WSBG reviews The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

World’s Smallest Book Group thinks Sebastian Barry’s writing is beautiful. We were all enraptured by the words and how they went together. We love it when that happens!

This is the story of a woman’s life told through the diaries of two people, one written by the woman herself as she reaches 100, having spent several decades in a mental institution.  Along the way, it reveals much about the story of Ireland and its civil war…especially the role of the very powerful and corrupt Catholic Church that seems to have a hand in everything. As we know, the church took very dim view of women.  Tragically, this woman paid a very high price for that.

It’s really a sort of mystery…a psychiatrist is trying to figure out what put Roseanne into the institution as he tries to figure out where she should go when it closes down. Near the end of the book, we were in for a bit of a shock.  Well, Joyce and I were. Reba and Darcy were savvy enough to figure out the surprise before it was revealed.  But I was gobsmacked! Wow!

Joyce and I dearly loved the book.  Reba and Darcy weren’t quite so taken with the story, but we all agreed about the beauty of the writing.

If you like reading about the long long reach of injustice, you will enjoy this book.  I think it’s critically important to read stories like this… because these things happened to women.  And still do.  May we never forget or look the other way. I very highly recommend it.

WSBG reviews The Cave by Jose Saramago

Okay, I’ll just say it.  World’s Smallest Book Group LOVES Jose Saramago. And we totally LOVED this book!  What a master!! You should immediately go out and read it. I’m not kidding.  Right now. That’s okay, I’ll wait…

Oh, you’re back?  So we were right, huh? I KNEW you would love it too…

So the book is about a man in his mid-60s who has been a potter all his life. He has a little pottery studio at his home in the countryside outside a large city.  The city has a number of zones (all fairly grim) but the center of it all is The Center.  I imagined it as a Mall of America kind of place… everything is artificial and controlled and ordered and big brother is watching every move everyone makes. The son in law is a security guard at the Center and when he gets a promotion to residential guard, the family can move to the Center.  Much of the book describes the evolving status of the family’s economic circumstances and their consequences. 

The characters are so  interesting and real. We so loved the old man and his daughter.  And the dog

And the writing. Ahhhhh, it is so beautiful and satsifying.  It draws you in ever so gently, then carries you up and down along the little waves that carry water along a river, now up, then down just a little, then tipping slightly to the left, enough to notice but not enough to throw you over, it’s best if you let yourself be carried, trust that the words will take you where you need to go…

Let me show you what I mean, I’m going to just open to a random page and copy one random sentence so you can see for yourself:

Cipriano Algor shrugged as if so say that he wasn’t interested and said again that he was going to have a wash, but he did not move, he did not take the step that would carry him out of the kitchen, a debate was going on inside his head between two potters, one was arguing that it was our duty to behave naturally under all circumstances, that if someone is kind enough to bring us a cake covered with an embroidered napkin, it is only right and proper to ask whom one should thank for this unexpected generosity, and if, in reply, we are told to guess, it would look most suspicious if we pretended not to hear, these little games played in families and in society are not of great importance, no one is going to draw hasty conclusions if we guess correctly, mainly because the number of people who might give us a cake is never going to be that large, indeed often there might be only one, that, at least, is what one of the potters was saying, but the other replied that he was not prepared to play the part of fall guy in some silly circus game of riddles, that is was precisely because he did know the name of the person who had brought the cake that he would not say it, and also because the worst thing about conclusions, at lest in some cases, is not that they might occasionally be hasty, but that they are precisely that, conclusions.

The family does in fact end up moving to the Center. It is truly a horrifying place.  Then there is a cave discovered, and it changes everything.  You’ll see.

Yes, the cave is a reference to Plato’s cave.  Made me wish I remembered my college Humanities class better, I wrote a paper about Plato’s cave.  There are also echoes of Kafka in the places in the story.  And props to the translator: Margaret Jull Costa.

