Book Review: Moloka'i by Alan Brennert

Moloka'i
Alan Brennert
Adult Historical Fiction
I listened to the Audible audiobook.
You might like this book if: You like historical fiction, you're interested in Hawaii, you like strong female characters, or sweeping stories that follow a character over a long period of time.

This book involved another of the moments of Synchronicity that often happen to me in connection with books. A few months ago, I happened upon an episode of a public television show called The Generations Project, which I'd never watched before. This is a genealogy show that helps an individual find out more about an ancestor about whom they are missing information. In the episode I accidentally found, a Hawaiian woman is trying to find out about her ancestor who was an inmate in the Kalaupapa settlement on the island of Moloka'i. It was a leper colony and I had never heard of it before.

When we chose books for one of my book groups, this one came up and I didn't really find out any information about it before I started reading. I had no idea what it was about. Well, it turns out that my TV show had prepared me well for the reading of this book and really enriched my experience with it. It is about the Kalaupapa Settlement, and the main character actually has several things in common with the person on the tv show. I loved that while I was reading, I could picture the place in my mind and have this real-life connection to the events of the story.

To summarize, this is an epic tale, following the life of one woman almost in its entirety. Hers is a rich life and I deeply loved her by the end. There are lots of other characters along the way and the story goes in waves of more and less interesting at times, just as life does. The writing is pretty good, though I'm curious to sample it in written, rather than audio, form. The narrator has such an influence on how a book comes across. This narrator has a cultural connection to the story, and that did add authenticity, which I liked, but the voice sometimes does obscure the writing. There were a few parts that the author included that seemed like they were added, while I'm sure they came from historical sources, merely to titillate rather than truly moving the story forward. It all worked out in the end though and even those characters became woven into the story in a way that fit a little better. Overall, I loved it and couldn't wait to pick up my knitting and listen. It is a 17 hour audio book, which means it must be several hundred pages as a book, so it is an undertaking, but it was a great story and I'm really glad I listened.

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Book Review: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery
Adult, Fiction, Translation

I had this book in my possession for quite a while and then last month it was my bookclub's pick so I was motivated to dig it out of the pile and read.

Just so you know, the author is a professor and student of philosophy, so there is much mention and quoting of the theories of some of the philosophers of the world, both well-known and not so. Some in my bookclub found all that a bit abstruse and it took a while for them to get into the book.

I did not have that experience. I loved it from the get-go, philosophical musings and all. The story is pretty simple, really. There is an apartment building in Paris full of rich people. The Concierge, what we would call the Super or Building Manager, is a woman of no consequence in terms of class, but has a secret that she keeps from the people who live in the building. One of the tenants is a little girl who has become deeply cynical about the world because of the hypocrisy she sees all around her. The third main character is a new tenant to the building who changes everything.

To me the book is about seeing, perceiving and knowing people.  It is about how we respond to others based on our own experiences, desires, needs, wants and pain rather than based on what is actually happening at the moment of interaction. I loved the main characters and saw bits of myself in all three, for better and worse. I struggle with this idea of hiding parts of myself because I'm convinced that I will never be accepted or understood. I enjoyed the included philosophy texts and quotes. For me they fit the purpose of trying to sort out what is important and what only seems important. As I read the book, the answer to that question is that we must come to see and to value those around us for who they are, and it really boils down to being as simple as that for me. Thus, I found myself laughing, crying, thinking, wishing and hoping throughout the entire arc of the story.  I think I will read this one again to view the characters omnisciently and extract more detail from the events of the story. 

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Book Review: Yarn: Remembering the Way Home by Kyoko Mori

Yarn: Remembering the Way Home
Kyoko Mori
Memoir, Adult

This one came my way due to the title since I love yarn.  Appropriately, I read it while away for the weekend at a knitting conference. It was a fairly fast read, and the skilled and quiet writing drew me into the story.

It does have to do with knitting as the author tells the story of her life, beginning in Japan and ending up in Washington D.C., and among all the changes she experiences along that journey, knitting becomes the still place where she goes to find order and peace.  Mori had a very painful and difficult childhood, overshadowed most of all by the strong personalities and powerful choices of her parents. Her quest to heal those wounds and make for herself a meaningful home is something that we can all relate to on some level. 

Overall, it was an enjoyable and thought provoking read. The author was deprived of a complete relationship with her family, and was left insecure and damaged. She tells that story in such a way that I cared about that pain and hoped for her to find a life beyond it, one where she can feel the same kind of comfort and familiarity that she does when she is knitting.

