Category: 52 countries

#4 – Babylon Rolling

Shall I be honest? I mean utterly, unflinchingly honest? I almost put this book down after the first page after the prologue. Amanda Boyden’s second novel, Babylon Rolling starts off with a love letter of sorts to New Orleans, beleaguered already prior to Katrina and devastated afterwards, and it’s touching if a bit affected, the use of the pronoun “we” and all that, and then the book itself carries on like a thunderclap before a storm. She’s a powerful writer — there’s no denying it. When I finished the novel on the way home, there were tears in my eyes.

Now I’m going to digress. I know I’m sick of how much I’ve been talking about The Wire lately so I can only imagine how sick the rest of the world must be (listen me, the world, pshaw). For someone who doesn’t live in the middle of a raging gang war or a city almost overrun by crime, I always feel there’s an authenticity to The Wire that could be horribly misplaced. It’s an ivory tower appreciation for something I have never experienced; the “realness” of it makes me feel like I’m involved in some way in the defeat of human society, if we’re being honest. ‘It’s not a war,’ The Wire keeps reminding us, ‘because no one wins.’ And this theme, the decay of civilization, in a way, pervades much of Babylon Rolling: people cheat on their spouses, horrible and traumatic accidents happen, dope slingers and their gangster counterparts reign in some corners, and tragedy seems to define a place that hasn’t even seen the worst of it, the hurricane hasn’t even hit yet.

But I felt like Fearius, the self-given nickname of a young boy christened Daniel, whose voice is written much like the dialogue in The Wire, wasn’t as authentic as I would have imagined he could and/or should have been. So I found him and his bad grammar and his lack of punctuation and his misapprehension of vocabulary a little off-putting in ways that I would have never criticized had I watched him in the television show. Yet, the other characters, some mentally challenged, others simply lost, were so completely whole that it kind of made up for Fearius’s terribly annoying everythingness.

I loved Cerise, a 70-year-old grandmother who loves her husband so fiercely she endangers her own life to save him, and her voice broke my heart all over the place. The simplicity and wisdom from which she lives her life is inspiring. The troubled marriage of Ed and Ariel reminded me a little of Tom Perrotta, and their actions not only underscored the main themes of the book, but they heightened the whole sense of troubled America in microcosm. But like Fearius, I felt Philomenia was a little over the top at times. The idea that all of these people live on the same street and that so much happens to them felt contrived, a little too Crash for me. But I can’t say I didn’t get caught up in the story and I can’t deny that there’s a powerful strength of voice to the book. I’m glad, too, that I didn’t put the book down after the first few pages. It certainly showed me, didn’t it?

READING CHALLENGES: Babylon Rolling is one of my Cleaning Out the Closet challenge books. That’s one down and 19 more to go, and since Boyden was born in Minnesota, I’m counting this book as the United States for Around the World in 52 Books too. I’m sure as sh*t not going to get stuck reading so few countries this year. It’s not exactly cheating to knock off all the easy ones first, is it?

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Blogging “The Fall of the House of Usher” for 1001 Books, I finished it too this evening. And reading? Who knows. I’ll wait until something calls for me.

#3 – In a Free State

The last thing I expected this morning was to get caught up in V.S. Naipaul’s truly excellent In a Free State. I woke up early, as I usually do, crawled out of bed, grabbed my book and cuddled up under the duvet on the couch. My RRHB slept. I read. He slept. I read more. He woke up. I crawled back into bed, fell asleep for a bit, and then finished the book. What a perfect lazy day before the craziness of real life picks up again the moment the alarm goes off tomorrow morning.

The last Naipaul book I read was A House for Mr. Biswas way back in second year university. I was captivated but that never brought be back to Naipaul. My post-colonial reading in later years turned back to Canadian, I left university, did my M.A., and never picked up another of his books. Another of the surprises that I found on my shelf, I must have ordered this book back when 1001 Books came out. In a Free State was first published in 1971 and it won the Booker that year. Bookended by two diary-like travel journals, the collection contains two short stories and a novella, from which it takes its title.

The first story, “One Out of Many,” follows a servant brought to Washington from Bombay. One day he steps away from his employer, leaves everything behind in the cupboard where he was sleeping, and becomes an illegal immigrant with an under the table job at a local restaurant owned by a fellow countryman. The story explores themes of alienation as Santosh makes his way in the United States, and slowly he discovers that he’ll need to leave almost 100% of his old life behind to survive.

