Posts filed under 'Literary Fiction'
If you like big rambly family stories, Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos is just that. It takes place in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, a town of people of Welsh descent, where the Jones family lives - a place smack dab in the middle of tornado country. As a matter of fact, the reader learns early in the story that Hope, mother of Larken, Gaelan and Bonnie, “went up” in a tornado and never came down. Bonnie herself was carried away by the tornado, but was deposited in the top of a tree. The storm was the defining moment in the lives of those children, each of them reacting in their unique way which we learn when we meet them 25 years later.
When their dad, Llewelyn, the town physician, is killed by a lightning strike, the family comes together to bury him. They are forced by the town’s Welsh tradition, to spend a week with their community, not speaking, but singing their dad into the next world. The funeral also reunites them with their dad’s mistress of many years, Viney, who had also been Hope’s best friend and the children’s de facto mother.
Larken is the oldest sister, a respected professor of art history in Lincoln, who is overweight and pretty much obsessed with food. She carries on an almost-inappropriate friendship with the married man who lives upstairs from her. She babysits often for his daughter Esme, and eavesdrops on the arguments of Esme’s parents. Gaelan is a very fit and good looking weatherman for the Lincoln television station. But he is not a meteorologist; that presents a problem as a young, pretty and ambitious one gets a job at his station. He pretty much sleeps with any attractive woman he can, which gets him in trouble with said meteorologist. And Bonnie, the youngest daughter - who was with her mother right before the tornado struck - works part time at her smoothie stand, but spends most of her time combing the local area for remnants; odds and ends she finds on the ground. She treats them as treasured objects, going so far as to make scrapbooks and art pieces with them. She lives in a garage.
We hear from all these characters and learn through their voices their back stories and hopes and traumas. Included are excerpts from Hope’s diary so we get to learn a lot about her too. There are many secrets to be discovered here and a wonderfully - maybe predictably - wrapped-up resolution where everyone (but poor Llewelyn) ends up getting what they want, need and love. It was a pleasure to read this charming, witty novel.
November 4th, 2009
Lisa - Central
Well, I’m not 100% sure about that, but I can tell you which books at the Madison Public Library have been checked out the most times over the last 15 years. Our library automation department can run these really cool reports that tell us which books might need to be replaced or removed depending on how many times they have been checked out over the years and I thought y’all might be interested to know which books have circulated the most here in Madison. You might think that the lists include big books like The Kite Runner or Water for Elephants, but you would be wrong.
See for yourself what people are finding at the library:
Fiction
- 1st to Die: A Novel by James Patterson.
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
- The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks.
- A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks.
- Keeping Faith: A Novel by Jodi Picoult.
- The Return Journey by Maeve Binchy.
- Paper Money by Ken Follett.
- Her Father’s Daughter by William Coughlin.
- Desire and Duty: A Sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by Ted and Marilyn Bader.
- Range of Motion by Elizabeth Berg.
Nonfiction
- The Pokemon Trainer’s Guide.
- The Snoopy Festival by Charles M. Schulz.
- Japanese Style by Susan Slesin.
- The World of LEGO Toys by Harry Wiencek.
- Batman, from the 30s to the 70s by E. Nelson Bridwell.
- Origins of Marvel Comics by Stan Lee.
- Son of Origins of Marvel Comics by Stan Lee.
- Color Style: How to Identify the Colors that are Right for Your Home by Carolyn Warrender.
- The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live by Sarah Susanka.
- A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara G. Walker.
The books in the top ten spots in the fiction category have gone out an average of 14.5 times per year, and the books in the top ten nonfiction category have gone out an average of 13.64 times per year, which is more than once a month! This is fantastic considering that the loan period is 28 days. 1st to Die gets checked out an average of 17.69 times a year!
I consider myself to be a “big reader” but I’ve only read one book from each list: The Handmaid’s Tale, which was assigned reading for a Women’s Studies class at the UW nearly twenty years ago, and The Snoopy Festival (I love Joe Cool!). Something that I found very interesting about the nonfiction list is that once you get into the top 50, there are a ton of cookbooks. They just never go out of style. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird do show up in the top 100 fiction titles, but so does Forever by Judy Blume, Bridget Jones Diary and almost everything by John Grisham.
