Tag: fiction

book-review, books, Family Drama, reading

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

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I enjoyed this book. How can you not when it starts of with a sarcastic octopus, who ultimately has the best lines in the entire book?  And I promise – no spoilers.

First we meet Marcellus – on day 1299 of his captivity. He is a giant Pacific octopus, exceptionally bright, bored, and aware his life span is coming to an end.

Next, we meet Tova, a 70 year old widow, who works evenings cleaning the Sowell Bay Aquarium each night where Marcellus lives. She has been working there since the death of her husband a few years earlier. She has been keeping herself busy, however, since the mysterious death of her 18 year old son decades before. Being busy helps her move forward in life.

Last, we meet Cameron. A 30 year old man that acts like a teenage boy. He has never taken responsibility or life too seriously, and can never catch a break to get ahead. Unemployed, Cameron awaits his friend while collecting the belongings that were thrown off a balcony while he was being thrown out of his girlfriend’s apartment.

These three beings will leave imprints on each other’s lives that will be remarkable.

As Tova and Marcellus are beginning to face the realities of where they are in life, they begin to have empathy toward each other. A simple act of kindness from Tova, who found Marcellus on the floor in the breakroom tangled in electrical cords, saved Marcellus’ life by getting him free. They become connected by this act, both physically and emotionally. Tova’s hand was entwined in the tentacles when freeing the cords. Suction marks remained after as proof of her being touched by someone or something else.

When Cameron receives a box from his Aunt of belongings from the mother that abandoned him when he was 9, Cameron believes he has found the identity of his unknown father. He leaves to find him and collect on 30 years of child support. When his luggage goes missing it is as if everything that tied him to what he was also went away.

Through a series of bad decisions, followed up by the genuine kindness of strangers, Cameron buys a crappy camper, makes some friends, and gets a job at the aquarium. As the lives and tales of the people he meets calm him, Cameron takes responsibilities seriously, and is even taught by Tova that every job you do is a job that is worth being done well.

As the end draws near for Marcellus – typical lifespan is 3-5 years or 1095 – 1825 days, Tova and Cameron learn from Marcellus how to take care of oneself and ones friends as that time draws near. It is with Marcellus’ help that Tova and Cameron learn lifechanging information, and why Tova made sure that Marcellus’ end was not in captivity.

As each person meets their next steps in life, it is the strength they received from each other that helps them move forward.

books, read around the world, reading

Pieces of Happiness by Anne Ostby

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What would you do if your childhood friend from 50 years ago sent you a letter asking you to leave your life and come live with her in Fiji on a cocoa farm? That is what happens to four 66 year old women in Norway. They have each gone their own ways, with their own secrets and pains. How would this work out? How has everyone changed? How have they not changed? And what about all the cultural difference between Norway and Fiji? How will they navigate this?

This is the story of five women facing the reality of getting older, at a stage where they are no longer who they thought they were. They come together and face with who they were, who they became, and who they want to be next in the time they have left.

An endearing story of how to find a new chapter when most people write you off, including yourself.   

book-review, books, literature, reading

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver is an author that has proven again and again that she understands the way the world works, with all its ugliness and beauty. With this novel, she yet again proves her superior abilities in story telling. A retelling of Dicken’s David Copperfield in the early 2000s in rural Appalachia, this novel shines its light on the same institutionalized poverty that Dicken’s railed against in Victorian times.

This story introduces you to Damon, known as Demon Copperhead because of his bright red hair. Demon was born to an addicted teen mother that had witnessed the death of his father 3 months before he was born in a trailer in the mountains of Virginia. With every turn Demon faces more odds against him – an addicted mom, an abusive step-father, a dead father, and more with each month. As you follow the path that Demon follows, you see obstacles thrown in his way each time he tries to make things better. Hanging over everyone he knows in Lee County VA is the ever-present need for a fix to take away pain – physical and emotional. We find that, in truth and in fiction, this is because drug companies have identified the largest population on medi=care that requests pain medications to sell aggressively and deceptively to. The people that have already been harmed by the mining industry are then preyed upon by drug companies. While the drugs are a problem, as Demon’s friend from foster care, Tommy points out, this has been a war on people that are different. The Hillbilly jokes keep putting down those that can and do survive by growing, hunting and sharing to fill needs of hungry bellies. 

It is through Demon’s grit and resilience, and ability to make do with what he has and not hope for more, that he is able to survive his trials. Along the way you meet people that don’t care, that care only about themselves, and those that cared but are too jaded with the inability to change things. You also meet the most unlikely people that go out of their way to try to ease someone else’s load or try to help them find their way.  You realize that while there is dark in the world we live in, there is also some light in it.

