I will admit it- hell, I have admitted it.  A rather large (too large?) part of my identity is wrapped up in not just being a reader, but in being well-read.  Sure, I've lied about reading books that I really only started and couldn't finish because they are high-faultin' classics that make me sound smart...haven't we all? (please, don't judge).  But just this once I am going to come clean-I was defeated by George Eliot and her classic Middlemarch.

There is nothing about Middlemarch that I shouldn't love as a reader and a feminist.  Female author fools the world by writing as a man to get her novel about a young woman  bucking the system taken seriously.  With themes of a women's role in society, religious hypocrisy, and political reform-if this book was tea I would want to drink it.  But apparently the book itself is better for me in the abstract than in the reality.  I simply could not get through it.

I first tried to read it in college, during a summer when I was determined to read the classics-with-a-capital-C.  I re-read Jane Eyre that summer, as well as Wuthering Heights, The Old Man and The Sea, and A Tale of Two Cities.  But when I tried to read Middlemarch, I found myself putting it down in favor of doing things like, oh, scrubbing the grout with a toothbrush or hand-waxing my 10 year old Renault.  I was relieved when it came time to go back to school and have an excuse to put it aside "for the semester"-you know, if a semester lasted 20 years.

OK, enter the advent of digital audiobooks.  Surely, if I could listen to a really good narrator read the words aloud, I would be able to get invested in the emotional life of the characters and not be distracted by the old-fashioned language.  Surely, the voice of the narrator would bring to life the long passages where Dorothea is rhapsodizing about Mr. Casaubon in her head, all he's-so-righteous-so-what-if-he-is-pedantic-and-old-and-not-that-attractive.  "And the audio version is 30 hours long, so I will certainly get my money's worth!", thought I.  Well, there's $14.95 wasted...I couldn't even get through the first two hours.  I listen as I drive, and I found my thoughts drifting to such an extent that I would realize I was home and could not list one event from the preceding 25 minutes.  So, I hereby admit defeat.  Go ahead and feel smug, all you Smarty McSmartypants who actually read this book.  Hmmmm, or did you?

Still Alice, Lisa Genova

I freely admit that a large part of my identity is defined by my not inconsiderable smarts.  When I was in elementary school, I was the stereotypical teacher's pet.  I easily comprehended the lessons, I always finished my work before everyone else, and I frequently had my nose buried in a book.  This caused me to be teased by the other students quite a bit (fourth grade was particularly brutal), and I was often alone.  In my moments of hurt and anger, I often comforted myself by telling myself that the other kids might be bigger and meaner, but I was smarter!  That defense mechanism from elementary school has lasted into adulthood.  No one is picking on me for being smart and loving to read and learn, but the ability to do all of those things has remained central to my own perception of who I am.

But imagine that the intelligence and knowledge that has become such a central part of my identity were suddenly fading, not because of old age or a freak accident, but slowly and inexorably due to early-onset Alzheimer's Disease.  This is exactly the fate that befalls the main character in the novel Still Alice by Lisa Genova.  Alice Howland is a 50ish Harvard psychology professor, ironically an expert in linguistics and the acquisition of language, when she begins having lapses in memory.  She chalks it up to stress and overwork-until the day that she gets lost three blocks from home.  She consults a neurologist, who gives the stunning and completely unexpected diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.  Alice is completely taken aback-what will become of her teaching, her research, her speaking engagements?  As she and her family struggle to make sense of her diagnosis, she designs a daily test for herself.  She will ask herself five questions, and the day that she has trouble remembering the answers will be the day that she ends her life.  But with her memory fading fast and her family taking care of her, will she be able to keep her dignity and make her own choice?

Genova did a good job creating the character of Alice.  Using first person narrative allowed the reader to go along on the journey with her, and frankly it was terrifying.  Alice goes through the stereotypical stages of grief-denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance-and at each stage I was able to imagine myself in her shoes.  The way that Alice is written evoke empathy and not just sympathy in the reader, which in this particular kind of story is more important than a cerebral analysis. 

Genova also used Alice and her situation to highlight certain issues releated to Alzheimer's disease.  She makes a point to bring forward the genetic nature of the disease, and in fact Alice and her children are tested for the defective gene, only to discover that her daughter Anne, currently in her late 20s, is sure to develop the disease.  Alice, released from her responsilibities at Harvard and at a loss for what to do next, realizes there is a need for a support group not just for the caregivers of people with Alzheimer's, but for the sufferers themselves.  She even makes an impassioned speech at an Alzheimer's conference about remembering the humanity of the person behind the symptoms.