Looking at the number of times these books get checked out, we know one thing: Madison likes to read!
October 30th, 2009
Molly - Central
After working in the library business for awhile I noticed several types of readers. Avid (first on holds list when books are ordered) Fairweather (everyone is reading this book so I should be too) Picky (I ONLY read romance) and the ones that I’m writing this review for, the Book Groupers. Some Book Groupers may cross over to the other categories, but many are locked into their once a month committement for purely social reasons. A night with a glass of wine and good friends, and oh yeah, that book we were supposed to read for tonite.
Two of my recent reads seem like they would be ideal for this demographic. Both Misconception by Ryan Boudinot and Trouble by Kate Christensen have characters that leap off the page, starting a conversation about any of them would be like gossiping about your favorite film star or ex-high school friend. Both books have plenty of crazy sex scenes, alcohol and drug use, adultery and unhealthy relationships, sorta like a new show on HBO, which makes them perfect for those attending a book group only after their DVR has been set for the evening.
I first read about Misconception at Shelfari and was intrigued by the author’s witty repartee. His short book (just over 200 pages) packed in a lot of story and he employed a unique storytelling style. Misconception, set in the mid-1980’s Pacific Northwest, begins by introducing us to Cedar and Kat, horny eight graders with two unusual sets of parents. Fast forward twenty years and Kat has tracked down Cedar to tell him about the memoir she’s written and to make sure he won’t sue her when it comes out. Boudinot flips back and forth between Kat’s memoir and Cedar’s narrative that fateful summer when life threw them together. Boudinot’s unique storytelling coupled with a dramatic conclusion with a great “one perfect line” ending make this first novel worth the read and very discussable.
Kate Christensen’s book Trouble takes place mainly in Mexico where the main characters are pulling a Thelma and Louise type getaway; tightly wound psychiatrist Josie is escaping a boring marriage in NYC and wild rock musician Raquel is escaping a tabloid style affair in LA. Left behind in NY is their friend Indrani, a trust fund baby turned college professor who can’t find love. Christensen talked about her book at Salon and I was pleased to find out one of my favorite book bloggers CR enjoys Christensen. If I had to choose a few words to describe Trouble, I’d say”high brow chick lit”. Though not a “perfect one liner” ending like Misconception, Trouble ended with a scene I just didn’t see coming.
So if your fun little book group doesn’t want to just read The Help like everyone else, suggest these two off the beaten path titles to them. You won’t regret it.
October 21st, 2009
Katharine - Sequoya
E.L. Doctorow returns to New York City in his latest book Homer and Langley. The title characters are based on New York’s eccentric siblings Homer and Langley Collyer who lived in their parent’s Fifth Avenue mansion for years while collecting and storing enough items to fill the several floors of the building.
Doctorow’s Homer and Langley started life as the privileged children of a physician and his socialite wife. However several profound events occurred in both brother’s lives as young men. Langley, a Columbia University student, joined the military during World War I and became a victim of mustard gas and shell shock. Meanwhile Homer, who had been gradually losing his sight for years, eventually became completely blind. Adding to the brothers’ misfortune, was the death of both their parents during the Spanish Influenza epidemic in 1918.
Soon after returning to his Fifth Avenue residence following the war, Langley began roaming the city streets daily looking for items to collect. In the meantime Homer, the narrator of the story, spent most of his time playing the family piano. Eventually their home contained a Model T Ford set up in the dining room, a Chinese bronze horse, machinery of all types and sizes as well as stacks of the many daily newspapers published in New York City. All that hoarding aside, Homer and Langley become witnesses to the changes in American society over the course of their lives.
While I enjoyed reading this book that was on my “don’t miss” list for the fall, I had problems with its basic structure. Homer (1881-1947) and Langley Collyer (1885-1947) were real brothers who did live in a Fifth Avenue mansion and became known as eccentric hoarders by the time of their deaths. While Doctorow’s novel used their real names and several basic facts, he moved their lives ahead almost 15 years and made other changes which I found distracting and difficult to reconcile with the real lives of his characters.
