Still Alice – Lisa Genova

2007, 300 pages
Alice has a good life. She just turned 50. She is a professor at Harvard and so is her husband. She has three children in their twenties and she loves them and very proud of them. At least of the first two. She is a little frustrated at her third and smartest daughter’s choice to skip college and go to LA to become an actress. But other than that and some other small things, like the time her husband spends on his work and research, that is too much even by her standards, she is happy and satisfied.
Until she starts to forget things. Not that it doesn’t happen to everybody here and there. But not to her. She always had an excellent memory.
She discovers she has early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Like half a million other Americans who start suffering from the Alzheimer’s symptoms before the age of 65.
The book follows the process of the advance of the disease from her point of view. How does it feel to gradually lose all the metal abilities that defined who she is all her lives. It also follows the way people around her handle her new situation. Her husband, her kids, her colleagues. What does it do to her relationship with them.
The book doesn’t give endless explanations about how everything make her feel. Usually it just describes what is happening. Like an empty chair next to her in a crowded room full of standing people. But I found myself crying throughout almost the whole book. These are just the kind of books that moves me the most: not explaining in words and words how the character feels, but showing the reader by making him feel the same way. I could feel the terror of the reality slipping away from the decaying mind.
Alice does her best to keep her brain cells in good shape. She exercises. Eats all the right food. Does Yoga. Meditating. At 50 her body is in perfect shape. Lean, strong and healthy. It does not help her brain nerve cells from dying.
Alice knows who she is – who she was her whole life: the brilliant researcher from Harvard, the excellent teacher, the devoted advisor to PhD students, always impressing everyone with her fast thinking and excellent memory. All this will be taken away by the disease. Who will she be then? She thinks about her priorities in life and the relationships with her loved ones. But is it too late? If you are anything like me, you probably thought after reading the last sentences “oh no, another one of this new-age books about the true meaning of life”. Not at all. This book will not preach you to sell you Ferrari. It is a very realistic book, down-to-earth, with no easy answers, only difficult questions and a very touching and true description of reality.
This book is not only captivating, fascinating and touching, it is also very important. It sounds the voice of Alzheimer’s patients, especially those with early onset, that unlike Alice, are usually misdiagnosed for long and precious time, given the wrong medicines and treatment. It is a must read.

Speaker for the Dead – Orson Scott Card

1986, 415 pages
Book two in “The Ender Saga”.

*** Spoiler Alert: May Contain spoilers to the first book of the saga “Ender’s Game” ***

This book takes place 3000 years after the events in “Ender’s Game”. But Ender is only 35 years old. Since he travels in almost light speed between the stars, telling the story of the dead buggers, time passes in a different paste for him during travel while many years pass in each drip that takes only a few days for him. We find him with his sister on a cold habituated star, teaching at a university.
In the meantime, only 22 light years away, there is another colony of Catholic Brazilians on a star where the only intelligent life form was discovered since the buggers thousands of years ago. Scientists from the colony study them with strict rules that should prevent any danger both to the Pequeninos, the aliens, and to the humans. But when something goes wrong, a call for a speaker for the dead goes out from the planet, and forces Ender to be involved in the events in the little colony.
Ender is not a child any more. He never really felt like a child to me, always too smart and in control, but he still has some human limits inside him I could relate to in “Ender’s Game”. Here he is totally unreachable, always knowing all, ahead of everyone else, figuring out in hours and days what others couldn’t begin to grasp in decades. He didn’t really feel like a human character at all.
Other characters in the beginning of the book did grasp my interest and caring, but the big jumps in time in this relatively short book changed them too much and put them in a place that prevented me from feeling that I “know” them enough to care. So the book lacked one of the most important things I look for – characters I feel I know and care about.
The world in this planet is quite interesting with very peculiar characteristics Card is trying to provide a convincing scientific explanations for. I wasn’t totally convinced but it was still interesting and I like the world of the aliens, the pequeninos.
The colony is Catholic-religious, and though the world is highly advanced technologically, with time travel almost at the speed of light, computer network faster than the speed of light, artificial eyes and more, still all civil matters are controlled by the church, living together without marriage is unheard of and so is divorce, a husband has a legal rights to access all of his wife’s secret files, and by the number of kids a miserable family with no love and no time or will to spend with the kids has, seems like contraceptives are also unheard of. I guess it was not the meaning but it felt like a horror story to me. Going back to the scientific part of the book that wasn’t very convincing, it felt like the whole plot was molded to fit the theological point of view of the author. Not only that, but the book was full of theological discussions that I found a little tiresome. The story could have been much more interesting without them, but I guess that for the author the plotline was only the “excuse” for these discussions. One more irritating thing – I don’t get what the idea of a Portuguese speaking community is – many sentences were said in Portuguese and then again in English for translation. What did it serve other then annoy the reader? After the end of the book Card talks about the book and tells a story that happened to him when he was a missionary in Brazil. It could be the reason for the Portuguese in the book, but I didn’t feel it serves any purpose, nor did it feel real or convincing that thousands of years from now this is the language colonists on faraway star will speak.
All in all, I thought the story was interesting in spite of some flaws, and I am glad I read it, but less theology and more character development could have made it a much better story.

