Book Awards Challenge
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Small Island
“But for me I had just one question – let me ask the Mother Country just one simple question: how come England did not know me?” This is the question asked by the baffled Gilbert, one of the protagonists of Small Island, Andrea Levy’s award winning tale of the first wave of Jamaicans to come to England after World War II. Gilbert is confused, because while any young student in Jamaica can recite the canals of England, the roadways, the ports, the railways, the docks, while they memorize the Parliaments and the laws that were debated there, while they take great pride in their mother country, the English that they…
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The Fifth Child
Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a happy family. It was what they had chosen and what they deserved. Often, when David and Harriet lay face to face, it seemed that doors in their breasts flew open, and what poured out was an intensity of relief, of thankfulness, that still astonished them both: patience for what seemed now such a very long time had not been easy, after all. It had been hard preserving their belief in themselves when the spirit of the times, the greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them, to isolate, to diminish their best selves. And look, they had been right…
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The Bridge of San Luis Rey
“I shall spare you Brother Juniper’s generalizations. They are always with us. He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven. He thought he saw pride and wealth confounded as an object lesson to the world, and he thought he saw humility crowned and rewarded for the edification of the city. But Brother Juniper was not satisfied with his reasons. It was just possible that the Marquesa de Montemayor was not a monster of avarice, and Uncle Pio of self-indulgence.” An historic rope bridge collapses in Lima, Peru, in 1714, dashing 5 people to their death in the gulf…
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The Graveyard Book
Nobody “Bod” Owens is the protagonist of Neil Gaiman’s newest story, The Graveyard Book. The book starts with the murder of Bod’s family, and his unknowing escape as an 18-month old toddler. Bod climbs out of his crib and down the stairs, and, finding the front door open, takes the opportunity to explore, unaware that his parents and sister are being ruthlessly stabbed inside. He ends up at a nearby graveyard, where he is taken in by the dead (and undead) residents. His story is told in a series of episodes, some seeming more like short stories than part of a larger tale. He grows from a toddler to a…
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Just In Case
If fate were trying to kill you, how would you escape its deathly grasp? If your solution were to change your name, disguise yourself by dressing and acting differently, and protecting yourself by obtaining an imaginary dog, a greyhound named Boy, then you might be David Case. David is 15, and lives in a suburb of London with his parents and his baby brother, Charlie. One day he saves Charlie from jumping out of a window to his certain demise (Charlie was wanting to fly like the birds), and rather than feeling blessed and fortunate, he instead snaps and decides that Fate is out to get him, and his best…
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Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is the story of a ten-year-old Irish boy in 1968. The book is told in Paddy’s voice, and Roddy Doyle captures the confusion and attempts to make sense of the world that go along with being 10, suppositions and extrapolations that children make. Paddy on death and religion: When Indians died – Red ones – they went to the happy hunting ground. Vikings went to Valhalla when they died or they got killed. We went to heaven, unless we went to hell. You went to hell if you had a mortal sin on your soul when you died, even if you were on your way…
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Criss Cross
“Wanna go to the movies?” he asked. No one had ever asked Debbie this question before. She had imagined, often, being asked this question, but not by Lenny. He was the wrong person. Wasn’t he? She had never felt that way about him. Had she? His question caught her off guard, and she didn’t know what to do with it. The part of her that was open to the universe was facing in another direction just then. She felt disoriented and uncomfortable and there was Lenny, waiting for her to say something back. “I think it’s better if we’re just friends,” she said. To her relief Patty arrived with a…
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Tamar
“He was not what you’d call a lovable man, my grandad. It wasn’t that he was cold, exactly. It was more as though he had a huge distance inside himself. There’s a game I used to play with my friends. One of us had to think of someone we all knew, and the others had to work out who it was by asking questions like “If this person was a musical instrument, what would it be?” I used to think that if Grandad were a place, it would be one of those great empty landscapes you sometimes see in American movies: flat, an endless road, tumbleweed blown by a moaning…
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Charming Billy
Billy Lynch, alcoholic, romantic, kind and loving man, has died. His friends and family come together to comfort his widow, and to celebrate his life. And Billy’s life seems to have two stories to it. The sad story of his alcoholism, which his friends and family tried again and again to guide him away from, with no success. And the sad story of his first love, an Irish girl whom he intended to marry, but who goes back to Ireland and dies. At least, that’s what Billy is told. The truth is, she took the money he sent her for her passage to America, bought a gas station…
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The Gathering
Two years ago, I had a letter from Earnest. He was writing to tell me that he was leaving the priesthood, though he had decided to stay with his little school in the high mountains….’I have no place left to live but in my own heart,’ he wrote, meaning he would conduct his life as before, but on privately different terms. And I thought this was the stupidest stuff I had ever heard until, sitting on a stool in the Shelbourne bar, I wondered what might happen if I just carried on as usual, told no one, changed nothing, and decided not to be married after all. And I wondered…
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The Bluest Eye
Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that marigolds did not grow. A little examination and much less melancholy would have proved to us that our seeds were not the only ones that did not sprout; nobody’s did. Not even the gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that year. But so deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola’s baby we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, and…
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Possession: A Romance
Maud shivered, as she always shivered, on reading this document. What had Christabel thought, when she read it? Where had Christabel been, and why had she gone, and where had Randolph Ash been, between July 1859 and the summer of 1860? There was no record, Roland said, of Ash not being at home. He had published nothing during 1860 and had written few letters – those there were, were dated from Bloomsbury, as usual. LaMotte scholars had never found any satisfactory explanation for Christabel’s apparent absence at the time of Blanche’s death, and had worked on the supposition of a quarrel between the two women. This quarrel now looked quite…
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Book Awards Reading Challenge
I’m already a month late for this challenge, as it started August 1st. Dang. Last year, the rules were to read 12 award winning books in 12 months. This year, the rules are to read 10 award winning books in 10 months. Here are the rules, from the awards website: Read 10 award winners from August 1, 2008 through June 1, 2009. You must have at least FIVE different awards in your ten titles. Overlaps with other challenges are permitted. You don’t have to post your choices right away, and your list can change at any time. ‘Award winners’ is loosely defined; make the challenge fit your needs, keeping in…
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Middlesex
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (author of The Virgin Suicides), is first and foremost the story of Calliope, a young Greek girl growing up in the suburbs of Michigan, and how at puberty, she becomes Cal, a young Greek boy. The story spans three generations, starting with Desdemona and Lefty, a brother and sister fleeing Greece during the war with Turkey in 1922. Unfortunately, Desdemona and Lefty are in love with each other, and the anonymity of fleeing their homeland for America gives them the opportunity to start over, as husband and wife. Their story is a sad one, because as Desdemona discovers the dangers of birth defects involved if they…
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American Born Chinese
Though I finished my Graphic Novels Reading Challenge, I’ve been sucked in enough by the genre that I decided I would try a few more. From other reviews I’ve read on the Challenge’s blog, I decided to try American Born Chinese. It is a tale of learning to accept oneself, ignoring the disparaging attitudes of those around us. Although American Born Chinese deals with the slings and arrows of racism, I would argue that the themes of acceptance and self-awareness translate well to all of us, and that anyone who has ever felt self-hatred in the face of society and its harsh criticisms can find something to identify with in…