his feelings about the war and his participation in it took up an outsize amount of the story.  In a way, it felt very "Yes, of course, focus on the white guy's story because that would be the most compelling to everyone."  I don't think that is fair to Glidden's reporter friends, but it seemed like Glidden wanted to focus the most on that story.  She even ends that story arc quite dramatically, with something like, "Sarah never interviewed Dan again" as the only words on a whole page.  Which makes it sound like either Sarah or Dan died, but neither of them did, and they continued to stay friends and talk to each other, she just didn't interview him again about the war.

That aside, though, I really appreciated Glidden's book and her focus on how journalists make decisions on stories, angles, ethics, and so many other things.  It was very illuminating, and I highly recommend seeking it out if you enjoy Joe Sacco's work or Brooke Gladstone's The Influencing Machine.  (Teresa, I'm looking at you!)

My first space opera

One of my closest friends gave me a copy of John Scalzi's Old Man's War for my birthday this year.  I had told her that I want to read more science fiction but that I find the genre a bit intimidating, especially the more traditional "space operas" and wasn't sure where to start.  She recommended Scalzi to me and then gave me this first book in a series.

Old Man's War is about John Perry, a 75-year-old man who signs up for the Colonial Defense Force (CDF).  The CDF takes old people from the Americas, gives them new, powerful, green bodies, and then sends them out to engage in inter-planetary warfare to defend human colonies in outer space.  Most of these colonies are people by Asians and Africans, who were bombed to oblivion by the western world in a Subcontinental War.

I'm really glad that my friend gave me this book to read as an introduction to space opera because right from the beginning, I felt super-comfortable with the book.  John's narrative voice is wry and self-deprecating and really funny, and I immediately felt welcomed into his world.  The story also moves pretty quickly and introduces some really great characters. The humor is just as important, if not more important, as the science and the plot and all the rest.  It's a really fun introduction to science fiction, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is unsure of where to start with "traditional" science fiction but wants to give it a try.

That said, there were a lot of things about this book that raised several red flags.  These I detailed out to my friend in very long-winded text messages.  Let me also just say before I get into all of these that both my friend and I are very feminist and very aware of white-washing and everything else that I'm about to talk about, and both of us still enjoyed this book.  Also, she said that some of my concerns are addressed by Scalzi in later books in the series, even if they were not addressed in this first book.

On to my concerns.

Very close to the beginning of this book, a pretty vile character points out that all of the space colonists are Indian (he calls Indians "Hindis" and "dot heads"), which is unfair because they lost the war and losers shouldn't get to colonize space.  All the white people (apparently being American = being white) can only get into space by joining this Colonial Defense Force.  This is insane because dot heads who lose a war on earth should not then get the protection of superior beings in space.

The whole race thing is brought up VERY clearly and intentionally, and yet, for the rest of the book, there is zero interaction with any colonists.  Based on the names that everyone on the Colonial Defense Force have, I would guess that there is also very limited interaction with anyone that isn't white or Hispanic (though everyone in the force has green skin, so "white" is a misnomer, maybe).  I know that science fiction generally has a diversity problem, so it's not that I was expecting a gloriously diverse cast here, but I was frustrated that the race thing was brought up so early on and then never again acknowledged or dealt with again.  It's like Scalzi was using the other racist jerk as a foil just to show readers how open-minded and kind John Perry is in contrast, which is annoying.  Mostly because he is using a conversation between two white men to show that one is racist and the other is not.  I would believe it more if anyone who was not white had a voice in the conversation.

And then, we are supposed to believe that John Perry is this upstanding guy who is not racist, but then he cheerfully goes from planet to planet killing other intelligent species who have built up cultures and histories over time.  There is a moment when he acknowledges how bad this makes him feel, when everyone around him acknowledges it as well.  But then they just move on and continue the destruction.  This I guess would be somewhat understandable if you're 20 years old and had never been through a war before or thought about other people before.  But again, John is at least 75 years old and had protested wars on earth.  But seems to think it's a totally different ball game out in space.  And again, they never once engage with colonists, so you don't even really know how he feels about people who are not the same as him.

There was one scene in the book that stood out to me a lot, possibly because I also recently finished I am Malala, and she spent a bit of time talking about the Taliban.  Some years ago, the Taliban destroyed ancient beautiful Buddhist statues.  There was a huge outcry for reasons I hope I don't need to outline here.

In Old Man's War, there is very brief moment in which John leaves a spaceship to go onto an alien planet.  He sees "an abstract sculpture of some description" and blows it up.  "Never much liked abstract art."  Possibly, I am a little too sensitive at this time, since this was clearly supposed to be a moment of comic relief prior to war.  But all I could think was, "IT MIGHT NOT BE UGLY ABSTRACT ART TO THEM, JERKFACE." 

And that's really where I feel like this book had a lot of unmet potential.  We're led to believe that John is this great guy because he has an excellent sense of humor, a lot of people like him, he treats his comrades well, he seems fairly smart, and he stood up against racism that one time in a pretty low-risk setting.  But then through the rest of the book, you don't  see any of the stuff he questions or worries about come back to him in terms of how the war effects him or how he interacts with colonists.  It felt very "here's the white savior you've all been waiting for!"  And that annoyed me.

