Saw this floating around the blogosphere in honor of World Book Day 2011 (not related to the encyclopedia) and thought it would make a fun, quick post for a Friday night.

The book I am reading: The White Queen by Philippa Gregory, and my feelings about it are mixed. The story is interesting, a page-turner, as her books always are, but the writing quality fluctuates, and so far the characters aren’t gripping me quite like the ones in The Other Boleyn Girl and The Boleyn Inheritance.

Technically I’m also reading Cordelia’s Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold, whose Chalion fantasy series I adored, but I’ve temporarily abandoned it because I got a bit bogged down in space politics after having only recently finished reading all the Orson Scott Card books. I really like the characters, though, so I’m sure I’ll be back to it once I’ve had enough of a fix in a different genre.

The book I am writing: Still Songs for Piano and Voice, which has received the attention of an editor whose critique confirmed most of my suspicions about bits that still need work and provided insight into potential marketing issues to work around. I’m excited to get back to work on it and whip it into shape; if only the Burt Squirt would cooperate by taking longer naps!

The book I love most: Anne of Green Gables, without question. My copy is falling apart, and every time I read it, I still laugh out loud. The warm fuzzies I come away with aren’t just from the oh-so-endearing characters, but also the nostalgia of reading it with my mom when I was eight and laid up with a broken arm, and of my friend Susan and me acting out Anne with our Barbies.

The last book I received as a gift: My brother gave me Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson for Christmas. I read a couple of chapters, but I had a hard time getting into it because so far it’s just the narrator talking about her grandfather and not giving me a good feel for who she is. I’ll probably pick it up again sometime, when I’m in a more literary frame of mind (and have had more sleep).

No. I don’t think I can come up with a negative comparison, when I’ve clearly found time to read and occasionally write about it.

It wasn’t until I compiled this list that I realized I’ve been reading a lot of sci-fi and fantasy; only one of the ten books is not sci-fi or fantasy. Which proves that despite my best efforts, I am a geek. (As if Battlestar Galactica being my number one top-ranked show ever wasn’t evidence enough of that.)

In addition to not having a broad representation of genres here, I also seem to have rated all my recent reads very highly. I hope this doesn’t indicate an indiscriminate taste in books; the day the Twilight saga appears on my reading list, you’ll know that’s the case. Until then, we’ll just chock it up to two things: #1, all these books are actually good, and #2, I don’t bother to finish books I don’t like. (If I did, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would make two non-fantasy/sci-fi reads out of eleven–but I quit after 100 torturous pages of it, which is ironic, as I didn’t even make it to the torture scenes.)

Onward to the reviews!

1. Children of the Mind, by Orson Scott Card

The final book of the Ender Quartet is my favorite book of the series. Not only does the story careen to a satisfying conclusion, but it rectifies the flaws of the previous three books by minimizing time spent with the annoying characters and focusing on the most exciting ones–particularly Wang-Mu and a new avatar of the long-dead Peter Wiggin, who share an adventure that is less interesting for what it is than for the delightful snarky chemistry these two share, and the new perspective we get of Peter, who has previously been characterized as nothing short of an evil political mastermind.

My gripe about this book is an uncharacteristic one for me: a lot of time is devoted to romantic relationships. The pairings aren’t really the problem (though the one involving Young  Valentine is rather screwed up on multiple levels), it’s that romance isn’t Card’s strong suit, in this or in subsequent books.  He can’t seem to escape the idea that as soon as a couple recognizes romantic feelings, they must immediately marry and procreate–which isn’t a problem in itself, except that as Card applies it, he undermines his characterizations of strong females, relegating them to breeding machines.

But this quibble is really a minor one, especially in Children of the Mind (marriage and babies become bigger plot points in other books). And while I’m mentioning titles, I must comment on what a talent Card has for naming his books. Half the fun of reading Children of the Mind is paying attention to the various ways this theme plays out throughout the story. It’s both literal and figurative on multiple levels. I’d give anything to be able to come up with titles like that.

Rating: 5/5 stars

2. Ender’s Shadow, by Orson Scott Card

Have you ever wanted to read a book from another character’s perspective and find out just what they were up to and thought during all the central action? (I wish J.K. Rowling would do this for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in which all the really interesting stuff happens to everyone but Harry.)

In Ender’s Shadow, Orson Scott Card improves a story you didn’t think could get any better by telling the same story over, following the point of view of Bean, another child genius who spends much of Ender’s Game as an enigma who, well, lurks in the shadows. The result isn’t a mere re-telling of the events, but instead completely shatters every conclusion you’d drawn about Ender’s Game. It’s a great example of what a narrator means to a story: Ender, you learn, has been an unreliable narrator, so in a sense it’s not until you get his story (well, it’s Bean’s story, but his story is inseparable from Ender’s) from another character’s perspective that you get the real story. And it’s a darn good one–though not, of course, without its flaws.

