Winter Vacation Reading List

I read a wide range of books this holiday - some were better than others…

The Harem Midwife by Roberta Rich
This is a loose sequel to Rich's first novel, The Midwife of Venice.  Though the characters are the same, you do not have to have read the first book to understand this one.  The book pick up where the last one left off - Hannah and Isaac Levy who have been exiled from Venice are making a life for themselves with their adopted son Matteo in Constantinople.  Hannah is a well respect midwife to the Sultan's harem while Isaac scratches out a living in the silk trade.  Life is generally good for the Jews of the Ottoman Empire - certainly better than it was in the Venice Ghetto.

Hannah runs into trouble when she is asked to verify the virginity of a Jewish slave girl who has been captured as an offering for the Sultan.  She takes pity on the young girl and lies for her which leads to fear for her life if found out and tension with her husband.  At the same time the family is visited by Francesca who poses as the widow of Isaac's deceased brother.  She is in fact trying to get her hands on his money and Matteo who was originally a Christian baby.

I won't give away the end - suffice it to say intrigue and close calls abound until the book comes to a neat but too predictable end.

The Great House by Nicole Krauss
I read this book for the second time as it is on my book club reading list.  And I did not like it any better than the first time around though I loved her other novel, The History of Love.  This book centres around a desk that makes its way from Nazi Europe, to London, to a Chilean writer, to New York and eventually is headed for Jerusalem.  Along the way we meet the various characters who use the desk - a writer in New York, a Chilean poet who is executed by Pinochet, an Holocaust survivor in London who harbours great secrets which her husband only uncovers when she reverts to the past with Alzheimers and an antique dealer who spends his life trying to find the desk and rebuild his father's study in pre-war Europe.

The language was just a bit too complicated and the writing too meandering for my taste.  I kept reading because I wanted to know how the various stories fit together but I was not really satisfied with how they did in the end.  I do look forward to discussing this with my book club as maybe I'll gain insights into the book which went over my head.

The Book Club by Mary Alice Monroe
Now this was just mindless beach reading but it did the trick.  We delve into the lives of five middle aged women who discuss books and life in a book club.  Each chapter starts with a quote from the book they are reading and ties into the happenings in their lives at the time.  I wouldn't run out to find this book but if you happen to come across it by chance, as I did, it's worth a read on a sunny afternoon.

About a Boy by Nick Hornby
This is also mindless reading about twenty something rich and unemployed Will who is living on the royalties earned for a Christmas carol his father wrote in the thirties.  He invents a two year old son so he can join a single parent's support group and meet single mothers who, in their vulnerability, are more attracted to him than they should be.  However, eventually he meets Marcus, a twelve year old self described weird kid who needs the kind of guidance Will can provide - how to dress, what music to follow and how to talk to girls.  He's less able to help Marcus with his severely depressed mother and detached father, but his help does enable Marcus to fit in at his new school in London where previously he was only bullied.  However, in the end it is probably Will who gains more of a sense of purpose from Marcus.  Again, I wouldn't run out to find this, but it's not bad.

Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth by Edeet Ravel
I really enjoyed this book though it was a bit heavy for vacation.  Maya and Rosie are both the daughters of Holocaust survivors who meet as teenagers and quickly become best friends.  They each cope with their parents' eccentricities in different ways - Maya by trying to distance herself and Rosie by being drawn into her parents' haunted life.  Maya attends a Socialist summer camp and there she meets Anthony, a counsellor who, together with his brother Patrick, become key players in Maya and Rosie's life.  Together the four teenagers visit the boys' mother's cottage in the Laurentian and must forever keep a terrible secret about what occurs there.
This is really an exploration of families and how they survive terrible atrocities that affect even subsequent generations.  And it is a story of unrequited love and how damaging that can be.  But most of all I admired Maya's strength at dealing with all of this and coming out fairly together in the end.