That said, I think I am going to read the next book in this series.  My friend said Old Man's War is an introduction to a complex and well-plotted series.  I trust her judgment, and the book really was enjoyable if you're not as hyper-sensitive as I seem to be these days. 

Has anyone else read this series?  Any thoughts on how it evolves as it continues?

"This anxiety of non-belonging."

As soon as I read the New York Times' book review of Susan Faludi's In the Darkroom, I knew I wanted to read it.  I immediately put it on hold at the library, and I went to pick it up the same day my hold came in.

I have struggled a lot with my reading this year.  But this book brought back so much of that enjoyment to me.  Every day after work last week, I would finish my dinner, pour myself a glass of wine, and then settle down on my sofa for some quality reading.

I set myself the task this summer of being more outgoing, of inviting a lot of different people to do a lot of things with me, and of trying to form true friendships with new people.  It has been a lot of work (and I wouldn't say it always feels particularly rewarding), but it's also been pretty fun and kept me extremely busy.  I have a feeling the people I have gotten to know over the past few months probably think that I am far more extroverted and social than I would probably ever describe myself as being.

For whatever reason, last week, I made no plans.  I had no plans for ten days in a row.  It was the perfect time to settle down with a good, meaningful, beautiful book.  And I'm so glad that In the Darkroom was there because it is one of the most moving books I have read in a very long time.

I almost hesitate to share a summary of the book because I think it will frighten some people away, and that would be sad.  At a high level, the book is about a grown woman coming to know her father after many years of estrangement, after he has undergone a sex change operation to become a woman.  She goes to meet her father in Budapest and the story unwinds from there, from his childhood growing up in a very wealthy Jewish family to the horrors of the Holocaust and the many re-inventions he underwent before this final one - choosing to live as a woman at the age of 76.

[Apologies if I am misusing pronouns here; Faludi refers to her father as "him" before the operation and as "her" after.  I will try to do the same.]

Faludi is a staunch feminist, and as she talks to her father and others who have undergone the male-to-female operation, she is struck by their adherence to traditional (stereotypical) gender norms.  Her father says troubling things like, "Now I can communicate better, because I'm a woman... It helps that I'm a woman.  Because women don't provoke."  She reads memoirs of women who talk about their experience, and none of them sound very feminist at all.  Take this quote from Jan Morris.  As Jim Morris, she had climbed Mt. Everest.  And yet, as a woman:

"I was even more emotional now.  I cried very easily, and was ludicrously susceptible to sadness or flattery.  Finding myself rather less interested in great affairs (which are placed in a new perspective, I do assure you, by a change of sex), I acquired a new concern for small ones.  My scale of vision seemed to contract... It is, I think, a simpler vision that I now possess.  Perhaps it is nearer a child's."

It's difficult not to be offended by the comments above.  And yet, most men who want to undergo sex change operations to become women have to pass a horrible test that dates from mid-century and very much requires them to conform to stereotype.  In order to be approved for the operation, they are expected to say that they don't mind putting their careers on hold or not being the bread winner, etc.  I had no idea this was the case.  The way that all of these memoirs are written with this assumption that women are inherently different than men in their approach to the world, and that feminists are stupid to want to change things because being a woman is just such grand fun, is very hard to take.  For Faludi, whose father fetishized womanhood prior to her operation with costumes and posed photos and then became much more conservation after her operation (this happens a lot, it seems), it must have have been overwhelming.

Faludi doesn't only tackle feminism, though.  She also talks a lot about Jewish identity.  Faludi is not very religious, but she doesn't have to be.  "I was someone with only the vaguest idea of what it meant to be a Jew who was nevertheless adamant that I was one."  Her father's relationship with religion was much more up and down.  Born to affluent but negligent parents who didn't even attend his bar mitzvah, Istvan Friedman shed his Jewish identity during World War II when Hungary became extremely anti-Semitic.  The many stories he recounts over the course of this book are amazing; he saved his parents' lives and the lives of many others, often by pretending to be a Nazi.  He escaped Hungry with friends on a fantastic lie.  He moved to Brazil, changed his name to Steven Faludi, and then moved to America, got married and had a family.  It was only when Susan said she was considering becoming a Christian that he informed her, quite violently, that she was Jewish.  "I remember exactly what I said.  That they exterminated the Jews.  And how could you do this?"

There are many stories like this in Hungary.  After World War II, there was Communism.  Many people hid their religion just to get by.  Only now are people (ironically, some of them ultra-right-wing politicians who denounce Jews) coming to know their family history and religion.  Faludi shares some of these stories in a beautiful chapter in which she attends Rosh Hashanah services and dinner with her father.  Temples that were built to hold hundreds now cater to groups of twenty or fifty.

In the Darkroom is one of the most moving books I have read in a long time.  The way Faludi weaves her own story with her father's and Hungary's, and that thorny issue of identity, is beautiful.

I studied my father's face, averted as it so often had been in life.  All the years she was alive, she'd sought to settle the question of who she was.  Jew or Christian?  Hungarian or American?  Woman or man?  So many oppositions.  But as I gazed upon her still body, I thought:  there is in the universe only one true divide, one real binary, life and death.  Either you are living or you are not.  Everything else is molten, malleable.

George Orwell's War

I am not sure what exactly piqued my interest in the Spanish Civil War.  I feel like there are so many books set during World War II, but hardly any (at least in English) set during the Spanish Civil War that immediately preceded it.  Considering the impact the war had on so many influential people, it seemed like something I should try to learn more about.

