State of Wonder - Ann Patchett

2011, 373 pages
Marina Singh, a scientist in a pharmacological company, is sent from the comfort of her lab in Minnesota to the Amazonas rainforest to check on a revolutionary research done by an eccentric scientist, Annick Swenson, who refuses to give any timetable or progress report. The last person sent to this mission, Marina’s lab partner, died of fever in the research camp, and Marina has another mission: to find out what exactly had happened to him – Dr. Swenson did not waste her time giving too many details – and gather his belongings for his family.
The book is beautifully written and covers so many subjects, handling of all of them in a very touching way: growing up as a child of a mixed marriage of an American woman and a doctorate student from an exotic country, never really belonging to any place; a demanding career and the toll on relationship, and different kind of relationship, for example with vast age differences; career choices, made by traumatic events and their outcomes; relationship with admired but strict and eccentric teachers; the overwhelming transition from cool north US to the hot humid and insect infested tropical environment; moral issues when developing a revolutionary drug and the use of local population for the research on one hand and protecting them on the other, and many more. All of these are fascinating, and as I said treated well, but these are too many areas to be dealt with in a not-so-long book, and I felt that though I was very interested in the book, it didn’t capture me until way into the book, about three quarters of it. Then there was some focus in the plot and I was completely captivated and could not let the book down. I wish the focus would be achieved earlier in the book to make the whole reading experience as fascinating as the end. But in any case, the book is very interesting, well written, and raises a lot of points to think about. I recommend it, but be ready for a relatively slow plot for most of the book.

What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty

2011, 432 page

29 years old Alice is happily married to Nick and they are expecting their first child. One day she wakes up after apparently hitting her head, and she finds out that 10 years has passed since her last memory, 10 years that were completely erased from her head. And it seems like her life went in a completely different direction than where she thought they will when she was 29. Some of the changes seem blessed - she is thinner, wearing elegant cloths in size Small, her belly is flat and muscular and it seems like she spends many hours at the gym. She has three children. Her house looks exactly what she always dreamed it will, and even more. She is not that shy insecure woman anymore, apparently she does all kind of public activities and even hosts parties at her home, could you believe that. But she finds out that other aspects of her life, that seemed so safe and stable, also changed, and not for good. Mostly, she just can't believe and she and Nick are getting a divorce. How could that be? They love each other so much, they are so right for each other. They complete each other. She starts a journey to understand what happened, what went so wrong, and who is Gina whose name comes up again and again every time she tries to make sense of these overwhelming new facts she has to learn about her life.
What are the important things Alice forgot? Are these those 10 years of her life that vanished with the bump on her head? Or maybe these are those things she knew at the age of 29, that somehow the daily routine and the unexpected events during the last 10 years made her abandon and forget, and now young Alice is here to remind her? The answer is not clear to the end of the book, and also the mystery of what exactly happened and why. I was completely fascinated by Alice's story, and laughed and cried with her, and I so hoped that the book will end up the way I wanted it to. The book is a light read but it handles the everyday items and builds up our lives - marriage life, the changes with the birth of the kids, the hard work of raising kids and the consequences of lack of sleep that is hard to imagine before getting to this stage, spending most of the time on career on account of family time and its consequences, all these things that happen to us and we don't pay attention to their huge consequences sometimes until it is too late.
I give a big recommendation to this book.

Maus - Art Spiegelman

“The Complete Maus” contains the two books:
Maus – A Survivor’s Tale – My Father Bleeds History – first published in 1986
Maus – A Survivor’s Tale – And Here My Troubles Began – first published in 1991
The complete book has 296 pages.
Art tells the story of his father, Vladek, during the World War II as a Polish Jew and his love to his first wife and the author’s mother Anja, and in the present, in Rego Park, NY, and his relationship with his second wife Mala and his son, Art, the author. It is a comic book. The Jews are painted as mice. The Polish as pigs. The Germans as cats and the Americans as dogs.
It is the first time I read a comic book as an adult. Telling a holocaust story as a comic book seemed like a very strange and unfitting idea to me, but I read a great review of the book, and read the first chapter online and liked it a lot, so I decided to try the book.
I thought the book was excellent. I can totally understand why it won the Pulitzer Prize. By moving from the present to the past, showing at the same time the story of the son who tries to learn the history of his parents and deals with a very difficult father, and the story of the Jews in Poland when their world collapsed and they struggled to survive in a cruel and senseless reality that seems too horrid to be real. The author also talks about the writing process itself, how he struggles to keep his father’s stories in order, to sway him from complaining about the present back to his past.
As the subtitle says, we have the story of a survivor, one of very few, while so many others didn’t come out alive from the holocaust hell. It is amazing again and again to learn how Vladek survived, how he had to use all his intellect, talents and resourcefulness to escape death and destruction. In the present story, we can see how all the qualities he had to adopt in order to survive make it so difficult for him and for others around him. Like someone says in the book, part of him didn’t really survive. He is extremely tight with money. He cannot see food wasted. He insists on doing everything on his own, or with the help he demands from his son, instead of paying for someone to do the job. It is so tragic to see how he cannot let go of these qualities that helped him stay alive even though it makes it impossible for people who love him to be at his side for long periods of time. The author also shows how, like many others who suffered from racial hate and discrimination in the worse possible way, he is blind to these qualities in himself, when burst in anger because Art’s wife takes a black hitchhiker – doesn’t she know better? He could have stolen all their groceries! When she confronts him and asks him how he can say that after all he’s gone through, he is shocked at the comparison of blacks and Jews.
The book also shows the desperate quest of the author to find out about his mother, who killed herself when he was 20 years old. He can only hear about her story indirectly from his father. It is much less clear how she survived the hell. Unlike Vladek, she was frail, thin, week. Art, and the reader, will never know for sure.
The story is very hard to read. No matter how much I read, hear and watch about these terrible years, every story is shocking all over again. What people had to go through, not by some natural caused disaster, but by the cold systematic cruelty of other people, is impossible to grasp. It doesn’t make it easier that this book is a comic book. On the contrary, since it makes the events so alive and real, it makes it worse. It is a hard read, but it is worth it, this is one of the best Holocaust books I’ve read.