This idea, of the cost of freedom and the impact of the realities of immigration, is carried forth into the second story, “Tell Me Who to Kill.” Leaving everything he knows behind, the narrator picks up and heads to London with the intention of giving his brother a better life, a life of studies, so he too can become “something.” He works hard, saves his money, and then as so many stories go, makes a bad decision that ruins everything. Told through flashbacks as he takes the journey to his brother’s wedding, the story becomes alive through his rich dialect, the obvious affection he feels for his brother, regardless of how he disappoints him, and the necessity of change when faced with adversity. It’s a crushing and heartbreaking story.

“In a Free State” inverts the situation. Here a white, homosexual man has come to Africa to serve the government,under ideals of serving for the greater good. Away from the safe collective where he lives, Bobby attends a seminar and then must make his way back during a time of political upheaval. His passenger, the wife of a British journalist named Linda, makes pleasant enough conversation to begin with, but it soon becomes obvious she isn’t happy either on the journey or in Africa. As their trip becomes even more arduous (they miss their curfew and are forced to stay at a ramshackle colonial resort), the polite nature of their relationship disintegrates. Armed with a sense of misapprehended colonial idealism, Bobby soon finds himself in all different kinds of trouble, some of his own making and much as a result of the political situations, and it’s damning. Like in the first two stories, Naipaul explores themes of alienation and separation, of family and work, of place and displacement.

I couldn’t put this book down. It’s a book I’d love to study. A book that reminds you how words can sever a problem from its root, pull it apart and set it down in a way that makes you see things more clearly, even if in the end, for all three protagonists, little changes despite how hard the world presses up against them to force their currents in a new direction.

READING CHALLENGES: In a Free State is on the 1001 Books list, and so I’ll cross it off there. But Naipaul was born in Trinidad, so I’ll count this book on my Around the World in 52 Books list as well. It’s actually a perfect book for that challenge. The landscapes, from the unknown African country that’s the setting for the novella to Egypt, from London and Washington as seen through the eyes of those who settle and are not born there, there’s an interesting sense of place that grounds the entire collection.

COMPS AND OBSERVATIONS: I couldn’t help but think of Blood Diamond when I was reading “In a Free State,” not because the stories are at all similar (it’s a terribly mediocre film in the end), but because when Bobby speaks to an African man in the book, he uses that patois that Leo uses at the beginning of the film: “Who your boss-man? Who?” As Naipaul describes the country as it slips from colonial to post-colonial rule, I kept hearing, “T.I.A. This is Africa, right?” from that scene at the bar. In terms of comps, for much of the story, I kept thinking of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” despite the fact that it’s obvious that Bobby and Linda are not at all lovers, their conversations have that same read-between-the-lines feel to them and the dialogue is excellent.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I picked up Amanda Boyden’s Babylon Rolling while my RRHB was using the computer. Fingers crossed I’ll finish it tonight, which means I’ll have managed to finish 7 books while I’ve been off for vacation. Not bad indeed!

#1 – A Hard Witching

Happily celebrating the new year, I read most of this book in between bewitching viewings of The Wire and during a sleepless night on the day before New Year’s Eve. I enjoyed Jacqueline Baker’s novel, The Horseman’s Graves for my Canadian challenge last year, and when I was cleaning off my shelves (have you noticed the trend?) I found a copy of her book of short stories. We were at writer’s group yesterday discussing the merits of short books, quick reads of under 200 pages — books just like A Hard Witching.

Comprised of eight stories, surprisingly not-interlocking, the sharp edges and hard lives of the characters are softened only slightly by Baker’s expert eye when it comes to detail and storytelling. While the easiest comp that one could make about Baker’s writing would be to Annie Proulx, but A Hard Witching lacks the “gothic” edge that colours many of Proulx’s stories (this is not a bad thing; I count Annie Proulx among one of my favourite writers). Set exclusively in or around Sand Hills, Saskatchewan, it’s impossible for the people within not to be affected by the landscape. It’s a popular, familiar Canadian theme, but Baker allows herself to take it a little further, to flush out the emotional lives of her characters in ways that feel fresh and not simply a reaction to their environment.

