Reading Roundup July - September 2015

Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

by Héctor Tobar (3 stars)

And the moral of the story is: don't get trapped in a mine for 69 days. It's the worst. The prospect of money and fame at the end of it doesn't really help much, and actually made things worse. Like, people behaved worse when they thought they were going to be rich than when they thought they were going to die, which gives one pause. But it might just be that when they weren't starving anymore they had energy to be themselves, and people trapped in a mine aren't angels any more than the rest of us, especially after two months of intense stress. But certainly things weren't as bad as they could have been. Thinking back to the worldwide saga of rescuing the miners, and the exhilaration of watching them on the internet emerge, the rest of us on outside of the mine definitely had the better end of that deal.

Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-1995

by Joe Sacco (5 stars)

This book. You'll understand everything better after this book. The graphic novel form is put to perfect use here. I was in Bosnia two weeks ago, and the man we rented our apartment from, who had fought in the war, was going to take us to Gorazde one afternoon if the weather had been better. I didn't know anything about it then. Read this book. These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories(Sarah Agnes Prine #1) by Nancy E. Turner (3 stars) There was a lot of action. There was a love story. There were some insights into pioneer life. Unlike pretty much everyone else in the world I didn't really love this book though. I found things mostly unconvincing; in particular I just didn't believe the voice was the voice of a pioneer woman in the late 1800s. She feels conflicted about the trade offs she made between her family responsibilities and having children and going to college, which, please. Things just relentlessly resolve in ways that are pleasing to a modern reader.  The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht (4 stars) While I'm not generally a fan of magical realism, I thought Obreht used it just masterfully in this story. Living in the Balkans post-war, everyone is scarred and traumatized by what has happened to their land and their countries and their families. People dig deep to make some sort of sense of it, and sometimes surprising things emerge. I thought the tension was really well played, the writing was gorgeous, and the characters interesting. The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris (4 stars) I don't really even know what this book is about, and I totally understand why a lot of people don't like it. But I really, really liked it. It is a story about redemption and unfair circumstances and loss and struggle. It is unforgivingly bleak. The idea is that a man Tim has some mysterious, uncontrollable disorder that randomly makes him walk until he drops from exhaustion, and it destroys his life. Is it a metaphor? I don't know. His wife loves him, and he loves his wife, and it is a truly touching love story. He fights hard against something he can't control. He wonders, to no really satisfying ends, about physicality and God and such things. It felt like an empathetic window into suffering. How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, Karen Dillon (3 stars) Do you, for some reason, like all your advice for living a fulfilling personal life couched in business case studies? This is your book. I found it a bit awkward and off putting; I just like to talk about family dynamics straight up, in terms of families. But there were some nice ideas here. Skippy Dies by Paul Murray (3 stars) This book was just not ok with me. The writing was pretty great, but I'm just fundamentally not ok with the world this book depicts. I can't stand grown ups failing children like this, and I just can't think it's funny. Do parents really send their children off to boarding schools like this, where they are thrown into a Lord of the Flies sort of jungle bathed in hormones and at the mercy of horrible adults?  I read this book in part while attending as an adult leader a weekend youth conference with teenagers from my church, and there could not be a starker difference than between the sad, lonely, bereft, crude, flailing, jaded, wounded, abandoned kids in this book, and the sweet, bright, innocent, (perhaps slightly dorky and awkward but charmingly so) teenagers that surrounded me in real life. And there could not be a starker difference between the revolting, self-absorbed, cowardly, pathetic adults in this book, and the committed, caring, supportive adults around me at the youth conference who were sacrificing so much to provide the kids with a solid foundation for their lives.  People seem to almost universally find this book funny, and I just can't imagine why. Thirteen-year-olds cluelessly and relentlessly joking about sex, getting in way over their heads with drugs, being molested by adults. It is sick and terrible. If this world resembles yours, you need to know that there are other worlds out there. Really. There are adults who care about raising children and teaching them how to love and be kind and happy, and who protect them and nurture them. People aren't perfect, but they are trying hard to be good. Don't Try to Find Me by Holly Brown (2 stars) Kind of a thriller? But not really thrilling, just lots of cringe inducing bad choices. This isn't my genre, so I don't know how it compares. It is written by a family therapist, and I did like some of the insights into family dynamics that emerged by the end. Therapists don't come out looking all that good, though. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (3 stars) If you're going to write a fantasy story, it must have a plot that moves. You cannot write a plodding fantasy book. This plods, unfortunately. It is trying to transcend fantasy, I think, and build into a metaphorical fairy tale sort of thing, but it gets bogged down in the loftiness of its goals. Which is why I was surprised by how moving the ending was - so tender and beautiful. Really this seems to be a book about being old; the elderly husband and wife are the only part of the story that breathe. But all the reveals feel anticlimactic and the battles feel false and the epic sweeping aspirations didn't work for me. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore  by Robin Sloan (2 stars) Many things in my life hint at the fact that I am not a fun person; me not liking this book is one of them. Everyone else loves it so I'm probably wrong about this but I thought this was a really dumb book. I didn't think it was clever or funny or engaging. It had the feeling of a Percy Jackson book but with a sillier premise. I did think it had a killer last paragraph, though!