Book Review: TransAtlantic by Colum McCann

Author: Colum McCann
Title: TransAtlantic
Publication Info: New York: Random House, 2013
ISBN: 9781400069590
Previously Read by Same Author: Let the Great World Spin
Summary/Review:

I’m privileged to review an advanced reader’s copy of this forthcoming novel courtesy of the Library Thing Early Reviewer‘s program.

This is a novel of contrasts.  It’s an epic story covering three centuries and as the title implies crossing back and forth the Atlantic from Ireland to Canada and the United States.  And yet it is a very personal book with detailed character studies of four men and four women.  The men are well-known historical figures: American abolitionist Frederick Douglass on a speaking tour of Ireland, Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown making the first nonstop transatlantic flight, and US Senator George Mitchell brokering the Good Friday Agreement.  The women are four generations of the same family whose lives briefly intersect with the historical figures: an Irish housemaid Lily Duggan inspired to go to America by Douglass, the journalist Emily Ehrlich who settles in Newfoundland, the photographer Lottie who marries an RAF airman from Northern Ireland, and Hannah Carson whose loses her son in The Troubles and as we read her story in her own voice in the present time is on the verge of losing all of her family history to the bank.

Just as in Let the Great World Spin, McCann does not interweave the stories, yet characters from other stories appear later on.  The stories are also connected by an unopened letter which acts as kind of a McGuffin and is one of the less effective aspects of the novel to me.  Other than though, the writing in brilliant and McCann has a special gift for capturing the human experience in words.  The fictional figures seem as real as the historical figures and the historical figures are so detailed as to appear as fully-realized literary characters.  This is another great novel by McCann and I highly recommend it.
Favorite Passages:

“What they need are the signatures.  After that, they will negotiate the peace.  Years of wrangling still to come, he knows.  No magic wand.  All he wants is to get the metal nibs striking hard against the page.  But really what he would like now, more than anything, is to walk out from the press conference into the sunlight, a morning and evening jammed together, so that there is rise and fall at the same time, east and west, and it strikes him at moments like this the he is a man of crossword puzzles, pajamas, slippers, and all that he needs is to get on a plane, land, enter the lobby of the apartment on Sixty-Seventh Street, step into his own second chance, the proper silence of fatherhood.” – p. 120

Recommended books: A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan  and Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
Rating: ****

The New Canon: 15 Modern Classics You Should Read Right Now

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People may tell you that literature is dying, but plenty of authors are hard at work redefining the book world with groundbreaking and mind-bending works sure to be read and reread for quite some time. With so many books vying to be the next "Great American Novel", this is merely a list of those who have earned their eminence and moved a generation some believed was devoid of literacy.

Read more… 1,218 more words

I'm surprised that I've read 9 of the 15 books on this list of Modern Classic novels since I tend to read non-fiction these days. Not only that but I really love several of these books. Here are my reviews of the books I've read:

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (****)
• Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides (****)
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (***1/2)
• The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (***1/2)
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith (**1/2)
• Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (****)
•  A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (****1/2)
• The Life of Pi by Yann Martel (*****)
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (no review available) (****)

I think from the remaining books I'd like to read Cloud Atlas and maybe Kafka on the Shore. What are your modern classics?

Book Review: When spiritual but not religious is not enough by Lillian Daniel

Author: Lillian Daniel
Title: When spiritual but not religious is not enough : seeing god in surprising places, even the church
Publication Info: New York, NY : Jericho Books, 2013.
ISBN:  9781455523085
Summary/Review: A Christian minister writes several essays about contemporary religious life, challenging people to go beyond seeing God in sunsets and waterfalls and seeking out God in the flawed human beings in the community around them.  Daniel is wise and humorous and at times sounds like a cranky old person (I looked at her author photo, she’s not), but always with the underlying goal of startling the reader into taking their relationship to God and community to a higher plane.
Favorite Passages:

“When you witness suffering and declare yourself to have achieved salvation in the religion of gratitude, you have fallen way short of what God would have you do, no matter what religion you are called to.

And by the way, while I think God does want us to feel gratitude, I do not think God particularly wants us to feel lucky.  I think God wants us to witness pain and suffering and rather than feeling lucky, God wants us to get angry and want to do something about it.