As a reader of historical novels, I would have preferred different names for the brothers while still following the general outline of their lives. That way, the author could have told the story and describe events during the 20th century without confusing the reader. In Doctorow’s book this confusion distracted from what was otherwise an interesting and entertaining view of two unique characters in history.
October 16th, 2009
Lesley - Central
…and one I might add, that won’t turn your stomach. Well, probably won’t turn your stomach. It depends on your tolerance level for dysfunctional families and relationships.
I have been reading WAY too many books lately that shed some blindingly bright light on the way our food is grown, produced, prepared, killing us slowly, whatever. This is not that kind of book. It is rather the kind of book that waxes poetic about pulpy purply tomatoes that smell of earth and summertime.
Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery, takes place in the famed Parisian apartment building that The Elegance of the Hedgehog is set in. Acclaimed food critic Pierre Arthens is dying and everyone close to or estranged from him gets a chance (or chapter) to make their feelings known. The critic might have been a supreme talent as far as food writing goes, but he was a lousy husband and father.
While on his deathbed, he struggles to identify a particular flavor that has influenced his life more than any other. This is where the food writing gets good. Deliciously good. But while he is consumed by identifying this lost flavor, he neglects his family and friends, just as he had during his healthy days. So really, what good is the flavor? And what has truly been lost?
This book will make you think about food, about family and about appreciating life while you have it.
October 15th, 2009
Molly - Central
I think it was back in February that I swore off books that dealt with grieving, but I slipped off the wagon. It’s not really my fault…my book group selected Goldengrove by Francine Prose for our next read. Unfortunately for my resolution, this novel was good enough to encourage further slippage….
Goldengrove introduces us to Margaret and her younger sister, the narrator, Nico. Margaret is the more beautiful, bohemian, worshipped older sister to the more analytical, scientific, pudgy 13-year-old Nico. And because Margaret has Nico wrapped around her finger; Nico plays decoy for Margaret’s trysts with her boyfriend Aaron. We meet them while they float on a rowboat in the lake outside their house in the Berkshires on a promising early spring evening. Before the sun sets, Margaret is dead. Her undiagnosed heart ailment kills her after she dives into the lake.
Of course her death shatters Nico’s family. Her parents, hippies in the old days, inherited the family’s summer house by the lake. Henry, who runs his bookstore, the Goldengrove of the title, loses himself in a book he’s writing about end-of-the-world stories of other cultures. Daisy buries herself in a haze of drugs. So neither of them notice when Nico begins to hang around with Aaron.
At first, the two bond over the loss of Margaret, feeling they’ve finally found someone that understands how they feel. They secretly get together to talk about Margaret and their bottomless sorrow. But as Nico starts dropping weight due to her emotional state and starts looking like Margaret, their connection escalates into a sexual attraction. Poor Nico struggles to navigate the possibility of very early sex, and equally, losing her own identity. Frequently measured against Margaret prior to her death, Nico finds it almost as easy to slip into her sister’s personality as it is for her to slip into Margaret’s favorite t-shirt. Hooked on old movies, thanks to Margaret, Nico realizes what’s happening when she sees Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo for the first time.
Prose has an intriguing character in Nico, though sometimes she seems older than her 13 years. I couldn’t help but like her. This is a rich little book that is more than just the story of the death of a sister. There are allusions to poetry, music and film. An examination of the process of healing. The slow emergence of a new person as Nico finally navigates her loss. It was definitely worth the slide off the wagon.
September 25th, 2009
Lisa - Central
I laughed out loud eighty-four times over the course of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. Some were mere chuckles, but others were loud guffaws of the wake-up-the-person-sleeping-next-to-you type. That’s a lot of of laughs, especially for a guy like me, and by “guy like me” I mean the kind of guy who keeps track of how often he laughs. Eighty-four laughs over three-hundred and sixty pages is a pretty good percentage, so if you actually end up enjoying the book more than I did, I don’t know how you’ll ever finish it. Then again, even if you find this book half as amusing as I did, or a quarter, you will probably still enjoy it.
Wonder Boys follows Grady Tripp through the weekend of Wordfest, a writer’s conference held at the college where he teaches writing. Grady’s wife has just left him, his mistress, the chancellor of the college, is pregnant with his child, and his editor, Terry Crabtree, wants to see the book he’s been working on. The book he’s been working on for seven years. It’s over two-thousand six-hundred pages long and has five alternate endings. Like Grady’s life, it’s a mess.
