The Door

The Door by Magda Szabo, 262 pages.
This Hungarian tale from the 1980s tells the story of a cleaning woman and her employer.
Emerence is a woman out of myth. She serves as a cleaning woman for and Magda (the character, not the author) and her husband. She refers to Magda's husband simply as "the master." Emerence is a force to be reckoned with; she is unwavering, unforgiving, and unstoppable. She cannot understand why anyone would waste time reading, let alone writing books, as Magda does. But Emerence comes to love Magda, as she loves Viola, the stray dog she foists upon Magda's household, and as she loves her privacy, her endless collection of cats, and her secrets. Emerence stands for everything that has passed and faded; for an old Hungary out of fable, and for the endless stoicism needed to survive both the war and the Soviets. She cannot be explained or reasoned with. But she can be disappointed and betrayed by those whom she loves. This is a wonderful book.

When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, 228 pages. Read by Sunil Mulhotra and Cassandra Campbell.
Brilliant neurosurgical resident (and professor), Kalanithi, finds himself diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer just as his career is about to begin. His priorities shift, naturally enough, and there are many thoughtful, sad moments. That's to be expected, of course. The unexpected sorrow comes when he discovers that in his drive to be the best, and then in his decision to keep his own medical concerns to himself, he had almost destroyed his marriage. He and Lucy must find a way to see some sort of future together even as their options become more and more limited.
 A very moving account of one doctor's illness.

Bettyville

Bettyville by George Hodgman, 278 pages.
George Hodgman, a book and magazine editor in NYC (Simon and Schuster, and Vogue, among others) returns to Paris, Missouri, to care for his aging mother. This is an interesting memoir, particularly because of the author's admitted reticence. He tell tales of his refusal to open up, and yet he seems to be truthful, as far as he can be, with us, his audience. His beloved mother, quickly becoming a shell of her former self, wants to live independently, but can no longer do so. George spoke at the Library in February and he was a wonderful speaker. He shared many of the stories that went into or surrounded those in the book. It was a great talk about a very interesting and engaging book. I look forward to reading his next book.

Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond

Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah, 271 pages.

Sonia Shah, medical writer extraordinaire, presents a compelling account of both historic cholera epidmecs, and more recent events, such as ebola and bired-flu epidemics that have threatened to become pandemics. She traces cholera from its origins in the flooding mangrove swamps in the Sundarbans region of what is now Bangaladesh, to the recent outbreak in Haiti. Shah explains how the Vibrio Cholare bacterium had always been present, occasionally causing illness in those who wandered out into those waters. It wasn't until the vibrio mutated, changed to secrete a strong toxin, and found a way to attach itself to the inner walls of its human host's intestine.
Epidemiologists now live in fear for when the next zoonoses  adapts for human to human transmission.
I look forward to reading her 2010 book, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years.

The Crooked House

The Crooked House by Christobel Kent, 357 pages.

Alison has spent a long time trying not to get too close to anyone. She has a good reason. When she was fourteen her family was taken from her, and she has never quite recovered from that traumatic night. Her new boyfriend Paul has secrets of his own, and with their shared reluctance to share details, she starts to believe that she may have finally found something, someone. Paul convinces her to accompany him to a friend's wedding even though it's taking place in Saltleigh, the marshy seaside village where Alison had lived in the titular house with her family, when she still had a family. The book draws you in, and if the characters actions don't always make sense, they have enough craziness and buried pain so that you can at least see the point behind their vain hopes and muddled plans. By the end, though, it was just a little too convoluted. The very end was about two twists to far for my tastes, and the clues buried in the flashes of repressed memory, seem a little too deliberately placed, with the narrative misdirection standing out from the story instead of flowing along with it. A fun, if somewhat unsatisfying read.