I will leave it at that. Except for this: Jose Saramago is a masterful writer and thinker. He totally deserved that Nobel Prize for Literature.  This is the third Saramago book we’ve read in book group (also read All the Names and Blindness). After discussing The Cave, we decided that WSBG will read a Saramago book every year forevermore.

I can’t wait!

WSBG reviews Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

This is a good book for a book group to read because it provides so much fodder for discussion.

It’s about how what we think makes us happy really doesn’t. Mostly because humans are not very good at imagining the future when we rely on our own imaginations to do so. (Because we base our imagined future too much on what we feel in the present.)

We are, however, amazingly good at rationalizing, which means we can pretty much decide to be happy pretty much whenever we want to if only we understand ourselves better.

We also have an uncanny ability to remember dramatic events and generalize them so we believe them to be typical. (That’s why we are convinced we always pick the slowest moving line at the checkout stand.)

There are so many interesting things in this book, including some that are really useful, like helping you understand why you don’t order what you really want when you are dining with others and why we can’t think of the name of one song while another is playing.

We generally enjoyed reading the book, although we had a couple of quibbles. We got a little annoyed with the author’s unrelenting attempts at humor (what Darcy so accurately labeled his “preciousness”). And we think he made a mistake by asserting that humans are the only species that predict the future.

In that case, Reba wants to know why chimpanzees store up rocks to throw at humans?

When will humans learn? Every time they claim that some behavior (e.g., tool making, language) is unique to their species, somebody discovers an exception.

So I think I’ve finally got it:  Humans are the only species constantly searching for a unique trait that distinguishes them from all other species.

WSBG reviews Gob’s Grief by Chris Adrian

So as I sat down to write the World’s Smallest Book Group’s most recent read, I suddenly realized I didn’t review last month’s book.  

And I had a damn good reason. I have no idea what to say about it. Except that it was the weirdest, most bizarre, truly outlandish book I think we ever read.

The book was Gob’s Grief by Chris Adrian. It begins with an 11-year-old boy (Tomo) leaving home to join the Union Army as a bugler during the Civil War. And was killed in the first battle he encountered. Shot right through the eye.  When the twin brother (Gob) who backed out of the army-joining thing at the last minute hears of his brother’s death, he is overcome with grief and sets out on a mission to bring the civil war dead back to life.

Along the way we meet up with Walt Whitman (yes, that Walt Whitman) in an army hospital in Washington D.C. where he takes a rather ummmmm, shall we say, obsessive interest in a wounded young man. We also encounter women from the suffrage movement (including Tomo and Gob’s mother Victoria Woodhull) and get into abortion, time travel, time machine construction, Abe Lincoln, photography, medicine, free love, communism, and many other topics I can’t remember any longer.

And in the end, it turns out that it was actually….  oh, sorry, almost spoiled it.

If you like reading really bizarre books that refer to everything but in the end might mean nothing, this just might be the book for you.

The World’s Smallest Book Group is not among its fans. The book jacket blurbs were quite enthusiastic, though sometimes from rather obscure sources. We did agree with this one from The Economist however: “Remarkable…utterly different. A work unlike any that has come before it.”

Bringing WSBG into the 21st century

Let it be said that not all the members of the World’s Smallest Book Group are as excited about the wonders of technology as this member is… witness this:  when I suggested we record our book ratings as comments on the book reviews on this blog, these were their responses:

Reba: I think I should just talk about my opinions and you take copious notes and post them on the blog.

Joyce: I prefer to make my notes on paper and store said paper in my closet.

Darcy: Total silence.

But I am not deterred!! I have a new plan: there’s a meme going around that just might lure them in… Please check back to see if I am successful.  Here’s the meme:

The BBC book reading list

The BBC believes most people will have read, on average, only 6 of the 100 books listed here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Look at the list and put an ‘x’ or a ‘*’, or otherwise highlight the ones you have read. Tag some people. 

