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.
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