The People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks

Hannah is an Australian rare-book expert and is commissioned to restore a famous centuries old Jewish book which had been lost but is found anew in Sarajevo towards the end of the Bosnian war. Hannah deals with the details of the book as well with personal demons relating to relationships with her mother and non-existent father. The historical fiction aspects and the way the story is presented to the reader is very appealing. However, some of the dialogue of the modern day people is trite. Overall, after a slow start, a great read. 8

The Double Bind - Chris Bohjalian

Intriguing story with a mystery-like unfolding about a young woman, Laurel, who deals with PTSD after a brutal attack. The truth is revealed in the end which brings the story to a somewhat chaotic close because I am left not knowing quite what parts of the story had been Laurel's delusions and what had really happened, which gets a little annoying. It would be hard to tease apart without going back and going over chapters again to compare minute details, which were really clues to her insanity, to facts were disclosed at the end. I wanted to keep reading to find out what would happen but I didn't feel quite satisfied when I did. Mostly well written except for some stiff and stilted dialogues. 7.

Luftslottet som sprängdes - Stieg Larsson

ooja
Swedish captivating thriller

Flickan som lekte med elden - Stieg Larsson

jajamen mycket medryckande och spannande

Män som hatar kvinnor - Stieg Larsson

ja

Between two worlds : escape from tyranny : growing up in the shadow of Saddam - Zainab Salbi and Laurie Becklund

Zainab grew up as in the shadow and force of Sadam Hussein. Her father was his private pilot and her family spent a lot of time partying (reluctantly!) in his circles. She provides an insight to Sadam Hussein as a person, a controlling scary person. Eventually, she was married off to an American stranger in order to get her out of Iraq and away from Sadam and his perpetrating son. It was a horrible marrige from which she fled and created her own life as a strong advocate for women in need. Good. It gets a little redundant to her about the extravagancies and outrageousness of Sadam and the people around him, however. But it is still good. 7

The omnivore's dilemma

great

Blue Shoe - Anne Lamott

Mattie lives in Marin!! Mattie is the main character in the book. She is a devout christian who sleeps with her ex even though he is scum and at the same time she wants to kill him. She had a jumbled upbringing and, while dealing with her mother's declining health and mental capacity, is trying to come to grips with her dead father's philandering. The story gets a little annoying at times but it all takes place in lovely Marin. I recognize all the names and places as well as plants and smells and people. I have always been a big fan of Anne Lamott, so how can I not like this one as well? 8

Bel Canto - Ann Patchett

This is a fiction hostage drama in an unnamed South American country. The main characters involve a famous opera singer and a successful Japanes businessman who are held hostage after a party to honor the Japanese man's birthday. The story is interesting, the setting is interesting, and the characters are interesting but somehow it still reads a little like a romance novel. Characters spend a long time as hostages having time to develop relationships independent of the real world. In the end it is necessary to have some of them die to solve the dilemma of returning to normal life and family after such an experience. It's entertaining but not believable. 5.

Eating Heaven - Jennie Shortridge

Any book that takes place in Portland, OR, immediately moves one step up the ladder! Eleanor Samuel's life is in crisis. Her uncle--he may even be her dad we find out as family secrets unravel--is dying from cancer and she is the one taking care of him. At the same time her food article writing career is veering off along with her eating habits. Described as in her late thirties and on the heavy side, she is forced to examine her grief, her life and her relationship with food all at the same time. What's not to like? I enjoyed it. 7.

The Red Azalea - Anchee Min

Anchee Min’s story about growing up on Mao’s China is absolutely gripping. The language, her writing, is terse and unadorned and as naked and raw as the life in China she fled. Everything about her childhood is so very foreign, the food, the people, the emotions, the culture, and the brutality of oppression, which makes it so intriguing, exotic if you will. At the same time, it is not difficult to recognize the humanity in it all, the humanity that we all share despite enormous differences. Some books fade into oblivion, but this is one that never could. 9+.