In terms of my “favourites,” I’d have to say that I enjoyed the title story most of all, for its somewhat strange, utterly compelling main character, a widow caught between the idea of how to lead her life post-her husband’s death and who she was while she was married, and for its stark, captivating ending. I loved this line to death: “Oh, trouble comes in threes all right, Edna would say generously, but it’s the weak who let it stay.” As Omar from The Wire would say, “Indeed.” An echo of sadness runs through many of the stories as well, not that it becomes overwhelming and certainly not to the detriment of the writing. They’re real honest people within these pages and Baker tells their stories without unnecessary frills. In a way, a nice compliment to A Hard Witching might be Tim Winton‘s The Turning and I’m so glad I found this little volume just waiting to be read on my newly organized bookshelves.

READING CHALLENGES: As Jacqueline Baker is Canadian and a lady, A Hard Witching counts toward my Canadian Book Challenge. I’m going to swap out Gil Adamson’s Help Me, Jacques Cousteau because my copy is buried in our closet and my RRHB convinced me those books would be out in the open soon enough that they didn’t need to all be pulled out for the sake of me finding it and Moby-Dick. I’m also going to count this as Canada for Around the World in 52 Books because it’s so evocative of our prairie landscape.

COMPS AND OBSERVATIONS: Baker has a talent for writing adolescent characters and their stories, similar, I think, to Kate Sutherland’s excellent All in Together Girls. Not exactly YA, they do capture the awkward and utterly alienating time one spends as a teenager and both explore how your teenage years stick with you well into adulthood.

OTHER REVIEWS: Melanie also read A Hard Witching for her Canadian challenge last year.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I finished Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare this morning and pulled Sometimes a Great Notion off the shelf to start this evening.

Around the World in 52 Books – 2009

So, here are some of the titles to work towards another year of reading around the world. As I barely made it through 13 titles in an ENTIRE year last year, I’m starting off with these 20 and will add as I go along the way:

1. The Successor, Ismail Kadare, Albania
2. The Swallows of Kabul, Yasmina Khadra, Algeria
3. The Witch of Portobello, Paulo Coelho, Brazil
4. Soul Mountain, Gao Xingjian, China
5. Tales from the Town of Widows, James Canon, Columbia
6. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, Dominican Republic
7. Sugar Street, Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt
8. The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai, India
9. Let It Be Morning, Sayed Kashua, Isreal
10. From Harvey River, Lorna Goodison, Jamaica
11. In the Country of Men, Hisham Matar, Libya
12. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid, Pakistan
13. Links, Naruddin Farah, Somolia
14. The Quarry, Damon Galgut, South Africa
15. The Speed of Light, Javier Cercas, Spain
16. In a Free State, V.S. Naipul, Trinidad
17. Snow or My Name is Red, Orham Pamuk, Turkey
18. Babylon Rolling, Amanda Boyden, United States

Additions to the list because I don’t feel like alphabetizing before dinner:

19. A Hard Witching, Jacqueline Baker, Canada.
20. Got You Back, Jane Fallon, England. Or Somewhere Towards the End, Diana Atill, England. Or Little Black Book of Stories, A.S. Byatt, England.
21. Ignorance, Milan Kundera, Czech Republic.
22. The House of Spirits, Isabel Allende, Chile.*
*Technically, Allende was born in Peru, and so if I was sticking to my own self-imposed regulations around the challenge, I’d be crossing off that country instead. But the blurb in the back of the book specifically calls her a “Chilean” novelist and I’m not about to argue.
23. Under the Skin, Michel Faber, The Netherlands
24. Bonjour Tristesse, Francoise Sagan, France

25. Brooklyn, Colm Toibin, Ireland

#64 – Blindness

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading interesting but somewhat bleak fiction. I’m halfway through Oryx and Crake, devoured Hunger and just finished Jose Saramago’s Blindness this morning. All three novels deal very strongly with how absence has an effect upon human society. Represented in the protagonist in Hunger, represented in the landscape in Oryx and Crake, and represented in the society’s blindness in Saramago’s brilliant novel. Why do novels about absence work so well? It’s an easy question to answer: because they force the writer to observe, and observation is always at its sharpest when there’s some sort of tragedy or trauma forcing it forward.