I chose George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia as my introduction to the conflict, mostly because it was available at the library on audiobook.  While that isn't the most flattering reason to choose a book, I didn't really know what else would work.  I didn't want a super-detailed, exhaustive history, and I wanted to read a first-hand account.

Orwell was a pretty great guide.  I loved his dry sense of humor.  It is hard to imagine Orwell having strong feelings about anything, based on his narrative style, but clearly he felt strongly enough about a cause to go to a foreign country and fight for it.  (And, obviously, he felt strongly about many things, based on the subjects he chose to write about.)

I do think many of the intricacies of the politics and maneuverings were over my head, possibly because I was reading this via audiobook and possibly because Orwell assumed that his readers would have at least a passing knowledge of current events at the time of publication.  Unfortunately, I have hardly any working knowledge of what was going on during the Civil War, so I was a bit at sea during some chapters.  But I didn't mind because the other chapters were very engaging.  Orwell definitely falls victim to stereotyping, describing Spaniards as slow and lazy, Italians as fashionable, etc., but he does it with so much humor that it's hard to take it very seriously.  He also gives himself the same treatment - at the beginning of the book, he talks about his obsession with learning how to use a machine gun, and using his very limited Spanish skills to ask if he can learn every day.  But instead of mastering the weapon, all the soldiers are taught is how to look good in a parade.

But even more than the humor, what stood out in this book was Orwell's own experience in the war.  He started as an idealist socialist, but as the war continued and he saw first-hand the effect on both soldiers and civilians, the propaganda machine, the lies and the politics, his perspective changed.  He no longer trusted the Communists to be honest and straight-forward; he saw that they, too, lied and cheated and committed all sorts of atrocities.  And then, I assume, he went and wrote Animal Farm, which proceeds in much the same manner.

Homage to Catalonia is an excellent read to fully appreciate Orwell's writing style and humor.  It's also a very honest look at how ideals can be lost in the midst of a horrible and bloody war.  While I don't know if it's the best book to read to get an understanding of the background and lead-up to the Spanish Civil War, it's definitely an excellent book to get you interested in the conflict.  And to understand a man's internal conflict, too.  Highly recommended.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again

I read Kate Atkinson's Life After Life for a book club I just joined.  I read it as an audiobook, which I think was a mistake.  The book jumps around in time so often and references side characters and events quite often and I'm sure I missed quite a bit.  This is a book that requires flipping from one section back to previous ones and forward to new ones as Ursula basically lives a Choose Your Own Adventure.  But it's a long book and I knew I wouldn't get through it in time for the meeting unless I was reading it on my commute, and one of my new years resolutions for 2015 is to get out more and meet new people, so I really wanted to do well for my first book club, so audiobook it was!

The book is about Ursula Todd, a girl born in 1910 who then goes onto live several different versions of her life.  Once, she died at birth.  Another time, she died by drowning.  Another time, she fell off a roof.  Eventually, she manages to grow out of childhood, really coming into her own during WWII.  Sometimes, she lives in Germany during the war.  Sometimes, she lives in London.  In one life (not a spoiler as this is the very beginning of the book), she shoots Hitler but it's unclear what happens after this.  This annoyed me as the book is quite long and it would be nice to know how that life ended...

Life under the veil in Iran

I cannot believe it took me so long to read Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.  I saw the animated film years ago, but what really pushed me to read this one was when I saw Satrapi about a month ago at the Chicago Humanities Festival.  She was just so vibrant and fun and apolitical (and said a lot of things about feminism that I pretty strongly disagree with) that it really made me want to read more of her books.

So, finally!  Persepolis.  The comic is the story of Satrapi's life in Iran, growing up with a big, liberal, loving family as the government becomes increasingly totalitarian.  Satrapi writes about the early influences in her life - her grandfather and uncle, both of whom fought for people's rights.  She moves onto her teenage years in Vienna, struggling to come of age in a country so foreign to her upbringing and so far from her family.  And then the difficulties of coming home to an Iran that was so different than what she remembered, and became increasingly difficult to deal with.

I loved this book.  The artwork and the writing are seamlessly integrated, in such a manner that I highly recommend Persepolis as a starter comic if you are concerned about reading a comic and are not sure how to deal with the words and pictures.  I am always concerned that I don't pay enough attention to the artwork in graphic novels, but in Persepolis, I had none of that concern:

I also feel like Satrapi does such a great job of showing us everyday Iranian life.  She did the same thing in Embroideries, and I can see why people say that Persepolis is so much better than Embroideries.  What I enjoyed about Embroideries was the rich, deep relationships that existed between the women in the book.  And that is true x1000 in Persepolis.  There is such a deep love between Satrapi and her parents, between Satrapi and her grandmother.  And her whole family is so supportive of her - not just when she shows her brilliance, but also when she makes mistakes.  And they never tell her to be afraid or to bow down to authority - they let her make her own decisions and live her own life and are very proud of her when she stands up for her rights.

This was truly a beautifully written, funny, and wonderful book.  I am so glad that I finally read it, and I can't wait to read Satrapi's Chicken with Plums and perhaps watch the movie that she directed this year!