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Book Review: The Things They Carried

So, enough of the emotional CAT scans I've been writing. Here is a book review that I'm posting right on the front end because it was so compelling. Ironically, it is someone else's emotional CAT scan, laid out for all of us to read.

The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
Fiction
Adult

This is a collection of stories about marching as an infantryman in the Vietnam War that are loosely woven together by a common narrator who also happens to be named Tim O'Brien. This is a work of fiction, however, and is not autobiographical. Even though the author did serve as an infantryman in Vietnam, he uses storytelling rather than documentary writing to cope with his experiences there. He even explains how this works in one of the stories, "How to Tell a True War Story:"

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed...The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

That means that it wouldn't be enough to just describe the death of a Vietnamese soldier. It means that one has to put words around the feelings of witnessing that death. This is what the author works to do in this book.

This is an ugly book, yet it is beautifully written. It has lots of foul language, yet it also has passages of an almost delicate beauty. It has images of war that are horrifying and brutal, yet they serve to shake anyone out of any sort of fog they might be in about the fact that war is, in fact, evil. People lose their very humanity during war, and it is a terrible thing to witness. Mr. O'Brien managed to use his writing as a way to work through his tour of duty and survive. Many are not so lucky, so I am glad for his willingness to share. I found myself in his writing and liked how he used rather spare prose, with just enough words, to complete an image in my mind.

In my book group today, a group of very nice, normal, middle-aged suburban moms, we had the longest, most detailed and passionate book discussion that we've ever had since I've been in the group. It was awesome to really tap into everyone's life experiences about the Vietnam war (we range in age from mid-forties to mid-fifties), misconceptions about war in general and how and why it is relevant in our every-day lives.

I didn't "like" this book. It frightened me, disgusted me, made me sad and sat heavy in my mind. On the other hand, I'm really glad I read this book because I have a larger view of the world and more tools to help me consider the complicated questions of right and wrong. I want to make it clear that while I firmly believe there are things worth fighting for, this book is not about that, so it is only part of the discussion in terms of the absence of honor that seemed to permeate the Vietnam war. The author refers to his political leanings, but mostly this book is about the act of war, not so much about the bigger picture. Yet, I am left thinking about the bigger picture as a result of his micro-view of actually fighting a war.

If you don't think you can deal with all the stories, read the first one, "The Things They Carried," and then read "How to Write a True War Story." They will be wrenching enough to stay with you for a long time.

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Book Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling
Genre: YA Fiction/Fantasy
You Might Like This Book: If you're breathing, for heaven's sake! Just read them all!
Bloomsbury Audio Book, read by Stephen Fry


I know I read this in the summer of 2007. I was waiting in line at a Wal-mart in Oakland, MD with everyone else when it came out. I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. Then I went and read it in about 8 hours. What I've since realized is that reading a book so full of detail in such a ridiculously short time requires is a kind of speed reading in which one skips all but the largest words. Apparently I didn't always choose the right words to speed read. I remembered a few of the major highlights, but as I listened to this delightful rendition by Stephen Fry, it became clear that I was, for all intents and purposes, coming to really know the book for the first time. All the other HP books I can remember. I've read several of them multiple times. This one I just read the once, that first breathless weekend.  But what a treat to rediscover this story so long after all the hype has died down. It was wonderful! I really, really loved it. I wholeheartedly commend J.K. Rowling as the author of a true classic. The themes in the book (and in the whole series) are just so universal and timeless that I found myself not just entertained, but actually uplifted and edified. I appreciate that she had the courage to paint a picture of real evil.  There are lines in this world and some things are bad and some are good. That is a courageous stand to take in a time in history when moral relativism is the norm and accountability is unpopular. For me the basic, bottom line truth that these books offer and that will keep me rereading them throughout the rest of my life, is that choices matter and that the most fundamental and important choice we each have to make, all the moments of our lives is between acting in a loving way or acting in a selfish way. Love really is the deepest and most powerful magic in the universe and I applaud Ms. Rowling for helping us all to remember that important fact. 

PS. If you're only familiar with the Jim Dale audio version, those are wonderful, too. I just love Stephen Fry as an actor, and loved his reading of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  From there, I developed a sort of obsession to hear his version of the HP books. I was not disappointed by his reading, plus these had all the awesome Britishness, some of which was edited out for us Americans. I highly recommend it, but I also recommend you borrow it from me since I had to order it all from the UK.

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