The “flaw” that stays with me the most probably really isn’t truly a flaw at all. But I imagine anyone who has children or has spent a good amount of time around children will have difficulty picturing Bean saying and doing the things that he does at the age of four. We’re not talking precociousness; this is a little boy who’s not only a genius and a prodigy, but extremely physically developed, as well (except that he’s tiny for his age). Maybe it’s because I live with an almost-one year-old, but I just cannot conjure up a mental image of a kid the Burt Squirt’s age (and he’s pretty advanced, having begun walking at 9 months) climbing out of his crib, toddling into a bathroom, lifting up the lid of a toilet tank (not the bowl, the tank), climbing inside, and hiding for a few days. But that could just be me…

Rating: 4/5 stars

3. Shadow of the Hegemon, by Orson Scott Card

It took six books, but Shadow of the Hegemon finally tells the story so tantalizingly hinted at throughout the Ender series: how Ender’s older brother, Peter, becomes the leader of a united world. Once again, preconceptions drawn through Ender’s unreliable narrative in previous books are shattered as Peter doesn’t become Hegemon in a megalomaniac bid for power; instead he’s helped by Bean, who’s trying to defeat an old nemesis who also wants to rule the world–and who, unlike Peter, is truly evil. The plot plays out rather like a game of Risk.

The best thing about this book is, of course, getting to finally know Peter for the first time–not Peter through Ender’s eyes, or through Valentine’s kinder but confused perspective, or even through the version of Peter in Children of the Mind, but actual Peter, as he really is: intensely flawed, but endlessly fascinating. And possibly a little bit crushworthy. If you’re the type of person who gets crushes on fictional characters. Which I certainly am not.

We also get to know some of Ender’s other Battle School friends a little better, in particular Petra Arkanian, who made more of an impact on Bean (or vice versa) than you realize in Ender’s Shadow, and who shines as a female lead who manages to be a consummate military mind while remaining wholly feminine. Ender’s parents, Theresa and John Paul, are fairly major characters in the Shadow saga, too, frequently providing welcome comic relief through their peculiar relationship with Peter who, for all his political shrewdness, regards them like all teenagers regard their parents: as idiots. Of course, the Wiggins are anything but idiots, which adds to the fun. If there was a whole book consisting of nothing but dialogue between Peter, Theresa, and John Paul, I’d read it.

In a departure from the previous of the Ender and Shadow books, Hegemon is, understandably, more political than sci-fi. But we do get a sci-fi element which becomes Bean’s ongoing storyline for the remainder of the series.

Rating: 5/5 stars

4. Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card

On the whole I liked the third installment of the Shadow saga. The storyline about Peter nearly committing political (and literal) suicide by trying to use his former political opponent in order to secure his own power, and requiring Bean, Petra, and his parents to get him out of the colossal mess this inevitably creates, is fantastic. The Bean storyline? Not so much.

It’s not coincidental that when Bean gets a romance things go downhill story-wise, as it bears repeating that Orson Scott Card is no romance writer. All the issues I have with the romances in Children of the Mind are amplified here, as Bean and Petra embark on marriage in their tender teen years. Admittedly, when characters save the world from an alien enemy before they’re teenagers, it’s not completely inconceivable that marriage and children would be the next thing for them. My problem with it is not that it happens, but what it does to the characters, particularly Petra, whose balancing act between soldier and woman gets all out of whack as she obsesses about babies in an unnecessarily angst-ridden plot. Perhaps it’s that I just didn’t expect a sci-fi political page-turner to go there. I’m not sure, but by the time Petra gets her babies, I felt as brow-beaten and un-enthused about it as Bean does. If Card is trying to promote a message, he could stand more subtlety. Or he could let someone have Peter’s babies.

Female characters in general suffer in this book. Another Battle School graduate, Virlomi, becomes a central figure in the restructuring of the world order, but Card doesn’t depict her with a great deal of personality in this book, nor is her role in this book engaging, but rather reads like a big set-up for the next book.

The political parts of the book more than make up for any weaknesses in the relationship and characterization department, as things really ramp up for Peter’s expansion of the Hegemony. Battle School veteran Alai becomes Caliph of the unified Islamic nations, and their cooperation with Peter is tenuous as they face the threat of a dominant China–all of which, obviously, brings to mind real world conflicts. And it’s that hint of reality, of relatability, that makes for the very best sci-fi.

