Nicole’s picks for 2011

Before 2012 officially starts (since today doesn’t count as it is still a federal holiday), I figured I would at least make one contribution to BGB since I fell off the face of this blog this year. And not only did I barely post (if at all), my reading significantly slowed down. Compared to our esteemed blogger, Tim, I only read about half the books that he did and almost half of what I read in 2010 – ugh.

2012 New Year’s Resolution – Read more and Relax (by reading more)!!!

Here are my top five 2011 books in no particular order but with non-fiction slightly edging out fiction:

My Korean Deli: Risking It All For A Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe.  A hilarious story of a young editor at the Paris Review who buys a Korean deli in Brooklyn with his wife and mother-in-law.  It’s a great tale of entrepeneurship, family and cultural differences.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson.  Written by the author of Devil in the White City, one of my all-time favorite books, this story recounts the time period when William Dodd, a college professor, became the US Ambassador to Berlin right before Hitler came to power.  This time period is fascinating and you realize how easily world events could have been completely changed.

Destiny of the Republic: A tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard.  I loved this book because it was filled with interesting facts and stories from turn of the century America.  Not only did I learn a a lot about Pres Garfield who I knew nothing about, but I also learned much more than my Encyclopedia Brittanica education about Alexander Graham Bell and the evolution of medicine in this country.

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty.  A novel about a woman who after waking up from an accident in her gym thinks that she is newly married, pregnant with her first child and madly in love with her husband instead of 39 yrs old with three kids and in the middle of a bad divorce.  A great vacation read.

The Paris Wife by Paula Mclain.  I loved this year’s movie, Midnight in Paris, and this could have been the companion read to the movie.  Set in jazz-age Paris, this book tells the tumultous love story of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley.  Filled with memorable characters such as the Fitzgerald’s and Gertrude Stein, this story made me wish that I could go back in time (like Owen Wilson).

2010 Top Picks

I shouldn’t be allowed to post my  2010 picks since I fell of the blog this year but hey I’m looking out at more than 2 feet of snow having just finished two of the books listed below and thought what better way to jumpstart 2011. 

So here goes (in no particular order):

Just Kids by Patti Smith (which clearly wins the BGB  book of the year award)

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson

Game Change by John Heileman and Mark Halperin

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Room by Emily Donaghue

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

How Green was my Valley by Richard Llewellwyn (everyone should read at least one classic per year)

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Eating Animals

Ignorance is bliss.  These words could not ring more true after reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.  Foer’s prior novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, rank among some of my favorite books so I was eager to read his foray into non-fiction.  I was even more excited that his new book was about something near and dear to my heart – food.  Food has always been a huge, wonderful part of my life.

I am one of those few people who spent their childhood eating dinner with my entire family and now my kids sit down and eat with their parents every night.  Common conversation around the table is what we are eating at our next meal, the opening of a new restaurant, or a great recipe we saw in Bon Appetit.  You get the idea.  That being said, I am very cognizant of what my family consumes and buy local, sustainable products as much as possible. Until I read this book, I thought I was doing a pretty good job.  Well – my pride in being a conscientious consumer has been tossed away now that Foer has seared into my brain the horrors of the poultry, pork, and fish industries.

Foer decided to write this book once his son was born and he wanted to fully understand how he was going to raise his child and what sustenance he was going to provide him.  Foer had drifted in and out of being a vegetarian most of his life but was by no means one of these hard-core vegans.  His grandmother was a big influence in his life and all of his memories of her were related to food and therefore he recognizes and talks a lot about how food is so much more than sustenance.  Food represents family, love, friends, and community which makes our choices much more difficult.  Unfortunately, 99% of animals consumed in this country are factory farmed which is a inhumane, unhealthy, and ruining our environment.  This is the focus of the book.  Foer gives detailed descriptions of how chickens, turkey, pigs and fish are factory farmed and I found every chapter upsetting and revolting.  From an ethics and moral standpoint, the abuses that take place in these factories are horrifying especially after you read the descriptions of how intelligent pigs are (much more intelligent than a dog) and realize the fear and pain that they endure.  Pain and suffering which is caused my man’s desire for cheap, tasty meat.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses?  If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy.  Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?  It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it.  And how would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting?  How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly?  Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

And from a hygenic standpoint, it is nauseating to read the accounts of these animals wallowing in their own shit.

Every week, millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by heart and lung infections, cancerous turmors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers.

Foer’s brilliance in writing this book is that he never comes across as proseletizying.   He addresses the horrors of factory farming with eye-witness accounts, interviews with workers, health experts and scientists.  And all the information is presented in clear, concise terms.  When I was only half-way through the book, I made the decision that I would NEVER buy pork, chicken or turkey from the Smithfields or Tysons of the world ever again.  And that I would also try to significantly cut-down on my families’ consumption of animals.  But then I came to the ending of the book where Foer basically says that doing those things are not enough.  His view is that every time you are dining with friends who are serving factory farmed animals or eating in restaurant, then you are contributing to the on-going demand for these animals.  As he states, it is a lot easier to tell your friends when they invite you over to dinner that you are a vegetarian rather than ask where the chicken came from.