Warbreaker – Brandon Sanderson

2009, 592 pages
In Elantris, the previous book by Sanderson that I read, there were humans who turned into gods, and there were a prince and a princes going to get married for political reasons. But the plot prevented both processes from happening. Sanderson explains in his website that after writing completely different things – a few fantasy series – he decided to write another stand-alone fantasy books that return to these issues and checks what happens when they do happen. How does it feel for a human to become a god. What’s it like to marry someone you never met for political reasons. That’s what happens in this book.
So again, we have a princess. Even two. Vivenna is the oldest daughter of the king of the small Idris kingdom. She is promised from birth to marry the god-king of the Hallandren big kingdom, in an agreement that leaves the small Idris kingdom independent. She prepares for this moment all her life, learning about the Hallandren kingdom and their system of gods that rules them. She is an obedient and responsible daughter and she’ll do everything to fulfill her part in the best possible way. Siri is Vevenna’s little sister. She is a free spirit that enjoys being “unnecessary”, all her bigger siblings fulfills all the royal duties. But when the moment arrives and the king father has to send Vivenna to the god king, he decides to send Siri, for reasons you will find in the book. She is sent unprepared to the heart of what Idrians see as the pagan and barbaric kingdom to an unknown fate. Vivenna, worried about her sister and suddenly feeling useless, decides to follow her and try to rescue her.
And we have a mortal that turns into a god. That’s what Lightsong the Brave was told. He died doing something very brave in his mortal life, and returned as a god. He cannot remember anything from his formal life, and his high priest is not allowed to tell him about it. He is full of doubts, a god who does not believe in his own religion, and tries to escape by being as useless and possible and by using endless sarcasm and cynicism, whenever he speaks, giving the book some very amusing moments.
We also have Vasher, going around the kingdom, using a magical sword to kill people and using a special magic to awaken objects to do his wills.
There are many surprises along the book. The author plays with the definitions of good and evil, and that’s a good thing, we don’t have definite good or bad people in the book, everyone is convinced that there is a full justification to what he or she is doing. However, some surprises and changeovers are not convincing. It’s not like I could say “yes, the clues were there all along and I just didn’t see them”. By trying not to use stereotypes in describing “good” or “bad” people, it just didn’t feel real and convincing.
However the story is interesting, the magic system using colors and awakening still objects was imaginative, and some characters were intriguing, especially Lightsong the cynical returned god. I did enjoy reading the book while I was reading it, but it didn’t draw me in, I wasn’t looking for any opportunity to go back to the book and read it. The only time I felt completely drawn to the book was at the end, that I liked a lot (and even shed some tears). In that aspect it was a little disappointing after Elantris, a book I could not put down after some point in the middle of the book.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers – Paolo Giordano

Written in Italian in 2008, 271 pages.
Two kids in Italy go through a trauma that changes their lives forever. Each kid and his own trauma, there is no connection between them back then. They grow up scarred and lonely, each one of them tries to find solace by physically harming oneself. They meet in high school and drawn to each other, but their internal scars don’t let them get really close to each other and close the gap between them.
The boy is a genius. He escapes to the world of numbers and math. Everything he sees he interprets in terms of mathematics. He thinks of himself and the girl as these pairs of prime numbers that only one number separates between them, so close but can never really touch.
I liked the way math was combined into the story, and the analogies the boy uses. I could understand to his preference of a world where everything makes sense and can be explained with simple (or not so simple, but at least known and sensible) rules, unlike the mysterious world of human relationship.
But I didn’t like the story itself. The love story wasn’t convincing and I didn’t enjoy reading about it. After finishing the story I felt it is pointless and incomplete, like it just ended arbitrarily. I wouldn’t recommend this book.
One small thing that bothered me: the author is a mathematician, not a biologist, but still he could avoid a very common mistake: identical twins are identical in everything, including gender. There cannot be identical twins when one of them is a girl and the other is a boy. This is a very common mistake in books, because, I guess, a girl and a boy that look exactly the same has lots of potential for a story, but I would expect a scientist to avoid this kind of mistake.