(I put the ones I’ve read in bold)

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen 
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien 
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling 
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee 
6 The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 
11 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott 
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger 
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger 
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald 
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis 
34 Emma – Jane Austen 
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne 
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 
42 The Da Vinci Code -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 
47 Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold 
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 
66 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 
74 Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (half of it)
76 The Inferno – Dante 
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White 
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo 

I think my score is 76.5.  Of course I’ve lived a pretty long life and some of these are books I read a looooooooong looooooooong time ago, so please don’t ask me to take a quiz on their characters, themes, or plots.  Interesting to note that a number are books we read in WSBG! Some are my most favorite books of all time, like One Hundred Years of Solitude, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Confederacy of Dunces, etc. etc.

I am quite certain the book group’s other members will have considerably higher scores!  At least one of them might approach 100.

Readers who are not part of WSBG are welcome to participate too!

Go for it sisters!!

WSBG reviews Lying Awake by Mark Salzman

This month we read Lying Awake by Mark Salzman, a rather short book about a nun (Sister John) living in a cloistered monastery who appears to have a direct line to the divine, but it turns out her rapturous visions and writing were a result of seizures.  She struggles with the decision to have surgery to eliminate the seizures and what it means that her spiritual awakening was not what it seemed to her (and others).

It was interesting to see how much was revealed about the nuns living there, without benefit of much conversation. Apparently, a few well spoken words will do (a lesson  that some members — well, one member — of the book group is trying to take to heart.)

The book is kind of a meditation on the meaning of religion and art in life. It’s also a nice glimpse into what it is like to live this kind of life, have this much silence and solitude. (Many aspects of that life appeal to those of us who are moving through our days at too frantic a pace!)

World’s Smallest Book Group is not known as a religious body. In fact, it might be hard to find this small a group with fewer actual religious leanings. So we decided to think about her “gift” as more of an artistic one. (Like imagining it was Dostoyevsky deciding whether or not to lose his writing, we were better able to relate.)  It was an interesting discussion along those lines.  

It also put some of us in mind of a research project Blaine did for his biology class senior year in high school.  He put this question out to the Internet:  ”If we had the technology to eliminate disabilities from the population, would that be a good public policy?”

Howard Rheingold referred to Blaine’s paper in his column, “For Some, the Net is a Lifeline.”

It’s hard to find Blaine’s paper on the web now, but it is referred to in this article in Disability Studies Quarterly.

We also talked about the notion that religion is a throwback to the bicameral mind, referring to Julian James’ book The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. If you want to read a book that will spark thinking and conversation, go there!

WSBG reviews In the Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron

To be honest, World’s Smallest Book Group didn’t actually discuss the book we read all that much at our December meeting. Why talk about travel writing when most of our members had been travelling: Reba to Switzerland: Darcy to Switzerland, London, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, etc.: Joyce to Argentina.  Lots of wonderful travel talk.  Didn’t leave much time for the book.

Joyce liked it best because she had actually been to many of the places along the Silk Road described in the book. (She’s easily our most exotic traveller and all my distant travels have been with her!) The book is well written and has fascinating information, especially since he takes the “hard seat” approach to travel in Asia. Interesting juxapositions of yesterday and today in his encounters. But somehow it didn’t really grab us. 

Perhaps there’s been too much going on in the world of late for us to let ourselves be swept away this time. 

One personal note:  this is the first book group book I’ve read on my Kindle. Boy did I miss easy access to a good map. Found myself going to Google Earth to follow along.  Plea to Kindle designers/makers: please incorporate awesome map technology asap so I don’t have to read it at a computer.  Thanks.

WSBG reviews The Reluctant Fundamentalist and In the Eye of the Sun

Where did our reading take us this month? New York, New Jersey, London, north of England, Cairo, Lahore, and some places in between. No wonder we’re tired…

I’ll start with In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif. Holy carp, what a long book! 785 pages! All four of us felt it could have been waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay shorter. First of all, let’s leave out all the “show your work” semantics research. Good grief! (I am especially pained because I actually labored through those sections, while other members of the group quickly figured out to skip those parts. My bad!)

