The Shadow of the Wind

It's been rainy the past several days, even though we've had an overall sunny summer. When we were growing up, my sister and I would go to the neighborhood pool almost every afternoon. Unless it was raining and then we would go to the library and check out as many books as we could carry.  The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon reminded me of a book I would have checked out on one of those rainy days.  Our hero, Daniel, is taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books at a young age by his father, and encouraged to "save" a book.  He chooses The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax and begins a lifelong love with the rare book, it's author and the women who also love the book and it's author.

This was a really pleasant book-- it read quickly, had memorable and well developed (male) characters, provoked nostalgia and was a good reminder of why we love to read novels.

4/5 netflix stars

Bags Are Packed

I stopped by the Brookline Booksmith yesterday to pick up Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert . It is the next pick for book club and when I reserved it at the library, the queue was 116. Plus, I'm going on vacation so thought it would be good to have my own copy. But the Booksmith is a triple threat as Steph has noted before: new books, discounted new books, and used books! I knew I shouldn't but...a conversation with Mihee this past weekend reminded me of my love of Carson McCullers, and I found a beautiful old Penguin Classic of The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. The Penguin Classics have a distinctive orange cover and the Booksmith had many...D.H. Lawrence, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs. G has a nice illustrated book of the many covers of Penguin, and, as an aside, the entire library of Peguin Classics, would certainly give your bookshelves a useful job, would set you back a pretty penny, and would likely take at least two lifetimes to read!
I'll be on vacation next week, but with luck, will have a few new books to review after.

The Year of Magical Thinking and Sophie's Choice

I am a terrible procrastinator and have always been. I distinctly remember my dad taking me to the public library the day before my 5th grade report on India was due, and neglected to send back my housing request form before the start of college, so that I was one of a group of students who had to live in a hotel for the first semester. Before my friend Jane left for the Peace Corps-- a year and a half ago-- she let me take her library of books, and while it was a big pile, I had visions of being able to finish them all before her return. At this point, I've read about two, one of which, Sophie's Choice, by William Styron, I just finished.

Besides being a Jane Book, my other reason for chosing this book was that Joan Didion referenced it in The Year of Magical Thinking. I generally demur from books (and movies) that are surefire tearjerkers, but I had heard such wonderful things about The Year of Magical Thinking that I reserved it at the library. And then forgot about it until an email arrived saying it was ready to pick up. I decided to just get it over with, even if it was depressing, but through reading it, came to identify and empathize with Ms. Didion. Throughout the year following the death of her husband and multiple hospitalizations of her daughter, she references many current days with the same day the year prior-- for example, while covering the Democratic National Convention in Boston, realizes it is her daughter's wedding anniversary, and recalls her, her husband's and her daughter's activities on that date...so different from her current, solitary experience, that she cannot bear to continue her Convention coverage. This intimate confession is one of many similar she makes throughout, and made me smile, not because of any innate humor, but because I could see myself doing the same thing. She recounts a trip to the grocery store she made on the day her daughter was hospitalized, and the receipt lists a handful of modest and meaningless items bought in the face of the profound. I can go through my emails I sent on September 11, 2001, well after I knew about the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and see that I signed up for a Friendster account, of all things.

Ms. Didion's husband had been re-reading Sophie's Choice around the time of his death, and in that book, the narrator/participant, Stingo, ministers his own Magical Thinking. Stingo goes to post WWII New York, from the South, and meets Sophie, an Auschwitz survivor, and her lover, Nathan, an American Jew. Stingo is naive both by age (an admitted 10 years younger, at 22, than Sophie) and experience (a virgin, not particularly well traveled or knowledegable about non-Southerners).

Stingo interjects Sophie's confessorial backstory (the fate of her anti-semitic father and husband, her and her children's own fate within the concentration camp), as well as her current story (arriving in America to meet her manic depressive soul mate, Nathan), with his own, if not mundane, then innocent, trials and tribulations. Accidents and mores of the era are reported on, and backlashed against with the same urgency and weight as Sophie's own drama. For each carefree, but frustratingly (for Stingo) puritanical girl he meets, we hear Sophie's own stories of lovers chosen by literally, life and death situations. Stingo builds up a personal crisis, only to have it comically contrasted to Sophie's mind and life numbing traumas-- does his father's altercation with a cab driver and subsequent (accidental) black eye really compare to the abuse Sophie suffers at the hands of Nathan?