Rating: 4/5 stars

5. Shadow of the Giant, by Orson Scot Card

Possibly my least favorite of the Shadow series, I found this one difficult to read because so much of it is political strategy and military talk, which tends to bog me down. I’ll give Card a pass for that, as the more strategically-minded reader will likely lap that up, but Shadow of the Giant also lost me at the character level. My issues with Petra from the previous book continue in this one, and though it’s intentional on the part of the author, Bean’s story is all but finished, and circumstances have left him bitter and morose and generally unpleasant to read about. The Bean/Petra relationship is loaded with angst and at times even borders on melodramatic, which would be fine if their relationship had ever been truly healthy, but it hasn’t.

Then there’s Virlomi, who I complained about in Shadow Puppets as not being terribly interesting. She does get more interesting, but not in a way that’s a mark in Card’s favor for the development of admirable female characters. Going from fanatical to insane, engaging in the most ruthlessly manipulative tactics to amass power for herself, Virlomi makes a good villain, and I will grant that if it weren’t for Virlomi keeping me turning the pages, it might have taken me a lot longer to get through this book than it did. Still, it would be nice to have a female character in these books who I actually like. The best that can be said for Virlomi is that she’s more likable than Novinha in the Ender series.

But, since the end of this book leaves tantalizing possibilities for Card’s yet-to-be-written final installment of the Shadow saga, which I’ll be first in line to read, I can’t bring myself to give it a low rating.

Rating: 4/5 stars

6. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

At first I was leery of this wildly popular teen trilogy (knowing the content of other wildly popular teen series), but I couldn’t resist the premise (which is just about the only YA series that isn’t about vampires): a post-Apocalyptic United States (now called Panem)  in which children are chosen annually from each of the redesignated “districts” to fight each other to the death on 24-hour television which the rest of the country’s citizens–including the children’s families–are required to watch. Gruesome, I know, but I love me some dystopian fantasy.

The protagonist is a teenage girl named Katniss, and she is everything a female action hero should be. Convincingly  hardened by a lifetime of poverty and, after her father’s death in a mining accident, bearing the burden of her family’s survival, Katniss is neither too skilled to be believable, nor too confused or naïve about human behavior and matters of the heart to make you want to shake her, like certain other YA fantasy heroines. It’s not easy to juggle an action story with an emotional arc, but Collins progresses both plot lines in a well-paced manner through a skilled first-person POV–which is not by any means an easy voice to master, especially in an action-heavy book, but the author does so without ever coming across as awkward or stilted; in fact, Collins is a master of the art of tight, concise writing, developing an entire, vast world in broad brush strokes that comes alive in the imagination without requiring hundreds of pages to do so.

Props also go to Collins for developing a teen love triangle that is about so much more than which boy is hotter or more romantic and better suited for the heroine. Unlike other teen series, love here is explored from the standpoint of what the characters bring to the table, rather than what they get from each other, and while there’s physical stuff, it’s not there for the sole purpose of titillating rabid fangirl readers (or indulging the author’s own fantasies), but to explore the relationship between physical attraction and real love, all within the context of the heroine getting to know herself and becoming more herself instead of losing herself to an irresistible passion–a line which I think I might have borrowed from Jane Austen’s Marianne Dashwood. It’s the kind of teen love triangle I’d feel comfortable with my own child reading, and even enjoyed reading myself because it’s realistic, making good use of the fantasy genre rather than cloaking romance in an ill-fitting fantasy gimmick (rather like my thinly-veiled Twilight bashing).

Rating: 5/5 stars

7. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

I should have learned after being so pleasantly surprised by The Hunger Games not to underestimate this series just because it’s marketed to teens. Because of the rules laid out in the first book for the Hunger Games, I thought I knew what was next up for Katniss and settled back to enjoy a well-written but predictable book. A very few chapters in proved this not to be the case, and the surprises just kept coming right until the cliff-hanger end that was so cruel I was really glad I discovered this series after the final book was published so I didn’t have to wait to find out what happened next.

If Catching Fire has a flaw, it’s that it’s the middle book of a trilogy and, as middle books tend to do, doesn’t stand out on its own like the first and last books do. But that’s a very minor complaint about a tightly-written story that introduces a lot of new characters and ideas crucial to the overall trilogy arc.

Collins is also to be commended for her daring to write a second book about the same characters returning to the Hunger Games without it coming across as same song, second verse. In fact, she outdid herself, devising a truly scary set of obstacles to serve as backdrop for a set of characters that are more multidimensional and compelling than those in the first book.

Rating: 5/5 stars

8. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

The conclusion of the Hunger Games trilogy shines as it brings Katniss’ adventures to a satisfying end. Not a happy end, which I’ve seen a lot of complaints about, but the right end.