Life and Fate

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, 880 pages.
I started reading this when I found it on a display that Kathleen or Christa had made for last year's summer reading book, Anna Karenina. I think it was the iconic photo on the cover of two Soviet soldiers during the battle for Berlin that first drew me to the book. I read the first chapter or two and then checked it back in. I tried again a little while later, once translated books started counting for double points in our reading challenge. I think that I started reading it in earnest after seeing Grossman and his war writings discussed while reading Nicholas Stargardt's The German War this past January. Reading this massive work was slow going, though; the characters' Russian names,their diminutives and patronymics can be confusing, plus, while the time-span over the course of the novel is relatively short, the book jumps around geographically, from Stalingrad to Moscow, from the death camps, to POW camps, to the Gulag. But mostly it was the sheer number of characters that had me turning to the back of the book, to scan through the handy and comprehensive list of participants. Once I had everyone straight, the story went more quickly.
Life and Fate follows Viktor Shtrum, his wife Lyudmila, her siblings, all of their children, and Viktor's colleagues during the later war years as the fate of Stalingrad, and the war itself are in the balance. The book explores how they all live their lives caught between Stalin and Hitler between victory and disaster. Vicktor's Jewish heritage adds a layer of complication to his life, as Russian anti-Semitism does little to reassure those trying to escape Hitler's minions. Victor's mother, caught behind the German lines, and sent to a concentration camp bravely decides to accompany a lonely little boy when there was still a chance that she could save herself.
It is a book that tells us that no matter what horrific situations one finds oneself in, there is almost always some hope and something worth fighting for, and that conversely, when life is seemingly at its best there is always room for despair. It's a sweeping torrent that carries you along. A fascinating writer and an excellent book. Well worth the time.
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Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande, 282 pages.

Gawande, a surgeon, staff writer for The New Yorker, and author of  2002's Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, and two other books, looks at how we as Americans face the end of life. Whether it is the care of the elderly, or catastrophic illness in younger people, medicine has significantly altered where we die and how we die. In many cases despite our lengthened lifespans how we die has changed for the worse, even if death comes later for most of us than it did for our forebears.
Gawande compares our twentieth century idea of nursing homes and intrusive medical-centered care to how we faced the end of life throughout most of human history and how more recent innovations in care can provided a setting that allows the patient more control over their own end.
Assisted living in its original incarnation, small patient-centered housing facilities, and quality hospice care can all help ease the physical suffering and loss of self-worth that can accompany nursing care. A thoughtful, intelligent look at an issue that most of us will face for ourselves or for our family members. Gawande is an excellent writer, and this is a timely thought provoking book.
We had a excellent book discussion about this in March.

The Life We Bury

The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens, narrated by Zach Villa, 303 pages.

Really well-paced thriller that worked for me. I liked the characters and I liked how even the seemingly extraneous plot pieces fit well into the story and moved it along. Joe runs off to college as soon as he is able, leaving his alcoholic bi-polar mother and his autistic brother behind. It's his first foray into freedom and he doesn't get far enough and as the book opens, his mother is manipulating him back into their rather toxic relationship.
Joe is working a couple of jobs, and has never been a stellar student, plus he registered at the last minute and all the good classes are full. He ends up in an English class he doesn't care about. It's no surprise that he has put off his biography assignment for longer than he should. He supposed to write about an older person who has had an interesting life. After checking at a local nursing home to see if he can set up a interview with someone there he ends up talking to Carl. Carl, it turns out, has served thirty years for a rape / murder. It was a gruesome crime, but Joe's unfazed. It's a little contrived how this all comes together, how the book gets started, but the rest of the book more than makes up for this mildly clunkybit of plot. Joe's relationships with his mother and brother are solid, and he becomes a much more sympathetic character as he realizes where his loyalties lie, and what he must do to be true to himself. His growing relationships with both Carl and with his neighbor, Lila, bring out the best in him. There are just enough plot twists, and the author sells you on the story, helping you leap over any plot holes.
I really enjoyed this.

One Hundred Poems from the Chinese

One Hundred Poems from the Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth, 148 pages.
Rexroth's book of translated poems includes 35 written by Tu Fu a scholar who wrote in the 700s. Rexroth refers to Tu Fu as "the greatest non-epic, non dramatic poet who has survived in any language."

Tu Fu:

A hawk hovers in the air.
Two white gulls float on the stream.
Soaring with the wind, it is easy
To drop and seize
Birds who foolishly drift with the current.
Where the dew sparkles in the grass,
The spider's web waits for its prey.
The processes of nature resemble the business of men.
I stand alone with ten thousand sorrows.

The other seventy or so poems are a variety of poets of the Sung dynasty, who wrote between 1000 and the 1200s.

This from Su Tung Po:
I fish for minnows in the lake.
Just born, they have no fear of man.
And those who have learned,
Never come back to warn them.