While this book packed a great deal of emotional punch, it is not exactly subtle in its theme-people who have Alzheimers are still people, and they know what is happening to them (at least for a while), and they should be treated in such a way that their dignity and pride is preserved.  Alice's suicide plan creates an interesting point for discussion, which makes it a decent book club selection.  That said, when I finished reading I felt a little bit like, "All that build-up for THAT!"  I was not a fan of the ending, but that didn't really take away from my enjoyment of the novel as a whole.  If you don't mind being sad on your vacation, this would actually make a decent spring break or summer read-it's easy and fast, but still has substance.

Fall of Giants, or How to Fit an Entire War in 1000 Pages

One of the reasons that I love historical fiction is that, when well researched and written, it allows me to learn something without actually have to read a history book.  I guarantee that reading the Little House books by Laura Ingals Wilder in elementary school taught me more about pioneer life than anything in my social studies book.  Same with Tudor England-almost anything I know about Henry VIII, his wives, and the various Thomases in his life is the result of the many, many fictional narratives I have read through the years.  It may not be "hard, academic" fact, but then is any history hard academic fact?  After all, it tends to be written by the victors, as they say.

Ken Follet is the master of the sweeping historical novel.  In Pillars of the Earth and World Without End, he showed us the world of 12th and 13th century England in detail both large and small.  World events intermingle with the day to day lives of the people to create a rich tapestry of story and feeling.  As such, I picked up the audiobook of Fall of Giants knowing that I was going to get a great story with interesting characters, and that I would learn an awful lot in the process. (Plus, it is 30 hours long-30 HOURS!  Talk about getting your money's worth for an audiobook)

Fall of Giants tells the story of World War I through the eyes of characters from various places in the social and political hierarchies.  There is Lord Fitzherbert, a wealthy aristocrat and his sister Maud, a feminist and suffragist.  There is Ethel, Fitzherbert's maid, and her brother Billy, who enters the coal mines at age 13.  In Russia we have Grigori and Lev Peshkov, brothers who are trying to escape the tyranny of the czar and find a better life in America.  There is the German Walter Von Ulrich, a friend of Fitz's from school, and Gus Dewar, an American working in Wilson's White House.  As the characters wend their way through events great and small, connections are made and people are drawn into situations both triumphant and tragic.

Follett obviously researched his little heart out for this book, which comes in at a staggering 985 pages.  As in his other books, he related important world events through the eyes of his major characters, of whom there are many.  And as usual, he created compelling personal stories for each character, heroes and villains alike.  He uses Earl Fitzherbert to show the conservatism and entrenched sense of privilege in the English noble class.  He uses Maud and Ethel to showcase the cause of first wave feminism and the suffrage movement.  Grigori and Lev live in a Russia that is cruel and repressive-and about to change the course of the world through the Bolshevik Revolution.  Gus Dewar represents the rising power of the United States in world affairs.  And Walter Von Ulrich is anything but a villain, though he is the "enemy"-he is handled with the most nuanced care by Follett, representing a younger, more progressive Germany fighting against the old guard in the cause of peace, even as he fights as a soldier on the front lines.

If that sounds like a lot to keep up with, it is.  And this is supposed to be just the first in a trilogy!  There is enough information in this book to make a trilogy of its own.  And that length is my only complaint.  I am not afraid of lengthy books-Under the Dome by Stephen King was one of my favorites last year-but the sheer amount of detail in this novel is at times slightly overwhelming.  While the personal stories of the characters are fairly easy to keep straight, I sometimes found my mind drifting through the the pages and pages of minute detail about specific battles and political machinations.  In fact, listening to it rather than reading it is likely the main reason I finished it.  I suspect that fatigue would have set in, and I would have put it aside to read something else, sure I would get back to it-which is something I rarely manage to do.  That said, I am glad that I stuck with it on my daily commute.  I fell in love with some of the characters as much as I despise others, and I am looking forward to seeing where their lives go, and where the fate of the world goes, in the next (I'm sure, hefty) installment.

When Prose Imitates Opera

While opera is not one of my favorite musical styles to actually partake of (unless you are a 20th centruy rock opera-Rent, I'm looking at you!), I have an enormous amount of respect for the history of the genre and the amount of hard work and dedication that it takes to do it right.  My wife, in fact, is studying opera and has herself performed in The Mikado and The Magic Flute, to name a few.  And while the operatic voice is not necessarily as beautiful to my ear as other voices (except my wife, of course, who has the voice of an angel), the thing that I love about opera is the over-the-top, completely unbelievable story-lines.  It's as though the word melodrama was invented just to describe classic opera.  Impossible love triangles, terrible tragedies, moments of silliness completely unlike anything in reality-opera is a place where literally anything can happen in the span of a three-hour performance and the audience just soaks it all up.

