More books that I think you'll like

I haven't blogged for a while, what with school obligations and family activities, but that hasn't kept me from reading, always my way to find peace. Bear with me, as I try to describe my latest 5 titles.

First up: Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee, about a brilliant young woman from an immigrant background (Korean), with a privileged education. After graduating from Princeton, she tries to reconcile her childhood background---Queens apartment, high-achieving sister, shy, tentative mother, stern, autocratic father; both parents hard-working managers of a Manhattan dry-cleaning store, owned by a wealthy Korean...---with her desire to make her way on her own terms. Casey gets herself kicked out of the apartment after a major blow-up with her father, eventually landing a summer internship in the finance field. Struggles ensue, boyfriends come and go, relationships shift, and finally and unexpectedly, she comes to terms with past and present. Good one for the beach!

Next: Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I should have loved this book, what with its quirky main characters, Renee and Paloma, each trying to fit into worlds they were clearly unsuited for---Renee, a closet intellectual who is the concierge of 12-year-old Paloma's swank Paris apartment building. Renee tries to keep her eyes dull and cast down when in the presence of her employers, so as to appear to them a mere dumb, workhorse, while Paloma, a budding intellectual, tries in vain to love her successful but vapid family. Enter a new resident, Kakuro Ozu, an eccentric and wealthy Japanese businessman, a quiet intellectual himself. The 3 find each other, and Renee's world begins to open out, until... As I said, I should have loved this one, but kept feeling that the characters were not quite alive, kept at a distance from the reader, as if viewing them and the story through a screen. Perhaps it was the translation (French to English)...

The next book I read was a real eye-opener: Anna Burns' No Bones, covering the Irish troubles in Belfast from the 70s to the 90s. Ironic that the British PM just apologized for all that. I wouldn't call this one an easy read, but try it if you want to comprehend what it was like to grow up in such a schizoid place during such a crazy time. I especially liked it because Burns liberally uses magic realism to move the plot along---but no easy dream sequences here, more flipped-out nightmares.

Always roving around trying to find credible ways to learn about other times and places, I came across this title in a sidebar I think in Time magazine: West with the Night, an autobiography by Beryl Markham. Markham was a pilot in Africa during the early years of flying, and did all kinds of fascinating things, among them flying medicine into remote locations and scouting elephants herds for big-game hunters. Fascinating also was the fact that any mention of men was strictly g-rated. Wondering about that, I looked her up on wikipedia and discovered that she'd had several marriages and relationships, one (relationship) for example with Denys Finch Hatton---remember him, of Out of Africa fame. The book was published in 1942, when such things were just not mentioned!

My favorite of this batch of books has to be "Socialism is Great!" A Worker's Memoir of the New China, by Lijia Zhang. She describes her life in Nanjing during the aftermath of Mao's death and the birth of the new market-oriented China. How does she do this?--by learning to read and write English. You gotta love her: she simply wasn't willing to accept the many oppressive rules and regs required to live in her society. Every time an obstacle blocked her way, she found a way to bypass it, this in spite of finding herself in a dead-end factory job, which most Chinese would have welcomed because it represented regular, if small, income and security for life. Just reading about the restrictions, many of which have eased up, that were placed on Chinese citizens' lives will shock your red-white-and-blue American hearts. We all know that many nations place a low premium on civil rights, and that many many people suffer accordingly, dependent on the degree of repression that exists in their country. I guess on a world scale, China's not soooo bad...but, talk about a micromanaged autocracy! How do you suppose the One-Child policy is managed? Period police, people! And easy access to abortion. Anyway, learn about Chinese factory life (currently in the news what with the recent auto factory strikes), Chinese family life, government reaction to the people of Nanjing during the Tiananmen Square protests for democracy, and life in Nanjing in this good read.

Check these out: The Jungle and The Last Algonquin

I finished The Jungle about 10 days ago. The last many pages were reminiscent of high school and college government classes---Sinclair uses all the familiar catch-phrases to introduce socialism to the reader that I remember listening to in class (and apparently actually absorbing).
Happily, Jurgis finds new life in the socialist message as well as new purpose. And Teddy Roosevelt and Congress got to work reforming the beef packing industry, thanks to the public's outrage after reading Sinclair's book. I think an excellent companion-piece to The Jungle just might be found in the 2009 documentary Food Inc. That because what most impressed me about The Jungle was the description of the utterly rank conditions of the packing houses. Food Inc., focusing on today's food production rather than that of 100 years ago, appears to cover similar ground.
Meanwhile, today I finished reading another book that I particularly enjoyed: The Last Algonquin, by Theodore Kazimiroff. This I can enthusiastically recommend to anyone who's interested in history, especially of the sort that is lost or hidden. It tells the story of--yes--the last Algonquin indian to have lived in what's become The Bronx. He was born sometime before the Civil War, the only child of the last couple of the Turtle Clan to have remained in the region of Pelham Bay Park. The parents died; he tried to live in the white world; finding it not to his liking, he returned to his childhood home, where he lived shielded from all until the author's father encountered him in 1924. Old Joe Two Trees told his life story to TK Sr., himself just a boy, which is related to us by TK Jr.. Completely fascinating and terribly sad. Read The Last Algonquin with another book about New York City history: The Island in the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto, an almost compulsively readable history of
the earliest white settlers on Manhattan Island.
Next up: The Elegance of the Hedgehog...