Rexroth's explanatory notes are illuminating, though at times seem disdainful (of the presumptive audience, not of the poets or poems). The poet states that ". . . I do not consider these notes at all necessary. They just seem to be the custom."
The book also features a select bibliography which includes a succinct comments by Rexroth about each work; from one-word judgements like "excellent," or "fair," or "biased" to the longer notes like "the less said the better" about Ezra Pound's The Classic Anthology.
Beautiful poems.

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A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedics Wild Ride to the Edge and Back

A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedics Wild Ride to the Edge and Back by Kevin Hazzard, 261 pages.
A fast-paced account of Hazzard's time working as an EMT and then a Paramedic in Atlanta. After studying for several months and becoming an EMT, Hazzard spent about a decade driving an ambulance; first for a private company, then for Fulton County. Once he became a Paramedic, he got his dream job,working for Grady Hospital in Atlanta. The bulk of his career was spent at Grady, and his best stories come from there. There are a lot of crazy vignettes about his own mistakes and misadventures, and a lot of stories about his colleagues, the various bureacracies (his one-time partner, a great Paramedic, was fired for making t-shirts for the ambulance crews, violating the county's copyright), and, of course, the patients.
A quick, engaging read. Reccommended!
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Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements

Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr, 474 pages.

Bob Mehr, who it seems, is normally a columnist and writer of liner notes, does a really good job on a readable, informative, and consistently even story of my favorite band from the 1980s. I saw the book on the review shelf and put it on request because it was about the Replacements. I was a little dismayed when I saw that it was 474 pages long, and more dismayed when I realized how little white space there was; we're talking narrow margins and a small font. How could someone write so many words about a band? I figured it would be repetitive, and in the end, boring, despite it's subject, but I was wrong.
Mehr constructs the book carefully, with each new situation, each chapter starting with a brief bio of the person introduced. He begins with the parents of the band members, then the four Replacements, their friends, lovers, management, and their musical contemporaries. They all get an introduction and all get their say. There are no real heroes here. The book is by no means a hatchet job, though the truth, as Mehr tells it, could easily support one. The author does attempt to answer, in a sympathetic way, the question of how a band which so many people thought would succeed in a big way actively and aggressively avoided that success. How four people who were all capable of playing so well together always let it all fall apart. It's a fascinating story, and a pretty sad one.  The sadness begins with founding guitarist Bob Stinson, who died in 1995. Bob lived with the scars of being abused as a child, and then struggled with substance abuse, violent tendencies, and mental illness all his adult life, and it took a heavy toll on his music and his life. The whole band was right there with him in a lot of ways and seemed to relish living out their reputation as the most dysfunctional hyper-talented band going. They drank pretty much constantly, until they couldn't anymore. Paul Westerberg, the most famous of the Replacements, struggled with depression, along with his drug problems and alcoholism. Tommy Stinson, Bob's younger brother, started playing with the band when he was twelve, and dropped out of high-school during his sophomore year in order to tour nationally with the band. He waited a year or two before becoming a full-fledged member of the chemically-fueled destructive team, but he caught up quickly. Alcohol and drugs aside, the band seemed determined, throughout their existence, to go out of their way defy the advice of anyone and everyone in the business, to slap away any helping hand offered, and to sabotage themselves and their careers with their fans, radio stations (including Lin Bremer and Johnny Mars at WXRT in Chicago) their own lmanagement team, and their record label; all in colorful and almost unforgivable ways. Eventually they seem to turn on each other. There's never any real redemptive moment for anyone, but that seems to be the way the band wanted it.
Interesting stuff.

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The Capitalist

The Capitalist by Peter Steiner, 294 pages.
I glanced at what I thought what I thought was a great review of this title on the back from the magazine Booklist. When I was about half way through, and didn't quite think that the book was all that great, I looked again and saw that the review was about the author overall, and not about this book.
There are little hints of what seem like laziness, phoning it in; a couple of the characters seem almost caricatures, and one character's gun is described as a ". . .cold blue steel, a Glock .45. . ." which is an odd description for a type of gun that is famous for being made out of a nylon polymer. There are some complicated plot twists, and clashes between characters which all seem to go nowhere. Overall the book is okay, but not one to seek out unless you're already a Steiner fan.