Even though Mockingjay breaks out of the Hunger Games arena to launch a full-scale revolution against the totalitarian regime that instituted the Games, Collins maintains her themes of control and manipulation throughout Katniss’ journey as the symbol of the rebellion. In true dystopian form, this book depicts the struggle not between good people and evil people, but between two conflicting ideologies, one being evil and the other being willing to employ evil for the sake of a cause. It’s not a new theme, not even in YA lit–in fact, it J.K. Rowling sort of addressed it in the Harry Potter series–but Collins excels here because she doesn’t get preachy or try to draw any big earth-shattering moral conclusions, except as they apply to Katniss, who is still a teenager and trying to process all of this while suffering great personal loss in the fight for what she (isn’t sure she) believes in.

Of course the love triangle is finally resolved, too, and it resolves in the only way it really could resolve. What I like about the way Katniss finally makes her choice is not that she is wooed or rescued by either suitor, but that she works with each of them, sees all their strengths and weaknesses laid out before her, and, weighing it against her feelings for each man, makes a choice that is true to herself. It may seem more pragmatic than romantic, but it works for the genre, and, I think, has a lot more in common with those more enduring literary pairings than with the pop romance that permeates teen and adult literature. To paraphrase Albus Dumbledore, we could use a little more of that kind of love in the world.

Rating: 5/5 stars

9. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

What can I write about The Help that will do it justice? It’s one of those books that, when I finished it, I couldn’t bring myself to start anything new for a few days because I couldn’t say goodbye to the characters I’d grown to know and love, and I actually started recognizing those characters as I went about my day-to-day life. (Walmart Tempie is Aibileen; I’m going to have a difficult time adjusting my mental image for the film.)

I grew up in a small East Texas town where Welcome to Greenville, the blackest land, whitest people was printed on a sign that hung over the main street and on the water tower. I’ve heard people claim this wasn’t meant to be racist, that it referred to the rich soil that made Greenville and its surrounding communities the cotton capital of Texas, but this is the same town were the mayor defended a mob for lynching a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1908, and in 1996 a KKK rally followed a rash of black church burnings. Even when I graduated from high school in 2001, the black kids and white kids formed two distinct groups in the cafeteria.

But even having been aware of racism, having witnessed the lingering effects of the segregation days on my community, having studied Jim Crow laws in history class, none of that really put a face on the millions of people who suffered, and continue to suffer, racial inequality in this country.

Then I read The Help.

Through the fictional narratives of two black maids and one young white woman in the 60s, Kathryn Stockett (a white woman and first-time novelist) gives a glimpse of race relations that is on the level of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s that good, that beautiful, even though so much of the content is cruel and ugly.

If  the three main characters were actual people, I couldn’t love them more: Aibileen, always quietly dignified and courageous under the most demeaning treatment, yet somehow un-embittered by her experiences so that she’s able to teach a little white girl not to emulate the racism being bred into her by her parents; Minnie, who makes her complaints against her white abusers known loudly and often hilariously but breaks your heart as she cowers beneath an abusive husband; and Skeeter, the young white woman whose eyes suddenly open to the fact that the way things just are is wrong, and who gives up everything and finds herself as she does what she can to make things right. And these are just the three leads who stand out against a backdrop of dozens of equally fascinating minor characters representative of the different boundaries that we place between ourselves, so that in the end the book isn’t only a commentary on racism, but on social behaviors at large. Which I think is interesting as discussing The Help with my girlfriends has brought to life a book club rather burnt-out by several lackluster reads, and it’s teaching us a lot about each other, as well.

A 5/5 rating when I’ve rated less profound books that highly doesn’t seems right. So I’m adjusting the scale a bit to emphasize how there just isn’t enough good I can say about this book.

Rating: 10/10 stars

10. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

I read this because I saw the movie a few weeks ago. It was such a haunting and disturbing story that I couldn’t shake it and wanted to know more about it (because obviously books never make it into films in their entirety), so I immediately downloaded the ebook and read a few chapters before bed. I can’t say too much about the premise because that’ll spoil it (and I almost wish I hadn’t seen the movie first, because I missed the opportunity to discover exactly what was happening to the characters as they discovered the truth themselves), but Never Let Me Go deals with the subject of cloning, what use might be made of clones, and how clones live within the world for which they’re created.

Interestingly, the author (who also wrote Remains of the Day) doesn’t choose to set this story in the future, as one might expect, but places it within an alternate history, which lends an extra layer of fear because you don’t read it with a sense of foreboding about what people might do, but rather a sickening guilt about what we have long been capable of as the text–never explicitly–turns your mind to Nazi medical experiments.