This is one of the few books that I have ever read that truly could  impact my life.  I haven’t decided at this point how I am going to proceed.  In the short-term I am going to stick to my original plan and just do my best but it’s not so easy.   As I was making my lunch this morning, I stopped and threw out the Boar’s Head turkey

[Turkeys]…..are given more antibiotics than any other farmed animals.  Which encourages antibiotic resistance.  Which makes these indispensable drugs less effective for humans.  In a perfect direct way, the turkeys on our tables are making it harder to cure human illness.

I can’t say happy reading but I can assure you that this will be one of the more thought provoking books you’ve read in a long time.

Lark & Termite

Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips was an interesting read for me because it was one of those books that I didn’t embrace until I was almost half-way through it.    The first half of the book is mostly character driven while the second half is much more plot driven.  This novel focuses on six characters living in West Virginia in the 1950′s.   One of the characters, Corporal Robert Leavitt,  is stationed in Korea in 1950 and his story takes place during the No Gun Ri massacre.  The story goes back and forth between each character and at the beginning I had a difficult time seeing how they all tied together.

Lark, a seventeen year old who has spent most of her childhood taking care of her disabled brother, is the most interesting character.  In one sense, she is completely naive and selfless and assumes her care-giving duties as a gift rather than a burden.

I’m so used to being with Termite, he feels like alone to me.  He’s like a hum that always hums so the edge of where I am is blunt and softened.

But by the end of the novel, she becomes the only character who takes charge of her life and makes a significant decision to improve her and Termite’s life.  Along the way we learn that she has been sexually involved with her neighbor from a young age and that she is much more aware of what is going on around her than you initially think.  What is most striking about Lark is the amazing sibling bond that she feels with Termite despite the  imbalanced relationship.

Termite, who is severely disabled,  is the character that I had the most difficulty with.  Phillips did an amazing job in writing Termite’s thoughts and feelings into the story from a first person viewpoint but I found it to be almost too esoteric.

Sudden morning air floats low to the ground amid the small houses like fragrant evaporating mist, a cool bath of dew and shadow and damp honeysuckle scent.  He gasps and hears the sharp grass under them move its fibrous roots.

You get the picture……Since I am much more of a “realistic” reader, I sometimes got lost in the endless metaphors of Termite’s voice.  From the reviews that I have read of this book, Termite’s portrayal was one of the triumphs of the book but I found it was a little too “lyrical” without moving the book forward enough.

The other characters include Lola, Lark and Termite’s mother, who abandoned them for reasons we learn at the end of the book; Nonie, the no-no-nonsense aunt who raises them and has borne the brunt of the mistakes her sister and lover made; Corporal Leavitt who is the father of Termite and in my opinion was included solely to show the atrocities of war and finally Charlie, who is Nonie’s lover and becomes a more important character as the book progresses.

As language driven as this book is, it is very suspenseful and there were many twists and turns along the way.  When I finished the book, I almost wanted to go back and re-read it because I felt that there were so many symbols and underlying themes (such as ghosts) that I probably glossed over.

It is only upon reflection of this novel that I realized how expertly Phillips conveyed the classic American themes of family, small-town life and war.  Lark and Termite was a National Book Award finalist and if you are interested in the use of language and style and how it can define a character, you won’t be disappointed.

Nicole’s Picks for ’09

It’s hard to believe that 2009 has come and is almost gone.  I guess it is true that the older you get, the faster time goes by.  When I first sat down to compile my “best of” list, my initial thought was that this was not such a great year for great reads.  After reviewing my entire 2009 catalogue (love Shelfari….), I realized that I did read some really great books; it was just interspersed with a lot of mediocre books.  And even worse than last year, I posted very infrequently - sorry Tim!  If I can’t seem to get my act together to write a review, you can at least take a look at my Top 10 of 2009 (in no particular order other than I am listing non-fiction first)………

• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
• Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie
• River of Doubt, Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard
• My Father’s Paradise by Ariel Sabar
• Push by Sapphire
• All Other Nights by Dara Horn
• Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
• Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
• The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamnada Ngozi Adichi

As Hanukah approaches this week and I have no answer for my husband who  keeps saying “Do you want a Kindle or not?”  I would like to know who amongst the BGB readers have made the switch.

Where the Wild Things Are – The Movie

After spending over 12 hours of the first part of my weekend immersed in baseball (Go Yankees!!), my boys and I tore ourselves away from our home screen and headed out on Sunday to the big screen to see Where the Wild Things Are.

There has been so much hype (much on this site) and I had read so many reviews that I almost expected to be disappointed.  To my delight – the movie exceeded my expectations and and was truly one of the best family movies I’ve seen in years.  When everyone in your family (ranging in age from 9 to 40something) gives the movie a 9 out of 10 rating – you know it’s good.

For those of us that are Dave Eggers fans, his writing style and depth of emotions are front and center in the screenplay.  The movie expertly depicts how deeply children are filled with emotion through the main character, Max, but even more so through the Wild Things.  Carol, the “lead” monster who is voiced by James Gandolfino is such a complex character – wild and crazy one minute and deeply hurt by his monster friend’s abandonment in the next scene – that you can almost hear your own child’s voice in the dialogue.