Review-itas: The Not-Quite-Hits Edition

I really want to read G. Willow Wilson's Miss Marvel comic book series.  While looking for it on the library website, I came across this other graphic novel by her, Cairo, and decided to give that one a try while I waited.

I read Wilson's Alif the Unseen about a year ago and had mixed feelings about it.  While I liked the lead female character and the genie, and the way Wilson weaved modern religion into her story, I thought the details of the plot were pretty difficult to follow.

My feelings about Cairo are pretty much the same, even down to the genie.  Wilson converted to Islam in college, and I really appreciate the way she uses her stories to educate readers about the religion.  She shares an Islam that is respectful, peaceful, and kind.  In a world that often portrays the religion in a very negative, extreme light, I can't speak highly enough of stories that show it as progressive and welcoming.

The plot, though, was still hard to follow.  Wilson seems unwilling to write "conventional" fantasy stories, which is fine, but she also seems to have trouble translating what is in her mind to paper, and so readers are left a little confused.  Or at least this reader is left confused.  Perhaps because religion is such a strong component of her stories, the aspirations are much more high-level than what I am used to and such nebulous descriptions of key components to the story make it hard to understand what's going on.

Still, I cannot wait to read Miss Marvel!

One book I started but did not finish was Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy, by Karen Abbott, a historical account of four women who participated in different ways in the American Civil War.

I had a vague recollection of the author's name, and when I realized that she was the author of Sin in the Second City, I had a feeling that I wouldn't love this book.  I really enjoy non-fiction, particularly history, but I feel like the events and the people are fascinating enough.  Authors don't need to add a lot of fluff to make the stories interesting.  Abbott, in my opinion, sensationalizes history a little too much.  It's very difficult to tell with her writing where the facts stop and her own hypotheses begin.  She attributes thoughts and feelings to historical figures without really providing any footnotes as to whether those are real or not.

The four women she includes in this book were spies on both sides of the war, and I'm sure they were all fascinating in their own right.  I loved that they were not limited by their sex but were willing to use other people's preconceived notions and beliefs about women to get ahead.  I would love to learn more about all four of these women, but I don't think Abbott's book is quite the right way for me to do so.  This book is much more a light beach read on the non-fiction scale, which has a lot of value in its own right, but just isn't right for me.

Also, seriously - the book is about women who did underground activities during the American Civil War.  I feel like she could have featured at least one woman of color here!  There are a couple of loyal slaves and servants mentioned who have parts to play, but I think Abbott could have put the spotlight on someone if she really wanted to.

Whoa, timelines are complicated when you are a time traveler

Ok, so these books by Connie Willis are absolutely massive, weighing in at over 1100 pages combined.  I am reviewing Blackout and All Clear together as they are technically two halves of the same book, but were separated due to the large size.  However, you really can't read All Clear without reading Blackout.

It's pretty difficult to do a summary of such a huge book without giving away spoilers.  Suffice it to say that three historians travel back in time from 2060 Oxford to 1941 London during the Blitz to observe what life was like for civilians during such a tense and stressful time.  And things go very, very wrong, so the three of them are basically stuck in WWII.  And then they get even more stressed out because it's possible that they are having an impact on historic events - what if they changed the course of history?  Uh-oh!

I have been going back and forth over whether I should even review these books.  There are already a lot of reviews out there, and I am not sure I have much more to add to the discussion.  I fell in love with Connie Willis when I read To Say Nothing of the Dog, which was wonderful and hilarious and romantic and not really in the same style as any of her other work.  Then I read The Doomsday Book, which was not funny at all but very tense and quiet.  Blackout and All Clear are a mix of all of these - there are moments of humor, quite a bit of tension, though not a whole lot of quiet.  Obviously, in the midst of the Blitz, there are a lot of sirens and booms and planes.  The books are long but read very quickly, mostly because you are so stressed out about what is going to happen that you are incapable of doing anything but reading very quickly to find out what happens next.  Willis definitely knows how to write a nail-biting, stomach-clenching story, and she's in fine form with that here.

Willis also really knows her London map, buses to Underground to streets and back alleys.  She makes sure that all her readers know that she knows the map, too.  I think the book could have been cut by at least 20% if she would stop telling us all the directions and transfers that her characters kept taking.  They got old to me after a while, but I can see how telling everyone just how many stops were closed down due to bombs, and all the complicated ways people had to get around instead, was a great way of adding to the setting and atmosphere of this story.

Truly, these books brought to life just how harrowing living through the Blitz may have been.  I think the London Blitz is one of those moments in time that the English like to look back on with pride at getting through, and I expect it's romanticized quite a bit.  After all, it's not like the English weren't crossing the Channel and doing much the same thing to other cities on the Continent.  Willis goes full throttle into the romanticism, calling out the many unsung heroes that kept St. Paul's Cathedral standing, that helped save friends out of the rubble, that worked to keep up the spirits of their comrades with plays and dramas and small, unexpected gifts.  And I liked that.  I am sure that there was looting and fighting and all sorts of horrors that happened during the Blitz, but hey, sometimes you just want to hear about the good things and not the bad.  There is a time for gray areas and people with complex motivations, but perhaps a story about everyday heroes is not the place for them.  I respect that.