It is the storytelling at the heart of opera that Anne Patchett manages to convey so beautifully in her novel, Bel Canto.  Bel Canto tells the story of a group of foreign businessmen and diplomats taken hostage during a failed attempt to kidnap the president of a small South American country.  Along with the 59 male hostages is one woman, Roxanne Coss, a world-famous opera singer who was flown in specially to sing for the birthday of a wealthy businessman from Japan.  Once the hostages and their captors have settled in for a long siege, new relationships begin to form, friendships blossom, and talent emerges from the most unlikely of places.

While the premise for the book comes from a real event-the taking of the Japanese embassy in Peru by a group of separatist guerrillas-Patchett admits that the story of what actually happened inside the embassy is known only to those that were there.  Her story is all her own.  The house where the hostages are kept becomes an island of timelessness in a sea of reality.  While those outside the walls continue to think about the future and how the drama will end, everyone inside the house eventually sees it a their only world.  The line between hostage and hostage taker gets pretty blurry, even from the beginning, when it becomes clear that the young people that the "generals" recruited for their cause had no real idea what they are getting into.  Everyone is equally trapped, and eventually the boundaries between adversaries break down.

Perhaps the most important character is Gen (pronounced with a hard G), a translator who came to the party at the side of his employer Mr. Hosakawa.  It is for Mr. Hosakawa that Ms. Coss was brought to the country-he is a great fan of opera, almost to the point of obsession.  After the initial take-over by the rebels, Gen becomes the only person who can speak the languages of all of the parties present.  Through Gen and his translating activities, we are able to access the conversations of characters who would otherwise be silent-Russian and Japanese and French and Dutch all translated in Gen's unemotional style.  But as time goes on, Gen begins to realize that while he is fluent in so many languages, he rarely uses any language, including his own, to share his own feelings and desires.  Pretty soon most of the characters have found other was to communicate, and this I think is one of the themes of the book-the universality of the human experience.

What is really remarkable about this book is the way that the narrative structure reads like an opera.  Once you have it in your mind that the story is operatic, you can pick out passages that would be arias, passages that are duets, places where the librettist felt that there needed to be a bit of "comic" relief.  Long, long paragraphs spanning more than a page, which would feel awkward and rambling in another context, take on the air of a passionate solo performed with a great depth of emotion.  Apparently, the average reader is not the only one who appreciates the operatic nature of the writing-the Lyric Opera of Chicago will be premiering the adaptation of the novel in its 2015-2016 season.

In the end the story is a tragedy, as so many operas are.  As the reader you understand that there is really only one way that this story could end-the only way that any story like this ends.  But still you hope for something to happen, some deus ex machina to come along and pluck the characters you care about from their inevitable destruction.  But just like opera, when the lights go down on this novel much of the audience is left weeping from the beauty and sadness of it all.

Poison Spreads-The Book Thief

Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II.  And that is about all I know-neither of my grandfathers would talk about that time.  Perhaps that's why stories about World War II had always held a fascination for me.  In my teens, I read all of James Michener's books about his time in Japan.  I also discovered books like When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Number the Stars, and of course The Diary of Anne Frank.  I've watched countless documentaries and movies about the Holocaust.  And when I think about World War II, the images I have in my mind are of concentration camps and ovens.  But now I have a new vision to add to my understanding of the madness that was Hilter's Germany.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak takes place during World War II, and tells the story of 10 year old Liesel.  Her mother is forced to place her children into foster care.  Liesel's brother dies on the train taking her to Munich, where she is given into the care of a couple on Himmler Street.  Through the tough love of her foster mother, and the sweet compassion of her foster father, she finds a way to cope with not only her brothers death but the quickly declining standard of living in Germany.  Things go along OK, until the dark night that a Jew shows up at their door looking for sanctuary.

Despite the tragedy and the devastation contained within the story, when I think of a word to describe this book I can only say beautiful.  This book is so heartbreakingly beautiful, I could almost weep just from the use of language.  But the story is so compelling that even if it weren't written so beautifully I would have had a hard time putting it down.  So often books about World War II focus solely on the fate of the Jews-and rightfully so.  There is nothing so important as ensuring that the world never experiences that level of genocide-or any genocide-again.  But the fact is that most of the German people were suffering as well, and this book shows so clearly how the poison of hatred and fear spreads, and how it takes an incredible strength not to give in to the despair.  Despite the constant threat of being found out, of starvation, of being killed by bombs, Liesel and her parents held on to their humanity and compassion.

Under the Heading of Places I Wish Were Real

Sometimes I read a book that has such a strong sense of place that I feel literally transported there.  Sometimes this is a bad thing, like in Elie Weisel's Night Or A Thousand Splendid Sun's Afghanistan.  But sometimes it is a wondrous feeling, especially when the place in question is full of magic.  This is how I felt when I read the Narnia books for the first time, and frankly I'd still like to visit Caer Paravel and hang out with Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy.  Erin Morgenstern, in her debut novel The Night Circus, creates just such a magical place in Le Cirque du Reves, the setting for her imaginary game of one-upsmanship between two talented illusionists.