The text is delicate and subtle, told in a rambling, conversational narrative that’s a break from sci-fi norms, yet somehow manages to be just as much of a page-turner as an action novel. And that everything is presented in such an objective, almost dispassionate tone, perhaps tinged with regret, further communicates that sense of horrified surprise that we let this happen. At times the subtlety frustrated me, because some sick part of me wanted the gritty, specific details of the world, but that it’s all kept vague and clinically distant, accepted by the narrator who assumes the reader knows the general gist of things and the rest is irrelevant, makes it that’s much scarier because it drives home all the points the novel makes about the value (and devaluing) of life.

Rating: 5/5 stars

What have you been reading?

Two books a month is a fine average even if I weren’t a mom, but I’d never have managed to read one book in five months if Mr. Burt hadn’t given me a Sony Pocket Reader for our sixth wedding anniversary.  The only time I get to read is when I’m nursing, and it’s not easy to hold a book and turn pages while wrangling a squirming baby. An ebook reader, however, requires only one free hand.   I’ve grown so accustomed to reading this way that I don’t see myself ever going back to print books, with the exception of when I want to take a long soak in the bathtub with a book. But where my friend didn’t have a chance to read till her son was two, I don’t foresee myself getting a chance to take a bath till then.

Also, when I use my reader, I feel like I’m in Star Trek.

One intent for my revamped blog has been to post reviews for every book I read, but I’m beginning to get the feeling I won’t get that kind of time for a few years, either. Until then, a blurb and a five star rating system will have to do.

#1: Emma, by Jane Austen

The BBC’s latest adaptation stars Romola Garai, who, along with the rest of the cast, seemed all wrong to me. So I re-read the book and was reassured that yes, the cast of the Kate Beckinsale version feels more like the characters in the book. Which is what I’m supposed to be reviewing.

With its hilariously entangled romances and witty social commentary, Emma reads like a Shakespearean comedy. Its strength, of course, is the heroine Austen set out to write as one “whom no-one but myself will much like,” but it’s the supporting characters you love to hate and hate to love who really make the novel for me.

Rating: 5/5 stars

#2: Mr. Knightley’s Diary, by Amanda Grange

Normally I avoid published Austen fanfiction like the cliché I’m avoiding at the moment, but last Christmas I picked up Colonel Brandon’s Diary on a whim because, well, Colonel Brandon…and I loved it. I don’t feel as strongly about Mr. Knightley’s Diary, through no fault of Ms. Grange; Knightley’s (if I may sound like Mrs. Elton) backstory of managing his estate and dining with friends doesn’t make for the page-turner Brandon’s torrid past love affair, military stint, and duel to the death. It is, however, entertaining to get inside Knightley’s head as he stews over Emma’s fascination with Frank Churchill, and the moment he realizes he’s in love with her is sweetly romantic, if not earth-shattering. A light-hearted, well-written, satisfying love story, and if you like the citizens of Highbury, a nice opportunity to visit them again. (An unexpected but welcome touch is a happy ending for poor Miss Bates.) 

Rating: 4/5 stars

#3: Mr. Darcy’s Diary, by Amanda Grange

If I hadn’t read other Amanda Grange novels, I’d never have picked up published Pride and Prejudice fanfiction, which typically amounts to little more than soft core Darcy porn. Like Ms. Grange’s other books, Mr. Darcy’s Diary keeps true to the spirit of Austen’s work and, in this case, enriches a character who doesn’t do much for me in the original. That’s right ladies: I’ve never been a Darcy fangirl. (Have I mentioned it’s Colonel Brandon who holds my heart?) But Pride and Prejudice from Darcy’s point of view at times left me almost breathless. It also cemented my rather unorthodox opinion that Matthew Macfadyen makes a better Darcy than Colin Firth. *ducks from hurled objects*

Rating: 5/5 stars

#4: A Proper Pursuit, by Lynne Austin

I picked this one up because I was in the mood for something lighthearted and romantic; a young woman choosing between a number of suitors and on the hunt for a runaway mother amid the backdrop of the 1893 World’s Fair seemed to fit the bill: a bit like American Girl all grown up. It started off promisingly enough, with a heroine whose stream-of-conscious internal monologue made me chuckle a la Anne of Green Gables. However, the narrative voice quickly got old as the story failed to move forward—not a bit like Anne of Green Gables. The characters were painted with the broadest of brush strokes, the romantic plot was predictable while the mystery was clumsily constructed and revealed through hasty exposition, and the parts that were meant to be heart-wrenching were cloying and preachy; more than once I felt like the author was attempting, unsuccessfully, to reproduce Christy. (Are you starting to detect a theme of this book trying to be like other, best-selling books?) Still, I did read the whole thing, if only because I wanted to see if all my guesses about the plot were right in the end (which they were). That’s something, I guess?