Stingo does, however, appreciate the gravity of Sophie's experience to his own; on the day she arrived at Auschwitz, he recalls he was eating bananas to "make weight" for recruitment into the armed forces. And ultimately, Stingo too harbors a secret-- his family's slave holding past has allowed him the funds to spend a summer writing, without working a 9-5 office job. While wet behind the ears as the main narrative takes place, the mature narrator Stingo alludes that the events of that summer not only allowed him to tackle the bulk of the book he wrote, but allowed him to part with his own past and find his own place in history.

Netflix stars-- 5 out of 5 for both books. Next up, a continuation on the same thread... Cane River by Lalita Tademy, chronicling generations of slaves in Louisiana. But first, the dishes and laundry I've put off while reading...

The Painted Veil

Despite having wanting to see the movie version of this book for months, I really had little idea what the story was about. This was a book club pick, so is not on my list of bookshelf books, although it's there now, since I actually had to buy it, the waiting list at the library was too long.

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham would be a comedy of manners, except it is no comedy. In fact, everything that can go wrong, does. Kitty fails to make a good marriage, so marries a suitor who will marry her before her sister's marriage. She takes a lover, who ultimately does not stand up for her and her husband, as payback, takes her to the heart of a cholera epidemic in a Chinese village. Death and destruction abound, but while the book was easy to read (at just 250 pages, it is a two night read), I felt nothing for any of the characters and regarded them all as superficial people. And perhaps that was the intent. The book takes place at the height of British colonialism, and through one of the characters, Maugham makes a point of declaring that the British can live anywhere, and have no connection to their homeland. Each of the characters looks out for his or her own person, without regard for others and their physical location-- whether England, Hong Kong, a small village or the Bahamas, the location is incidental and once the "job is done" the location and people connected with it are useless.

I guess I was hoping for a little more romance, but when I look deeper, the book could be transposed to many situations in present day.

Netflix rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

Sister of My Heart

Several years ago a close friend moved from her home here in Boston, across country to San Diego. I met her through Steph and really only became close to her that final summer before she moved. She, Steph and I would go rollerblading along the Esplanade every week, we each made a quilt and genarally hung out like junior high BFFs. At the end of the summer, she had to get rid of a lot of stuff-- I bought some furniture off her, but she also gave me some of her paintings and sculptures. Within the stuff I inherited was a copy of a book entitled Sister of My Heart. It was a hardback book and the synopsis was about two cousins growing up in India and how they were close like sisters. Five years later I finally got around to reading it, and while it was corny at times, it was also all consuming-- I couldn't wait to finish it. It was easy to find parallels between Sudha's and Anju's friendship and mine with my friend. Obviously neither of us had an arranged marriage, but we've both lived through and shared major life changes and a recent business trip to San Diego allowed us both to talk about our relationships deep into the night, not unlike Sudha's ultimate trip to the U.S. to be with Anju and her husband. At first I thought the book would be straightforward, but it turned out to have a complexity I wasn't expecting: the choices the cousins make conflict with traditional story telling and place them in direct conflict with society's dictations, as well as their own desires. Their attachment to each other over the years, excluding those around them, was at times unbelievable, as were the Mothers' change of mind towards the end. The end of the book left many avenues open, so I wasn't surprised to see a sequal... The Vine of Desire. Netflix stars? 3.5 out of 5 (my love of the book and its characters increased throughout).

Charms For The Easy Life

Charms For The Easy Life came from my coworker. We were walking to the T after drinks one evening and she said she always carries books, but hadn't finished one in over a year. She stated this with the same kind of acceptance one has towards a gym membership: you pay for it, but never, or rarely go. And that's fine because it's there when you need it. So she pulled out of her bag Charms for The Easy Life and told me I'd like it. It's a small paperback and looked like an airport buy, so when it was cold and rainy the whole weekend, I settled into the couch and started reading. On Saturday I told G not to bother me and that I would do my chores on Sunday. As the cold rain poured outside, I enjoyed several of my favorite things: magical realism, women's friendships and the South. It was purely enjoyable and produced a fair cry at the end (possibly co-induced by my butt falling asleep on the couch) so on a Netflix scale of stars, I'd give it three out of five.