In spite of this, or because of it, Grady makes for a wonderful picaresque hero and Wonder Boys is a wonderful novel. While the laughs are there, so are well-drawn characters and real pathos. As Grady, Crabree, and Grady’s student, James Leer, stumble through one adventure after another, it begins to appear that the book’s real subject is male friendship. Don Quijote was published in the early seventeenth century, and Wonder Boys in 1995, which makes me wonder why people seem to think Judd Apatow discovered it. Not that there’s anything wrong with Apatow’s films, but if you’re all caught up on the bromance canon, Wonder Boys was also made into a film with Michael Douglas, Robert Downey, Jr, Katie Holmes, Tobey Maguire, and Frances McDormand.
September 14th, 2009
Jon - Central Library
= true love forever. Or at least a good go at it. The dairy farmer missing two fingers is named Benny and the beige librarian is named Shrimp and they are the stars of the wacky romance in translation Benny and Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti.
I will call this a romance, even though on the spine of the copy I checked out from the library, there was a “literature” sticker. I do find that curious - is it “literature” because it was written in Sweden and that makes it more literary than if it were written in the States? Because this book is an all-out romance. We’re talking meet (not so) cute, an awkward first date, lots of crazy sex, lots of tender moments, lots of will they make it or are they just too different? Hope hope hope. Want want want. Sigh sigh sigh. You get the picture. It’s a romance. A really good one.
Even though Benny and Shrimp are living in modern day Sweden, the feeling of this book is very similar to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The community is small and rural, the characters are oh, so quirky, and opposites attract when it comes to the couple in question. The book is not written in letters, but in alternating chapters. Shrimp’s chapters are decorated with a star and fleur-de-lis pattern and Benny’s with little cows.
You may learn a lot about dairy farming. Unless you already know a lot about dairy farming, this being Wisconsin and all. Regardless, it is a reminder to us all that it takes a lot of hard work to run a dairy farm. Hard, hard work that never really ends. You will not learn so much about being a librarian.
I know I say this several times a year, but I haven’t said it yet: this is my favorite book of the year. It’s everything that the cover blurb says it is, offbeat, charming, and fun. And it really makes your heart hurt.
September 3rd, 2009
Molly - Central
Post World War II Hong Kong is full of intrigue and danger in Janice Lee’s first novel The Piano Teacher. In 1952 Claire Pendelton, bored and trapped in a loveless marriage, takes on a job teaching piano to young Locket, daughter of a wealthy Chinese couple, Victor and Melody Chen. Locket is a lackluster and disinterested student, but Claire remains on the job because of her curiosity about the Chens and because of her affair with Will Truesdale, the Chen’s chauffeur.
Will, a British expat, was in Hong Kong during the war and has never recovered from his wartime experiences during the Japanese occupation. The story of what happened to him as well as his love affair with the beautiful Trudy during that period, is juxtaposed with current happenings in the city.
Like another recent first novel I read (and liked less), The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, The Piano Teacher explores a turbulent wartime period and gives us a fascinating look at Hong Kong, life in detainment camps, and the ability of some to take advantage of wartime for their own benefit. Of the two, The Piano Teacher is a much more complex and readable book, with a lot more depth in its depiction of turbulent war time history. So if you’re in the mood for some wartime angst and intrigue, give Lee a shot.
August 31st, 2009
Mary K. - Central
The Help by Kathryn Stockett is a very polished and readable first novel, set in Jackson, Mississipi in the early 1960’s. Eugenia ” Skeeter” has returned to her childhood home after graduating from Ole Miss without an engagement ring. She has no plans for her life, except for a vague notion that she might like to write.
Skeeter’s childhood friends are all married and settled, with social lives which feature bridge games and meetings of the Junior League. In their households, black women wear white uniforms and work as maids in white households. They do everything for the families, including raising their children, but are never considered to be part of the family. And Skeeter ends up splitting with her best friend Hillie after Hillie begins a campaign to have bathrooms designated exclusively for the black maids so that the maids do not contaminate the facilities used by the white family.