Celia and Marco are just children when their training begins.  Their teachers, Celia's father Prospero and Marco's guardian Alexander, are old rivals who have, over the years, challenged each other to a game.  The "game" involved pitting their pupils against each other in a challenge like no other.  Their task is to manipulate the physical world as a test of their skills, and their playing field is a circus-a magical circus that is only open at night. But things do not go as the old masters planned when Celia and Marcos stop seeing each other as adversaries and start seeing each other as something else entirely.

Le Cirque du Reves as imagined by Morganstern is a place full of amazing people doing amazing things.  There are the usual acts of contortionist and fortune teller, but there are also tents full of things that defy reality-a garden made exquisitely out of ice, a cloud maze that allows you to literally climb into the heavens, a wishing tree where wishes really come true.  Even if the book was nothing but a long description of the marvelous things at the circus I would have read it and been happy.  But there was also this really intriguing, mysterious story going on that had my interest piqued.  While I did not get all of the answers that I was hoping for about exactly what was going on, the fact that I am still thinking about the story and what it might have meant shows what an affect it had on my imagination.

I don't usually read other reviews of a book before I write my own, but I was curious about how other people were affected by the story.  I was not surprised to find that the New York Review of Books was not exactly over the moon about this book-I imagine if does not meet their rather high-falutin' definition of literary.  But the other reviewers I read all felt similarly to me.  For a first novel, this book does a pretty good job with evoking mood and setting up a solid plot structure.  Character development is oddly lacking, given the rich possibilities for the creation of a mythology to explain the enchanters and their pupils.  But unlike some of the other reviewers, I actually saw the circus itself as a character, or at least an extension of Marco and Celia.  I felt like a learned a lot about them through the kinds of creations they made for their customers.  I know that some readers may be put off by the non-linear narrative, but I didn't find it distracting at all, since each section is clearly marked, and there is no real jumping back and forth within sections, only between them.  One reviewer I read felt that the ending set up a sequel, but I'm not sure about that.  While the fate of the circus seemed rather open-ended, I was OK with it.  I like imagining the circus, traveling the world, appearing and disappearing like magic, delighting everyone who is lucky enough to discover it.

What is it About Islands?

I have always wanted to live in an island.  Maybe it's longing for the sea while living in the middle of the country, or wanting to be set apart from the rest of the world, but I have often thought with longing about a small house overlooking the sea, reached only by boat.  I've always thought Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard (I am a New England girl by temperament if not by birth), but after reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows and Mary Anne Shaffer, I think that the Channel Islands might be a good choice as well.

The novel is told through letters and telegrams between Juliet Ashton and various residents of the island of Guernsey in the months after the end of World War II.  The Channel Islands were occupied by Germany during the war, and the residents were completely cut off from the rest of England.  For five years they had no news about what was happening in the rest of the world-no newspapers, no radios, no letters from family or from their children, who they sent to the mainland before the invasion.  One night, after dining on a forbidden pig with friends, a group of islanders was caught out after curfew.  On the spot, one brave young woman, Elizabeth, created a fictional literary society to explain why they were out together.  In order to put the truth to their lie, the small group of friends created an actual book club, and their meetings allowed many of the members to keep their sanity in the midst of war.  Years later, one of the members contacts Juliet Ashton, a journalist and author, to say how much he enjoyed a book that once belonged to her that he found in a used book shop.  Their correspondence leads Juliet to the island, and to a story both tragic and triumphant of love and friendship in a time of war.

I started out thinking that I was not going to love this book.  I am not that fond of epistolary novels, and the last one I read (check out my not-so glowing review of Between Friends) was so bad that I almost put this book back down once I'd picked it up.  But after resisting the pull of the story for 50 pages or so, I was drawn completely into the lives of the characters.  Juliet reminded me of a character from a period mystery I read recently (this time a glowing review of A Duty to the Dead)-a spunky, scrappy, snarky, but ultimately kind and loving young woman.  And I think that the reason that this worked where Between Friends did not is because each of the letter writers had such a distinctive voice.  Despite everything being told second hand, the novel felt very intimate and personal, and I felt like the character development was pretty good.  But what really made the novel work for me was the historical events it was based on.

I knew that the Channel Islands were occupied during WWII, and I already had some vague idea about their relation to France and England politically (which is to say, they "belong" to England but have their own government, a bit like Puerto Rico, I suppose).  But this novel filled in some details in my admittedly sketchy picture of that period in British history.  And like any good historical novel, it led me to do some more reading and research on the topic.  Rather than using lots of long exposition to provide background, the stories of the islanders comes out in dribs and drabs over the course of Juliet's relationship with them, and the novel feels light and easy to read, while at the same time having some substance-not an easy balance to maintain, but one that Burrows and Shaffer pull off rather well.