Like in Hunger, the characters in Saramago’s book are not overtly named but referred to by description: “the first blind man,” “his wife,” “the doctor,” “the doctor’s wife,” “the girl with the dark glasses” (even if she’s not wearing them), etc. In a way it makes the plight, an epidemic that causes blindness throughout an entire city (or country), more poignant; it hits everyone and anyone. That is, with the exception of the doctor’s wife, who retains her sight even when the rest of the world has gone blind. The opening scenes of the novel are pitch perfect: a man alone in his car in traffic suddenly goes blind — a form of white blindness (instead of seeing darkness those affected see nothing but white) that spreads like wild fire throughout the population.

Those first individuals who “catch” the virus are quarantined and suffer through a hellish situation as more and more people arrive who suffer from the same plight. The novel doesn’t shy away from its central theme: when humans are pushed away from civilization they will act abominably. That’s not to say that the core group the novel remains centred around — the first residents quarantined after becoming infected — don’t act decently. They do and continue to do so regardless of their increasingly difficult circumstances. But they come across nefarious and despicable people as they try to survive the decimation of their society.

I’m not sure if it’s the translation, but Saramago’s writing style reminds me of Marquez. He writes long, luxurious sentences that examine every aspect of the situation. The allegory (if I’m using that word correctly) of the story almost keenly ascribes the defeat of human society when faced with this kind of categorical tragedy. Old philosophical debates of the essence of the human soul, whether it’s good or evil, are apt in terms of thinking about this book, and that’s probably why I enjoyed it so very much.

But before I sign off, here’s an example of how Saramago’s keen observations bleed into every inch of the novel:

Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them come irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armour, we might say.

READING CHALLENGES: Jose Saramago was born in Portugal so this novel counts toward the Around the World in 52 Books challenge that has been woefully under represented in my reading this year. There’s no way I’ll catch up now so I’m guessing I’ll give up sooner rather than later.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Finishing Oryx and Crake and Brideshead Revisited (more 1001 Books!).

#63 – Hunger

In my last post about the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, I was full of resentment over having slogged my way through American Pastoral. With Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, I’ve now forgiven the list. As the unnamed protagonist wanders around Christiania (Oslo) starving and half-mad, he narrates the decline of both his physical and mental states. Hunger is a striking, captivating novel that feels utterly modern in its conception with echoes of the stream of conscious-type narratives that I am ever-so fond of reading.

Originally published in 1890, the struggles of the writer to simply live, to find a warm, dry place to sleep, to keep his body protected, to find food to satiate the most basic of the body’s expectations, seem beyond him for many reasons. He has no money because he hasn’t sold an article (he has sold many articles to the pawnbroker, though). He’s been evicted because he can’t pay the rent. His appearance deteriorates as the novel continues leaving bits and pieces of his hair all over the city (it’s always falling out!). While respite comes throughout the book in various different places, the overall suffering and consistent starvation of the narrator, his awful living conditions, and the fact that at one point he resorts to sucking on wood chips ensures that he never really comes through the other side.

In a life where a few pennies (øres?) would make a world of difference, the writer clings to a sense of his own morality. He refuses to steal any food for survival. He pays back his debts (even if it means he’ll starve once again). He believes entirely in the value of his written words if only he could get his mind to work. He simply never asks for help. Then, driven to the brink of madness, the writer finally sacrifices his freedom for survival, and it’s a bittersweet moment.

Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920, and from what I can discern from the biography in the back of the book, his own struggles to make a living from his work inspired aspects of Hunger. The author’s strength of character comes through (sitting atop a train after being diagnosed with tuberculosis and breathing in as much air as humanly possible) both in terms of the power within this novel but also in his personal story. Balancing out the basic needs of life with the kind of hard work the narrator resigns himself to just in order to survive, the entire book feels like a testament to the kind of men who value ideals of strength in character above all else. All in all, it’s a magnificent book. One that I would have never discovered had I not embarked upon the whole 1001 Books Challenge in the first place.

READING CHALLENGES: Killing two challenges with one book: Norway for Around the World in 52 Books and another 1001 Books title.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: My second-hand copy underneath my 1001 text, which has a far superior jacket image.