My main complaint with this book probably isn't a fair one, so I'll just touch briefly upon it here.  Couldn't there have been just one person of color in the story?!  I mean, there's this Badri guy who seems to just kind of mess up people's space-time coordinates (assuming he is South Asian based on his name), but he is the ONLY ONE, and he can hardly be counted as even a secondary character.  I mean, come on.  These historians are traveling back in time from 2060 - there's probably a lot of mixed race people at that time.  And maybe they are mixed race, but their names and physical descriptions make it hard to believe that they are.  And then there's the people in London, which was the seat of a global empire, and apparently NO ONE there was not white, even so.  It bothered me a lot.  In a book of 1100 pages set in the midst of a massive world war, I feel like there could have been one person.

Anyway, I have talked in zero ways about the plot or the characters of this book, and have managed to write quite a bit.  I don't really want to talk plot or characters. The plot is a bit complex and I don't want to spoil what was really a great ride for you. And while I enjoyed the main characters, I didn't fall in love with any of them. Really, my heart belonged to the secondary characters in this one, and they make so many of the scenes so wonderful that I have a feeling you will fall for them, too.

Review-itas: History Audiobooks Edition

Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything is about the epic undertaking of creating the Oxford English Dictionary.  The process took years.  DECADES, even.  Like, more decades than most people in the era really lived.  I suppose this is reasonable, as there are a lot of words in the English language, and I can't even imagine how one goes along cataloging them and defining them.  And how political it can become.  For example, the word American was put into the first edition of the dictionary, but not African.

Winchester shares a lot of anecdotes such as the one above, and others that are much more humorous and interesting as well - a kleptomanic assistant, the little jokes the compilers put into their example sentences, the difficulties with printers... it's an entertaining book, though not supremely fascinating, and I am pretty sure that I won't remember anything from it except that the dictionary took about 70 years to create.  Ah, well.  It was fun!

Longbourn is also set in England, though during the Georgian era, not the Victorian.  This book has gotten a lot of attention recently as it is kind of a spin-off from Pride & Prejudice, but it hardly references the people and actions of that great novel; rather, it focuses its attention on the servants who work for the Bennets.  Poor as the Bennet family is, they are wealthy enough to have servants, and the servants have a very different life view than they do.  All they do, really, is work, and so they are both fascinated and repelled by people who can spend so much of their lives in leisure, and who seem to have no regard or thought for other people's comfort.

The stars of this book are the servants, particularly Sarah, the housekeeper Mrs. Hill, and the new footman James.  I enjoyed learning about how they spent their days, their small victories and never-ending exhaustion.  However, I felt very separate from them in this novel.  Maybe it was because of the narrator, but it felt to me like there was a great distance between the reader and the main characters, which was unfortunate.  Also, I found parts of this book pretty dull.  I really enjoyed learning about the "downstairs" life of a Jane Austen novel, but the characters were just so quiet and tired, I did not grow to love them as I loved Elizabeth Bennet, with her wicked sense of humor and fine eyes.

I am hoping to read more short story collections this year.  One that caught my eye was When the Emperor was Divine, by Julie Otsuka.  It's about one family's experience of the Japanese internment camps in the US during WWII.  None of the family members are ever named; they are referred to as "the woman," or "the girl" or "the boy."  This was a little strange, but I think it was done to make us feel like the story could be about any family, not just one.  While the book feels like one story, it really is a series of vignettes told from different POVs.  It was very illuminating to learn about the internment camps; while the "guests" were not necessarily treated horribly in the camps, they were given no compensation after they left, and many people came back to homes that had been poorly maintained, their belongings stolen, and many Japanese-Americans had trouble finding work after the war.

While I didn't love this book, it did really pique my interest in the internment camps.  I have Hotel on the Corner of Bitter & Sweet on my shelf to read, so I'll be sure to pick that one up soon!

The culture shock of coming home after war

I have a general goal of reading Alan Allport's Demobbed:  Coming Home After World War II and Julie Summers' Stranger in the House in a close enough time frame to each other that I can get both the soldier POV and the home front POV and compare and contrast the two.  I've now read the first book, so just need to get myself together enough to read Stranger in the House within the next few months.

I've had Demobbed on my shelf for a couple of years now, having purchased it when I was on a kick about learning more about the after-effects of WWII on people's lives.  Some time ago, I read and really enjoyed Soldier from the War Returning, which focuses on American men coming home after WWII.  Demobbed focuses on British soldiers and their families attempting to return to civilian life after six years of war.  It talks through the whole demobilization plan, the efforts to get everyone employed, and the difficulty of picking up a life that had been on pause for so long.

War, what is it good for?

I added Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun to my wish list immediately after finishing Americanah.  The two books are very different (and make clear that Adichie took her own warning about the danger of a single story to heart).  Half of a Yellow Sun is set in 1960s Nigeria during the terrible war for Biafran independence.  We experience it through the perspectives of some very different people - twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, Olanna's servant Ugwu, and Kainene's boyfriend Richard (who is the "white male European" POV in the story).

Adichie is my newest literary crush.  Mainly because of interviews with her like this.  I don't think she actually has a "Heroines who don't annoy me" list, but she seems like the sort of person who has an awesome list of heroines that she loved and I bet every book that those heroines are in is awesome, and I want access to that list.