The civil rights movement didn’t happen because people felt lucky.  The hungry don’t get fed, the homeless don’t get sheltered, and the world doesn’t change because people are who are doing okay feel lucky.  We need more.” – p. 9

“At one point, the whole world was safe for animals.  Now their territory is constricted.  Human beings control so much of the landscape and we have huge areas where animals rarely go — schools, hospitals, stores, churches.  So I like to think of the sight of an animal in the airport as a special gift.  We get a glimpse of nature in a sterile place.  We get a dose of animal instinct in a place where we all have to behave ourselves.  It’s as odd as hearing a dog bark in church, and just as wonderful.” – p. 137

“I don’t want to choose.  The church has plenty of tents staked out on the battlegrounds of who Jesus is, and why it matters.  I pitch my tent in the field of mystery, and have yet to nail it down.” – p. 161

“I’m tired of playing by that dull and pedestrian set of rules, which has everything to do with a litigious, factoid-hungry culture and nothing to do with following Jesus.  I don’t come to church for evidence or for a closing argument.  I come to experience the presence of God, to sense the mystery of things eternal, and to learn a way of life that makes no sense to those stuck sniffing around for proof.” – p. 166

“I believe that there really is a connection between who we were raised to be and who we are now. It might bot be a straight line, but you cannot connect the dots.  God works through all kinds of religious communities at different points in our lives.

No spiritual home is all good or all bad. So give thanks for the small and tender blessings of every place that has never been our spiritual home, and for lessons you have learned.”  - p. 182

Recommended books:The Call to Conversion by Jim Wallis, Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, and Pray All Ways: A Book for Daily Worship Using All Your Senses by Edward M. Hays.
Rating: ***

2012 Year in Review: Favorite Books

Here’s my annual list of my ten favorite books read in the year.  As always, this is merely the best books I read this year not books published in 2012 (books published this year are bolded in the complete list below).  For previous years see 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006. You may also want to check out My Favorite Books of All Time or see Every Book I’ve Ever Read cataloged in Library Thing.

In no particular order:

• Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man’s Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut by Rob Sheffield
  
• A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
• Straphanger by Taras Grescoe
• Marco Polo didn’t go there by Rolf Potts
• Pedaling Revolution by Jeff Mapes
• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
• Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick
• Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton
• Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson by Mark Siegel
• The Woman Who Died A Lot by Jasper Fforde

And now the complete list.  Not a great year for reading as I didn’t maintain much focus on reading and less so on reviewing books.

Books Read in 2012

January

• A Soul To Steal by Rob Blackwell
• Pedaling Revolution by Jeff Mapes
• Saturday by Ian MacEwan (A)
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman

February

• Green Metropolis by David Owen (A)
• Best Mets by Matthew Silverman
• Moon Yellowstone & Grand Teton: Including Jackson Hole by Don Pitcher
• The Rough Guide to Yellowstone & Grand Teton by Stephen Timblin
• A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

March

• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
• The Sandman : Preludes & Nocturnes : [volume 1] by Neil Gaiman
• The Fiery Trial : Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner
• Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton

April

• Doctor Who. Volume 1, Fugitive by Tony Lee
• Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life by James Martin
• God After Darwin by John F. Haught

May

• The House of Silk by Anthony Horwitz
• Sleepwalk With Me by Mike Birbiglia
• The Walking Dead Book 2 by Robert Kirkman
• Bookhunter by Jason Shiga
• Unbroken by Lauren Hillenbrand (A)
• A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
• The Last Icon: Tom Seaver and His Times by Steven Travers

June

• Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man’s Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut by Rob Sheffield
• The spirit level : why greater equality makes societies stronger by Richard G. Wilkinson
• The Clockwise Man by Justin Richards
• Plugged by Eoin Colfer (A)
• Marco Polo didn’t go there by Rolf Potts

July

• Big questions, or, Asomatognosia : whose hand is it anyway by Anders Nilsen
• Empire State by Jason Shiga
• All That We Share by Jay Waljasper
• Life by Keith Richards with James Fox
• Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
• Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

August

• Doctor Who. Volume 2, Tesseract by Tony Lee
• Doctor Who. Volume 3, Final sacrifice by Tony Lee
• Doctor Who. Series 2, Volume 1, The Ripper by Tony Lee
• City : a guidebook for the urban age by P.D. Smith
• Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