The Jungle and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Still working on The Jungle---little Antanas has died tragically and Jurghis has taken to the road. He jumps a train and makes his way into the countryside. Some brief happiness follows but he's barely living, merely existing from day to day and suppressing his grief. What next can this man endure??

Meanwhile, I've decided to lighten things up a bit for my upstairs reading, and so have begun The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. You'll like this epistolary novel if you like historical fiction (how the islanders coped with German occupation [the Germans thought they'd use Guernsey as a staging ground for the Battle of Britain, but stuck around for the duration of the war even after giving that one up]), or if you love quirky characters. On the first face this book seems light and frothy, but as you read you'll be amazed and impressed with how the authors build a complex story. Check it out, and let me know what you think!

The Jungle

I'm in the midst of reading The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. I'm really enjoying it, though it is so, so grim! I'd been intrigued to read the book since seeing references to it in the 8th grade SS textbook, and its significance to industrial reform in the US during Teddy Roosevelt's administration---it was an important factor in his pushing through the Pure Food and Drug Act. That is to say, TR read the book, as did many Americans, and one and all, they were appalled by the conditions of the workers in Chicago's meatpacking industry. Even more so, though, they were shocked and disgusted with the quality and condition of the meat products that were coming out of the 3 big packing companies (for a while, the Beef Trust, til it was busted by the gov't) and landing on their tables. The story focuses on the extended family of Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus; the characters maintain their humanity throughout even as they fall prey to the brutality of the Packingtown yards. He details 1st the conditions of the packing plants and the products going out to market---which will make your toes curl---and the daily conditions of the workers (6 1/2 day workweek, often paid by the "piece," rock-bottom wages, 10-hour days with one half-hour break, and that's just the skeletal outline). I'm about midway through the book, and he has shifted to the utter, soul-crushing degradation experienced by the workers, through the experiences of Jurgis and his family. Reading this book, and reflecting on the recent criminal activities of some of our big financial institutions, I am squarely behind a government that regulates business.

Salander and Blomkvist

Upon reflection, I do have one reservation about about my new favorite book series---for the under-18 crowd: the books are sprinkled with some nasty sex and violence (can't contemporary authors drive their plots some other way?). Larsson doesn't overdo it, but it's part of the story.

Finished Stieg Larsson

ok, I finished Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire, and can recommend it without reserve. Definitely check this one out. Shocking conclusion, and it totally sets you up for the 3rd book in the series. Alas, that book is not due til late May. So, I shall move on in my reading---next up: Caroline Cooney's The Voice on the Radio, which I've been reading with Aurora, and Sinclair's The Jungle. The Cooney book is the third in a series, the first 2 of which we've enjoyed. The series concerns the discovery by the main character, Janie, that she had been kidnapped as a toddler and raised by the Johnson's, who innocently thought little Janie was their own daughter's child. We really liked the 1st 2 books, but have found this one a bit less gripping. The Jungle is a book I've always wanted to read, but like so many classics, haven't. Kind of seems like required reading for me, though, since I teach social studies. I've also got Thackerey's Vanity Fair going, but with only the mildest of enthusiasm. The trouble is not with the story or the writing, but with me---this is one of my bedtime-reads, and during the work week, I'm generally asleep within 10-15 minutes. Makes for a plodding pace!
What are you reading?

1st post

I'm starting this blog because I love to read, and I want to share that marvelous satisfaction with you---maybe you'll share some of your great reads with me.

It gives me joy and pleasure to read a good book, so much so that I usually have a minimum of 2 - 4 books going at any one time. I keep a book upstairs, downstairs, in my pocketbook and in my lunch bag. Usually I read these titles in their logical places according to where they're located: in bed before going to sleep, downstairs after school along with a cup of coffee and my daughter's company, also in the kitchen while cooking...yes, that's why the pasta is a little soft tonight..., out and about while in some sort of a waiting-mode (doctor's office or what-have-you), even on occasion at school when I take a rare solo lunch in my classroom. Usually I keep the books well separated, sort of categorized according to my probable alertness. Presently, however, my upstairs-read has spilled over into just about any place I can reasonably read, it's that good: Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second in a three-part series. To sum up all the critics' blurbs, it is compulsively readable! The characters are all so refreshingly off that I love them all, even the heinous bad guys (and they're pretty bad). The plot is tight, and the action intense. Good thing I'm on vacation this week...