I don't really know how to write a review that encompasses all that Half of a Yellow Sun is.  In some ways, there are parallels with Americanah.  There are multiple narrators in the book to ensure that we get more than one perspective on what is happening.  Those narrators are from different backgrounds and classes and genders, to ensure that we get as full a view as possible.  But the books are more dissimilar than they are similar.  Americanah is set in both Nigeria and abroad, and it's a story of two people who feel that life has a lot to offer them.  Half of a Yellow Sun is set during a truly horrifying civil war (and one that I, appallingly, didn't have even the vaguest notion of before reading this book) and it is difficult to approach subject matter like that with anything approaching unbridled optimism.

I also felt that the characters in this book were harder to know.  They were just elusive enough that I never quite felt like I fully understood them.  They were always just beyond my grasp.  The only one who felt fairly easy to understand was Richard, the British ex-pat, and I think that is only because he was so very transparent in his feelings about everything (or so he seemed to me - I may have missed a few layers).  But while it was hard for me to know everyone well, everything I do know about them felt so genuine.  Olanna in particular really came alive to me.  I loved that Adichie presented her as an idealist and a radical, but that her upper-class upbringing still came out sometimes when she worried about her daughter spending time with the wrong kind of people.  That is such a realistic depiction of how people struggle between who they want to be and who they are, and it rung so true for me.  I also liked learning about Ugwu's time as a soldier and all the things he did that he later looked back on in horror, and then how he felt when he saw how the war (and the soldiers especially) had ravaged his own family life.

There is so much here that is important to read and to know and to acknowledge.  It is a very heavy book, but it's also brilliant, and there are moments of redemption and kindness and happiness that really shine through the bleakness.  I highly recommend a read - Half of a Yellow Sun is not a book that you will easily forget.

Spies who get caught!

Rose Under Fire, by Elizabeth Wein, is the companion novel to Code Name Verity.  This book starts a bit after Code Name Verity ends and features only a few of the same characters.  The main character here is Rose, an American pilot working for the Air Transport Auxiliary in England.  One day, she flies off-course and is caught by the Germans and sent to a concentration camp, Ravensbruck.  She spends six months there before she escapes with some friends, and then she shares her story through journal entries.

Similar to Code Name Verity, this book is about the strength of friendship between women and just how much those friendships can mean to people.  I love that Wein gives friendship so much the spotlight in her novels, much more than romance, and that she makes clear that platonic relationships can do so much to help us through horrible times and keep us trucking on.  There was so much sacrifice of one person for another in this book, so much attention to the greater good or to help ease someone else's pain just slightly.  I think that was wonderful.  And, importantly, I loved that Rose was always the protagonist and hero of her own story.  She instigates the action in her life; she gets herself into a mess and she works with a team to get herself back out of it.  And then, when she's out, she deals with pulling together the pieces of herself to become a working human being again.

Spies Who Fly!

If you have not seen a ridiculous number of reviews of Code Name Verity on your book blog radar, then please let me know.  We must follow completely different bloggers and it would be fun to find some new people that read totally different books!

Code Name Verity takes place during World War II.  It begins with a young woman in a Nazi prison forced to tell her story to a Gestapo by writing every day about her experiences in the war to date.  We learn more and more of Julie's story as the book continues.

Two young women, Julie and Maddie, meet during a very stressful situation and become the best of friends.  Maddie is a fantastic pilot, and Julie is recruited to be a spy.  And, now, Maddie is lost and Julie is being tortured in prison, forced to tell all her secrets to the enemy.

And then you get to Part Two of the book and things get shaken up.

There were many things about this book that I really liked.  Most of all, I appreciated the friendship between Maddie and Julie.  It may just be me and the books I read, but it's not often that you see a friendship at the center of a book targeted to teens and adults any more.  I loved that this book was about two young women finding each other and becoming fast friends and then doing everything they could to keep each other as safe, warm, and happy as possible.

Also, I liked learning about women in the war effort.  Granted, there was not that much information provided about this, but just having a book set in which the women are the heroes and are able to defy odds that men are also up against - this made me happy.

However, I did not love this book.  Possibly this is due to high expectations going in, but most likely it is due to the inordinate amount of time spent describing types of planes and how to fix planes and what it's like to fly planes and the words you'd use to help someone land a plane.  I also found the narrative style very fragmented.  Maybe I was just too distracted a reader but I had trouble with characters who would pop up in one place and then not show up again and then finally come back and be different.  Or some big event would happen, like bringing a Nazi pilot down to land in Britain, but we'd not know what happened after that.  Or Julie becoming a spy, but us not really knowing how or when that happened.  There were a lot of holes.  And I get it, when you are confessing to the Gestapo, you are not going to share all these intimate details, but Julie does share a lot of details on some things and then not on others, so I found it a little frustrating.

A first-person account of John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry

The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride, has gotten a lot of buzz this year.  The back of the book actually has a pretty good summary, so here it is:

Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1856, when the region is a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces.  When John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, arrives in the area, an argument between him and Henry's master quickly turns violent.  Henry is forced to leave town - with Brown, who believes he's a girl.

Over the ensuing months, Henry - whom Brown nicknames "Little Onion" - conceals his true identity as he struggles to stay alive.  Eventually Little Onion finds himself with Brown at the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 - one of the great catalysts for the Civil War.

An absorbing mixture of history and imagination, and told with McBride's meticulous eye for detail and character, The Good Lord Bird is both a rousing adventure and a moving exploration of identity and survival.

