Reading Roundup: June - August 2012

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (4 stars)

This was an exceptionally interesting, readable, and moving book. The science angle was interesting; Henrietta was the person who unknowingly donated her cervical cancer cells to science, which cells have since revolutionized medical research. More interesting to me, however, was the way that Skloot's research for the book brought two entirely different worlds into contact. Skloot, a highly educated white person, was able, after years of slowly establishing trust and friendship, to observe the world of Henrietta's descendants, poorly educated black folks living in poverty. I appreciated the honest, vulnerable way Skloot presented both herself and the Lacks family.

Also, true story. Once there was a researcher who was studying Henrietta's cancer cells, and he got a little nervous and wondered about whether the researchers could catch cancer from the cells. So he went around his hospital and injected all his patients, without them having any idea what he was doing, with her cells to see if they got cancer or not. And he had lots of helpers in his "research". So, let's hear it for human subject review boards and evolving medical ethics. Yikes.

 Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed (3 stars)

There is really no substitute in a child's development, apparently, for a stable home situation. Without it, I guess, you can find yourself hiking solo across California and Oregon with no prior backpacking experience in a desperate grasp at some sort of answers to why you are in your late twenties and completely self destructing - serial, compulsive adultery, heroin, total aimlessness - in the name of grieving your mother's death. I found it hard to empathize with the author Cheryl Strayed, and since this is essentially her memoir of coming to grips with life and adulthood it wasn't my favorite read. And I'm not sure why I found her difficult to like; her brand of immaturity was just especially irritating to me. I did enjoy her transformation on her trek into a somewhat competent hiker. I'm sure glad she didn't die along the way, though; her total lack of preparation for a serious undertaking was an additional annoyance. She had never even packed her pack before setting out, and most astonishingly she didn't know how to read a compass. She is very open about all of this and makes no excuses for herself - either her bad behavior or her total ignorance about backpacking. I was especially impressed that she resisted the temptation to create a moment of revelation on her trip when she suddenly grew up and understood Life. She is simply a better person at the end than the beginning because she undertook something very challenging, and many times the only way out of a situation she wished to avoid was through.

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton (3 stars)

This is an engaging read and much better than I expected at every step of the way. It totters on the edge of cliché in so many ways, yet each character, each plot twist, and the entire structure of the book manages to just transcend the mess that it could have been. It is a multi-generational story of abandonment and betrayal and pain, but I'm pretty sure I'm not giving anything away to say that there is some eventual redemption in the end. We all have our own issues we deal with and the ways we are twisted inside twists our lives and the lives of others in unfortunate ways. But I do hope that there was at least one great titled family in England that lived in a large manor estate that wasn't entirely devastated by their crippled emotional life. If so, they are not well represented in literature. It seems like there is a whole genre in which petty, messed up people manage to transform their privileged lives into hellish crucibles through their fear and nastiness. It is a sad thing, and I hope more of a convenient literary device than a record of what the aristocracy was really like. Anyway, this is no great classic but it's a story that draws you in and artfully unwinds its tale.

Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen (3 stars)

I felt like I was reading article after article in Redbook magazine while reading this book. I've never actually read anything in Redbook, but this book is how I imagine it. A little bit of humor, a little wisdom, some keeping it real, some inspiration, some loss, some friendship, some romance all mixed together. It isn't a bad formula, I guess, especially for a magazine article, but does get a bit tedious for a book. The book is about aging, and Quindlen does seem to be doing a marvelous job of it. But I'm not quite there yet, and I felt the generational divide. At the end, I was left with the strange sense that, despite being a book that is entirely introspective and reflective, there was a lack of depth.

Room by Emma Donoghue (4 stars)

I avoided this book for years because of its disturbing premise, but am happy to report that there is no gratuitous horror. There is a background of horror, of course, but the foreground is an amazing story about a heroic woman rising so far above her circumstances it is hard to believe. It is the story of a beautiful childhood, actually. Of a child being exquisitely protected and loved and nurtured, and the difficulty of having that protection weakened. It is probably the story of every child, actually, but it happens so much earlier in their life that they cannot tell the pain and confusion of their world slowly becoming bigger than their loving parents' arms. It is a beautiful and challenging story, not to mention a real page turner, and what more can we hope for in a book?

Mockingjay (The Hunger Games #3) by Suzanne Collins (2 stars)

Mostly, I just could not wait to get out of Katniss's messed up, cynical, exhausted, devastated head. It is probably true that this is what violence and war does to a person, but it made for really tedious, unpleasant reading.