Near the end you are rooting for some happiness to find him, and you are never sure. You care deeply for him by the time you turn that last page.  And you hope that the ride he is on is a positive one.

book-review, books, Family Drama, literature, reading

The World Played Chess

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by Robert Dugoni

This is a complex, intertwining story told by two men in three time periods. We start in 2016 when Vincent, a successful lawyer, receives a journal from an old friend he hadn’t heard from in years.  The author of the journal was William – someone that Vinny met when he was 18 in the summer of 1979. William, 12 years older than Vinny, had made a strong impression on him, and while he never spoke of the friend, this relationship helped shape the way Vinny approached life. William’s journal was written when he was an 18-year-old going off to Vietnam in 1967. Vinny had been a witness to William’s PTSD that summer, when he couldn’t fathom how difficult choices in life can be and how they change your course forever.

In 1979 Vinny just graduated as valedictorian, was accepted into Stanford, but his family was unable to pay the tuition and he is devastated. Instead, he is headed to community college. As he parties with his friends that summer before school, he takes a job in construction. There he meets William, a Vietnam vet twelve years older than he is. Over the course of the summer William tells stories of what he lived through as his life unravels.

As Vinny reads the journal in 2016, one entry each day, he is also preparing for his son Beau to graduate high school and go off into the world.  Disappointments and frustration are all there, as Beau tries to become independent and make his own decisions. After a tragedy Vinny watches as Beau struggles with the fragility of life. He is seeing personally that growing old is a privilege, not a right. Through Vinny’s eyes we see the pain of watching youth stolen from both William and Beau at the same point of life. You are reminded that the moments in between are all about shaping who you are. You need to accept your abilities, and make choices for yourself and your family, with the knowledge that all choices have consequences that you must live with. You also learn to put things in perspective – like being able to go to community college is better than not being able to go to college at all.

Everyone’s demons are different, but in the end, the role that Vinny place for both William and Beau is someone that has enough empathy to listen. That allows both men to face the hard parts of life, and be able to move forward to being a better person because of their past, not despite it. In 1979 most didn’t want to listen to those that saw horrors in Vietnam, and in 2016 most don’t want to acknowledge the dark possibilities in life.

This story was so well written that it was not hard to jump between the timelines. The interweaving of the stories is what makes it just so poignant – even though each man had different things happening in their lives at 18, the hope for the future and the realization of what that really means is difficult. As I watch my own son at 18, this has given me another layer of understanding to what it is he is grappling with. I wholeheartedly recommend reading this. 

book-review, literature

By the Book

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Did you ever feel like you have heard a story before – often?  It seems as though there has been a number of “reboots” happening in the storytelling world. 

10 Things I hate About You is based on The Taming of the Shrew;

A Thousand Acres is King Lear;

The Lion King is Hamlet;

The Madwoman Upstairs is Jane Eyre;

The Lost Child is Wuthering Heights;

On Beauty is Howards End;

Bridget Jones’ Diary is Pride and Prejudice;

Clueless is Emma. 

Adding to this list is a retelling of one of one of my favorites – Persuasion.  By the Book, by Julia Sonneborn, as with many retellings, notes the book as a favorite of the protagonist’s (Anne with an E – a nod to another beloved book).  Though many names are similar, Lady Russell became Dr Ellen Russell, others are new to the telling.  As the original – Anne’s father cut her off when she didn’t go to law school, her sister Lauren’s attacks Adam as someone who would never be successful, and Dr Russell pushes that Anne follow her mentor’s footsteps to Yale’s MFA program. All these combined to put pressure on an impressionable young college woman that was not sure how to do anything other than fight for her books, her constant comfort.

With modern twists and turns that are inevitable in a Victorian love story, even if told in the 21st century, there is always comfort in knowing that all will end well.  Especially in the crazy COVID world we live in. 

Well written, a fun read that kept my interest. 

book-review, literature, Middle Eastern, read around the world

Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak

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There are spoilers here, but I tried to keep them to a minimum.  This book was translated from Turkish.  While many times a book can lose something in translation, I was amazed that I felt no stilt or stumble along the way that happens in so many translated works.  This was an amazing story that unfolded in surprising and extraordinary ways.  Well worth the read. 

This story starts off in a way that does not prepare you for its depth.  It is modern Istanbul and the country is simmering in the duality of the world -– is it Secular or Religious? Rich or Poor? East or West?  A woman is driving her daughter through the city which teems around them as they are stuck in traffic.  This woman, Peri, uncharacteristically leaves her bag in the back seat of her car, and it is stolen.  Also uncharacteristically, she runs after the thief to retrieve it.  As she runs through the alleys of Istanbul, she is faced with the dark underside of the city.  She is wounded, and almost raped, but is able to survive with only a knife wound to her hand, and a photo from another lifetime.    Peri then returns to the car with her daughter, drives on to her original destination – a dinner party with the elite of Turkey.

