The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This is a fascinating novel.  It centers around two twins, Rahel, the sister, Estha the brother, their dysfunctional family and the repressive society that they live in.  The story unfolds in two time periods, the present, when the twins are 31 years old, and in 1969 when the twins were 7 years old and tragic events occur which transform their lives and propel them into wounded adulthood.
The characters are complex, the main villain, Baby Kochamma, the aunt of the twin's mother, is a bully, but also  the victim of mistreatment herself.  None of the characters escapes the small things that together bring ruin, but they are all defined by their own experience of lost opportunity, personal endurance, and love.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

When I was living in San Francisco in the mid 1990s, my housemate Julie owened this book.  I'd seen the film, and I liked it.  She said she hated the film, and that the book was much better.  If I'd read the book first, I might have agreed.  But since I did see the film, and let's face it Ralph Finnes is excellent, I can't honestly say I like the book better.  I like them both, but feel they are two different things.

In the novel, you get to know more about the the other characters inhabiting the Italian Villa at the end of WWII.  We learn about Hana, the nurse taking care of the English Patient, who is a 20-year old Canadian nurse.  Hana is dealing with the loss of her father, who burned to death earlier in the war, as well as the loss of a former lover, also a soldier, and her living with her decision to terminate her pregnancy upon hearing of her lover's death.  We learn more about David Caravaggio, who knew Hana and her father before the war, and who is a professional thief recriuted into Allied intelligence.  We also learn more about Kip, the Sikh who works as a sapper, defusing bombs for the British/Italian forces.  He is a very interesting character, and it think it is a pity more of his story was not made of in the film.  In fact, if memory serves, Kip only seems to hook up with Hana at the end of the film, which is not the case in the book. 

Hana has some interesting daddy issues, as you would imagine, as she is tying herself to a man who is dying in the way she believes her father did.  Caravaggio has been tortured by the Germans, has had his thumbs cut off, and has become a morphine attitic in during his recovery.  He also knows how to make an interesting morphine cocktale that eventually gets the English Patient to talk.

The writing is superb, although it takes a few pages into the book to get into it.  The narrative is not straight forward or chronological, and is often narrated from different points of view.  The "English" Patient's character is morally ambigious. He sleeps with his friend's wife.  He works for the Nazi's. But even when he is burned to a crisp and high on morphine, he is charming as the devil and the author makes him very sympathetic. I think the filmmakers just found it easy to focus on his story, because aerial footage of the desert is a cinematographer's wet dream. The passionate love story which takes center stage in the movie, makes up a third of the novel, but as I said, there are a whole lot of other interesting things going on.

The four characters are living in their own world at the end for the war.  They've made their own little community and have their own mechanisms for keeping the destruction outside away from themselves for several months.  It think its interesting that most of the novel takes place in North Africa or Europe, but what jolts them back to reality are the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't recall any of this being mentioned in the film.  Colonial/post colonial history and politics affected people in a very personal way.  This novel is more than a simple love story.  It's about personal survial, nationality vs making your own identity, and memories that transcend time and space.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

I finished reading this book on the train home from work last night.  Despite the title, only one chapter of it takes place in the Netherlands, the rest of the story happens in various places around London and the Lake District. 
McEwan is a wonderful writer, at times putting his characters and his readers in very strange, weird situations, that spin out of control.  Atonement, his other novel that I've read, while a completely different story all together, does manage to go over some similar themes: memory, moral dilemma, delusion and betrayal.

This story opens with two old friends, successful in their professional fields, one a classical composer, the other a chief newspaper editor. Both men are their late 50s, at the funeral of, Molly Lane, the former lover of both men.  The death of this vivacious woman makes them think about their own mortality. Over the next few weeks, a pact made with each other after the funeral, turns their friendship into personal tragedy.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

I just finished reading my first "new" (new for me) Booker Prize winner this evening.  The only reason I picked up this one first was because it was what happened to be available at my local library branch when I was on my way to work on Thursday.   If I'd planned this reading challenge earlier I would have been more organized and picked up Amsterdam on my way to the Netherlands and read it there.  Never mind.