The hopes and desires that the Wild Things have for their king are what most humans want in life – stability, friendship and fun.  Where the Wild Things Are  is as much an adult movie as it is a children’s movie.  About 20 minutes into the movie – I was concerned that it would be over my kids’ heads.  Not only did they completely get it but afterward wanted to talk about why the different characters behaved the way they did.  When was the last time you saw a kids movie and actually had something to discuss afterward?

The costumes were fantastic and overall the movie is visually stunning and a complete joy to watch.   It was worth the admission price to hear my own son, Max, get out of the car this morning and turn to me with an impish grin and say “Let the wild rumpus begin!

***Great post, Nicole, and Ima let you finish, but because we are a blog that explores the intersection of books and music (and film) – be sure to check out the excellent soundtrack to the movie by Karen O (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and the Kids — Tim****

Sag Harbor

It might not seem that I have anything in common with the protagonist of Sag Harbor, a 15 year old black kid from NYC who is spending his summer out on the Hamptons, but this book literally made me feel like I was reading a story about my teenage summer. Why the similarity? Because this book is set in 1985 and Benji, the protagonist, is a teenager who loves New Wave music, bad 80′s sitcoms, and uses all the queer catch phrases that were heard around my school that same year when I happened to be 15 years old.

Sag Harbor is Colson Whitehead’s fourth book (a previous book, John Henry Days, was a Pulitzer and NBCC finalist) and is autobiographical. The story relives the joys of teenage summers, especially one spent in a family beach house in a town where all your friends come back year after year. Sag Harbor is apparently a (or I should say the only) beach town in the Hamptons whose summer population is upper-middle class black families. Benji and his family own their summer home and have been vacationing in Sag Harbor his entire life.

The story begins right after Memorial Day when Benji and all his summer friends regroup after spending the school year apart. Benji attends an exclusive, mostly white NYC prep school.  It is up to his more urban, hip summer friends to school him in the latest rap music and handshakes. Benji spends the summer working at the local ice-cream store, thinking about girls incessantly, hanging with his home-boys, sneaking beers on the beach, and blasting music on his boom-box. One of the funnier scenes in the book is when Lisa Lisa comes to town and Benji and his friends try to get into the local club to see them play. Music is featured prominently throughout the book and Colson Whitehead even put together an exclusive playlist of nine essential tracks found here which is truly a blast from the past.

Sag Harbor is the perfect, summer vacation read; a hilarious, hip coming-of-age story which made me realize that the time period in which you grew up creates as much of a bond as your race, financial, or social status. The pop-culture of the mid 80′s defined my teenage years and those shared memories brought a big smile to my face.

Away We Go

I am a huge Dave Eggers fan (as many of us are at BGB) so it really didn’t take much to convince me to dash out to my local indie movie theater as soon as Away We Go started showing. This movie met all my expectations. It is quirky, sweet, funny and has a great soundtrack. After the movie, my husband asked me “What was the movie really about?” Upon discussion, we realized that it was about life, being a parent, making decisions on how to raise your kids and that ultimately there is no right answer.

There are five different segments in the movie each of which portrays a family with very different beliefs on family and particularly child-rearing. Some are hilarious, some are pathetic but mostly it demonstrates that you can only do your best and hope that your kids turn out okay. The two main characters, John Krasinski from the Office and Maya Rudolph from SNL are in their mid 30’s, expecting their first child and feel that they just don’t have their shit together. In one of the more poignant scenes of the movie – they are debating whether they are really “fuck-ups” or not. That is one conversation that all of us have had at some point in our lives.

Eggers and his co-author wife, Vendela Vida, have denied that the movie was autobiographical. Even if it is not exactly a story of their lives, I felt that Eggers was in his comfort zone with the themes from his other books: loss of parents, childhood, family, etc.

This is a perfect movie for a date night with your spouse especially if you want to reminisce about that magical yet crazy time in your life when you were pregnant for the first time and trying to figure everything out.

(Heather at I am Fuel… was also charmed by the movie and some excerpts from the soundtrack )

My Father’s Paradise

Yona Sabar was born in Zakho, Kurdistan in the mid 1930s. Zakho is a remote city surrounded by mountains in Northern Iraq and for three thousand years was home to Jews, Christians, and Muslims who lived peacefully with each other. This part of Iraq is so isolated that it was one of the only places in the world where the inhabitants still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Every else in the Middle East, Arabic became the dominant language when Muslim armies from Arabia conquered Mesopotamia but for time immemorial, Aramaic remained the language of the Jews of Kurdistan.

My Father’s Paradise: A son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq is told by Ariel Sabar, an American-born journalist and Yona’s son.  The story begins with Yona’s grandfather, Ephraim, who was the only fabric dyer in Zakho. He was a religious and spiritual man and the stories surrounding his practice of Judaism exemplify how robust Judaism was in this city.