Unsuccessful in her search for a magazine job in New York, Skeeter takes the advise of an agent who advises her to move out of her parents’ house and get a job as a writer. Unfortunately the only journalism job available at the Jackson newspaper is a column on household hints. Skeeter knows nothing about housework, so she turns to her friend Elizabeth’s black maid Aibileen for answers. This connection, and her falling out with Hillie, prompt Skeeter to write a book about the lives of the black maids. With the help of a determined Aibilleen, she gets the life stories of many maids and is able to publish the book anonymously.
The story is told in alternating chapters by Skeeter, Aibileen, and Minny, another maid which made listening to the audiobook a pleasure, with each character assigned a different narrative voice. I highly recommend this book for its portrayal of the time period, the racial strife, and the civil rights movement, as well as insider view of middle class white households in that era. The individual characters all show their strengths and ability to endure and Stockett makes them come alive for the reader.
August 17th, 2009
Mary K. - Central
2008 was a great year for witches. Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader and Kathleen Kent’s The Heretic’s Daughter were both excellent reads. John Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick was rather eh, but still a big book as far as witches go. Even if that book was only eh, I spent far too much time going back to read the Witches of Eastwick and then watching the 80’s movie. I had never seen the movie before and found it highly entertaining, if only for Cher’s fantastic hair.
I predict the witch book this summer is going to be the biggest one, yet. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe combines elements of all three of last year’s books. There’s mystery and intrigue. There is a modern day Salem element with flashbacks and psychic visions of previous Salemites. The main character, Connie Goodwin, is a Harvard graduate student specializing in American Colonial life, so there’s history, history, and more history. And there is a common thread that ties generations of women together: women who have special skills with herbs and healing and possibly other more magical powers.
The plot revolves around Connie discovering an exciting primary source for her dissertation. She desperately needs to come up with something new and starts investigating the possibility that a centuries old book of recipes or “physick book” is still floating around. Her advisor is a little too invested in her finding the book and weird things start happening after she relocates to her grandmother’s home outside Salem. When Connie finds some old “recipe” cards in her grandmother’s kitchen written in Latin, the plot really starts to heat up.
This book certainly gets you thinking about women and their role in the history of medicine. Many of the books about the Salem witch trials focus on the innocence of the accused or what the idea of witchcraft stood for in a Puritanical society, but this book draws attention to the women who did have special skills in healing. The witches and their physick as presented in this book more closely resemble modern medicine than blood letting or blistering or prayer, common medical practices in Colonial times. It makes you wonder how much progress may have been lost because women and their recipe books were not trusted or taken seriously.
You may also wonder what hidden gems are tucked away in the special collections of libraries, though I’m pretty sure we don’t have any physick books shelved alongside the local yearbook collection here in the basement at Madison Public Library. If you’re looking for a spellbinding physick book, stick with Deliverance Dane.
July 29th, 2009
Molly - Central
Relationships have their key moments. There’s the first kiss, the first night, meeting the parents, and if things go sour, the getting rid of each others stuff. But what if the love letters and toothbrush holders didn’t have to go to the cardboard box or bonfire? Instead, say, Sotheby’s? Leanne Shapton’s new book imagines this, presenting a fictional auction catalog of a failed couple’s possessions, complete with photographs, descriptions, and estimated value. When Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry first came across the counter, it took me a few minutes to realize that it was, in fact, a work of fiction and not a real catalog. What a brilliant concept, and it turned out to be endlessly fun to read.
The clues to Lenore and Harold’s love seep through the photographs and descriptions presented here. Lenore writes a column for the New York Times entirely about cake, while Harold travels the world as an in-demand photographer. They’re a sophisticated, eclectic, and witty couple who go to chic New York parties, scribble song lyrics in paperback books, and pose for photos with a stuffed squirrel. They also exchange quite a few handwritten notes, which provide the greatest clues to the dissolution of their love.
After finishing this, I was charmed by how much one can learn about someone from his or her possessions. This book may inspire me to start Nancy Drew-ing my friends and neighbors. Next up for me is Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. Beware of where you toss your grocery lists around me.
July 23rd, 2009
Rebecca - Monroe Street
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