Animal, vegetable, miracle - Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver and her family moved to their farm in the Appalachians and decided to spend a year only eating local fooods. A lot of it came from their own farm. Kingsolver writes well as usual and chronicles a year of their efforts be locavores. She shares beautiful stories from their gardening adventures and cooking and canning productions. The stories are intertwined with research and data about the food production industry as well as some lovely recipes. Her response to the question why Americans eat so much bad food is "alimentary alienation" derived from Marx' theories of humans' desire to control an entire process of manufacture. Brilliant. She also writes eloquently about vegetarianism having adhered to a vegetarian diet for periods herself. Sometimes she is even funny. "Strangely enough, it's the animals to which we have assigned some rights, while the saintly plants we maim and behead with moral impunity. Who thinks to beg forgiveness while mowing the lawn?" Splendid book. 9

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

This is a book I have been wanting to read for a long time. It's amazing in its detail and use of language. I was transported to dusty hot California instantly. It's a short book that could have been expanded but it's still enjoyable. Two laborers are travelling from job to job as farmhands. George, who smarter, takes care of the dim-witted Lennie. They dream of a place to call their own where they work only for themselves. Their dream is predictably crushed when Lennie gets in trouble again. In the end, George is forced to "send off" Lennie towards that dream... Sad. Good. 8.

Julie & Julia - Julie Powell

365 days. 524 recipes. 1 tiny apartment kitchen. Julie Powell has always adored Julia Child. Around the time she is about to turn 30, Julie is depressed and feels her life is going nowhere. She is a lowly liberal secretary for a government agency populated by Republicans. She decides to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking during one year while blogging about it. Her writing is hilarious. I laughed out loud several times. This is easy and fun reading and by no means any heavy duty literature. I enjoyed it for what it is. I even learned a new word, prolix. Tediously lengthy in speech and writing. Anyway, Julie cooks her way out of depression and mediocrity and into a new career as a writer. "Two years ago I was a twenty-nine-year-old secretary. Now I am a thirty-one-year-old writer. I get paid very well to sit around in my pajamas and type on my ridiculously fancy iMac, unless I'd rather take a nap. Feel free to hate me--I certainly would." A funny and easy 8.

Clara Callan - Richard B. Wright

This book won prizes in Canada and I am not sure why. This was my choice for one of my bookclubs. And I didn't even like it very much. My bookclub seemed to like it however. The premise was interesting. Two sisters from a small town in Canada part ways in 1934. One heads to New York for a career in radio and the other stays behind working as a school teacher. The book follows them over the next couple of years. It sounded interesting enough, but I didn't like how the author--a man--described Clara's feelings around sex and motherhood. Clara is the sister that stays behind. At one point she gets raped and then she fantasizes about that and goes out of her way to find the guy that did it. It is too weird. I just don't like it when men attempt to imagine what a woman might be going through. It becomes very stereotypical and contrived. The book contains a lot of references to literature, radio, and film at the time, which was interesting. 5.

Ines of my soul - Isabel Allende

My bookclub picked this historical fiction about Ines Suarez, a woman who played a big role in the conquest of Chile by the Spaniards in the 1500s. The historical aspects of the book in regards to the indigenous cultures is interesting because of the role the hierarchy of the indigenous societies played in their downfall. However, some historical facts such as the endless wars and the cruelty of both Spaniards and Indians get tedious. Ines is imagined as a superhuman who doesn't seem to need sleep nor food and can do anything from amazing cooking to astonishing healing and adventurous lovemaking. Hm. Her life and relationships with powerful men seem romantisized and Allende's style with an element of magic realism makes the story of Ines more fictionlike than realistic. I did appreciate some of the man-bashing; at one point Ines states that all men are only interested in three things: fornicating, drinking, and killing. 6?