I don't want you to read too much into this, but this book took me forever to read.  I am not sure why, because it really grabbed my attention right at the beginning, with the first line:  "I was born a colored man and don't you forget it.  But I lived as a colored woman for seventeen years."  The Good Lord Bird takes place over only a few months, so now that I've finished the book, I can't help but wonder what else Little Onion did in his life.  But, gosh, it took me a long time to finish.  Maybe because it's written in dialect and had some long dialogue scenes.  (Has anyone else noticed that most books written now do not have really long scenes of philosophical dialogue, whereas I feel those scenes were very popular in books in the past?)  Or maybe it was because it was so heavy-handed with the foreshadowing that I didn't want to continue on and read what had already been so direly hinted at actually come to pass.  Or maybe it's because the weather has been amazing in September and at this time of year, you want to be outside WHENEVER it is nice because there are only so many more days of this before winter comes and can be depressing.  Who knows?

Even though it took me some time to finish, I still enjoyed the novel.  It's not my favorite of the year, but it was very good.  It's one of those books you wish you liked more because it's so well-written and gives you such a different take on a historical event that people tend to gloss over and talk about in broad strokes.  The Good Lord Bird definitely brought a lot of subtlety and heart to the Harpers Ferry episode; the event came to life for me in a way that it never had before.

And I thought life was hard as a MIDDLE child...

The Third Son, by Julie Wu, is populated by characters who are completely extreme. The main character, Saburo, is an extremely neglected child.  His lady love, Yoshiko, is an extremely ambitious person.  His parents are extremely strict and harsh.  His older brother is extremely cruel.  His cousin is extremely kind.  The Americans are extremely wishy-washy.

The cover is extremely pretty.

I really did not enjoy this book.  I don't know too much about Taiwanese culture, but if Julie Wu is correct, then third sons are so little loved that their parents can pretty much starve them so that they need to get injections due to severe malnutrition.  Even when the family is wealthy.  First sons get everything, and everyone else must fend for themselves.  Poor Saburo never even got an egg.  They all went to his extremely cruel older brother.

The Third Son begins in Taiwan during World War II.  Saburo is a young boy trying to escape an air raid, and he runs into a beautiful girl while trying to escape and hide.  The two of them have a moment.  Then the beautiful girl, Yoshiko, walks away, and Saburo goes back to his miserable existence.  But he never forgets Yoshiko.  He thinks about her as he gets expelled from school, thinks about going to but then never applies to college in the US, and pretty much any other time.  Then he meets her again, but his extremely cruel older brother is interested in her, too.  So Saburo has to find a way to win her back.

I think there were many reasons this book just fell flat for me.  First, I didn't really care much about Saburo or Yoshiko.  I guess they were nice people, but Saburo was just really whiny and Yoshiko wasn't even in the book for most of the time.  So I didn't really believe in this huge, epic love story between them because - well - I couldn't really see what there was to like in each other.  And everyone else in the book, too, was just so exhausting to read about.  I mean, seriously, Saburo's parents were just SO MEAN.  And I didn't understand why, if they were so wealthy, they wouldn't just buy enough food to feed their whole family instead of only getting enough for themselves and their eldest son and not giving enough to everyone else.  I don't think I fully understand just how the cultural norms worked.  And even if a culture generally favors an eldest son, I don't think that means that they despised their other children, but that's what this book made it seem like, and it was hard to read.

To me, the most valuable aspect of this book was the insight it provided into life in Taiwan in the mid-20th century.  I didn't really know anything about the Japanese occupation and then the transfer of power to China, and then the crazy political machinations between different Chinese parties, becoming more and more paranoid.  It was good to learn more about it, and I appreciate Wu for shedding light on a topic that we in the West don't hear much about.

Note:  I received a complimentary copy of this book to review.

The Khmer Rouge, through the eyes of a child

In the Shadow of the Banyan was a book that I stupidly chose to read in fairly public places - on planes, trains, and buses.  This was not a great decision because it's very difficult to read this book with dry eyes.  It's also very hard not to continue reading this  book once you've started, and so I just tried to sniffle very quietly and discreetly into my tissues and everyone around me politely pretended not to notice.

In the Shadow of the Banyan, by Vaddey Ratner, is set during the Cambodian civil war of the 1970s.  We first meet our narrator, Raami, living a charmed life as a royal princess on an idyllic estate in Phnon Penh.  But very quickly, revolution comes and Raami's family must leave their home to go become workers in the country.  This is especially difficult for Raami as she suffered from polio as a baby and has difficulty walking.  It's also difficult for her royal father, who believes in the ideals of the revolution but must hide his identity for his family's safety.  He makes a sacrifice that most can't understand and that his family finds it difficult to forget.  As Raami is shuffled from one place to another, connecting with some people and completely dissociating herself from others, working long, hard hours and slowly starving, we see the Cambodian civil war in all its terrible reality, and learn the power that stories can have to lift us away from our lives.

I cannot believe that this is Ratner's first novel, and in her second language, no less.  The writing was absolutely stunning.  Imagery fills every page, imagery of flight and heroes and sacrifice and love.  There are beautiful poems to break through the drudgery and pain of everyday living.  And so many amazing characters.  There is Raami herself, of course, introspective and lonely for most of the book as she sees society fall apart around her.  And her mother, one of the strongest and most resourceful women I've read about in some time, who works tirelessly for her daughter.  And Raami's father, the poet prince, who stands for everything that is lost in the revolution - culture and beauty and happy times.  And so many others who exemplify generosity and kindness of spirit, or hopelessness and despair.

