Stubborn Twig - Lauren Kessler

I don't know why I hesitated to read this book, a historical chronicle of true events. Maybe it was the look of it and the size of the font, the textbook quality about it. It was indeed written by a professor at the University of Oregon. However, once I started I was engrossed in the story of the Yasui family. The book chronicles three generations starting with Masuo, a Japanese immigrant, arriving in the United States in 1908. He setttled in Hood River (right up the road from me!) and built an empire around a grocery store and fruit orchards as well as various and numerous other enterprises. He raised a family and worked incredibly hard to become an accepted member of American society and almost believed he had succeeded when World War II began. Anti-Japanese sentiment had been mounting and Pearl Harbor unleashed a flood of racially based discrimination culminating in interment camps throughout the West. Yasui was imprisoned on false grounds of being a dangerous alien spy. Most of his family were sent to camps. The book describes the difficulty of acculturation as it pertains to the Japanese in the U.S. during an ugly period of time. It describes the duality of living a Japanese life at home while being immersed in American culture elsewhere, the close ties and strict boundaries of Japanese family life as opposed to the rights of the individual of the American culture. Great book. It's an 8 (close to 9) for sure.

The Feasting Season - Nancy Coons

This is a silly book about an inane woman having a inane love affair with an inane man. Meg is an American writer married to a Brit, Nigel, and living in France. It's hard to understand why she ever married him because he belittles and patronizes her and doesn't do his share of household work or spend time with their children. Then she goes off and has an affair with an unattractive chainsmoking selfish French photographer. It is all very predictable like a bad romance novel, which is almost the category where this book belongs. On top of it, the writing style gets old. It's a first person narrative in a journal format almost hour by hour or blow by blow, literally. Yeah. A little too graphic on some details. Like Meg cleaning herself in a bidet after having sex with the chainsmoker. You have to really love all things French to appreciate that... It's a quick ready though but only a 3.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

"A well without water. A bird that can't fly. An alley with no exit."
Phew. And a book with no ending and no answers.... The Wind-up Bird Chronicle took me quite some time to get through, and I am a fast reader! It took me a while because every word and every sentence seem to be important in order to understand the overall picture and mystery of the unfolding story of Toru Okada, an unemployed married 30-year-old man in a Tokyo suburb. The story is a period in his life of big changes--his cat disappears and then his wife Kumiko leaves him. Interwoven with his story are other tales which are intermittenly tangential tales of other people's fates and intermittently stories or events relevant to his life or circumstances. Various characters appear and disappar in a dreamlike fashion. Some of Toru Okada's experiences seem like hallucinations. But hallucinations that leave permanent physical scars like a mark in his face from "passing through a wall." He is described as an ordinary unremarkable nobody, but his reactions to the environment and his actions (e.g., climbing into a deep dark dry well for extendend periods) are not ordinary nor are any of the other characters or their actions. Reading this book was at times compelling and at times both annoying and amazing. It is like partaking in somebody's hallucinatory dream of good and evil. It's intriguing and a 6.

Anagrams - Lorrie Moore

Lovesick and evil sock. Cool. I did enjoy some of the anagrams in Anagrams. Unfortunately, the book contains too many quips and quick standup comedy-type jokes for my taste. It’s a solid 4. The main character is Benna whose life is dispensed in bits and pieces of reality and imagination interspersed with some wittiness and mostly bad jokes. It's like the author collected all the funny lines she came across and strung them together in a story. The mixed together reality and imagination bits make the book a little hard to follow in the beginning. The story of Benna, despite the jokes and word play, is sad with her imaginary friend and daughter and troubled love life, but the ending is downright gloomy. Here’s a taste of the despondency, “They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.” Or how about this quote:
Sunday is always a bad day. A sort of gray purgatory that resembles a bus station with broken vending machines.
And now I'm so blue I feel like poking my eyes out with the potato peeler...