You will not be aware until you have finished the story, that this is a metaphor for her life. 

The story is told starting now, and flashing back to Peri’s history.  With a bit more told each time, the woman becomes more visible.  Her mother, a religious woman, believes that there is darkness in Peri’s soul, and Peri had not faced it in years before she was following the child that stole her bag.  It is this darkness that has led Peri to live between her mother and her father, non-religious, that fight each other for everything.  Peri has spent her life being conflicted because she didn’t want to take sides, even if she was leaning toward her father’s.  He had placed all his hopes for the future of the family on her going to Oxford.  Peri was successful in getting there.

Once there, however, she continued to remain outside everything.  Her suite mate, a fully assimilated woman from Iran, suggested that Peri take a lecture with Professor Azur on Gd.  Initially not interested, she warms to the idea.  Once accepted to the selective seminar, the challenges that Azur puts in front of her continue to perplex her.  Another woman Peri befriended in the college, Mona, a religious Egyptian, joined her in the class.  The suite mate, Shirin, ended up convincing them all to live together.  All along, Peri was warned by some that Azur thought he was Gd, and Shirin who swore he was.  Throughout the story, you see the twists and turns of the pathways of Peri’s mind, just like the pathways she ran after her purse.  The wound on her hand continued off and on to bleed and throb, just like Peri’s emotions.  The duality of choices, to be or not, and the reality of Peri’s which was in the middle, are reflected throughout the country, and even within all the people at the party.  As Peri is faced with inquiring minds that hear she went to Oxford, she speaks out for herself, timid at first.  She reviews and revisits the past during this dinner, and she comes to a conclusion.  She asks her mother for a phone number.  Once dialed, she faces the first of many steps toward reconciling herself.  At the end of the call Shirin tells Peri to call Azur.  Peri, during this phone conversation, had been hiding in a hall.  She then hears and sees masked men enter the house, and she hides in the closet behind her.  In the blink of an eye, she calls Azur, and hears he is not angry.  She then begins a seminar on Gd, teaching the teacher.  As the power runs out on the phone, Peri stands and opens the door.  She is finally ready to come out of the closet, figuratively and metaphorically, to face her destiny.  She is no longer hiding from herself or anyone else.

book-review, books, read around the world, reading, time travel

Time travelling

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If you were able to go back in time, would you? What if there are all sorts of rules that you need to abide by to do this? You have to sit in a specific cafe, at a specific chair, and not get up. You can only meet someone who had been in the cafe, and the present will not change. And you only have as much time there as it takes for the cup of coffee you were served to go cold.

That is the truth about a small cafe in Japan that has been serving coffee for over 100 years. Urban legend has been published, but most are scared away by the rules. This book, Before the Coffee Gets Cold translated from Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Japanese best seller by Geoffrey Trousselot, tells the story of four people who are driven to make the choice to sit in this chair. Each has their own reasons for doing this. One goes back to confront a man who left her, one is seeking to receive a letter from her husband’s early onset Alzheimers, another to see her sister one more time, and the last to meet the daughter she has not been able to meet. All while knowing they need to wait for the seat to be empty, as it is occupied by a ghost that didn’t drink her cup of coffee in time.

The beautiful reasons why they choose to go, and the unexpected ways these visits unfold are nothing short of love stories. Written tenderly, even in translation, each woman that goes is motivated by love – unrequited, romantic, familial and maternal. Each visit, while not changing the present, has significant impact on each of these women.

The way the stories unfold is comforting and the language evokes a dark and cool underground cafe in Japan. A gentle read of love and the possibilities of reliving a moment in time.

It may be an ironic way to end 2020, but it does bring hope.

book-review, books, Family Drama, reading

Glass Houses

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Choosing a book, I went to my bookshelf and found Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander. After that was finished I found A Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindberg. Then my colleague Nigel suggested I read The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. Each of the books, a scientific search for understanding a near death experience, a reflection on life and its every stage, and a tale of giving of yourself to heal others all pointed me on a path away from sadness, and toward a purpose. Then, as if by magic, the library’s electronic version of Emily St John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel was available.