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Ordinary Light: A Memoir

Ordinary Light: A Memoir by Tracy K. Smith, 349 pages
The Pulitzer-Prize winning poet recounts the death of her mother from cancer, and then loops around to tell the story of her childhood, her home, and her family. Smith's voice is so clear and precise; both listening to her read her memoir and reading the book itsel, are a joyful experience. Smith is adept at telling the story at one remove, at looking at her younger self with understanding and wry humor; realizing that even the smartest among us are foolish at times, especially when we are young. Her recounting of her almost-affair with her high-school English teacher, and the judgement she was subjected to several years later by members f her mother's church, are well-crafted, tinged with nostalgia and somehow sad and funny.
The book is moving, lyrical and beautifully written, I enjoyed it.
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Tales from the Loop

Tales from the Loop by Simon Stalenhag, 126 pages.
This Swedish book is fascinating. The paintings are of a sort-of everyday rural Sweden, but they  are transformed into extraordinary landscapes by the addition of a variety of unusual objects, the debris left behind after the building of an imaginary particle accelerator, strange space-junk, superannuated robots, and ancient beasts that have wandered in through a tear in the fabric. Lots of fun.
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The Private Eye

The Private Eye by Brian K. Vaughan, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente,
A very imaginative, colorful, and fully-realized tale of a semi-dystopian future wherein the internet has been abandoned, everyone leads a masked existence with their own secret identity, and journalists have taken the place of government authorities.
A private investigator (now an illegal occupation) reluctantly seeks to uncover the truth of the murder of a former client. Aided by the victim's sister, his own grandfather, and a gung-ho assistant, P.I. becomes involved in something much larger than a simple murder, and must confront his own secrets as well as those of the society in which he lives.
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The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project

The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project by Robert Boynton, 271 pages.
Boynton, a journalist who has worked for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications, tells a fascinating story Japanese citizens who were kidnapped and spirited away to North Korea during the 1970s. Boynton's telling of the tale is a little flat, and does not quite make a fascinating read. He was able to interview several of the abductees after their return, and he was able to talk with many government officials in Japan and South Korea. The narrative itself bogs down a bit, with a fair amount of speculation that leaves the reader wanting more detail, more confirmation (of some of the stories), and more spark. A decent book and an interesting subject.

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Nimona

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson, 266 pages.
A fun, funny, and engaging graphic novel about two graduates of the local  institution of law enforcement. They had been great friends, more than that even, but then their was an incident and their paths split. Lord Ballister Blackheart chose (or was forced onto by circumstance) the path of villany, while Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin is the hero of the kingdom.
They clash often, they are adversaries, but the situation between them is somewhat stable. When Nimona arrives on the scene the dynamic shifts. Ostensibly Blackheart's sidekick, Nimona is far more than she seems, and soon becomes the story's center.
A satisfying tale with great art. Highly recommended.
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The Core of the Sun

The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo, 306 pages. Translated by Lola Rogers.
Vera and Mira are born into a dystopian alternate-Finland, where the gender rules from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine hold sway; women are either dim-witted elois, suitable for subservient breeding, or truculent morlocks, kept out of the gene pool and destined for life of drudgery. It's also a flavorless world where alcohol, nicotine, and even chili peppers are forbidden and almost impossible to find. This is a particularly difficult world for Vera (renamed Vanna), a savvy, attractive morlock who is passing for an eloi, and who is looking for her lost sister. She is burdened, at the same time, with a strong addiction to illegal capsaicin. When Vera and her dealer / fake boyfriend meet up with the members of the Gaian Transcendental Capaicinophilic Society, some of their problems are solved, but new problems explode.
Creepy in places, and a fairly taut thriller, this Finnish genre crossing novel is one of those read-in-one sitting books. Disturbing and fun.
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The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, 399 pages, translated by Ken Liu, audio narrated by Luke Daniels.

A book that starts with the Cultural Revolution in 1960s Beijing and then spins out about four light years. Along the way there's an online game, the Three-Body. Those in the Three-Body  they have a problem, namely that the world they inhabit has a tendency to self-destruct. There are too many suns, it gets too hot, and then it gets too cold and the inhabitants have to use some extreme measures to survive.
The people who play the game start to think about it all differently when they realize that maybe it's not a game.
There are a lot of interesting characters and some convoluted storylines. It is easy to see why The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo last year.

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