#50 – His Illegal Self

Peter Carey remains one of my most adored living authors. I count some of his books among my all-time favourites (Oscar and Lucinda; Theft; Jack Maggs). His latest, His Illegal Self, isn’t at the top of my Peter Carey goodies list, but it’s not at the bottom either (that honour belongs to the Ned Kelly book that [to date] remains unfinished). His talents are considerable so even a mediocre book by Carey is hands and feet better than an excellent book by a lesser writer.

The story of a young boy who’s kidnapped by a woman who isn’t his mother and spirited away to the wilds of Australia, His Illegal Self is an arresting story. I think it’s just not entirely believable. As a result of his mother’s (and father’s to boot) illegal activities as political radical protesters, Che (as he’s called) lives with his posh mother on Park Avenue, spending much of their time at a summer home outside the city. He’s only eight (I think) when the action begins and yearns for his mother who remains a distant memory locked away in his mind. When Dial shows up and kidnaps him from his grandmother under the guise of taking him to see his mother, everything that could possibly go wrong does.

As I said above, I did find the plot somewhat implausible; there are far too many nefarious characters in one place who consistently roadblock the way back to a legal existence for both Che and Dial. The voice of the story sometimes comes across as kind of alienating and more than once I found myself backtracking just so I could be sure I knew what was going on. Yet somehow, despite some little bits of confusion here or there, I did find the novel to be a swift read.

READING CHALLENGES: While I think I’ve already done Australia for Around the World in 52 Books (which I am so very far behind it its almost criminal), Carey hails from there so I’ll add it to the list.

#32 – The Woman Who Waited

While I have to say that while much Andrei Makine’s IMPAC-shortlisted novel, The Woman Who Waited, exists somewhere between lyricism and imagination, much of the book suffers from slightly muddled storytelling. There’s also a quirk in his writing that slightly befuddled me: how sentences and dialogue simply trail off with an ellipsis… and then start up with a completely different thought. Maybe it’s an attempt for the author to force the story off the page? Maybe it’s a way for Makine to foreshadow the ambiguous nature of his main character, a Leningrad scholar to goes to a remote northern village and ends up falling in love with an equally ambiguous woman.

Who knows.

Annnnywaaay. There’s are fairy tale elements to the book that I quite enjoyed. Lots of deep, mysterious woods. Plenty of aging old crone-like women. Many figures appearing out of the mist. Goodly amounts of atmospheric hoarfrosty weather. The story goes like this: boy comes of age in an urban environment in Leningrad that’s slightly unsatisfying. Listless encounters with the opposite sex lead to drunken fumbling behind the curtain (literally and metaphorically) and our hero sets off to the north on an anthropological mission. He’s going to record and study the rituals of the women of Mirnoe, a tiny village obliterated by the Second World War, now populated almost entirely by diminishing families and widows. Among the elderly women lives a 46-year-old woman named Vera who has waited since she was 16 for her soldier to come home to her. He never arrived.

Our narrator becomes fascinated, even obsessed, with Vera, and a strange relationship burgeons between the two. He’s intrigued by her story and this drives him to follow her into the woods, to the railway station, into her house. But he’s young, foolish, and selfish, and as the novel progresses it becomes obvious that he’s incapable of telling her story, as much as he wants to. Ultimately, I think the book, more a novella than a full novel, is worth being read. The setting (which fulfills my Russia component for Around the World in 52 Books) is mysterious, enigmatic and ultimately the most interesting aspect of the novel. It’s a lovely little fable, and while so far it hasn’t blown me away like Rawi Hage’s DeNiro’s Game, it was certainly worth the read.

READING CHALLENGES: As well as being Russia (see above), the novel the 3rd title from the IMPAC shortlist I’ve read so far.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I indulged in a little something special for myself starting this morning: Paul Quarrington’s The Ravine. I’m already over 50 pages in. Then I need to start kicking ass in terms of The Canadian Book Challenge, as I’ve got two months left to read 4 different provinces. Gack!

#30 – DeNiro’s Game

Oh my, oh my, oh my, what a good book Rawi Hage has written. DeNiro’s Game is my favourite of the two IMPAC books I’ve read so far, and it’ll now become the benchmark to which I compare the rest of the shortlisted titles. It’s unconventional structure, it’s achingly lovely prose, and it’s heartbreaking moments all catapult together to form a book that rockets along like gunfire from beginning to end.