If you don’t know by now, Ms. St John Mandel’s Station Eleven has been on many “To Read” lists because it was a novel that predicted a pandemic like the flu that decimated the economies of the world and killed millions. It was a brilliant story, well written and so believable that it was eerie when COVID-19 showed up. I was eager to read her new novel. The story is written over a number of years, by a number of characters. The story weaves them in and out of each other’s lives. At the core is Vincent, a woman from Vancouver who lost her mother to a canoeing accident when she was about 12. Her half brother, Paul, comes into her life after a stint in rehab for drugs, running from the law because he shared some bad drugs with someone who died from them. Through back and forth stories we next see them at an exclusive Hotel Caiette on an island in British Columbia. The place is owned by Jonathan Alkaitis, who works in finance and owns the hotel. One night someone writes in acid ink “Why don’t you swallow broken glass” on the window of the hotel, shaking a guest, Leon Prevant, to his core. As time continues, we find that Paul, who worked at the hotel as a cleaner, was accused of the graffiti and left the next morning, and Vincent, his sister was working as a bartender that night. That night was when Jonathan gave her his business card with money as his tip.

As the story unwinds, there are small and large choices that are made by each of the players. Knowingly or not, or as one person states – knowing and not knowing together – each is faced with a question. How easy is it for you to cross the line? Some choose to stand on the morals they claim to have, while others are surprised when they cross them in hind-sight. It is this struggle between our actions and out beliefs that are the moral of the story. That, and the interconnectedness of each person to another. Throughout the changes and years, each remains connected bringing into question the idea of coincidence – is it real or is there a cosmic plan?

In the end, it is those with self-knowledge that are aware of the impact others have on them and the price to be paid for not crossing the line.

By the way – I don’t believe that it was a coincidence that these books came to me in that order.

 

book-review, books, literature, memoir, Non-Fiction, reading, romance, Science Fiction

Happy Stories for Stressful Times

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In this crazy time of social distance, self-isolation and quarantine, there is nothing better than curling up and escaping with a good book. I spend a ton of time doing this. In order to keep up our spirits, I thought I would share some titles that are fun and enjoyable to help the time go. In no order other than the one that I thought of first:

A Man Called Ove: All about a grumpy man that finds his solitary world turned on its head when a young family moves in next door. He becomes engaged despite his best intentions, leaving you smiling all along.

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic: Eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn enrolls in an undergraduate seminar his son teaches on the Odyssey. Explores both the story and their relationship. Sweet tribute to his father.

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood: Trevor Noah’s memoir of growing up in South Africa and coming to America to host The Daily Show on Comedy Central.

Daisy Jones & The Six: A fictional band who’s only album is an anthem for 70’s rock and roll broke up and no one knows why – until now. Hearing this story is a bit like Almost Famous, but even better.

Mrs. Queen Takes the Train: What would happen if the Queen of England went on a stroll without the knowledge of her courtiers? Find out here.

Roommates Wanted: 1990, Toby Dobbs is gifted a house for a wedding gift from his father. One month later his wife leaves, and Toby advertises for roommates. 15 years later they are still there. How to move forward in his life, now that his father is about to show up for the first time in 15 year? Smile and read on.

The Daily Show: An Oral History: How the show came into being, hosts changed, and how the show changed the country. As a fan of the show, and of Jon Stewart, I loved reading the behind the scenes and remembering when I first watched the shows/events they mentioned.

The Martian: A young adult book that had my son at the opening line (“I am F*&^*&%). I loved it because it was fun, stressful, and funny.

The Most Beautiful Book in the World: Eight Novellas: Eight separate stories populated by a wide cast of characters, all exploring what beauty is.

The One and Only: Love of football and romance combine in this story of a super football fan with a crush on the legendary head coach, her best friend’s father.

book-review, books, reading, Science Fiction

What Station am I at?

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Every day life gets weirder. Fewer people are working in the office. Streets normally bustling are empty. No rush hour traffic. All of this makes me grow more spooked.

As a new convert to the dystopian genre, I don’t have that many books to reference back to. I have always expected things to happen like Orwell’s 1984 with the government tracking your every move. All they need is access to your fitbit or iphone. If they want to get rid of your books, like Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 just access your hoopladigital or amazon account. Say what you want about who is in charge in government, but to me, it certainly feels that all pigs are equal, just some more equal than others (another shout out to Orwell.) Access to birth control and OBGYN doctors is so limited, and fertility treatments are so expensive, its just time before we are all looking like handmaids.

But Emily St. John Mandel’s book Station Eleven is haunting me right now. Four years after I read it. In her story everyone started to catch colds and die. Only some survive, and no one knows why or how. Self isolation had been part of the story, too. As I remain in my home with my family, keeping away from others who may have been in contact with people that have been tested positive, it makes me wonder. Will I need to strike out to find others?

The bonus of being isolated is there is plenty of time to catch up on my reading. Let me know if there is anything you think I should pick up during this incredibly strange time.