Second, most of the scenes and conversations went on faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too long, seemed like a bit of lazy writing and editing. Make your point but don’t punish us, okay? When the conversations go nowhere, we don’t need forever to see they are going nowhere.

The book is about Asya, a privileged young woman from a very wealthy Egyptian family. For much of the book, she is pursuing a PhD in linguistics at a university in northern England, although the story jumps between 1979 and 1967 and years in between. She fell in love with Said as a young student, and they are married after she finishes college. Because she is hysterical about the pain of intercourse, she can’t have sex, and Said acquieses, although she becomes pregnant and has a miscarriage (never explained and she seems to have no idea how it happened). But moving right along, she ends up having flirtations with other men, and then finally an affair with an English man with absolutely no redeeming qualities, and is in fact, a complete and utter asshole. Having created a kind of ultimate male villain, she rather inexplicably keeps going back to him. Usually with no explanation or clear motivation, other than she feels bad because she made him feel bad. Then she makes Said feel really really bad when she reveals she did indeed have a whole bunch of hot sex with the Englishman, Said then turns into a complete heel and jerk, which makes her really want him after all, but then not so much. And then she finishes her PhD and ends up working in family planning with Egyptian women in rural villages. But of course.

For 785 pages, there is an awful lot missing in the story. The author brings up multiple things without ever explaining or resolving them. (E.g., why was so much made of Said’s lies when they were young, without any explanation??) Why did she suddenly turn up with the sadistic Englishman in New York when she had seemingly finally been rid of him?

The relationships all seemed so superficial, as, in the end, did the main characters. While we expected the book to generalize to the dilemmas and challenges facing women caught between two cultures, in this case her highly neurotic nature limited the book so it seemed to apply only to these individual people. Oh how it made us long for reading Naguib Mahfooz again.

We did really enjoy getting the perspectives on political events during that period from multiple characters’ points of view, another reminder of the very limited reporting and characterizations we are exposed to in the U.S. We also enjoyed many of the minor characters and the insight into family life and friendships among women. Here’s a thought: it would have been a good book if you left out the main characters and their relationships. Would have been a whole lot shorter too!

Now moving on to The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid. We really loved the book! Two of us read it twice, in fact.

The book is the monologue of a man from Lahore who had been very successful in the U.S., graduating at the top of his class from Princeton and viewed as the top performer among the elite recruits of an American valuation firm (with the perfect name of Underwood Samson). In the course of the one-sided conversation, we learn about his experience in America and how he became so disillusioned with the culture and people that he returned to Pakistan.

There is a kind of theme of unreality running through the book in which characters are suspended in a kind of nostalgia that feels like an imagined reality that cannot have ever actually existed, but something keeps them trapped in the belief to the point they cannot live otherwise.

I think Americans need to read this book. I just looked over the reviews on Amazon, and I have to say, we Americans can be awfully touchy about anything remotely criticizing us, especially when it can be placed in any context with 9/11. My goodness, people. Do we realize how thin skinned we are?! We’re the most powerful nation on earth when it comes to weapons, control of resources, wealth, etc., but we can’t bear anyone suggesting we have anything to aplogize for or feel shame about? Don’t truly strong entities have enough faith in themselves to welcome questions? Aren’t those who are really comfortable with themselves able to hear to critiques. As Aaron said at work the other day (quoting a movie line, I believe): “Get off your cross and use the wood to build a bridge to get over yourselves.” Please.

Here’s what we felt was the most powerful passage in the book:

“A common strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie’s concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism, which was defined to refer only to the organized and politically motivated killing of civilians by killers not wearing the uniforms of soldiers. I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who lived in the lands in which such killers also lived had no meaning except collateral damage. This, I reasoned, was why America felt justified in bringing so many deaths to Afghanistan and Iraq, and why Americans felt justified in risking so many more deaths by tacitly using India to pressure Pakistan.”