Yona’s father, Rahamim, and uncles, expanded the family business and became prosperous merchants. Yona lived a charmed childhood filled with family, friends, and even education as he was one of the few children in his community who went to school. This all changed in the 1950s with the forced evacuation of all Jews from Iraq. After the establishment of the state of Israel, Iraq renounced the citizenship of its Jewish population. There was a mass exodus of 120,000 Jews to Israel and Yona and his family were part of it.

Yona’s family arrives in Israel as penniless immigrants at the bottom of the social ladder. As described in the book, Israel was completely unprepared for the mass influx of immigrants in the early 1950s, and there were not enough residences nor jobs for all the new arrivals. Furthermore, the Middle Eastern Jews were considered second class citizens as compared to the European Jews. Yona’s memories of his parents struggle for survival and daily humiliations are central to Yona’s future destiny.

Yona has a menial day time job and attends night school. Through his hard work, he is accepted into Hebrew University. While taking a language course, his professor takes an interest in him since Yona speaks Aramaic, which at that time was an unexplored frontier in linguistics. Yona flourishes at Hebrew University and after graduation leaves Israel to earn his doctorate at Yale in Neo-Aramaic and eventually ends up as a professor at UCLA. Yona became the language’s foremost expert in the world as well as one of the only people who has documented the culture and life of the Kurdistan Jews.

This memoir is told by Ariel who had a very distant relationship with his father growing up and never tried nor wanted to understand his father’s past and who he was. It is not until Ariel has a family of his own and he visits Israel with his parents does he realize the importance of his family’s story. In 2004 – he quits his job as a newspaper journalist and sets out on a journey to explore his family’s history. The result of his journey is this gripping, captivating history.

A finalist in the non-fiction category for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle’s awards, My Father’s Paradise, is certainly worthy of this prize.  The book reads like a novel while rewarding the reader with a fascinating history and linguistics lesson.

My Jesus Year

Benyamin Cohen, the author of My Jesus Year: A Rabbi’s Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith, recently spoke at my local JCC. I was unable to attend but the flyer for the event sparked my interest in his memoir.

Cohen is a 30 something, native Atlantan, son of an Orthodox rabbi, who is spiritually void and feels that he has spent most of his life going through the motions of Orthodox Judaism. And as described throughout this memoir – there are many, many motions. If you are a practicing Orthodox Jew, your daily life revolves around many repetitive prayers and rituals. Cohen believes that much of his religious life is spend interpreting laws down to the minutiae. For example, the Talmud (which is the basis for all Jewish law) when exploring the prohibition against cooking on the Sabbath questions:

“How long must something be on the fire before it is considered ‘cooked’? Is direct heat even needed? Is defrosting something equivalent to cooking it? Is salting vegetables equivalent to preserving them and thus too similar to cooking?”

Judaism is a religion in which actions trump faith. This type of religious conviction is completely anathema to most Christians. They merely want you to accept Christ.

Cohen is troubled that synagogue attendance is at an all-time low while church parking lots are filled to capacity. He describes how in Atlanta, there are no fewer than 15 mega churches with more than ten thousand congregants each, the most in the entire country.

Cohen decides to spend a year exploring Christianity. He hopes that whatever he finds will ignite a new found passion and enthusiasm for his faith. Every Sunday (and occasionally some days in between) he attends a different church.

The chapters in the book in which he visited mega-churches with rock concerts, consumer products and thousands and thousands of cheering Christians are what I found most fascinating and entertaining. While Cohen’s commentary can sometimes be a little snarky, I found that he did not come across as condescending but rather inspired by how many people he interacted with who had such strong convictions of faith and spirituality.

The more amusing chapters are when he attends a Christian professional wrestling match:

“Colt Derringer turned his back on God and UCW [ United Christian Wrestling], but maintained the World Heavyweight Title. What’s now in store for this tortured soul?”

The woman selling nachos tells me that more than thirty children have given themselves over to Christ in the last month after these matches.

and when he visits a Pentecostal revival. Cohen notes that in a recent study nearly 20 percent of Christians in America speak in tongues several times a year.

This book is a quick, funny read that makes you realize how religious Americans are. Living in New York which is somewhat “areligious” and filled with so many Jews, this book was an eye opener for me. Cohen’s thoughts on how to take the most popular practices of Christianity (music, hope, communal participation) and use them to increase religious Jewish participation are spot-on and something that Jewish leaders should consider.

Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories

About 1 year ago, I read one of my favorite books in 2008, The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff (my review). As with any first novel, you always wonder if the author’s subsequent books will be as good. Thankfully, Groff didn’t disappoint and she is officially on my favorite author’s list. She just published, Delicate Edible Birds, a collection of 9 short stories and each one contains the same lyrical prose that I loved in her first book.  The central characters in these stories are strong women who live life to the fullest and experience great change within each story.

L. DeBard and Aliette was my personal favorite. The story is set in 1918 and Aliette is a 16 yr old girl who suffered an illness (polio perhaps?) that has rendered her legs as…

…small, wrinkled sticks…..her kneecaps like dinner rolls skewered with willow switches….