Skinny Bitch - Freedman & Barnouin

Foul-mouthed and straight up is how the dish is served in this book. Gotta love two women who disguise a vegan lifestyle book behind a clever title. Since I have been a vegan myself for about two years right before my first pregnancy and a vegetarian for many years up until recently, the information is not new to me. However, it is dished out differently. How about, "Soda is liquid satan?" This book is sometimes funny and sometimes crude. Nevertheless, it is helpful reading; it is good to be reminded of these things again. These things = treatment of slaughterhouse animals, antibiotics and hormones in livestock, and the mis-directed interests of incestous government agencies that are supposedly protecting the general public while all along taking money from corporate America. Nothing new, but a good reminder. I will be more mindful of what I eat. Besides, vegan food is good. I love veggies! 9.

High Latitudes : An Arctic Journey - Farley Mowat

Farley Mowat describes his journey in 1969 across Canada's frozen North. It seems like village after village is filled with disillusioned and unemployed Inuit people, or Eskimos as they were called at the time. The Inuit have been more or less forced by the Canadian government to give up their traditional way of life. They don't hunt anymore and they don't live in tents anymore. Their children are sent far away to go to school for a traditional education. Their environment is filling up with garbage--abandoned oil drums and plastic debris. Despite Mowat being an excellent writer, it is a pretty depressing picture. A few positive developments are revealed as well: the encouragement and success of traditional art for sale as well as grocery and goods cooperatives. This was a pick by one of my reading groups and I struggled to get through it. 4.

Stealing Buddha's Dinner - Bich Minh Nguyen

Nguyen's memoir of her family's escape from Saigon in 1975 to the U.S. and their/her subsequent adjustment to American culture. She came to love American food, which seemed more exotic than her grandmother's traditional Vietnamese dishes. Her father married a Mexican woman, Rosa, who introduced even more diverse food into Nguyen's life. The book deals with her longing to be just like the blue-eyed, blonde-haired Americans. In the end, as a young adult, she travels back to Vietnam and realizes that it is not her home anymore; she is American. Also, the book chronicles how she, as an adult, reunites with her mother, who didn't emigrate with them in 1975 but arrived much later. I enjoyed the book from a cultural perspective as well the nostalgic details of food items. Maybe a 6.

The Grass is Singing - Doris Lessing

The book begins with the murder of Mary Turner, the wife of Dick Turner who is a white farmer in colonial Africa (Rhodesia which later became Zimbabwe) in the early 1900s. Then we find out what lead to Mary’s tragic fate by learning about her childhood with an abusive father and an oppressed and depressed mother. Her young adult years give a picture of a fairly confident and independent woman working in an office in a city, supporting herself and enjoying city culture with cinema, romance novels and lots of parties and friends (although shallow). Eventually out of peer pressure and advancing age, she marries Dick, a stranger, and moves out to the country to live a life in poverty and madness on his barely sustainable farm. The most interesting aspect of the story is the relationship between master and slave—all the white farmers use and abuse African workers who are paid little to nothing and who have virtually no rights under the white man’s rule. The Africans, or natives as they are referred to in the book, are viewed and treated more like animals than humans even though without them, the white farmers’ lives and riches would not be possible. Therein lies the complexity; the whites have to continue to treat the natives like slaves in order to justify their ownership and cultivation of acquired African land. Newcomers must learn this. Poor whites, like the Turners, threaten to upset this racial balance and erase the line between white and black. The book leaves several questions unanswered. For example, was Mary intimate with her houseboy Moses? What were his motives? How much did her husband understand? This book is a 9. By the way, Doris Lessing just received the Nobel Prize in literature.