September

• 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About by Joshua Clover
• The Art of Fielding  by Chad Harbach (A)
• As if an enemy’s country : the British occupation of Boston and the origins of revolution by Richard Archer
• Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick
• The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (A)
• Wherever I Wind Up by R.A. Dickey with Wayne Coffey
• Bonobo Handshake by Vanessa Woods (A) 
• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
• The Sandman. [Volume 2], Doll’s house by Neil Gaiman

October

• The Sandman. [Volume 3], Dream Country by Nei Gaiman
• The Sandman. [Volume 4], Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman
• The Woman Who Died A Lot by Jasper Fforde
• Spook  by Mary Roach (A)
• The Walking Dead 3 by Robert Kirkman
• The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde
• Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat by Hal Herzog (A)
• The Song of the Quarkbeast by Jasper Fforde
• The Walking Dead 4 by Robert Kirkman
• The Sandman. [Volume 5], A Game of You by Neil Gaiman

November

• The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon
• Sailor Twain, or The Mermaid in the Hudson by Mark Siegel
• The Walking Dead 5 by Robert Kirkman
• The Walking Dead 6 by Robert Kirkman
• Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders by Larry Millet

December

• Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan (A)
• The Walking Dead. Volume 15, We find ourselves by Robert Kirkman
• The Walking Dead. Volume 16, A Larger World by Robert Kirkman
• The Magic Maker by Susan Cooper (A)
• The Walking Dead. Volume 17: Something to Fear by Robert Kirkman
• The Thoreau You Don’t Know by Robert Sullivan
• The Submission by Amy Waldman

Book Review: As if an Enemy’s Country by Richard Archer

Author: Richard Archer
Title: As if an enemy’s country : the British occupation of Boston and the origins of revolution
Publication Info: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2010.
ISBN: 9780195382471
Summary/Review: Sometimes you pick up a book thinking it will be about one thing and discover it’s about something else, and learn a lot in the process.  I thought this book would be about Boston occupied by British troops under siege of the Continental Army ca. 1775-1776.  Instead it is set a few years earlier from 1768 to 1770 when British troops were first sent to police the unruly provincial capital.  I did not know, for starters, that after the Boston Massacre (where this book ends) that British military forces were withdrawn from the city only returning for the later conflict.  Archer creates and interesting panorama of Colonial Boston, small in geography and population, where the army formed 1 out every 5 adult males.  The inevitability of conflict between the troops and the populace in what was effectively an armed camp is discussed, but also the unexpected alliances.  Many merchants who would go on to become Loyalists, for example, were fine with the political dissent against taxation and the occupation at the time.  Archer writes an engaging and informative history of a time and place I thought I knew already.

Recommended books: The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution by Alfred F. Young,  Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes, and Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence by Jack Tager.
Rating: ***1/2

Book Reviews: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

Author: Chad Harbach
Title:  The Art of Fielding
Publication Info: New York : Little, Brown and Co., 2011.
ISBN: 9780316126694
Summary/Review:

Set at a liberal arts college in Wisconsin, this novel focuses on shortstop phenom Henry Skrimshander and the Westish College catcher and captain Mike Schwartz who recruits him for the school and team.  The early part of the novel focuses on Henry’s fish out of water at college and his sassy gay roommate Owen Dunne.  Owen seems to good to be true as he not only writes plays but also is on the baseball team (and gets away with reading books in the dugout) .  The novel takes an unexpected turn when the college president Guert Affenlight becomes the central character as he deals with reconciling with his estranged daughter Pella and an obsession with Owen.  Eventually the stories of all five characters come together, although the unlikelieness of their grouping based on a number of coincidences is one of the weaknesses of the story (especially the actions of these characters at the conclusion of the novel which just don’t ring true).  The strengths of the novel are strong characterization and beautiful prose.  Harbach is adept at describing baseball like a great sportswriter but also fills his novel with literary references (most obviously to Herman Melville, but the novel often seems to be channeling John Irving).  The Art of Fielding is not a perfect novel but it is an enjoyable read with unforgettable characters.

Recommended books:  A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger, and The Little Book by Selden Edwards.

