Sunnyside

I finished Sunnyside by Glen David Gold a couple days ago.  I expected to love it, since I loved his first novel, Carter Beats The Devil.  But surprisingly, I didn't like it for the exact opposite reasons that I did like Carter.  Gold made Carter the Great seem like a real human being, fallible but likable and ultimately a good man.  Gold's treatment of his three protagonists in Sunnyside is a little cruel, I thought.  The bad things that happen to them seem like they're done for a larger narrative point being made, rather than being things that could actually happen which in a certain context have additional meaning.  Also, two out of the three men (an army private and Charlie Chaplin) are not good people.  By the end of the book, they have had little or no development into better human beings.  I didn't like spending time with them.

Finishing it was a slog, but I didn't hate it. Lee Duncan, the third protagonist, also an army private, was actually a character I liked.  He was kind of naive, and a little obsessed with fame, but he was interesting and I could care about him.

Oh yeah, and the author's note at the end of the book ends with a reference to climate change.  Climate change references depress me.  I do what I can.  I'm aware it's a problem.  Having it sprung on me in an unexpected place like that got on my nerves.  Maybe the note will make some people more aware, make them change their behavior.  Or maybe not.

Anyway, I'm done with it.  Should you read it?  I've read a lot of good reviews of it, but I'd stay stick with Carter and then wait for his next one.

Broken Glass Park

I read Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky last week.  It was translated from German, and is about a teenage girl, Sacha, whose family moved to Berlin from Russia.  Her mother's ex-husband, Vadim, murdered her mom and her mom's current boyfriend about a year before the beginning of the novel.  Sacha has two goals: to write a book about her mother's life, and to murder Vadim.

Vadim is currently in prison for the murder, but she makes plans and is ready to wait till he gets released.  When a local paper publishes a sympathetic interview with him, Sacha goes to the office to speak with the writer.  This leads to her introduction to the editor of the paper, a complicated man named Volker, and brings more changes into her life, some bad and some good.

Sacha and her brothers and sisters live in a tenement apartment, with a distant cousin as a guardian.  Sacha is intelligent, sharp and sarcastic, but clearly in pain, fighting the overwhelm and horror in her life.  I wish she could be friends with Doria, the protagonist of Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow by Faiza Guene.  They seem like kindred spirits.  Doria is a teenaged Moroccan immigrant in a Paris tenement, living with her mother.  Her father has left them for a second wife back in Morocco, and she's dealing with that abandonment along with larger issues of racism, classism, and sexism.  Both girls are wounded but fighting, not accepting of their situations.

If I were eight (and for some reason these books were appropriate for eight-year-olds) I would totally have me and a friend pretend to be Sacha and Doria, and we'd go off and have adventures.

Carter Beats The Devil

I just finished reading Carter Beats The Devil by Glen David Gold.  It was fantastic! It's about Charles Carter, a popular magician in the 1920s, being suspected of murdering President Harding.  (Yes, it changes history a bit.  A surprisingly small amount, though.)  Carter's childhood challenges, his besting of the cruel Mysterioso, his rise to fame: all of it is entertaining.  It's an almost 700-page book that went by in a flash.

One of the things I appreciated most was that Carter, although flawed in many ways, is a good guy.  He generally tries to do right by people.  He's kind to animals.  In fact, kindness to animals is a major, reoccurring theme.  I can't handle even fictional animals meeting sad ends, so I appreciated this.

Side note: Glen David Gold's wife is novelist Alice Sebold.  I can't imagine being married to someone in the same exact field as me! I think it would be really tough to deal with competitiveness and jealousy.

Kafka on the Shore

I understand my friend who said, of the two Murakami novels she'd recently read, that she preferred Kafka on the Shore to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  I just finished Kafka and it was great.  A young man leaves home, running away from a curse/prophecy and hoping to find information on the mother and sister that left him when he was little.  Kafka ends up (and "ends up" is the right term, as he just seems to fall into this position) working at a private library in a town far from his native Tokyo.  The elegant, mysterious Miss Saeki is his boss.  

Alternating chapters follow Nakata, a simple-minded old man who uses his ability to speak with cats to help locate lost pets.  He learns that cats are being abducted by an evil man in a silk hat and tall boots.  This discovery leads him down a dark path that eventually crosses with Kafka's.