The Best Place on Earth

This is a collection of short stories by an Israeli/Canadian writer.  I wouldn't say the stories are the best I've ever read, but they were reasonably entertaining.  They all focus on Israelis of Middle Eastern descent (rather than Eastern European).  Some are set in Israel, others in Canada and one in India; most deal with young people on their way into the army, in the army or just finished the army.  They give perspective on war, poverty, love, and family issues.  The title story comes from a saying found on one version of the British Columbia license plate - though it is clearly used with irony by this author, and her characters, who are strongly tied to Israel.

Like with most short stories, the characters are not as well developed as I would like, and the plots are unidimensional.  But this is an easy read and I was entertained by it.

This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

Though it sounds like it will be dark, this book had me laughing out loud.  It was the funniest writing I've read in a long time.  The story is told from the perspective of Judd Foxman whose father has just died and is told that his father's dying wish was to have his wife and four children sit shiva together for the whole 7 days.  So Judd returns home to be with his mother, sister, two brothers and their assorted partners and children.  But he returns home humiliated as his wife has just left him after he's found her in bed with his radio-shock-jock boss.  Apparently they've been having an affair for over a year but he's failed to see the signs.  And to top it all off, as he's packing his car to go to the shiva, his ex, Jen, stuns him with the news that she is pregnant.

We follow Judd to his childhood home where he meets up with his mother - a psychiatrist who has written a best selling book about child rearing, that mentions her children by name, to their humiliation as children and now; his sister Wendy, her three children and her self-absorbed hedge fund husband; his brother Paul who is now married to Judd's first girlfriend and the baby in the family, Phillip who has been a free spirited drug dealer and shows up with a woman 20 years older than him who used to be his life coach.

The interactions between family members who have spent little time together in recent years are funny and sad, but so realistic.  The bit players who wander through the shiva are equally entertaining.  I don't want to give away any of the surprises because this book is really worth reading on your own.

The Guts

I always have mixed feelings about Roddy Doyle's books, and this one was no exception.  He can be very funny but his topics are really dark.  It also takes a little while to get into the rhythm of the Irish accent, but once you do the language flows effortlessly.  This book was a sequel to one of his earliest novels, The Commitments, which I had not read.  It could still understand the book, but I can't say whether I would have enjoyed it more if I'd been more familiar with the characters.

The book centred on Jimmy Rabbitte, a 47 year old married man with 4 children who is diagnosed with bowel cancer and thinks he may be dying.  He had been the member of a band in his youth (the Commitments, of the earlier book) and now he works at finding old bands then finding the people who used to love them and getting them to buy their resurrected songs.  His business had been successful for a time but is dwindling.  So he has his son's band pretend to be an old band and create a "long lost" song recording.  The band then, mistaken for a Bulgarian band on youtube does a cover of the song that "sounds remarkably like the original".

So the book swings between the humour of the fake band making fake music and the depressing scenes about Jimmy's surgery and chemotherapy - and the debilitating side effects.  In chemo he meets up with a former band member who is even worse off; feeling vulnerable he also has an affair with the former lead singer of his band.  The book ends at a Woodstock like music festival where Jimmy camps out with his long lost brother, the band member dying of cancer and another loser middle aged man who is teaching him to play the trumpet.  They all watch Jimmy's son perform - and Jimmy can't help but reveal the truth about what he is.

The various relationships Jimmy has - with his wife, his children, his father, his boss and his old friends are really what holds the book together.  It's a good read, but not a fantastic one.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

This book was far too weird for my liking.  I kept at it because I thought the main storyline was interesting but it was interspersed with Zen practices and beliefs which I found distracting though I was able to skim over them for the most part.  There was also some magical realism which I just didn't buy, or maybe didn't get - pages disappearing then reappearing and strange things like that.