L. DeBard is a 43 yr old, former Olympic swimmer who is hired by Aliette to teach her to swim and get her legs working again. Aliette seduces DeBard and they have a passionate love affair. The story ends in tragedy, but I don’t want to give away too much because it was so gripping that I couldn’t put the book down. DeBard and Aliette and their love affair are not the only characters and plot in the story. Groff excels in her ability to so richly describe all her characters and incorporate other fascinating storylines into the main plot. During this time period – an influenza epidemic is ravaging New York and Groff uses this as a backdrop to describe the hysteria and insanity that grips Aliette’s household. Aliette’s former nurse, Rosalind who becomes her father’s lover goes nearly mad with fear of influenza.

…..she makes them wear masks inside. She forces them to carry hot coals sprinkled with sulfur. The apartment stinks like Satan…..And when Aliette comes to L. in the night, she swings her coals like a priestess swinging a censer.

Groff’s imagery completely immerses the reader in the storyline.

Majorette was another favorite of mine. In this story, we follow a girl born in the early 1950′s to a “white-trash” family who pays her little attention. When she is 10 years old, she discovers baton twirling and twirling she does.

She took the hollow ringing in her and twirled it away, ……she sent batons spinning up like whirligigs into the night sky…..”

You can feel the girl’s pain and loneliness through Groff’s description of her behavior:

And she said Yes to the boys who called for her, and Yes to the football players who jogged after her before practice to ask her to the movies, and Yes to parking in the makeout lane, and Yes to their hands under her skirts, and Yes when they pushed their jeans down their thin hips because by then she forgot what it meant to say No.

Baton twirling leads to beauty pageants which lead to a college scholarship, a stable marriage and children of her own. And in Groff’s words:

This is how a life falls into place.

My final favorite is the last story, Delicate Edible Birds. The title refers to l’ortolan, a tiny bird which is an illegal delicacy in France.  Secret societies exist in which people blindfold themselves and eat the bird whole. As an aside, my brother who is a chef wanted to name his restaurant L’Ortolan but we convinced him that this would not be appealing to many people.

Bern, the main character in this story, is the most independent and fierce of all. She is a reporter in France at the beginning of the German occupation in WWII. She is fleeing Paris with several colleagues when they are captured in the countryside by a Nazi sympathizer. Bern’s strength and ultimate decision to save her fellow travelers is riveting. I loved this character and even more so when you consider what an enigma she was during this time period.

I often forget how enjoyable a well-written collection of short stories is. Take a break from the novel or whatever you are reading and pick up this book – you won’t regret it.

2008 Best Reads

I had a great year reading in 2008. I read more than ever and when I took a look back, I realized that I read a lot of really good books. Unfortunately, my posts were few and far between. Oh well – better to read and not post than not read at all………So here is my top ten (in no particular order)

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
• Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
• The Exception by Christian Jungersen (review)
• People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (review)
• The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff (review)
• Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen
• The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado (review)
• Infidel by Aayan Hirsi Ali

Other BGB Year-end Lists:

• Tim’s Favorites of 2008
• Tim’s Favorite Children’s Illustrated Books ‘08-ish
• Shaft’s Best of 2008

Happy Election Day!

What an exciting and historic day. Even though my home state of Connecticut is a foregone conclusion – I was still in line at 5:50 am when the polls opened and there was definitely electricity in the air. We are hosting an election night party (tasty Obamatini’s are calling my name) and have included kids in the festivities. Here is the 2008 Presidential Election Quiz I am giving to the kids (ages 6-12). How many questions can you answer?

1. What state is Sarah Palin from?
2. Where is Barack Obama’s father from?
3. What is Joe Biden’s current job?
4. Name 2 other people that ran against Barack Obama for the democratic nomination.
5. Where did John McCain go to college?
6. John McCain will continue the war in Iraq. True or False?
7. The next President will be number in US history.
8. How many electoral votes does Connecticut have?
9. How many electoral votes do the candidates need to win?
10. What is the minimal amount of electoral votes that a state gets?
11. What is the most common first name for a President?
12. Name two presidents that have the same last name?
13. When does the president take office?
14. What animal represents the Democratic party?
15. Who was the Democratic candidate for our Congressional representative (CT 4th district)?

P.S. In my children’s school mock elections – both of their classes went 100% for Obama.

Where I Come From

I kicked off this past weekend by attending one of the many cool events hosted by New Yorker magazine as part of their weekend festival. Friday night was Fiction night with an unbelievable line-up of authors. The session I attended was “Where I Come From” – a discussion with Junot Diaz, Shalom Auslander and Sherman Alexie. A Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Foreskin’s Lament and The Absolute Diary of a Part-Time Indian were all amongst my favorite books of the past year so I was pretty psyched.

I had not given much thought to the commonality of these authors since they all come from such different backgrounds – Dominican kid growing up in Jersey, ultra-orthodox kid from a Hasidic community and an Indian kid from the rez. But what made the discussion so interesting was how similar their backgrounds all were. To put it in context – all 3 of these authors are approx our age (this is a generality about the readers of this site but let’s just say that the 80′s were our formative adolescent years) and they were all outsiders growing up. When I say “outsiders” – I can’t stress enough how these 3 guys were completely miserable in high school. Diaz talked about being a Dominican nerd in a black/Puerto Rican school who just wanted to read all the time, whilst Alexie was the token brown kid in all-white right wing school. And even though Auslander was part of the “in” crowd because he wore his “kippah” in the cool way – his inner struggle with God tormented him through his adolescence.