Rating: 2/5 stars

#5: Persuasion, by Jane Austen

A second chance at love for an older couple who just couldn’t make it work the first time around may be Austen’s best storyline.  Unfortunately, it’s not a very good book. Much of the crucial action happens off-stage, reduced to summarizing narrative. While this stylistic choice highlights the reserve and compliance of the heroine, not actually seeing Anne’s first encounter with Captain Wentworth undercuts the emotional impact that should be present when a woman meets her former fiance, with whom she is still in love, eight years after breaking off their engagement.  It’s the equivalent of Austen recounting the Netherfield ball instead of showing Elizabeth and Darcy’s dance and their glorious UST.  I root for the idea of Anne and Wentworth, but my imagination isn’t captured by characters I feel I know. The character I feel I know best is Anne’s hypochondriac sister, Mary Musgrove, who seems to have more dialogue than all the other characters put together.  (Though I do tend to have a soft spot for Austen’s obnoxious characters.)

The novel does contain my favorite line out of all Austen’s novels, Captain Wentworth’s achingly romantic “you pierce my soul.”  Guh.

Rating: 3/5 stars

#6: Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana De Rosnay

It doesn’t sound quite right to say you enjoy Holocaust novels or are a fan of them, so I’ll instead say I read a lot of them. Sarah’s Key introduced me to the tragedy of the French expulsion of Jews, which was carried out not by the occupying Nazi soldiers, but by the French police force. The narrative alternates between Sarah and her parents’ horrifying arrest and deportation while a little brother is left behind, and Julia, a journalist who discovers Sarah’s story while researching an assignment on the 60th anniversary of the French Holocaust. Frankly, I could have lived without the Julia storyline, which detracts from Sarah’s story with that of a rather unsympathetic, navel-gazing character dealing with a crumbling marriage and surprise middle-age pregnancy. I did appreciate how the Holocaust played as a background for an anti-abortion tale, but the two stories simply lack the cohesion and thematic focus to bring them together in a satisfying conclusion.

Rating: 3/5 stars.

7: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford

This is the epic teen romance that should be sweeping the globe: a Chinese boy constantly bullied at his all-white school befriends a Japanese girl just as the US passes legislation to relocate citizens of Japanese descent to internment camps. Who needs sparkly vampires and werewolves to thwart love?

The writing does this beautiful story justice; vivid but not overly wordy description takes you back in time to Seattle, 1942, to the cluttered streets of Chinatown, Japantown, and the desolate internment camps. The characters are people—noble people, flawed people, strong people, weak people, people with motivations, people who act senselessly…Both place and character reminded me of the work of one of my favorite authors, Jhumpa Lahiri, whose stories focus on the differences between first and second generation Indian-Americans. I suppose I’m drawn to themes of cultural and racial identity and generational conflict, all of which charge Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

I learned a lot from this book, too, which is always a plus for a history lover. It goes to show how one-track our history studies in the US are that it had never occurred to me that there would be conflict between the Chinese and Japanese in America, particularly bitter hatred on the part of Chinese immigrants, many of whom left China precisely because of Japan’s relentless assault on China for decades prior to the US entering World War II. Not that racism and cultural discrimination are ever acceptable; but I think of a line from Harry Potter: “the world isn’t made up of good people and Death Eaters.” Life isn’t black and white, and insult, injury, and injustice have a way of leading otherwise good people to participate in evil. Another historical aspect that struck me as particularly poignant was the dignity of the Japanese characters even as their every right as American citizens was violated. I hadn’t realized how the Japanese volunteered to build their own prisons and serve in the US military to prove their loyalty. That same inner doggedness that turned out Kamakaze pilots fueled truly honorable US citizenship. I think all these things struck me because the same issues of race and politics of America in 1942 continue to be eerily relevant in 2010. (Why can’t we ever learn?)

Interestingly, like Sarah’s Key, this novel is also told in an alternating timeline. Only in this time, it works, as we follow the same character in two different decades as the events of the war years continue to haunt him forty years later.

The best book I’ve read in a long time, and one I’m sure to read again and again.

Rating: 5/5 stars

8: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll

I think I’m supposed to say something about Alice being a timeless children’s classic, only I’m not sure what kids today think of it. There’s no plot, and a lot of the references to the English court system and poems Victorian schoolchildren would have learned go right over my head, and I have a degree in English lit. Or maybe there’s so much nonsense in it that kids love it, anyway. I guess I’ll just have to read it with the Burt Squirt and report back then.