Shanghai Diary - Ursula Bacon

The story, a memoir, of a young Jewish girl fleeing an affluent life in Germany to escape the Nazis during WWII was interesting from a historical perspective for me. I had never known much about the fate of the refugees in Shanghai, China, before. I learned that they were actually bombed by the Americans intending to stamp out Japanese activity, which I never knew, and that for years they lived in squalor and had to wait several years after the war was over to receive their visas to travel to the United States or other countries. Some of the details of her daily life, thrust into such different culture from her own, were interesting as well. Other than that, the book is supposed to read like the diary of a ten-year-old girl during the subsequent seven years of her life, but the voice is not a girl's. The reflections and descriptions seem to mature like an older person's thoughts but the text is interspersed with parts like "Oh, grownups! They can be so strange sometimes. I don't understand how they are thinking." It gets annoying to read. The best parts were the various wise words of a Chinese-British man, her friend, on a spiritual journey, "You will be able to capture your childhood from within, and you will sweeten it with the wisdom of your years. We are everything we have ever been, only more so. We are our own work." or "Dear friend, always remember. We come here to stay. We come here to go." I rate this book a 5.

Teach like your hair's on fire - Rafe Esquith

A teacher, who spends most of his free time and money to coach his poor inner LA fifth-grade students to become better people and students, writes about how some of the magic happens in his classroom. Esquith's daily schedule is rigorous and he never takes vacations; however, his students learn and grow in amazing ways under his tutelage which is payment enough for him. The most amazing thing he does is the annual and complete Shakespeare play the students put on. I would love to see it! Apparently, some of his classes have toured and performed in far away places. There's got to be a video. Hm. I must check. Anyway, his writing and methods are inspiring even though he probably is insane. Or at least his wife must be by now. This man must not have a life outside of his elementary school! His job is his life, which turns out to be quite fullfilling in his case. When did he have time to write this book?

The Magician's Assistant - Ann Patchett

Sabine is a detached unlikeable 40-ish woman living alone in a large home in LA after the death of her husband Parisfal. Well. Husband is debatable. They had been married for a year by the time of his death but never had sex because he was gay. Before his death, he was in a committed relationship with a man, Phan, and the three of them lived together in Phan's house. Phan had died 5 years earlier. Parsifal was a magician and Sabine was his assistant for 20 years or so. Upon his death she discovered that Parsifal had a family she never knew about, his mother and siblings lliving in Nebraska. Anyway this book is a drag pretty much until the end. The ending almost makes up for some of the snail pace and predictable dullness of the story line as well as the numerous insufferable syrupy dream sequences. I will have to muster up some willpower to pick up one of Patchett's other books, e.g., Bel Canto which is supposed to be splendid. A weak 5.

This is not Civilization - Robert Rosenberg

Fun story following a young restless American, Jeff Hartig, as he spends a year in the Peace Corps on an Apache reservation and two years teaching English in an isolated village in Kyrgyzstan. Characters from these years later converge during an earthquake when Jeff has a job in Istanbul, Turkey. Lively descriptions of exotic customs, foods and locales fill the book. Interesting people cross his path. However, Jeff himself is a selfless aimless kind of character who is hard to like. There's no explanation or resolution of his restlessness while the other people seem to find their places. The opening line can't be beat, "The idea to use porn films to encourage the dairy cows to breed was a poor one." It's an 8.

Honeymoon in Purdah - Alison Wearing

A female Canadian travel writer goes to Iran with a male gay friend pretending to be a married couple on their honeymoon. The book came out in 2000. I think the actual trip took place in 97 or so. I particularly liked her descriptions of how she experienced being covered at all times. Her full-length black manteau is outfitted with big shoulderpads in order to fall straight down and not reveal any curves. Her headcover is a slippery scarf with a clip that she and other women struggle to keep in place sometimes with the help of their teeth. She writes about the heat and sweating profusely under all the layers of fabric but also about the freedoom of being invisible under her cloak as she is sitting in the corner of a temple or walking down a busy street. The most lasting impression of the Iranian people, as experienced and conveyed by her, is the overwhelming friendliness of the warmhearted Iranian people. Strangers invite them in, feed them, entertain them, and drive them around everywhere they go. The Iranian people's questions are always about America, "Are people bad in America?" and "Do Americans hate us?" They are always relieved to find out that Wearing and her "husband" are not American but Canadian. Hm.... Very enjoyable. 8.