Even more fascinating was that Diaz and Alexie both had the same response to why they wrote the books that they did – “To fill a nothingness and/or silence.” Both of them talked about how there were not any books from their culture about nerds and dorks. Most Latin American and Native American fiction particularly by young male authors were all very macho, aggressive and tough and that books about being a nerd just didn’t exist. They wanted to write a book that appealed to who they were not who they wanted to be. They both seemed surprised at how many people their books touched and spoke to (not to mention the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award that they respectively won).

These authors were as inspiring as readers than as writers. They all spoke extensively about their love of books of all genres. Diaz said that he refers to himself as more of a reader than a writer because he loves to read so much more than write. They were all irreverent, brilliant and open about themselves. I would have loved to just hang out with them at a bar and swap nerdy high-school stories. A classic insight into Alexie was that he described himself in high-school as “all the Breakfast Club characters rolled up into one.”

Shalom Auslander was exactly how I pictured him after reading Foreskin’s Lament. Throughout the book – he describes his torment in growing up in a Hasidic community in which you were controlled fear. He discussed the emphasis placed on the forbiddeness of any type of sexuality particularly masturbation. One of the rabbi’s threats were that if you masturbated you would end up in a giant, boiling pot of sperm for all eternity when you died. Can you imagine???? I digress but I can’t get that story out of my head. This book really haunted me because I couldn’t get over how tormented and angry Auslander was, not to mention that the Judaism he describes is so vastly different from my own. And what struck me after hearing him speak last night is that he is even MORE angry than I thought. This is one angry and bitter dude. Sad.

All in all – a great literary event. And to continue the cultural festivities, Mr. Nitro is attending “Worst Nightmares: Horror Movies with Wes Craven and Hideo Nakata”. If I thought it was a quirky crowd at the author’s discussion, I can’t even imagine the crowd at that event.

The Exception

If a friend recommended a book that she described in her email as “a thriller translated from Danish, the story has broad psychological and moral themes” – would you be racing out to the bookstore? Probably not, but after my friend could not stop talking about this book – I decided to give it a go. And I’m so happy that I did. The Exception by Christian Jungersen is one of the best books I have recently read.

This book, a bestseller in Europe, is a fascinating study of human nature. The story is set in a non-profit organization that studies and disseminates information on genocide. This organization is only staffed by 5 employees and when a couple of them receive a death threat – the dynamics within their little office quickly spiral downhill.

Their first thought is that one of the war criminals that they have been tracking down is threatening them but through the irrationality of human nature, they quickly turn on each other. Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of one of the employees which allows the reader to see how the same incident or situation can be interpreted completely differently by each of the characters within the novel.

The 4 women who are central to the book all have their own personal histories and tragedies. One was bullied as a child, one has a debilitating arthritic disease, one was taken hostage in Africa while working for an aid organization and the last one had serious relationship issues. These personal histories all play a large part in how they react to the death threats and how they start to become suspicious of each other and end up forming factions within their own organization.

What is so ironic about their deteriorating relationship is that these are women that study the psychology of genocide and what causes rational people to commit murder and atrocious crimes; yet, they end up demonstrating many of the same behaviors which they study. They use their subject knowledge to further their own suspicions rather than taking a step back and becoming aware that their actions mirror many of the abhorrent behaviors during genocide.

The unraveling of who sent the death threats takes many twists and turns and the author leaves you in suspense until the very end and even then does not positively solve the mystery for you.

I also admired the way that Jungersen used his setting to educate the reader about genocide. I learned so much about the various genocides that have occurred during the 20th century as well as the psychological studies about group think and behaviors in these situations. There were a few studies described that I already knew about such as the Stanford Prison Experiment in which college students volunteered for a study and 1/2 are prisoners and 1/2 are guards.  Within days the prisoners became passive, depressed, and despairing while the guards became agressive, callous and hostile. There were no significant personality differences between the 2 groups at the beginning of the experiment but it demonstrated that people act according to the roles given to them by external forces.  There were many other experiments and studies that Jungersen described that I found fascinating.

The Exception was educational, thought provoking, entertaining, and a real page-turner. And it accomplishes all this even though it is set in Denmark and translated into English. Kudos to Jungersen – not an easy feat.

The Man in the Sharkskin Suit

I read a lot of Jewish lit and most of it revolves around Ashkenazi Jews (those who immigrated from Eastern Europe). I haven’t read many stories or even know many Sephardic Jews – those from Spain and the Middle East. The Man in the Sharkskin Suit is the story of a prestigious, Jewish family in Cairo in the 1940′s and 50′s who eventually flees to Brooklyn under the Nasser regime.