I do have a soft spot for Alice because I watched the 1985 miniseries hundreds of times as a child. And I can still sing “Jam Tomorrow.”

This time, the Kate Beckinsale version is not the one to watch.

Rating: 5/5 stars

9: Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card

The Ender series is the first sci-fi I’ve ever read, and I’d definitely read more, if that’s any indication of how I like the Ender books. It takes a bit of adjusting to get into Speaker for the Dead, which picks up 3000 years after Ender’s Game and doesn’t answer a lot of questions about what happened after the first book. However, you’re immediately drawn into an intriguing mystery about some creepy aliens on the planet Lusitania, and the plot never loses momentum even when it comes careening to the end.

I do have several fairly major criticisms. The book suffers from a dearth of sympathetic characters. Understandable, when you’re dealing with a dysfunctional family, which is crucial to the plot and, indeed, part of the whole concept of Ender being “Speaker for the Dead”—one who speaks, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about people. Still, it’s a bit of a struggle for me to fully connect with so many characters who either continually make stupid choices (which, granted, facilitate the plot) or are downright unlikeable. Though supercomputer Jane is pretty awesome; not far into the book I decided that her fate, alone, would make or break the book for me. Another problem with the characterization, though, is that Card is guilty of the telling vs. showing crime. Maybe the genre necessitates a bit of foregoing character-driven scenes in favor of plot? Because I so thoroughly enjoy these books, I’m beginning to re-think that hard and fast stance somewhat. Also, when writing a series, a certain amount of summary of events in previous books is inevitable to keep readers up to speed, but Card isn’t an author who does this particularly well. At times the clunky writing pulls me out of the story.

Even with those flaws, I was unable to put down Speaker for the Dead for the two weeks I was reading it. And as soon as I finished, I immediately went on to the next one.

Rating: 4/5 stars

10. Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card

It’s actually a little difficult to review this one, because the fourth book in the Ender quartet, Children of the Mind, is less its own book than a continuation of Xenocide. Still have problems with the unlikeable characters in this one, though a new, fascinating, and sympathetic set is introduced so I have to conclude that Card intentionally wrote the Ribeira family that way and isn’t simply bad at characterization. This one gets awfully expositional as the sci-fi plot unfolds, but again, I think a certain amount of that has to be overlooked in sci-fi. At least it helped me understand what was going on even as my mind was being blown, and made me want to keep reading. And by the end I’d decided that Xenocide was my favorite of the series so far.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Did I mention that all these books-and more-fit on my Sony Pocket Reader?

What have you been reading?

Recently several girlfriends and I organized a book club.  Our first read was Persuasion, which I’ve had recommended to me many times as Jane Austen’s best work.

Having now read it, I must disagree.

The story — a second chance at love for an older couple who just couldn’t make it work the first time around — may be her best.  The style?  In my opinion, not so much.

One of the qualities I like about Austen in general is how accessible her novels are to today’s readers.  Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Northanger Abbey, for example, read easily, primarily through lots of dialogue that both tells the stories and develops the characters.  It’s the style I’d come to expect from Austen (and, I have to admit, the style of contemporary novel I prefer).

That said, the divergence from the dialogue-heavy style of Austen’s earlier work took me by surprise in Persuasion. While the prose passages are impeccably written and packed with Austen’s wit, they nonetheless exemplify telling versus showing — the ultimate writing mistake, by today’s standards.  I appreciate that the “rules” of writing have evolved over time as the way people live and read has changed, but even bearing that in mind, I found it difficult to connect with the characters of Persuasion because of it.

Much of the crucial action happens off-stage and is merely summarized  in narrative after the fact.  I suppose on one hand this stylistic choice highlights the reserve and compliance of the heroine, Anne.  On the other, not actually seeing Anne’s first encounter with Captain Wentworth undercuts the emotional impact that should be present when a woman meets her former fiance, with whom she is still in love, eight years after breaking off their engagement.  Imagine if Austen had simply recounted the Netherfield ball instead of showing Elizabeth and Darcy’s dance and their glorious UST.  You wouldn’t root for them to get together in the end, would you?  That’s how I felt reading about Anne and Wentworth.  I rooted for the idea of them, but my imagination wasn’t captured by characters I felt I knew; they remained names whose personalities eluded me.

One character in the novel I did feel I saw rather than merely heard about is Anne’s hypochondriac sister, Mary Musgrove.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she also seems to have more dialogue than any other character.  Even though she’s meant to be tiresome and obnoxious with her constant bellyaching and oblivion to her sisters-in-law’s attempts to avoid her company, she became my favorite character purely on the basis that I knew who she was amid a bunch of virtual strangers.

