false 126 19 18 true 5841116 read 1 true 4380585 currently-reading 0 true 4380584 to-read 0 false 4385972 naipaul--a-bend-in-the-river http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/60911100 Caryl's review of Dear American Airlines: A Novel
by Jonathan Miles

I loved this book, Caryl. It takes a pretty pedestrian premise and turns it into a powerful meditation on guilt, family, and redemption. Great great read. Enjoy. Jim ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/58864373 Pam's review of Suite Française
by Irène Némirovsky

Pam wrote: "I will miss seeing you at CEE, but I look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia in November, Dean Marshall! I will be sure to tell everyone hello for you. I am presenting with Sheila Benson and M..."

Great news about the tenure decision, Pam. They are smart and lucky to have you. Celebrate! Jim ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/57237865 Jim's review of Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories
by Elizabeth Strout

Michael wrote: "I liked this book! The writing reminded me of Gilead. I like carefully written prose and the chance to interact with language in ways I haven't seen and Strout does this."

Marilyn Robinson is a great connection, Michael. Thanks! Jim ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/57239605 Jim's review of Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler

Hasty wrote: "A coworker turned me on to Octavia Butler 2 years ago. I think she's amazing. Are you familiar with her Lilith's Brood series? I just finished it. Fantastic stuff. I've read Kindred, and loved it..."

Thanks for the tip. I've read another of her books, though the title escapes me. It was a lot like The Road--apocalyptic journey through post-war hell sort of thing. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/57378989 Wild Nights!: New Stories (Hardcover) by Joyce Carol Oates
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/57239605 to: Kindred (Paperback) by Octavia E. Butler

This was a find for me, and one I’m really glad for. Octavia Butler was, for most of her career, an African-American writer of science fiction—one of the first to achieve widespread recognition, winning many awards and writing a good many books along the way. Kindred was published in 1979, and I only came upon it while looking for something else. It centers on Dana, an African-American writer in her 20’s who is married to Kevin, a white man, also a writer. They live in Los Angeles, but their lives are sundered one day—and here’s where the science fiction part comes in—when Dana becomes dizzy, falls the floor of her apartment, and awakens in 1815 Maryland at the edge of a pond where a young white boy is drowning. Not knowing what else to do, she rescues the boy and resuscitates him, delivering him to his mother who is screaming by the shore. What Dana doesn’t realize right away, however, is that given the time and place, she is now a slave. She has a college education and highly liberated political spirit. Moreover she is wearing slacks, which causes more confusion than you might think. But she is most of all black, and thus she is most of all owned.

The book’s premise is that Dana will be called back to the past each time the boy who was drowning—Rufus is his name—gets in some kind of physical trouble. And she is called back because Rufus, as an adult, will sleep with one of his slaves, and Dana will be a direct descendent of the child that comes from that union. As it happens, Rufus gets into a lot of trouble. He is abused by his father and so disfigured by the slave system itself that he becomes a cruel man and a ruthless overseer. But Dana returns again and again—she has no choice—and the real richness of the novel comes in Butler’s exploration of what it would be like for a 20th-century woman of color to be forced into the role of slave woman, compelled to accept some parts of that role in order to survive. Some of it is graphically brutal—Dana herself is whipped and beaten several times, and we witness the beatings and rapes of other slaves as well. In spite of the violence, I want to make a case for this book as an adolescent novel, as a book that students might read next to To Kill a Mockingbird or Frederick Douglass or The Watsons Go to Birmingham. It raises exceptionally important questions, and its time-travel premise offers a promising invitation to young readers. It’s not easy emotionally, and it has no unambiguously happy ending. But precisely for those reasons, I think it deserves a wide readership in schools.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/53368822 Jim's review of A Room With a View
by E.M. Forster

This is another of those books that I might have/should have read years ago, but now I’m glad I waited. Its description of the mating habits of upper-class Brits during the pre-war Edwardian period is dryly funny, often cynical, and deeply textured, and the trick of enjoying the book is learning to care about these mostly silly people. Forster is always winking at you over his characters’ heads, more subtly than Wilde, perhaps, but with the same kind of disarming charm. Don’t be looking for the serious stuff you get in A Passage to India. This is an airplane book with a touch of class. Not to be assigned in school under almost any circumstances. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/57237865 to: Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories (Hardcover) by Elizabeth Strout
In this extraordinary collection of interrelated short stories, Elizabeth Strout explores a territory so carefully mapped by Annie Proulx, Alice Munro, Richard Yates, and Raymond Carver. It’s a space where grown up, unexceptional people hide from themselves, from their families, from their pasts, from whatever future they can imagine. Tragedies and sadnesses here are not presented as garish events, but as quiet, unnamable tremors felt deep underground, disturbing the familiar order of things. Connecting the stories is Olive Kitteridge --large, ornery, demanding, often rude—a retired 7th grade math teacher married by habit to Henry, a mousy but gently loving pharmacist in a small coastal town in Maine. Starting here, with Olive and Henry, Strout creates a network of characters, bound to each other by geography, weather, and time, but more importantly by the secrets they keep or don’t, by the failures they can’t help, by the small gestures of dignity or sympathy that are as often ignored as acknowledged by others. An aging red-headed piano player in a local watering hole, who provisions herself with several bolts of vodka before each night’s performance, finds the courage to break off by phone a decades-long affair with a married man who has made her life hell. But she lets him into her apartment later even as he calls her a cunt and tells her never to do that again. Olive herself visits her long-alienated son Christopher, his unyet-met wife, and their two children (neither Christopher’s) in a small Brooklyn apartment only to receive from Christopher a carefully-scripted, therapeutically-larded lecture on her failures as a mother. A young man returns to the small Maine town with a sad, crowded past and an intention to end his life. Olive sees him sitting in his car, and since she had taught him in 7th grade, imposes herself into his front seat and begins a long conversation that leads him finally away from despair. The lines connecting these stories are distinctly non-linear, but as you read them one after the other your understanding of the characters deepens while your sympathy for the lives they are crafting is like warm sunlight on your face. This is an astonishing book. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/53368822 to: A Room With a View (Paperback) by E.M. Forster
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