Lucette Lagnado, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal retells her father’s (Leon aka “Le Capitain”) life which is the opposite of the American dream. Throughout most of his life, he is a dashing, cosmopolitan entrepeneur who lives life to the fullest. He begins his day in synagogue, then goes on to wheel and deal (Lagnado never really knew how her father earned a living – just that he seemed to be some kind of high-end peddler) and then socializes with Cairo’s glitterati late into the evening. Leon is portrayed as a dashing figure, the title of the book stems from the fact that he always wore white sharkskin suits, and he is idolized by the author who becomes her father’s companion throughout most of his life.

Lagnado is the youngest of four and her father dotes on her and gives her all of the affection that he does not give towards his wife and other children. While Lagnado sees her father through rose colored glasses, she does a good job of also showing the dark side of Leon. Her parent’s had a very unhappy marriage and her other siblings had a much more strained relationship with their father. Lagnado’s mother is the least likable character in the memoir. She is a weak woman who realizes that her marriage was a mistake in the first few months and spends the next 50 years as the miserable, underdog.

With the rising tide of anti-semitism after the formation of Israel and Nasser’s rise to power in Egypt, life becomes more and more difficult for the Jews of Cairo. Finally in 1963, Leon realizes that he has no choice but to leave Cairo. The rules were very stringent about emigration and families were not allowed to leave with any money – only clothing and personal items. Jewish Services agencies around the world took responsibility for emigration of these Egyptian Jews and most settled in either Israel or America. Lagnado’s family ends up in Brooklyn via Paris penniless and with no prospects for a viable future. The remainder of the book details the hardships that they encountered including the author’s serious illness and the eventual estrangement between the other siblings and their parents.

This book is a heart-felt, personal account of a family’s tumultous life which started in the Old World and ends in the New World. What does not change throughout the memoir is Leon’s unwavering adherence to Judaism and his deep love for his daughter. I really enjoyed this book and was most fascinated by the description of Cairo in the 1940′s. I had no idea that it rivaled Paris with its nightlife and was a booming melting pot of Christian’s, Muslims, Jews, Egyptians and British who were stationed there during the war. Leon represented a time and place in history that his daughter beautifully recreated with this memoir.

The Monsters of Templeton

Having recently read Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat (both excellent by the way), I was in the mood for a good, light-hearted novel. And I found it in Lauren Groff’s debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton.

This book is set in the fictional town of Templeton, which is actually Cooperstown, NY where the author grew up. She snatched the name from James Fenimore Cooper who also wrote his books about Cooperstown but called it Templeton. She also incorporated many of the same characters in her novel that were in Cooper’s: Marmaduke Temple, Chingachgook, and Chief Uncas are just a few. As Groff states in the author’s note, “Fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.” Now only if all these fake memoirists of the past few weeks could have kept that in mind.

The book’s central character is Willie Upton who returns home to Templeton broken-hearted and pregnant after having an affair with her professor. Willie is infamous in town because she is the last descendant of the founding father of Templeton, Marmaduke Temple who settled the town in the late 1700′s. She returns home to her kookie mother who was a former hippie and had always told Willie that she was a love-child from her days living in a commune. Her mother proceeds to reveal to Willie that her father is actually a Templeton resident and is also a relative within the original Temple family. Her mother leaves it to Willie to research and discover who her father is.

With this premise, the book travels back and forth in time through the many generations of the Temple family. Even though Marmaduke Temple was a Quaker, he had dalliances with his black slave and a Native American girl both of whom bore children. This created quite a complex family tree and through Willie’s research, we learn about the many characters in her family as well as the evolution of the town of Templeton. Of course there are secrets revealed and many scandals uncovered in the course of her research. As Willie grapples with her own identity and eventually discovers who her father is, we witness her transformation from a lost, little girl to a more grounded woman.

As a backdrop throughout the story is the ginormous (I know this isn’t a word, but I always thought that it should have been) monster that has been discovered in Glimmerglass lake which the town borders. Basically, this is a type of Loch Ness monster that has lived in the lake for over 200 years and finally dies and comes to the surface to the astonishment of the citizens. The monster is a symbol of all the dark secrets of the town that had always been hidden under the surface.

Groff’s prose is wonderful and lyrical and her descriptions of the characters are rich in imagery and their individual voice. Each character is so original and authentically portrayed and her choice of words to establish their voice is never random. The book was filled with so many great characters all of whom I wish I could have met. And none more so than the “Monster.” The epilogue is actually the Monster’s voice:

On the day it dies, the Monster thinks of:

………and how it will soon see the people legs kickety-kicking up there in the bright surface and how it loves to watch the legs kickety-kick and how it always hopes the people belonging to the legs forget to go up into the air and begin to sink;……and how sometimes the little dead people would come untethered from the lakeweed the monster had tied them in so they wouldn’t go floating up into the broad air, for even when they turned purple and their flesh fell off, the monster loves them;

I had so much fun reading this book and looked forward to picking it up every day because it took me away to a mesmerizing, magical world.

The Optimist’s Daughter

Our book club selection this month was The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty. I was looking forward to reading the book because I had never read anything by Welty and felt that I should have. This was her novel that won the Pulitizer Prize in the early 70′s and I had absolutely no idea what the book was about.