I read the book aloud to my family. Saturday morning after I had finished it the night before, I heard a report on the radio that Americans had attacked “insurgents” in western Afghanistan and 76 civilians had been killed (with Americans first insisting all the dead were terrorists, but then later admitting to the “collateral damage”). Do we not think we will be paying for this a long time, America? Why are we letting our leaders do this in our name?

Even though the book is just a man talking, it is completely riveting. (Picture the movie Dinner with Andre in the way a conversation can be completely spellbinding.) There is so much tension, as we try to understand who he is talking to (an American “black ops” or a frightened businessman?), what will happen, is violence about to be played out?

And the ending! What happened? What was the glint of metal? Was someone killed? If so who? And who was the killer?

I just found this interview with the author on Amazon:

“It was always intended to end as it does. For me, the reader is a character in a novel, and the way one reads it shapes the outcome. So a reader who is more suspicious of Pakistanis might read it differently from one who is more suspicious of Americans. But it is the fear we are all being fed, the sense that something menacing lurks in the shadows of our world, that has the potential to make the novel a thriller. In reality, we should be much less frightened of our world than we are. When two people meet and disagree on this planet, the result is almost invariably a conversation–nothing more and nothing less.”

Ah, so very satisfying. This is the perfect book group book: very well written, easy and quick to read, so very much to digest, and even more to talk about!

neurotic

How I’m feeling about my Kindle

As I’ve been reading my first two full length books on the Kindle, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I feel about the experience… does it work? does it feel right? does it change the experience of reading, and if so, how?

Here are my observations so far:

In many ways, it is easier than reading a printed book. By that I mean:

1. It’s lighter and therefore easier to hold. Especially in bed, where I do most of my reading (as long as I keep it in the suede case that came with it…without the case, there’s not enough room to hold it and not touch buttons unintentionally, more on this issue below.) Since the case is very book-cover-like, that works very well).

2. It’s also really easy to carry around, which I find I do more often and catch more moments for reading on the fly. If I travelled a lot, this would be the most important feature, I’m sure.

3. It’s easier to find the place I left off. When I open it, it instantly lands on the last page I was reading, so I don’t have to worry about forgetting to mark where I was, losing the bookmark, risk breaking the spine, decide whether or not it’s okay to fold corners of pages, etc.

4. The ordering and buying process is incredibly convenient. (Maybe too convenient? Will I buy too many books?!)

5. It enables my habit of reading more than one book at a time. (Confession: in addition to the two Kindle books, I’m also reading three other print books I had before getting a Kindle.) If I find it hard to carry one printed book around, imagine if I tried to carry all the books I’m reading at a time? Impossible if I want to maintain my already-listing posture.

Other favorable features:

I love the “get a free sample” of the book feature. So far I ordered sample portions of five books. I subsequently purchased two of them, and am liking both a lot (those are the two I’m reading right now.) I decided against buying the other three, based on the sample. Two of the books I likely wouldn’t have bought in any case, but one I probably would have, based on the book descriptions, reviews and recommendations. So maybe I saved myself some money? Possible, but debatable.

These old eyes love the adjustable font feature. The other day I actually read without my reading glasses! That hasn’t happened in years! (I went back to the next smaller size though, because I found I wanted more words on the screen, so the glasses came back.) But I don’t find my eyes getting tired when I read a long time, like I sometimes do when reading a print book with small font.

I love the fact that I don’t have to agonize over decisions about what to do with the book after I read it, viz., somehow make room on a bookshelf here at home (not easy!) in case I want to read again someday or loan to a friend, take back to Powells, take to Goodwill, etc. It will always be there for me and never take up any space at all. I find this very cool!

I love the fact that I can’t ever lose books, because Amazon will keep my copy on file.