Obviously, any book about civil war and revolution and genocide is not easy to read.  And this book is about all those things.  But it's also about the bonds that can grow and strengthen between people, about the different kinds of sacrifice that parents and lovers choose to make for the people who matter most to them, and about all of the ways that humans have of surviving hardship and making the most of what they have, all of the stories we tell ourselves about the heroes that came before and the beauty that they saw in our flawed, imperfect world.  Absolutely beautiful - I hope you give it a try.

Lions on the Loose in a War Zone

Pride of Baghdad is one of those books I would see everywhere.  Every library branch I go to seems to have it on the shelf, and every bookstore stocks it, too.  After at least three years of running across it and never picking it up, I bowed to the inevitable this week and impulsively checked it out from the library.  I thought the fates had finally aligned and I would meet a book soul mate.  Eh, not quite.

Pride of Baghdad is about a family of lions that, in the midst of America's bombing of Baghdad, escapes from the zoo.  They are overwhelmed by the experience of being out on the streets and having to catch their own food, and the artwork really illustrates the impact of war.

But in my opinion, the impact of war has been illustrated in other books in a much more vivid and moving way than it is here.  This book is based on a true event that really is a great basis for a story - starving lions were found by US military personnel in Baghdad - but it was just not executed in a way that drew me in.  The lions had no real depth to them.  They just went from one danger to the next, one episode to the next, and while I understood they were scared, I didn't really understand anything about them as individual characters.

They wanted to escape the zoo - okay, fine.  That doesn't really make them that unique (I would guess).  And then, they get culture shock.  That's reasonable, seeing as they are in a human war zone.  And then, they encounter a psychotic bear.  Well... okay, but why?  It was just a series of occurrences that didn't feel connected.  While the story moved forward chronologically, I didn't feel like there was any progression in plot.  And then the book just ends so abruptly and I assume I was supposed to feel sad and bitter about the heartlessness of war but instead, I just felt annoyed that I had read this whole book and still couldn't differentiate between the two lionesses.

So, sadly, all that karmic energy that kept putting this book in front was all for naught!  Hopefully the next time that happens, it's more of a successful pairing.

King Hereafter and Queen Once Again

I read Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter over several weeks, but I don't think I would say that I read it slowly.  It's a long book with tiny font, with foreign words and subtle plot development, with larger-than-life characters and evocative landscapes.  It's the sort of book you can't read too slowly because it takes some time to get into the rhythm of it, to remember everyone's names and their histories and their relationships to the other characters.  So I would read it in bursts - 40 or 50 pages in a night being a "burst" - and then go to bed, exhausted but enthralled.

So much happened in King Hereafter that I am not even going to attempt to do a plot summary.  Instead, here's the blurb from the back of the book:

In King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett's stage is the wild, half-pagan country of eleventh-century Scotland.  Her hero is an ungainly young earl with a lowering brow and a taste for intrigue.  He calls himself Thorfinn but his Christian name is Macbeth.

Dunnett depicts Macbeth's transformation from an angry boy who refuses to accept his meager share of the Orkney Islands to a suavely accomplished warrior who seizes an empire with the help of a wife as shrewd and valiant as himself.  She creates characters who are at once wholly creatures of another time yet always recognizable--and she does so with such realism and immediacy that she once more elevates historical fiction into high art.

In this novel, Thorfinn is a giant - he is taller than everyone around him, with a deep and gravelly voice.  He's ugly, hardly ever smiles, and he rarely takes anyone else's advice.  He's brilliant, like so many of Dunnett's other male characters are.

He's also married to one of the most beautiful women ever, Groa, who has the great honor of being the newest entry (and the first new entry in years) to my Heroines Who Don't Annoy Me list.  Groa is wonderful.  She supports Thorfinn in everything, but she is also one of the few people who talks back to him.  She's witty and well able to understand political intrigue, and she was, for me, the focal point of this whole story.

[NOTE:  The rest of this review assumes that you know how this story (the story of Macbeth) ends.  I wouldn't say they are spoilers as it's heavily implied through the whole story, and well - most people know the ending, but just wanted to give a heads up.]

Guernsey: A tax haven that's home to a delightful cast of characters

When listening to the audiobook of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (which I highly recommend), I often thought, "This would make a fantastic costume drama for the BBC, possibly with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench playing two of the busybudy but entirely well-meaning islanders."

And it would.  In fact, I would be surprised if no one has bought the movie rights to this book and if Judi Dench isn't on the list of people shortlisted to play Esola.

This book is such a treat.  And when I say "treat," I mean the very sweet, hurts your teeth kind.  It reminded me a bit of Anne of Green Gables because everyone in it is just so well-meaning and kind and wonderful except for some people who really are just too bumbling and ridiculous to be taken very seriously.

Is it a character flaw to like a book a lot on every level but not love it because you think it is TOO PERFECT?  Probably.  But that's the way I am!  I can't help it.  I admit there were times when this woman Elizabeth was being described as saving yet another person from death or despair or loneliness, and I just rolled my eyes because seriously, this Elizabeth woman seemed too good to be true.

Who is Elizabeth, you ask?  Well, let me tell you.