Based on the title, I assumed at least one of the characters in the book would be optimistic. That was not the case at all and our book club was quite puzzled over the title of this book. All of the characters were depressed and sad. Our group also felt that the book was more of a short story than a novel and in fact, while doing some research, we found out that it did start out as a short story and then Welty turned it into a novel.

This is a very Southern tale set in Mount Salus, Mississippi. The main character, Laurel, has come to be with her father, the Judge, while he undergoes surgery in New Orleans. Also present, is the Judge’s second and much younger wife, Faye, who is the antithesis of Laurel’s mother. The first half of the book takes place in the hospital and moves very slowly. The tale just meanders along during the Judge’s recovery until things go wrong and the Judge dies.

The second half of the novel is where things get interesting. Laurel and Faye return to the home in which Laurel grew up to bury the Judge. Faye is a crass, lower class, money grubbing woman who first claims that her entire family is dead but then has to backpedal when her family shows up from out of town for the funeral. Her family is a caricature of lower-class, white southerners who will show up for any type of melodrama and take over the party. Laurel and her friends (she calls them the Bridesmaids), are disgusted by Faye but take little action to do anything about it. They are a throwback in time and Laurel, herself, takes a backseat and allows Faye to control everything and doesn’t seem to care that Faye is going to throw out all her childhood belongings and memories.

There is not much that happens in this book but to me it was a good character study of the South in the 1960s. Outward appearance, dignity and your place in society were held above everything else. I wish it had been a short story and don’t really understand why it won the Pulitzer. Many in our book club did not like it at all but I found it to be a quirky, Southern tale with little action but depth of character.

People of the Book

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks has received a lot of positive press and the subject was definitely right up my alley. A couple of years ago, Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for March which was not a favorite of mine.  I was hoping that People of the Book would meet my expectations. And it did. I really liked this book – the subject matter, the writing style, and especially the way the book was laid out.

People of the Book tells the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah. A Haggadah is the book that is read during the Passover seder that tells the story of Passover. The Sarajevo Haggadah dated back hundreds of years and was illustrated with medieval illuminations, which was very unusual for a Jewish religious book of that time period.

The story begins with Hanna, an ancient book expert, who is asked to do some restoration and write an essay about the Haggadah after the war in Bosnia has ended. The book was saved by a Muslim librarian while Sarejevo was under siege and is now going to be put on display at a National Museum. While Hanna is doing her restoration, she finds some interesting artifacts in the book (a butterfly wing, drops of wine, salt, a white hair) and these artifacts are the device through which Brooks tells her story.

Each artifact takes the reader back to a certain time period in history with the family that was in possession of the Haggadah. The story goes back in time, so we start in Sarejevo in 1940, then go back to Vienna in the late 1800s, then to Venice in the 1600s, Tarragona in 1492 and finally Sevile in 1480. Between each historical section, the book switches back to Hanna and her own story.

The historical sections of the book were the most engrossing. Each period in time demonstrated the importance of books and their impact on civilization as well as the religious diversity throughout Europe in each of these periods. Each individual story always had a Jewish family’s life intermingled with that of either a Catholic or Muslim depending on the location and time period.

Even though each subsection was little more than a chapter, Brooks did an amazing job of educating the reader about the city during that time period. Through her description of clothing, past-times, servants, etc, you really felt like you were immersed in the lives of the families that had the Haggadah. Each story unfortunately ended violently with one group of people pitted against each other. It was fitting that the Haggadah ended up in Sarajevo, which had suffered appalling ethnic cleansing in the 1990s, because all the historical periods that Brooks describe end up suffering some form of ethnic/religious cleansing. The book is the artifact that survives the human violence even when its owners do not.

I was least interested in the story of Hanna. She is the daughter of a brilliant, Australian surgeon who finds out her own secret family history in the course of researching the Haggadah. I found her and her story a little dull and superfluous to the rest of the story.

Brooks’ description of the Haggadah was so rich that I felt like I could almost feel and smell the pages of the manuscript. When I finished reading the book, I wanted to go visit the Library of Congress and just look through some really old books and try to envision their story and when they were written and where they have travelled. For anyone who has a love of books as well as history, People of the Book will be a very satisfying read.

When We Were Bad

Bad is the operative word for this review. When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson is an annoying, not funny, trite read.

The book is described as a humorous look at the lives of a Jewish family in England. The family matriarch, Claudia, is a famous rabbi and believes that she has the “perfect” family with 4 wonderful children and a doting husband. This perfection starts unraveling when her eldest son leaves his bride at the altar and her eldest daughter starts shunning her familial duties and suffers an identity crisis. The other 2 kids are portrayed as total losers throughout the book (they are both in their late 20′s, living at home and their lives revolve around pleasing “mummy”), yet their family continues to dote on them.

I did not like any of characters and found them all to be insipid and uninteresting. There is neither character nor story development, and the chapters just flip between the boring lives of each family member.

Needless to say I am surprised that this book received critical acclaim, and I remember picking it up after seeing it on one of the Best of 2007 links on BGB.

Two big thumbs down.