Cost

I know, two posts in one day. I finished the long, bad Against the Day a few days ago, and I finished the shorter, better Cost today.

Cost delves into a family that learns of and reacts to the heroin addiction of one character, Jack. We meet the family just before they learn of this addiction. The mother and father are divorced, and the father has remarried. Jack's maternal grandparents are on the scene, as are a maternal aunt and older brother. Most of the book happens during the course of a few days, although there is some follow-up that occurs later.

Robinson does a nice job of shifting among the perspectives of different family members. It's somewhat similar to that of Jodi Piccoult, although it's not dramatic and sustained in the same way. She seems to "check in" with each of the various characters without the dramatic shift. I enjoyed that style.

The story was very engaging, although I had to skip some of the explicit descriptions of shooting up. I'm way too squeamish for that stuff.

This book is a quick read without sacrificing psychological intensity.

Against the Day

I haven't posted anything for a long time because I was slogging through this book. Spoiler alert: it sucks. It took me forever to read it because a) it was 1085 pages long, and b) I couldn't get into the book. So many times I thought about quitting it, but I just can't stand to do that. I read this book because it was one of the 1001 books to read before you die. Trust me, you can die in peace without reading this.

One issue was the numerous extremely long sentences that are individually difficult to follow, such as the following:

"Appearing these days in the infant science of counter-terrorism as an all-purpose code name, the bloke you sent out a discreet summons for to alert your own security staff to a crisis, the real "Inspector Sands," beleaguered, ever struggling to define and maintain a level of professional behavior, unaware of his drift into legend, soon enough aged beyond his years and sweated into a moodiness at home that could not but slop over onto the wife and kids, would find by midcareer no time even to take of his hat, hurrying as ever from one emergency to the next--"Ah, Sands, there you are, and high time too."

It's also very difficult to follow because it involves 39 characters (according to Wikipedia) with really weird names, such as:

• Lew Basnight
• Chick Counterfly
• Darby Suckling
• Sloat Fresno
• Yashmeen Halfcourt
• Deuce Kindred
• Cyprian Latewood
• Lake Traverse
• Professor Heino Vanderjuice
• Scarsdale Vibe

These characters travel all over much of the world and cross paths with each other in the most unlikely of situations over the course of about 30 years.

The story involves time travel, gratuitous sex, confusing mathematical theories, and rediculous songs. I checked out some reviews, and here are some of my favorite snippets:

• "All the paranoia and silliness and vast workings out of history make it easy to overlook the sheer beauty of Pynchon's prose." - Mark Feeney, Boston Globe
• "Rambling, pompous and often completely incomprehensible" - The Economist
• "It's a world of mystery and paranoia, of inchoate longing, of disillusionment and anticlimax. Like Pynchon's characters, we wander through a swarm of hints that both promises light and darkens what little day we have." - Greg Hollingshead, The Globe & Mail
• "Against the Day is built out of vast amounts of period detail, from ladies' hats to the arcane minutiae of the mathematical squabbles of the day...(I)t's quite a challenge to hold its multitudinous threads together in your head sufficiently clearly to grasp what it is they're being woven together to form." - James Lasdun, The Guardian
• "This shambling ragbag of prose rattles with more than a hundred characters, multiple settings in this world and others and a multitude of narratives held together by gossamer skeins of plot." - David Goldblatt, The Independent
• "It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
• "There is too much going on among too many characters in too many places. There are also too many tonal shifts, as though Pynchon set out to mimic all the styles of popular fiction -- boys’ adventure stories, science fiction, Westerns, comic books, hardboiled crime fiction, spy novels, soft-core porn." - Louis Menand, The New Yorker
• "The text is overwhelming, unstable, encyclopaedic and extravagantly allusive." - David Gale, The Observer

And, there are many more. Don't waste your time on this huge book.

Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism

I know I haven't put anything up in a long time. My computer is dying, and I've been slogging through a super long and non-engaging book for weeks now. In the meantime, I read this book at work.

This book is super interesting. It tells the story of a woman who was diagnosed with Asperger's/High Functioning Autism as an adult. She talks about her struggle to fit in and how developing an understanding of and community with gorillas helped her learn to how connect with humans. She talks a lot about her experiences with gorillas, which I found really interesting. It is also a message of hope for adults with Aspergers/Autism, as she leads a satisfying life with a partner and a child. I definitely recommend it.