The downsides:

You can’t get every book you might want this way. For example, upon the recommendation of the delightful son of a co-worker, I tried to buy Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close last week. Incredible as it may seem for a newer book that is quite popular, it wasn’t available. After ordering the print book (which arrived within 24 hours from Amazon!), it was clear why: there are very some strange color markups and visual effects in the text, which presumably would be impossible to replicate in the Kindle. Future technology may change this, I’m guessing…

It’s very touchy. You have to work to get the hang of holding the Kindle so you don’t touch something that makes it do something you don’t mean to do. At first, I couldn’t find a way to do that, but then I found using the cover handled the problem for me. I think they still have some design work to do. But that’s the name of the early adopter game!

There are still so many features I don’t know and don’t use yet, and sometimes I feel that makes me a bad person. Right now I’m just happy to read. Once I feel I really get the hang of that, I’ll try to move on to annotating, highlighting, and all the other cool features I don’t understand yet and feel guilty about not using.

There is something different about the reading experience. I’m trying to figure out what this means, and whether it is a matter of habit? For example, and I hadn’t really thought much about this before, but I think there IS something sensually soothing about the feel of a book cover, thumbing through the pages, smelling the fresh paper and ink. I’m trying to deconstruct and parse exactly what the print book experience is for me. I’m still working on it, and will check back in when I have something insightful to say.

I’ve found there are a lot of really interesting discussions on the future of books on the web. I hope to have something to contribute to that discussion someday.

But first I have to find something more insightful to say.

WSBG reviews The Inheritance of Loss and Climbing the Mango Trees

This month we went to India. Had two quite different experiences there. The people who climbed mango trees were rather well off and quite westernized. Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India by Madhur Jaffrey is a series of mildly charming stories about growing up in those circumstances. I found it mildly boring. (Maybe I just find living completely tidy lives kinda boring, and maybe it’s mostly envy that motivates my critique.)

Here’s a short description from Publishers Weekly:

The celebrated actress and author of several books on Indian cooking turns her attention to her own childhood in Delhi and Kampur. Born in 1933 as one of six children of a prosperous businessman, Jaffrey grew up as part of a huge “joint family” of aunts, uncles and cousins—often 40 at dinner—under the benign but strict thumb of Babaji, her grandfather and imperious family patriarch. It was a privileged and cosmopolitan family, influenced by Hindu, Muslim and British traditions, and though these were not easy years in India, a British ally in WWII and soon to go though the agony of partition (the separation and formation of Muslim Pakistan), Jaffrey’s graceful prose and sure powers of description paint a vivid landscape of an almost enchanted childhood. Her family and friends, the bittersweet sorrows of puberty, the sensual sounds and smells of the monsoon rain, all are remembered with love and care, but nowhere is her writing more evocative than when she details the food of her childhood, which she does often and at length.

The parts of the book I enjoyed most were the parts that described experiences when India and Pakistan were partitioned.

The book didn’t rock any other WSBG member’s world, either, though they enjoyed reading it more than I did. A bonus is the collection of family recipes at the end of the book. I’m sure they are quite fine and tasty.

The people who inherited a lot of loss made for one helluva book. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai fairly brought us to our knees. Here’s a blurb from the New Yorker:

Desai’s second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states—Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet—meet. At the head of the novel’s teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds “too messy for justice.” He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquillity of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook’s son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter’s affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai’s life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.

We were collectively stunned by the beauty of her writing. So many times we found ourselves just savoring phrases, sentences, paragraphs. And the portraits are so vivid, this was one of those books we felt transported by, we could hear and see and smell the story. Gawd, we live such sheltered, protected lives here in the beautiful northwest corner of the U.S. Let us not forget our experience is rare and privileged and do what we can to share what we have with others across the world.

I found it very curious that Inheritance of Loss only rates 3 stars on Amazon, while Climbing the Mango Tree has 4.5 stars?!? I highly doubt those readers would pass the WSBG entrance exam.