The story of Bassam and his friend George, two boys who grow up in war torn Beirut to become men who survive as the bombs drop and people fall out of their lives and into graves at an alarming speed. The two boys, now young men, find their way with guns tucked into their pants, who make a living in ways that are so foreign to me that I often had to close my eyes and take a deep breath, and do far too many drugs (who could blame them?). Set into three distinct parts, ‘Roma,’ (where things in Bassam’s imagination will still work out the way he hopes), ‘Beirut,’ (where life in a war zone becomes glaringly difficult), and ‘Paris,’ (where Bassam adapts to a different kind of life), the book remains riveting throughout.

For a first-time novelist, Hage’s prose-poetic style of writing is effective, repeating phrases, images and inspired metaphors litter the pages, and his characters are strongly drawn. I didn’t earmark as many pages as I thought I would, but I did find the following passage very moving:

Still I stood in the booth, looking with an empty gaze through the glass. I felt as if I could live inside of the book, feeling its borders, claiming it for myself. I pretended that I was talking on the phone, but all I wanted was to be in the booth. I wanted to stand there and watch every passerby, I wanted to justify my existence, and legitimize my foreign feet, and watch the people who passed and never bothered to look or wave.

If I have one teeny, tiny criticism, it might just be the overdone use of L’Etranger throughout the last third of the book. The parallels between the characters, sure, they’re there, but I felt like it was the only stereotypical, oh-yeah-I-guessed-it aspect to the book.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: You guessed it, just the jacket with a link back to Anansi (as pulled from their site), as I’m away from my camera this afternoon.

READING CHALLENGES: The second of my IMPAC books, Lebanon from Around the World in 52 Books, and if I were still needing to read Canada, the passing mention of Montreal (where the author resides now, I think) would have totally counted.

#29 – Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, could possibly be the best book I’ve read so far this year. Achingly beautiful prose echoes through each of the stories, and they all have such a resounding and impressive narrative voice that it’s impossible to put the book down once you’ve begun. The stories are as rich and inherently detailed as the best novels aspire to be, which just goes to show that Lahiri’s skills as a storyteller are paramount. She’s one of the best writers working in English today. I know that’s a bold statement, but I’d put forth that she rivals Alice Munro when it comes to ensuring that the form of the short story isn’t relegated to beginner’s classes and college literary journals. The work is powerful, passionate, cutting and emotionally driven. And while each of her stories work with similar themes, first and second generation East Indian families in America, they’re also each distinct both in terms of their internal rhythms and the morals that drive the narratives forward.

In the first half of the book, Lahiri doesn’t really play with form. The stories are straightforward in the sense that they don’t play with time or traditional methods of storytelling, but they are rich in character development, and they do ache with the everyday heartbreak of life. In the second half of Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri has written three linked stories. The first two use the second person, which I was resistant to at first, but once I read the last few pages of the book, I understood her choice. You will too. It’s these three linked tales, stories of Hema and Kaushik, characters linked by a common childhood, that will crush your reading soul in the same way any good book should. I don’t want to give anything away so I won’t say anything more about them, just to reiterate that to appreciate them is to appreciate writing at its finest.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT:If I have one criticism, it’s that I’m really not fond of the book’s jacket. Hence no photo, although I guess I could have taken a picture to make it seem less, well, boring.

READING CHALLENGES: I don’t think I’ve read an American author yet for my Around the World in 52 Books. This would be a great one to read for the States. It’s a rich canvas, writing from the perspective of immigrants to the great and fascinatingly flawed country. And while I had Dennis Johnson’s book in mind. I’m going to count this instead. Even if the setting is somewhat secondary to the character development, in a sense, it’s defining of it too, place defines these characters as much as it marginalizes them; it changes their lives from the moment the plane touches down and new homes are built. But it’s also a fascinating study of the idea of what it means to be a part of a second generation in the U.S. How different their lives are from their parents, how charged with being both American and Indian can be, how important it is for history to change perspective.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I was reading Huckleberry Finn on the ride home (I finished Unaccustomed Earth on a hard cement bench outside of The Bay after having a quick bagel with Sam before heading back up to the craziness that is work these days). But I’m not sure if I’ll continue. Maybe, like I said the other day, I’ll finish The Sealed Letter tonight.