While I’d rank Persuasion as my least favorite Austen novel (though I have yet to read Mansfield Park), I must concede that it contains my favorite line out of all her works, Captain Wentworth’s achingly romantic “you pierce my soul.”  Guh.

I’ll also repeat that I really like the story, especially after viewing the 1995 film, which rights the wrongs of the novel because the media of film necessarily shows instead of tells. Captain Wentworth’s bitterness and inability to get over Anne are so much more clear to me as performed by Ciarán Hinds.  

On a related note, Persuasion must be one of the more difficult Austen novels to adapt, precisely because of the lack of actual dialogue in the book.  Lots of work required on the part of the screenwriter to create Austen-like dialogue.  I want to say that in the Sense and Sensibility commentary, screenwriter Emma Thompson mentioned that she considered adapting Persuasion (though I might be misremembering; she might have mentioned that a Persuasion film came out the same year as her S&S).  In any case, I’d love to see what she could do with it, as S&S is not only my favorite Austen film, but my favorite movie ever!

Austen enthusiasts and Persuasion fans, do comment and tell me why I’m wrong about this book.

However, I just watched the movie, and for the first time in my life I think I can actually say I prefer a film to the original source.

(Wait.  Scratch that.  I also like the 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility better than the book, but I’ll let Jane Austen off the hook because it was her first novel and I’m sure if she’d had a little more experience, her version would have been just as good as Emma Thompson’s.)

Anyway…while the film version of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas remains doggedly faithful to the novel, it omitted what I now realize to be my key irritation with the book, which is the author’s device of depicting Bruno’s naïveté through his consistent mispronunciation of key words (fury for Führer and outwith for Auschwitz).  Also, the movie never named the concentration camp, which I thought lent a great deal more plausibilty to the premise of A) a free boy being able to observe the workings of a concentration camp from beyond the fence without being noticed by guards (not that other camps weren’t as horrific as Auschwitz, but its being the most notorious one, made it, in my opinion, perhaps not the best choice for the novel’s setting) and B) a young Jewish boy not having been immediately gassed upon entering the camp along with his grandparents.

So while the premise may still require an overall suspension of disbelief, the movie erases the flaws of the book so that this glimpse into the way we perceive good people and evil people (or, more accurately, people who are both good and evil — or have the capacity for both good and evil, which is all of us) stands out in a deeply profound way.  It’s a story that lingers with you after you’ve turned the final page (or turned off the DVD player), particularly after viewing it and having such clear visuals.

For me, even more than the utterly disturbing last scene, is the prominence of Nazi propaganda throughout the film.  Which was one other aspect of the book that bugged me; a boy Bruno’s age surely would have been indoctrinated against Jews in school — especially a boy who’s father ranks high enough to be made kommandant of a major concentration camp.  But this is not so in the book for the sake of Bruno’s absolute ignorance when he meets a young concentration camp inmate.  While the movie does stay true to this on Bruno’s part, it makes excellent use of his older sister, Gretel, who, after developing a crush on a young soldier, becomes enamored with The Hitler Youth and hangs on to the children’s Nazi tutor’s every word.  When Gretel is first introduced to us in the film, her arms are full of dolls; later, the dolls are relegated to the cellar while she plasters her bedroom walls with posters of Hitler and the League of German Girls.  The transformation is disturbing, to say the least; I’m not sure which is more so:  the image of a 12-year-old girl being so given over to a dangerous political movement, or of her mother being stunned speechless to see it.

Here I must comment that I particularly liked the way the film fleshes out Bruno’s mother.  The book focuses more on his father, and while the father remains at the heart of the film, I felt that, again, the plausibility of the premise was strengthened by the film’s omniscient point of view, which allowed us to see her dawning realization of just how final “The Final Solution” was.

Which brings me back to the other propaganda image that lingers with me almost an hour after I finished the movie.  At a crucial juncture in the story, Bruno stumbles upon his father, grandfather, and other Nazi officials viewing a propaganda film that depicts Jewish prisoners happily enjoying the “comforts” of the “work camp” after their day’s labor is complete:  they play organized sports, attend concerts, socialize at a cafe.  Bruno sees these images and believes his friend in the concentration camp is okay — that he is, in fact, happier than Bruno, who is not allowed to play in his own back garden and has no friends.  Despite having seen some Nazi propaganda, I’d never seen this, and was astonished and appalled that they could even have dressed up the concentration camps.  I almost didn’t believe it, thought it might have been an invention of the film-makers, so I googled.  Sure enough, a propaganda film was made at Theresienstadt in the now Czech Republic.

I really must get around to reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and watching Schindler’s List, which I keep putting off because I’m never in the mood.  When is one in the mood for the Holocaust?  One must look at it anyway.