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

2006, 256 pages
A father and son wander through a ruined country, all burned and empty of almost any resources, trying to find their way to the sea, to the south where it’s warmer, not really knowing what they hope to find there. All they have is a cart with some groceries, a gun with two bullets and each other. Usually they don’t meet any other people. When they do, they are very careful, because they are probably of “the bad” people.
Usually when I read a book I expect to identify with the characters, to feel what they feel, to fear what they fear and hope what they hope. In this case, the only way to make it through the book was to keep myself detached, to remind myself this is only a book, these are not real people and the events are not really happening. The book is like a parent’s worst nightmare, and worse. Not only does civilization ceases to exist, so there is no way to rely on society to provide the basic needs, but also the nature is all ruined, the water dirty, the vegetation all dead, and all animals are gone. The colors are only a far away memory, all is black and gray, the sun is not visible and even in the middle of the day light is dim and poor. The father cannot provide the basic needs of his son – food, shelter, security, hope for the future, trust of order and justice in the world. He has to see him going thinner, quieter, sadder. When they talk, he tries to give him a reason to go on, to survive, and teach him how to do this in the tough reality they live in. The boy clings to the fact, or desperate hope, that they are the good ones, they hold the fire, they will not turn to evil ways even if it means they will not survive. He insists on helping the less fortunate than them, even if that means getting closer to starving.
Though the book is short it draws the reader right in. It describes this hopeless apocalyptic world in a very realistic and believable way. Their reality is vividly described, if it can be said on such a colorless world. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone, especially a parent, who cannot detach himself from a story he reads, because it can truly be haunting and heartbreaking. But it is a great book, though it is short it remains in the mind of the reader long after it is done.

The Red Pyramid (The Kane Chronicles, Book 1) - Rick Riordan

2010, 528 pages

I enjoyed a lot reading the Percy Jackson series and I was looking forward for the next series by Riordan. The Egyptian mythology always fascinated me as much as the Greek one or even more and I expected a lot from the Kane Chronicles which is based on the Egyptian mythology. The book was cute, fast-paced and full of action and humor, but I wasn’t dawned by it as I was by the Percy Jackson series.

In this book we have Carter and Sadie, brother and sister. Their mother died when they were 8 and 6, and since then Carter travels around the world with his Archaeologist father, while Sadie stays with her grandparents in London. They only see each other twice a year.

When Sadie is 12 and Carter is 14, Carter and his father visit Sadie, and they all go together to the British Museum. But the father has more than educational intentions, and things go terribly wrong. Carter and Sadie have to fend for themselves, save themselves and by the way also the world, while learning surprising facts about themselves and the Egyptian mythology, that turns out to be more than just old stories.

The story is told by Carter and Sadie, in turns. I always prefer one teller, and a story has to be really good to make me identify with only character (did someone say “Song of Ice and Fire?”…) . It did not happen here. The story starts with the action right away, with no chance to learn about the main characters before they start running for their lives and fighting scary monsters, and that also interfered with the process of falling for the characters and feeling for them before the action starts.

Just like in Percy Jackson, the colliding worlds of 2000’s teenagers and an ancient mythological world is a source for many funny situations and jokes, but it all seemed a little recycled and tired, and I didn’t find it as funny as I found the previous series.

One part really disturbed me at the beginning of the book, where it was explained that the existence of the “gods” does not contradict the one and only “God”, because they are all His creation. I found it a redundant flattery to the believers among the readers, and I don’t remember anything like that in the Percy Jackson series, nor do I remember any problems for believers to read and enjoy Percy Jackson.

All in all it was, like I said, cute, a nice read, but I do not think I will go on to the next books of the series.