On Beauty

This book follows the experiences of one family, although other characters intertwine in various ways. Howard, the father, is a White British professor in the American Northeast. Kiki, the mother, is a Southern African-American woman who has invested her life in her husband and children. Jerome, their oldest child, is a college student is notable as the only family member who is religious (Christian). Zora, their daughter, is a college student who struggles notably with her own body image. Levi, their youngest child, is a high schooler who becomes active in a movement supporting equal rights for Haitians.

Overall, the book is about conflict...conflict between various family members, conflict between family members and other people in their surroundings, conflict between liberal and conservative values, conflict between different racial/ethnic/socioeconomic groups, conflict between who characters are, who they want to be, and who they want people to think they are, etc. While the story itself is generally not overly heavy, it does provide a great deal of thought provoking material. I think you might want to read it.

The Red Queen: A Transcultural Tragicomedy

This book has an interesting and unconventional style. The half of the book tells the story of a Korean woman who became a princess and was to become the Red Queen. Her real name is not known. I'll call her the Red Queen for the sake of clarity. She lived a long life and saw her father-in-law, son, and grandson as king; her husband was mentally ill and was murdered by his father (the king). The second half of the story tracks a female professor in England in the 21st century. She mysteriously received a copy of a memoir of the Red Queen and becomes somewhat obsessed with her.

The most unusual characteristics of this book are:

1. The whole story is told in the voice of the Red Queen. She is dead but is tracking the developments of the modern world. She is aware of the internet, reads voraciously, and has a vested interest in continuing to share her story.
2. The author (Margaret Drabble) wrote herself into the second half of the book. She is a character who interacts with the other fictional characters in the book. She is a novelist in the book and is only a minor character.

I thought this book was interesting. The story of the Red Queen was fascinating, but the idea of continuing mentally after death is more intriguing. The Red Queen has all of eternity to read whatever she wants, to research topics that interest her, and to see how she has impacted the world. That idea is quite compelling. It would be very painful to see the world continuing to unfold, while having essentially no impact upon it. However, at the same time, the idea of having eternity to read sounds fabulous,  although I could imagine that at some point eternity would feel exhausting.

Child 44

I have to preface this by saying that I know almost nothing about Communist Russia. I wish that I did, so I could tell how far from impossible (and I hope it's really far) this story is. This book was an engaging and suspenseful read. The story involves the search for a mass murderer in a society where murder is alleged to never occur. Each of the individual murders was pinned on an easy target, even when it became clear that they were connected. The powers that be could not admit that they were all committed by one man. Instead, the murderer was sought by one disgraced cop who was considered a traitor. In the end, the connection was a little too close for anyone's comfort. In this story Russia is a dystopian society were everyone is a potential traitor who could be murdered for the slightest infraction. The downside of the book...it reinforces the communism=inherently bad myth. Other than that, it's a good read.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

#31! It's April 16, and I've read more books than I read last year!

This was a good one. This story provides a glimpse into Henry Lee's life during two distinct time periods.

During the first, 1942-1945, Henry is 12-15 year old Chinese American boy growing up in Seattle. He is caught in a cultural divide between his traditional Chinese parents and the American society into which he was born. His father is extremely anti-Japanese due to extensive war and conflict between China and Japan. Meanwhile, Henry slowly falls in love with a Japanese classmate named Keiko. She and her family are removed from Seattle and forced to live in internment camps. Miraculously, Henry manages to visit Keiko and maintain some contact with her until Henry's father stops their correspondence. Toward the end of this time period, Henry met Ethel, a Chinese American girl, falls for her, and proposes because he is afraid that he will never be able to find Keiko again.

The second time period is 1986, although some elements that the author mentions (e.g., online support groups) are not consistent with 1986. In this portion of the story Ethel has been dead for six months. Henry has a strained relationship with his 21 year old son Marty, which is improved during this story after the introduction of his White fiancee Samantha. In 1986 the belongings of numerous Japanese American families that were removed to internment camps were found in an old hotel in Japantown. Henry, Marty, and Samantha go sleuthing through these items and find some items of Keiko's. Marty and Samantha use the internet (which was not so well developed in 1986) to find Keiko, and Henry visits her in New York City.

During the book, these stories are interspersed, so each is unfolding simultaneously. The story itself is both bitter and sweet. It is truly disturbing that the US government locked up US citizens in the 1940's due to their ethnic heritage. The story reminds me a little bit of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in its illustration of how children are not born with discriminatory beliefs but these have to be taught. Clearly then, we can teach children otherwise.

I recommend this sweet, sad book. It's a quick read and will touch your heart.