Kafka on the Shore is slightly more straightforward than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  At the end of the book, I felt like I knew what happened, mostly, whereas in the other book I felt like I understood about 50% of what eventually transpired.  It also crammed in less side topics and strange secondary characters.  That might make it the better book.  But ultimately I think I slightly prefer The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. That may be simply because its protagonist was someone easier for me to understand.  Kafka, as a fifteen-year-old, is different enough from me in age, but his thoughts seem somehow more opaque.  I had a lot of little questions about him I really wish were addressed ("why do you believe in this curse? did you have any friends in tokyo? what are your memories of your father?" and a ton more).

Still, that doesn't mean I didn't love the book.  Haruki Murakami is definitely my obsession of the month, and I'm going to pick up another book of his tomorrow, most likely.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

I thought I'd mention a book I read a month or two ago, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Alison Hoover Bartlett.  It's the true story of a book thief, John Gilkey, and the bookstore owner-turned-detective, Ken Sanders.  Sanders helped catch Gilkey after he committed a string of thefts of rare books in the late nineties.  The author, Bartlett, talks in depth with both Gilkey and Sanders, and ultimately finds herself involved in the story as well.

It's a quick, intriguing read, and a window into a world I'd never thought about.  (I love to read, but rare book collecting had never occurred to me.)  I wish it could've been longer, though.

Should you read it? If the topic interests you, yes, why not?

Something less twisty and intense

I took a break between Murakami books to read something lighter and more straightforward.  Thin Is the New Happy by Valerie Frankel is a memoir about Frankel's attempt to free herself from her lifetime of dieting and body image issues.  I enjoyed it.  It's light-hearted but also honest.  Frankel didn't have a horrible eating disorder or shocking history to write about (though that's not to say there aren't sad, difficult things that she dealt with and discusses in the book), but that doesn't mean she has nothing to say.  Her observations are funny and keen.  One line I enjoyed is when she points out that dieters think of certain foods as bad or evil.  "Putting 'cupcake' in the same category as 'Osama Bin Laden' is just wrong."

I really, really hope she is still managing not to obsess about her weight.  It's so tough in our culture.

Haruki Murakami, Chicago Diner

So the unthinkable has happened, in that it's been so long since I've updated that I can't remember all the books I've read, and therefore can't record them on here.  I might try anyway, at some point.  For now, let me say that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami is fantastic.  I just finished it.

Toru Okado's cat has gone missing.  His wife asks him to look for it, since, because he's unemployed, he has time.  She also asks him to consult with a psychic recommended to her by her brother. Toru's meeting with the psychic is one of the first very strange things that happens to him.  Soon he's getting phone calls from a mysterious woman, discovering a dry well by an abandoned house, and searching not just for his cat but for his wife.  This book is almost impossible to sum up.  Crazy stuff happens.  I was riding the L in Chicago while reading it, and kept putting my hand to my mouth in shock (though surely I wasn't the strangest-seeming person on the L).

I bought another book of Murakami's, Kafka on the Shore, but haven't started it yet.

I'm in Chicago currently (reading on the L and whatnot) and I just need to mention the Chicago Diner.  My boyfriend and I ate there tonight, and it was SO GOOD.  It's an all-vegetarian, incredibly vegan-friendly restaurant.  I had a homemade sweet potato veggie burger with avocado, lettuce, and a mango-pineapple sauce on a whole wheat bun with a side of roasted veggies with pesto.  Deliciousness!  And the menu is just a beautiful thing to read - choosing that veggie burger was tough.  My boyfriend got country fried "steak" with mashed potatoes and the same roasted veggies and pesto.  Also incredible! He also got a super-yummy vegan milkshake and I got refreshing blackberry iced tea.

If you're near Chicago, go there.  If you're not, well, maybe you should be.

Back to it

Ooo, it's been awhile since I've updated, and I've read a lot of books.  Most recently I finished a young adult book called Celine by Brock Cole.  It came out in 1989.  It was recommended to me by Claire Zulkey, the author of another great young adult book that I read last year, An Off Year.

Celine Morienval is a teenage artist living in Chicago with her step-mother (who is only six years older than her).  The book covers about a week in her life, as she goes to a terrible party, destroys some of her art and begins a new project, befriends a little boy and gets a crush on his father, and deals, just a little, with how hurt she is that her actual mother doesn't want her around.  There's a lot in it, it's messy like real life, and it's awesome.

Now, I'm going to play some softball.