So, what can I say about this book? Truthfully, I'm glad I read The Inheritance of Loss, because now it is off my list.  Although I thought the writing was solid and most of the story was pretty interesting, it is not one of my favorites.  Overall, the world outlook is pretty bleak and one feels like the characters are doomed to their fate.   I did learn a lot of things, for instance, I didn't know about the USSR recruiting Indians to be part of their space program (which competed with the USA Apollo missions), or the details about the civil unrest in northern India in the 1980s.

After I finished reading this novel, I was curious to see what other critics thought.  Many of those reviews are mixed, too.  For example there is a lot of praise for her descriptions and in-depth characterizations. On the other hand, some people found a lot unnecessary descriptions of minor characters led to a bit of confusion.  (I personally found that just made the story drag in some parts, rather than adding confusion.)  There was also high regard for her  ability to seamlessly integrate social history--colonial, post colonial, and 1980s style American capitalism--with personal memory, racism, xenophobia, and physical and emotional abuse.  She did address these subjects realistically,  too, and she made things like personal shame of poverty and shame of one's cowardly acquiesce to an unjust status quo understandable and cringeworthy at the same time.

If you have read this book, let me know what you thought about it.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Do you skip bits of a book?

I read this novel in 2003 - 2004, when I was living in Cardiff.  A Cypriot friend of mine said she only got half way through the book and she just couldn't finish it because the middle section of the novel has a very, very long boat ride. The main character, Pi Patel, an Indian boy on his way to Canada, is stranded in a lifeboat that is set adrift.  Having read the book, and getting her to agree that the writing was great, as was the opening of the story, I told her if she was impatient, she could to skip to the last part of the book.  It would then make her want to go back and read the middle section.

I'm sure a lot of my writer friends would take issue with this.  A writer lays down as story as they want it to unfold to the reader, and while they are writing it is their baby.  I agree on a certain level.  But at some point I think a story becomes its own entity and takes on its own life, and if certain parts of a story are told out of order, it doesn't matter if it makes it accessible personally to a reader, and if the story is good in itself, it can transcend the order.  This novel does.

I can give another example of times when I skip bits. I finished a quick-to-read novel called, A Gathering Storm, last week before Christmas.  We find out about the main character in a series of flashbacks to World War II, where she worked for Allied intelligence, and at some point gets captured in Occupied France.  There were torture scenes. You get an idea of what happens to her because after she escapes and is returning to England, she mentions that she's glad her fingernails are growing back (and other things are healing).  So yeah, when I get impatient or squeamish, I don't necessarily read it as the author intended.   While I am truly grateful the text this there, I do admit I skim/skip, sometimes.  I'm pretty sure we all do it, for different reasons.

What Animal are you?

What facet of your personality does your pet or any animal you relate to reveal?  I seem to collect a lot of cat-loving friends. A cousin of mine collects anything that has to do with squirrels.  A friend from college told me on Facebook that she named her dog, Pi, after the main character in this book.  I've always wanted to get another dog (I had 3 when I was growing up) and name him Boba Fett officially, but call him "Bo" or "Boba" most of the time. (My husband doesn't the responsibility of a dog, and with the amount of traveling we do, it would be unfair to the dog to keep one now).  But anyway, this is a good question raised in the novel, that gives it, its twist.  How do we perceive ourselves? How does what we do make others characterize us...even under extraordinary circumstances?

Cool math tricks / owning your inner geek

Pi, is a feisty boy that you've just got to admire. Early in the novel, he takes control in a classroom situation to avoid years of bullying because of his strange name, which is Italian for "pool."  He says something proudly like, we Indians are a nation of mathematicians and engineers,  (indeed, they did invent 0) and nicknames himself "Pi."  
Not sure what teachers today would think of a student taking over their black/white board on the first day of school, but admiration for their knowledge probably trumps a bit of cheekiness.  

