Library Mama

Right next to the fiction desk where I often sit, we have bags that are called Book Club Kits – 10 copies of the book with a reading guide packaged in a large canvas bag. The idea is that people can check out the whole bag, and everyone in the book club can have a copy of the book to read. It’s a nifty and popular idea. The problem is that people are always asking me to recommend books from this collection to them – not just for book clubs, but because they figure they must be especially good books. Why is it that book clubs seem to favor depressing books? I have read very few of the books in the collection because I’m just not that into reading depressing books. But, as a good librarian, it’s my duty to serve my patrons, and so I resolved to read more of the book club books. Here’s the first one:

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett A poor Latin American country tries to curry favor with a Japanese business man by hiring his favorite soprano to sing at a birthday party for him. A group of terrorists decides that this would be the perfect opportunity for kidnapping the president, and take everyone at the party hostage when they find that the president isn’t in attendance. Yes, there is great potential for unhappiness in this scenario, and the ending, I feel bound to warn you, merits at least a hanky or two. But in the meantime, the book is not a thriller, but a lyrical exploration of the people involved. It feels kind of like A Chorus Line, where the characters come under the spotlight one at a time and spill their guts for us, but with music by Chopin or Verdi. It also explores in loving detail what happens to the characters as they adapt to their new lives and forget the reality of the outside world. The reader, like the characters, is tempted to forget that hostage situations just don’t have happy endings for everyone concerned.

I listened to this book, performed by Anna Fields. She has a lovely rich voice, which is very nice for a book where the beauty of the voice features prominently. But she has difficulty differentiating between her male voices, a problem when the vast majority of the characters are men. And, while most of her accents are passable, her Japanese accent sounds remarkably similar to the French. Don’t ask me to explain this. These quibbles aside, I’d still recommend listening to the book, as her reading makes it that much more intimate an experience.

I told you it was so, and here it is: a couple of real written for grown-ups, not about babies books.

The Tea House on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens Confession: I feel at times that I lack real grown-up literary appreciation skills. When I’m reading for pleasure, as long as either characters or plot are good, I’m OK with some other aspect being a little off. This book, though, made me revise my opinion of my literary evaluation skills upward a little. I read a review that said that the characters were a little wooden, the plot a little contrived, but all in all cute. I figured I’d still enjoy it, and the thought of a nice cosy Irish book was really appealing. The book follows the owners and customers of a small tea house in Belfast, with chapters devoted to different characters. The characters are highly stereotyped – the owner of the café, Penny, who really wants a baby but feels trapped by her husband, Daniel, who is neurotically stingy and doesn’t want to focus on anything but the business. There’s a starving artist, two self-righteous old ladies, and lots and lots of people looking for love and finding their current relationship not working for them. They are described in such a way that I couldn’t tell at first if the reader was supposed to like them or laugh at them, and I never did care terribly much what happened to them, though in the end, even the least sympathetic characters got happy endings. It was mildly entertaining, and I guess it did quite well in Ireland. I’ll try the new Alexander McCall Smith book, about residents of a boarding house in Scotland.

The Gilded Chamber: A Novel of Queen Esther by Rebecca Kohn Esther has always been a fascinating figure for me – I was always drawn to stories of women strong enough to find a place in the overwhelmingly male world of the Bible, and Esther is the only woman to have a whole book named after her. Brief plot summary: the King, having banished his previous wife, decides to annex every beautiful virgin in the kingdom, in hopes of forgetting his pain or something. Esther, a Jew, is taken and ends up being chosen as Queen, a powerful but still precarious position. Eventually, she uncovers a plot to destroy all the Jews, the King not knowing that she is one herself. I’m not sure that it’s quite as good as The Red Tent, the book to which it will inevitably be compared. It is similar in its women-centric view of a patriarchal society, and I think Kohn had a little more of a challenge working with the more structured Biblical story. It’s sometimes hard to believe that Esther can be as naïve as she claims and yet act with such political acumen. The story is really beautifully written and well worth reading.

I read this book for the second time while on leave. I love this book, and it is another older one. When I lived in Germany, it was still pretty new and popular, but I didn’t buy it because I was a little afraid to try to read it in German. Plus, books are much more expensive in Germany. When I was in Up With People, a host mom gave me her copy of it, full of sticky notes and scribbles in the margins. I made the mistake of loaning it to another cast member after I read it, who said she’d return it but never did. Alas! Last summer it was featured in a Borders display and so I bought a replacement copy. And what is this fabulous book, you ask? Read on!

Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaardner The novel stars fifteen-year-old Sophie Amudsen. (This leads to more existensial reflections on my part – I was 15 when the book was published; now I am 30 and Sophie is destined to remain 15 forever.) She’s a pretty ordinary teenager, when mysterious letters and packages begin arriving in her mailbox, some to her, and some to another girl who shares Sophie’s birthday and who ought to live nearby, but who isn’t in the telephone book. The packages to her are lessons in philosophy, and the novel itself is a history of philosophy – the plot mirrors Sophie’s current philosophy lesson, and we get the text of her lesson as well as what she’s doing. This manages to make a potentially dusty subject quite lively, even if it’s a little hard on the characters. By the end of the book, Sophie and her tutor have realized that they are probably only characters in a book, and are trying to find a way to wrest control of their lives from the author.

Well, OK, so this first one looks kinda like it's about that S thing, and the second one definitely has lots of stuff about bees in it... is that reaching too far? Anyway, both mainstream fiction of the sort typically marketed to women.

Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner *Warning to my ttc friends: a major character in this book is pregnant.* (I couldn’t tell from the book description, honest!) This book was described as “chick lit, but deeper”, which does pretty well as a highly superficial description. That is, you won’t feel your brain cells either being numbed by the shallowness of characters or plot, but neither is it so dense that you’d need extra sleep and a study guide to get through it. So. Cannie is a moderately successful journalist, fairly content with her life. Then her ex-boyfriend – whom she dumped – publishes an article in a major women’s magazine called “Loving the Larger Woman” in which he describes the difficulties of dating a fat woman. Meaning her. Suddenly her life seems to be falling apart, and her mother’s newly lesbian identity – complete with gravelly-voiced girlfriend – isn’t helping. And then things get more complicated. The characters are genuinely funny, and the plot manages to be amusing and still say something about the important things in life.

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Kidd Monk So I finally read this book after probably dozens of library patrons told me that I must read it. It is a really good book. It also has a plot that sounds so improbable as not to function, yet somehow, the story flows so smoothly that I didn’t notice until I tried to describe it. Here’s the outline: 14-year-old Lily Owens lives with her emotionally abusive father and a black nanny, Rosaleen, in the south of the 1960s. She’s burdened with the guilt of having killed her mother in a horrible accident when she was four. When her nanny gets into trouble trying to register to vote and her father won’t do anything to help, saying only that Rosaleen will probably be killed, Lily decides it’s time to leave. The pair run away and find refuge in the house of three black beekeeping sisters. Told in beautifully poetic language, it’s a thoughtful portrayal of Lily’s coming of age amid the tense race relations of the 1960s.

Way behind, but here we go....

Montmorency: Thief, Liar, Gentleman? by Eleanor Updale Well, you know, when someone puts a book in my hand and says, “Read this – you’ll like it”, I usually do read it. This one the teen librarian put into my hands. It’s a fine Victorian adventure of a swashbuckling type, even though there are no actual duels involved. Montmorency was an ordinary thief in Victorian England, when a fall injured him badly enough to make him a curiosity to an upper-class doctor – could he possibly be fixed? As he is escorted from prison to the homes and lecture halls of the upper class by the doctor, he hatches a plan to make a better life for himself using his new knowledge of the ways of the aristocracy and – most important – the brand new sewer system. At first, he plays his own servant, using a lower class persona to steal and an upper class persona to sell the goods. But soon, the line between pretence and reality blurs, and Montmorency becomes tangled in even bigger things.

The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud You know I have a weakness for a good fantasy, and this one got starred reviews in all the publishing magazines. The story is set in an alternate-reality modern London, where wizards run Parliament. The narrative alternates between the third-person story of Nathaniel, a young and ambitious wizard’s apprentice, and Bartimaeus, the ancient and powerful djinni he calls up to serve him. The djinni was for me the best part of the story – in the audio book, his voice sounds like a jaded and snarky Tim Curry – tired of the magicians who always think they know best, proud of his own exploits. But the rest of the story was pretty disappointing for me. Yes, it was exciting and fast-paced, but the plot was motivated by nothing but fairly routine revenge, lots of politics, and little to no character growth. The only women in the story were weak characters who, though loved by our hero, did nothing in the end but inspire him to more revenge by their failure to survive. There was a very interesting subplot about a group of commoners trying to overthrow the repressive wizard government, but so far our characters are firmly aligned with the wizards. I can hope for more from the two sequels currently planned. In the meantime – it’s great stuff for adolescent boys who want fast-rolling adventure without too much subtlety.

No Ordinary Matter by Jenny McPhee The quote which begins this book says something along the lines of, “Truth is stranger than fiction only because we can’t make things up as strange as the truth.” The book then launches into a highly improbable plot that nevertheless manages to be both entertaining and thoughtful. Veronica Moore, soap-opera writer, has always felt in the shadow of older sister Lillian, a successful neurologist. Lillian has recently become pregnant, having chosen an unwitting sperm donor for a one-night stand. When the same man is hired as an actor on Veronica’s soap, she falls in love with him, but can’t tell her sister. In the meantime, the sisters have hired a detective to help them discover the secrets they think their father had when he died 25 years earlier. It only gets crazier from there.

Naming Ceremonies by Mandy Ross
Birth and Growing Up Ceremonies by World Book “How does one welcome a baby into the community?” a friend recently asked me, “Especially if you don’t want to promise to raise him exclusively in one religion?” Well, as it turns out, books on such things for adults are in short supply. Instead, I found these two books. They’re aimed at children, but have helpful and interesting information on how birth is celebrated in different cultures, with double-paged spreads featuring traditions from major religions and cultures. The World Book offering includes general coming-of-age ceremonies with the naming and birth ceremonies covered in the Ross book. The Ross book seems geared towards slightly younger children, with potentially unfamiliar terms bolded and defined in the glossary. Overall, though both are good resources with lots of information and pictures, I felt that the Ross book with its more limited focus was able to cover the topic better. It focused more on current traditions and the people that follow them, with fewer stereotypical statements such as, “Children in the middle ages were often abandoned” or “All Native American cultures lived in harmony with nature,” which seem to me neither helpful nor relevant.

Certain Women by Madeleine L’Engle This is, I admit, a 15-year-old book by a favorite author, which I was re-reading for comfort fare. L’Engle is one of my favorites for her ability to write about complex things happening to complex people, and yet have the stories be about hope, not despair. This story follows Emma Wheaton, successful actress and daughter of the wildly famous actor David Wheaton. As the story opens, they and various other family members are taking a last cruise in his small boat as he is dying. David Wheaton has seen himself much like the Biblical David, especially regarding the many wives that both of them had (there’s a handy chart in the front to keep them straight.), and dreamed of starring in the play about King David that Emma’s now-estranged husband never finished writing. Chapters take their names from the wives of both Davids, and the story alternates between the present and Emma’s past, including scenes from the play. It’s not as complicated as it sounds, and an engaging and thoughtful book.