Elantris – Brandon Sanderson

2005, 656 pages
Raoden is the prince of a kingdom called Arelon. He is going to be the king after his father, he is going to get married to a princess from a nearby kingdom, and it seems like everything goes well in his life, until one morning everything changes, and nothing will ever be the same for him.
Sarene the princess of Teod arrives to Arelon to get married. A political marriage, to create a bond between Teod and Arelon to help these two kingdoms to stand against the Derethi empire that swallowed the rest of the world except for these two last kingdoms. But she hopes the marriage will be more than that. An old maid of 25 years, exceptionally tall, smart and opinionate, she has no chance for marriage of love in her home land, and she is left with the option of helping her father the king in politics and maybe find her happiness away from home. But an unpleasant surprise awaits her at Arelon.
Hrathen arrives Arelon to save the people. If he converts their religion to the Derethi’s Shu-Dereth, they will not be killed when the Derethi empire invades to their land. He will do anything in his power to convert as many people as possible to the only true religion and save both their souls and their bodies.
And in the center of all is Elantris, the city that used to be the most beautiful city of all, its habitant half-gods, beautiful and full of magic that kept the satellite city and the whole Arelon flourishing. Until ten years ago it all changed and the blessing of Elantris turned into a curse for unknown reasons.
I enjoyed the book a lot. It is a fantasy book just as a fantasy book should be, full of action and romance, with charming characters that touch the reader and make him care for them. The beginning was very interesting, displaying the characters, the world and its rules. After that the book was a little slow, but from about the middle I could not put it down until the end. It was worth it to read the relatively slow part because it sets the background for the events at the second half of the book and makes the reader deeply involved in what’s going on and what is happening to the characters. Sanderson has a lot of imagination, he created a full and detailed world with its politics and religions and great characters, and built a plot with lots of surprises and interesting turns. I will definitely continue to his other works.

Pawn of Prophecy (Belgariad Book 1) – David Eddigs

Del Rey Books, 1982, 258 pages, US
Many years ago, a family of gods created the world. They divided between themselves the nations that worshipped them. But one of the gods became greedy, and almost ruined the world in a war between the gods over a magical object. The gods decided to abandon the world in body and leave a powerful sorcerer to watch the magical object and the royal family who keep it.
All this is ancient history, old tales, that Garion the boy hears but not necessarily believes. He lives in a farm with his aunt, the kitchen manager, and enjoys a peaceful life. Until one day a series of events cause drastic change in his life and he finds himself involved in strange adventures and old legends and prophecies.
I loved the book and enjoyed it a lot. It is funny and touching. I had to smile while hearing it (because I heard the audiobook). It is not too violent or harsh, safe for teens and older kids. I especially liked the character of Garion the boy. Unlike young main characters of other books, he didn’t feel like an adult that found himself inside a boy’s body. He behaves like a boy in a very convincing way. He can nag and annoy, complain sometimes, has to ask about anything, and sometimes just has to do the opposite of what he’s told, but it doesn’t make him any less charming and likeable. I am curious to see what happens to him and the rest of the characters in the next books of the series.

Runaway – Alice Munro

2004, 352 pages
Eight short stories by the Canadian writer, all take place in Canada, and tell the story of a woman.
The woman can be very young, very old, or in between. Sometimes and old woman goes back to some event in her past, long time ago.
Many times this single event changed their lives. The chance has a very important role in these events. If things had been a little bit different, in some small way, there could have been a completely different outcome. Sometimes only after many years the woman learns about the role of luck and chance in the events that changed or could have changed her life.
All the women are seeking something, some change, a relationship, a self fulfillment, or sometimes they seek the way out from the situation their prior choices got them into.
I enjoyed the book a lot. I usually don’t like short stories. It takes a while for me to get to know the characters and the setting of the story, to care enough for them to be interested in what is going on. But this book was written so beautifully. I got to know and to care for the characters in each story. I was happy the “meet” some of the characters again in the next stories, many years after the previous story. I felt the author captured the essence of the human nature, the hopes, the fears, the reasons for our actions. All the stories were very convincing and felt true, like those people could really exist and these events could really have happened.
Weather and scenery play a big role of the book and I enjoyed reading about the places, both the places I know and love in Western Canada, and the places I am less familiar with in Eastern Canada. I later read that Munro lived in both places. I could feel she writes from a deep knowledge of these locations.
I was happy to know a new author (for me of course) and love her writing. I am sure I will go on to more books she wrote.