Pi is geek chic.

Possession: A Romance. By AS Byatt

I'm still on winter holiday in Holland, and have no access to Man Booker Prize books.  So this first entry (or two) will be from memory.  In a way it is related to the David Lodge book I'm reading now, Small World, as it's about English Literature academics and poets, and it is a romance, in the classical sense... yes there are love stories in the novel, but as a whole it is about the medieval notion of the quest/finding adventure.

There are four main characters, two modern day academics, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, and two poets who lived during the Victorian era, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. (These are non historical characters, but Byatt was inventive enough to create poems "written" by them.)  The basis of the novel is that the modern day academics discover love letters revealing an affair between the two Victorian characters, which is a surprise, because Randolph was married, and Christabel was in a long-term lesbian relationship.

The book takes a few pages to get into, because AS Byatt really wants you to feel like you're entering another world, a magical strange world, and uses heavy language, but the story is compelling.  One of the loveliest scenes in the novel has to do with one of the characters interacting with their child for the first time on an ordinary day, in a meadow.  "Of some things their are no records"  that section of the book says.  This is true.

As a busy parent, there are lots of mental images I have of my son that have never been captured with a camera or discussed with his dad or family or friends, but merely dance around in my head and can be triggered by anything.  When I see a leaf falling from a tree in autumn, for instance, I recall him and a friend of his sprinting past me after school, and scattering a big pile of leaves as both five-year-olds run through it, looking at each other and laughing, in the exuberant way only the young can laugh.  It was a gray day, the leaves were brown and pale yellow, so their blue uniforms made a very striking picture.

Similarly in Possession, a little girl makes a chain necklace of flowers, runs around in the Spring grass, and laughs.  She enjoys herself thoroughly, but she forgets the mundane happy moment, and a message she was meant to pass on.
 
I read this book in the mid 1990s, when I was still living in San Francisco, so the fact that I still remember parts of the story vividly is pretty revealing about how good it is. How much do you possess those you love?  How much does what you love posses you? The reader ponders these issues of free-will, relationships, and hidden personal history in this book.

This ain't no bucket list

This year I turn 40.  I wanted to mark it by doing something that is pleasurable, requires brainpower and stamina, and ultimately benefits me.  No, I'm not thinking of becoming a banker.  (I can't do that in less than one year.)  I've decided I'm going to read all the novels that have won the Man Booker Prize .

I've never counted the books I've read in one year, so it will be interesting to see if I can manage this.  I know many people think that librarians spend all their time reading,  we do read a lot, but that is on our own free time.  With a few exceptions, most of us don't get to sit around and read literature at work.

There are a few reasons I've picked the Booker Prize winners.  First, there are more than 40 books on that list (the Prize was established in 1969).  Second, I've read 3 of the books already, and I know that they are good.  Third, I wanted to read contemporary fiction, including books I might not normally pick up.  Forth, (I hate to sound like a project manager here) you need measurable criteria and a clear beginning and end, otherwise, this will just be one of those great ideas that someone had and never did anything about. 

In general, I think when people make a list of things to do by the time they are such-and-such age and publicly share it, that's just asking for all sorts of criticism.  (For example, on many of these lists people put "learn another language."  That sounds laudable, but to really, really learn a language, I think you need to travel and actually be in another country or culture for some period of time.  To think you can learn a language just by listening to some tapes is like saying you want to be a great gardener, but only getting a house plant or two.)  Also, there are lots of things you may want to accomplish, but like many things in life that are worth pursuing, doing, and/or having, like publishing a book, or getting a house or stating a family, or going on that special trip, there is a lot of luck involved and many things that you have no control of.

So, this blog will not be about aspects of my life I have no control over.  This blog will be about books as I read them this year. I'm blogging about them to make sure I do it, and I invite comments on what other people think about those books. 

Do I have life list, at all?  When I was 22, I did write one.  I'm happy to say that I've done most of the things on that list (as well as things I never thought I'd do) but no, I'm not sharing that list here.