The basic story was about Ruth, who lives on a small island off Vancouver Island.  She is a writer suffering from writer's block who has moved there from Manhattan to follow the man she loves who is also quite weird.  I was never quite sure if he was an environmental activist or what he was - he also suffered from some undefined illness that I never really understood.  Walking along the beach Ruth finds a freezer bag filled with a diary written mostly in English, a notebook which appears to be another diary written in French, some Japanese letters and a man's watch engraved in Japanese.  She, and others on the island, speculate this is something swept away by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan that travelled the ocean and ended up here.  Though they are never quite sure the timing is right.

The English diary is that of Nao, a teenaged girl who was born in the US but moved back to Tokyo with her parents when her father's job in Silicone Valley disappears, together with his savings, after the dot.com bubble bursts.  Nao is bullied at school, must face the repeated suicide attempts of her father and is generally miserable living in relative poverty after a very middle class life in the US.  When her mother gets a job and her father is trying to get help for his depression she is sent to spend the summer with her 104 year old great grandmother who is a buddhist nun living in a small, secluded community.  Her great grandmother senses her misery and tries to give her coping mechanisms which she calls super powers.  After leaving her summer feeling stronger, though not strong enough to return to school, she spends her days trying to tell the story of her great grandmother's life though it is really more her own story.  There are also several asides that are quite interesting about her great uncle who was a kamikaze fighter who lost his life in WWII.  The French diary, Japanese letter and watch belonged to him.

Ruth tries hard to find Nao and her family and discover first whether they really existed and then what happened to them in the wake of the tsunami.  She enlists others to help translate the Japanese and French (though she is Japanese herself, her command of formal language is not perfect) so we meet some local characters too.

There were also distracting segments about the fate of her cat and a crow that appeared to be from Japan.

All in all, though there were some interesting stories and characters, the book was just a bit too hard to figure out for me to find it enjoyable.

Cinnamon Gardens by Shaym Selvadurai

Enchanted by Selvadurai's latest move, I decided to pick up one of his older titles and was not disappointed.  This book is entirely set in British Ceylon and provides a good introduction to the historical roots of the conflicts in present-day Sri Lanka.  The characters are primarily upper class Ceylonese who are negotiating with the British - some want full independence, some partial.  Most tend to agree that universal franchise would not be appropriate though Annalukshmi, a young female teacher who bristles at her family's expectation that she will give up teaching to marry, does feel enfranchisement of educated women is appropriate.

We follow Annalukshmi through two unsuccessful matchmaking attempts and an equally unsuccessful match which she finds on her own.  The book also tells the story of her more traditional younger sister, through whom we see the pros and cons of agreeing to an arranged marriage.

The other central character in the book is Annalukshmi's uncle Balendran, a closeted gay who gave up a happy relationship with a British man once his father found out about it.  He has since married and had a son and we see the havoc that prevails when his former lover visits Sri Lanka.  We also learn of his brother Arul who was banished to India for marrying a lower caste woman.  Though on a visit to India, Balendran learns of his father's secrets which causes him to question his obedience to him.

All in all this is an interesting read filled with colourful characters.

Tomorrow There Will be Apricots by Jessica Soffer

Overall I didn't really enjoy this book.   There were times when I really wanted to know what would happen next but most of the time I was bored.  The book tells the story of two lonely people - Victoria whose husband has just passed away and Lorca, a young teenager who self mutilates, in my mind justifiably given how cruel and uncaring her mother is.

Lorca, always trying without success to please her mother, seeks out Victoria as the chef at restaurant where her mother claims to have had her favourite meal ever.  Victoria offers cooking classes at the behest of her odd neighbour (though aptly named) Dotty.  Lorca is the only one to show up.  And the two women bond - briefly believing their connection is even greater.  At the end they are there for each other - but first there are some twists and turns.

The book also revolves around recipes and food - all of Lorca's metaphors are food related.  At first I thought it was interesting - then it seemed too forced.

In all I don't really recommend this book unless you are very interested in Iraqi recipes or lonely people.