What if you were a 15 year old white boy in Texas with some sort of irritable bowl condition, and your best friend were a gay Mexican boy who couldn’t take the cruel teasing of his classmates, and shot and killed 16 people at high school, including himself? What if, because Jesus (your best friend) is dead and also a murderer, and the townspeople want answers, and blood, you suddenly find yourself in jail, not yet accused of a crime, but coming close? What if you befriended a CNN reporter, the only semi-decent reporter in town, only to have him betray you, sleep with your mother, and then you find…

Waiting is the story of a man, Lin, who lives in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. He is a doctor in a military hospital, and is satisfied with his life there. His aging parents live in a remote village, and want to arrange a marriage for Lin, so that the wife will care for them in their illness and old age. Lin agrees, and so he is married to Shuyu, a devoted and old fashioned woman who cares very well for Lin’s parents, and gives him a daughter, Min. Lin does not love Shuyu, and never has, but he is grateful to her for all that…

Last week, while banished from my house so that painter men could change our walls from a boring white to an inviting brown, I was thankful to live in beautiful California, and that our townhouse has a pool just outside the front door. So, I sat beside the pool and finished the next book in my Book Awards Reading Challenge, Runaway, by Alice Munro. This book won the Giller Prize, which is an award given for outstanding works of Canadian fiction. If you’re unaware of Alice Munro’s work, it is almost exclusively comprised of short stories, and Runaway is no exception. There are 8 short stories in this volume, all…

I’ve always envied men who could watch their wives grow old. Boughton lost his wife five years ago, and he married before I did. His oldest boy has snow white hair. His grandchildren are mostly married. And as for me, it is still true that I will never see a child of mine grow up and I will never see a wife of mine grow old. I’ve shepherded a good many people through their lives, I’ve baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no…

What if you lived your life for just one person? And that person lived just for you, so you were ‘each other’s world entire’? I think there’s a romantic sense of that feeling, of being consumed by a new love affair, a new baby, a feeling that without that person, life would not be worth living. But we all have other reasons to live, whether we acknowledge them or not. There are family, friends, helpful strangers, animals, nature, books, work, music, whatever it is that gets you through. But what if you didn’t? No family, no friends, no helpful strangers, no faith in God, not enough food, no clean water,…

I’ve just finished the first book in my Book Awards Reading Challenge, The Giver. The Giver is a children’s book, written for kids about Maya’s age (aka, probably found in the young adult section in the library), and it won the Newbery Medal in 1994. The Giver is sort of science fiction, set in the future, and at first appears to be a Utopian setting. The main character is Jonas, a 12-year old boy. At the age of 12, children learn what their careers are going to be. A group of elders watches them for a couple of years prior to them turning 12, while they volunteer throughout the community,…