The Human Stain - Philip Roth

A book full of lies. I am not even sure the ending is not a lie by the author in the story, Mr. Zuckerman. As Coleman himself says at one point, “there is no closure.” Hm. Strange. The story is too neatly packaged at the end, coming full circle. Hm. A lie? This book was hard to get into. I almost put it down several times because it seemed to ramble and go off on tangent topics like the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, which in the end still made sense. It was the era and it was included because of the powerful men, sex, and lies connection. The Human Stain. We are tainted by our humanity and one powerful man was almost taken down by one human stain. Coleman Silk, in book, was taken down by one word, spook. He was a pale black man who lived his life as a white person, a Jewish white person, and cut off contact with his family. He was a professor at a lily-white college. Lily-white is a word used on two occasions in the book. I did like this book. It is wordy and long and full of intellectual reflection and almost preachy in its rambling at times. Not a book for idle summer beach blanket enjoyment. Interesting racial issues. My rating is 7 (of 10). As a linguist I also have to admire the impossibly long sentences, sometimes extending over a full page. Amazing.

Life is Meals - James and Kay Salter

Did you know that the Aztec word for testicle was ahuacatle?? That's where the name of the avocado came from and it was believed to be an aphrodisiac. And that the word for chocolate came from the Mayan word tchocolatl. Anyway, after I got used to the format of "Life is Meals", it seemed to improve. Originally I had thought the book would contain actual chapters and perhaps short stories. But it is organized as a calendar with 365 entries, one for every day. It was interesting to read but not amazing in any way. Some of the information seemed old and lifted out of a book of quotations or birthdays of famous people. Some entries are actual little anecdotes from dinner parties that the husband and wife authors have held and recipes and menus are included. My rating would be 5 (out of 10 possible). Obviously, I did come across a bunch of interesting facts such as the bergamot in my Earl grey tea is oil from an inedible but fragrant citrus fruit from Calabria. And this cracks me up... the writing on a sign that could be found in bars in France in the '40s and '50s:

La vie moyenne d'un buveur d'eau: cinquante-six annees.
La vie moyenne d'un buveur de vin: soixante-dix-sept annees.
Choisissez-vous.
(Average life of a water drinker: 56 year. Average life of a wine drinker: 76 years. You choose.) Brilliant! :-)

Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris

I had heard that “Then it Came to the End” is a funny book about people in an ad agency during a period of layoffs. How interesting can that really be?? It seemed more like the premise of a sitcom. The book actually turned out to be better than I first had anticipated, maybe a 7. It took a while to get into because of the little information that is given about the characters. I found it hard to care for them or about them for the longest while. Ferris writes the book in a first person plural perspective (we), which is an important tool for the feel of the story and definitely for how the book ends. However, partway through the book, he switches to first person singular to relate the story of the nebulous boss Lynn and her illness. From then on the characters seem to have more clarity. They—Tom who writes deranged emails, Genevieve who is stunningly beautiful, Benny who is liked by all, Karen Woo who is disliked by all, Old Brizz who is the old smoker pitied by all, and many more—are all crazy in some way but normal at the same time just like most of us. It is as if they are all stereotypes rather than real people, and maybe that is exactly why I found it difficult to care for them at first. They are all stuck in their jobs needing the paycheck but probably wanting to leave. Whenever somebody actually leaves their job, one guy always remarks while toasting, “So good luck, and fuck you for leaving, you prick!“

The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion

This book happened to be the first one for no particular reason. It was just on the pile of my books to read. It was one of the ones I recently received an email from the library about impending due date. On a scale from 1 to 10, I would give this book a 6. It's well-written by a proven author. However, the topic, the true story of her coping with grief after the loss of her husband of 40 years (John Gregory Dunne--also a writer) and her daughter's illness, is too up close and personal. Although it is a universal topic, it is too intimate for me at this point in time. I may return to this book at a later time in my life. Didion quotes lines of poetry dealing with grief and death and these stayed with me:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum,
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

They are the "Funeral Blue"s lines from The Ascent of F6 by W.H. Auden.