Rating: ***

Book Review: 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About by Joshua Clover

Author: Joshua Clover
Title:  1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About 
Publication Info: University of California Press (2010)
ISBN: 0520267877
Summary/Review:

Cultural critic, poet, and professor Joshua Clover examines the pivotal year of 1989 as it manifested itself in popular music.  He has three main focal points.  First, the transition of rap music from Black Nationalism to gangsta, from East Coast to West Coast, through Public Enemy and NWA (with a short dalliance into the third way of De La Soul’s da inner sound, y’all).  Next, he goes to England for the rave scenes of “The Second Summer of Love” which is both a term I’ve never heard before and a culture I knew little about.  Back in the US, Clover heads to the Pacific Northwest for the emergence of the inwardly focused punk/metal blend of grunge.  Later chapters also explore what was on the Billboard charts in 1989 and explicates the vapidity of the Jesus Jones’ song that provides the subtitle of the book.  The ultimate conclusion is that popular culture embraced the image-event of the fall of the Berlin Wall but missed that actual revolutions of  that year.  Overall, this was an entertaining trip down memory lane (not to mention filling in the gaps of the things I missed the first time around) but found the author’s use of an overly scholarly tone off-putting.  If you’re interested in music criticism and the history of the late 80s/early 90s, pick up this book as it won’t take long to read, but otherwise I wouldn’t recommend it.

Recommended books: How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll by Elijah Wald and Talking to Girls About Duran Duran by Rob Sheffield.

Rating: **1/2

Book Review: Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Author: Alison Bechdel
Title: Are You My Mother? 
Publication Info: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2012)
ISBN: 9780618982509

Previously Read By the Same Author: Fun Home

Summary/Review:  The follow-up to Fun Home, Bechdel’s graphic biography of her father, this book deals with Bechdel’s complicated relationship with her mother. It’s actually about a lot more than that as center to the story is the process of Bechdel writing the story about her father and how that was troubling to her mother. Psychology is also central to the narrative as Bechdel details decades of sessions with her therapists and the book is heavily illustrated with quotes from the writing of the psychologist Donald Winnicot. My favorite aspect of Fun Home was how Bechdel worked in literary allusions into her story and that is at play here, most fantastically in she compares Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own with the plexiglass dome in Dr. Seuss’ Sleep Book. The psychology stuff is rather heavy and kind of weighs down the story that it makes it less perfect than Fun Home for me, but nevertheless an excellent examination of the human condition.

Recommended Books: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Rating: ***

Book Review: City : a guidebook for the urban age by P.D. Smith

Author: P.D. Smith
Title: City : a guidebook for the urban age
Publication Info:   Bloomsbury Press (2012)
ISBN: 9781608196760

Summary/Review:  This is kind of a coffee table book for urbanists depicting humanity’s greatest invention – the city!  The book is split into bit size chapters about different aspects of the city from public parks to public transportation, from skyscrapers to the street, and from coffehouses to hotels.  The books spans history and the globe seemingly try to create a city in the pages with snapshots of what makes up the city.

Favorite Passages:

“Look above the shopfronts and you begin to sense the history of the original buildings: exposed beams, time-roughened brickwork as red-raw as abraded skin, a plaque recording a creative life spent in a building, faded lettering advertising a long-defunct product.  As you stand in the high street, to the ubiquitous CCTV cameras you are just one more figure among the crowds of shoppers, someone with time to kill and money to spend.  But as you begin to notice these traces of the past and read the urban text, the city starts to come alive. You become part of its history, more than a mere consumer of products.  You are ready to begin a journey that can take you back to the roots of civilisation itself.  It is time to start walking.” – p. 171

“Creative cities are edgy places, where conservative, traditional forces collide with new, radical ideas in a shower of brilliant sparks.  Great cities are complex, even disorderly, cosmopolitan communities.  They are certainly not the easiest or safest places in which to live (housing conditions in Athens were far from ideal).  Such cities are often overwhelming and intense environments.  But this is often why they are such creative places. After all, it’s the irritant of sand in an oyster that produces a pearl.” – p. 253

Rating: **1/2

Book Review: Doctor Who. Series 2, Volume 1, The Ripper by Tony Lee

Author: Tony Lee
Title: Doctor Who. Series 2, Volume 1, The Ripper
Publication Info: IDW Publishing (2011)
ISBN: 9781600109744
Summary/Review: The Eleventh Doctor accompanied by Amy and Rory visit Victorian Whitechapel and find themselves in the midst of the Jack the Ripper killings where the Ripper is <SPOILERS> an alien! </SPOILERS>  Another enjoyable comic adventure for Doctor Who.

Rating: **1/2