Twilight - Stephenie Meyer

2006, 544 pages
It is very embarrassing for me to write the next sentence: I loved the book. Why embarrassing? Because it is a young adult book. The heroin is a 17 years old high school student, and it talks about first love. My interests should be a little more… mature, shouldn’t they? And if all that isn’t bad enough, I didn’t just love the book. I fell in love with it. I was completely submerged it in. I couldn’t let it out of my hand. I read all of its 500+ pages in two days. I can’t remember too many times such think has happened to me.
So what’s going on in this book – Bella comes back to Forks, WA to live with her father. Her mom left the town with her when she was a baby, but now she decides to go back there, for reasons that become clear later in the book, though she despises this green and rainy place, and much prefers hot and arid Phoenix where she lives with her mother since the divorce. In the new small-town school a group of extremely good looking boys and girls catches her attention. They sit together in the cafeteria and don’t socialize with the other kids. She gives special attention to Edward, who is good looking, and as she finds out soon enough, also smart, brave, strong, with some more surprises. It all looks too good to be true, and indeed she finds out he is not exactly human. But this will not stand in the way of such strong first love.
It was very easy for me to identify with Bella. She is addicted to reading. She loves literature and biology in school and does not need to work too hard to do well in them. She suffers from lack of coordination, and that makes her something between a total failure to danger to the surrounding in ball games (reminds me of the bowling game when I threw the ball backward, to the horror of my friends who stood behind me), and always feels like an outsider.
Wuthering Heights is Bella’s favorite book and it shows well in the story, with her romantic attraction to the mysterious, dark and dangerous.
The writer said in an interview she didn’t read almost any vampire book or watched any vampire series of movies and she tries very hard not to be influenced by them in the vampire world she built in the saga. And I am so glad she did it. Forget the disgusting smelly creatures of “The Historian”. Meyer’s vampires are divinely gorgeous, smell great, show special talents mentally and physically. If they only solve the problem of thirst to human blood, they will be perfect.
It is only the first book of the series. I already uploaded the next one to my kindle. It’s night, everybody’s fast asleep. In the quiet and dark it is easier to believe unnatural things than in daylight. Perfect time to cuddle on the reading recliner and start the second book. If it is as good as the first, I will probably not be seen for the next couple of days, and in the meantime, please do not disturb.

A Mercy - Toni Morrison

2008, 178 pages.
US of the 1690s. Florence is an African slave, separated from her mother and baby brother as part of a debt settlement between her previous master, Senor, to Sir, her new master, and arrived to what will become New York state, a wild country, forested and full of wild animals, to help the mistress and the two other slaves to hold the house and the ranch.
The story alternates between Florence and the other two slaves, when she goes to find someone whose identity we find later in the story. Florence tells the story in her own unique language, faulty English since it was not her mother’s tongue. She learned English only when she arrived to her current location when she was a child. The story starts with Florence’s monologue in the present, and the exact circumstances of how she get there, and what happened in the past, we find out gradually during the story, so I will not spoil them here.
The story sounds very intriguing, but the myriad of characters in this short book, and also the associative and confusing at times style of the book, where explanations to things that are said arrive much later, stopped me from identifying with the characters and get into the story, and I ended it with an indifferent feeling. The same feeling I had in her only other book that I read, “Beloved”, and I think her style is just not for me. In spite of all the prizes she got, her books are just not for me. I also lacked some context and historical background. The story is told through the eyes of the characters, which lived in this period and obviously didn’t feel the need to explain their surroundings. This was another reason it was difficult for me to get into the story and “live” it.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum

First published at 1900, 272 pages.
I never read this famous children book before. I have seen the movie of course, and saw some adaptations. My daughter participated in two different stage adaptations in her short acting career. After I bought my kindle, I found out that lots of classics can be downloaded for free because their copyright has expired. I started filling out the gaps I had in classics. I downloaded this book from feedbooks:
http://www.feedbooks.com/book/197
And now to the book itself. I saw the movie a very long time ago and didn’t remember very well what happened there, so I knew something about the plot but didn’t remember the details. It is the story of Dorothy, a child who lives with her uncle and aunt in a farm in Kansas. One day a big cyclone (probably a tornado) carries her to a far away and strange land. She tries to find a way to come back home, and on her way meets some very strange creatures. Some of them become her good friends who go with her through all the adventures and dangers.
I can see why there are so many visual adaptations to the story. It is so visual, full of wonderful descriptions of sites, views, people and creatures, cloth, buildings, gems and colors.
On the other hand I felt that it is still worth reading the book because there is a lot more in it than can be represented in a musical. Some true questions of good and bad; What is courage and can someone that feels fear can be courageous? Or maybe he is the only one can truly be called that way? Can a brain be of use without experience? Can we stop believing in something we thought true for so long, even when we find out that it is not? What is a true magic? I enjoyed a lot to read about these issues, in a light children-book way. I was also warmed by the goodness that flowed everywhere in this book. There were almost no bad people, except for the wicked witch of course, and a few exceptions here and there. I don’t remember how it was in the original movie, but in the adaptations I saw lately this warm feeling of goodness was gone.
I recommend the book to anyone who missed it as a child. It is worth reading even for those who saw the movie and know the plot already. There is much more in the book.

This book is not there yet, but many other books can be found in My Virtual Library.
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