The Reading List

 Sara Nisha Adams

This is another sad book

It is the story of a girl Aliesha who is living with her brother and their mother who is severely depressed and always needs to have one of her kids present to look after her.  The mother seems to prefer the son and Aliesha is very hurt by this. 

Aliesha is on summer break from school and gets a job at a local library.  She isn't a reader and just wants to listen to her music and check out books.  An elderly man, grieving the loss of his wife, finds a book she had read, The Time Travellers Wife. He is not a reader but picks it up and finds he enjoyed it. He has become very reclusive despite the urgings of his daughters.  He decides to overcome his lethargy and go to the local library and ask for another book to read. She is very rude to him and just waves him over to the stacks.The man is embarrassed and runs from the library with a drivers manual.

Aliesha is chastised for her treatment of the man.  While she is checking in books she finds a reading list of 8 quite diverse books: To Kill A Mockingbird, Rebecca, The Kite Runner, Life of Pi, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, Beloved and A Suitable Boy.

She is able to see the man again and gives him the first book on the list she found to read.  Then she decides she better read that book and the others on the list so she can recommend other books to him.  They become friends after this and discuss the books and also share some of the sadness in their lives.

Gradually Mukesh starts to go out more including to his church and starts having his wife's best friend over for dinner.  They just want to be friends.

We learn that other people also find copies of the booklist in other places.  Mukesh buys some of the books for his young granddaughter and takes her to the library to get a library card.  This cements their friendship.

Aliesha's mother really needed treatment, not sure why they didn't get her hospitalized.  Her behaviour was a huge burden on both kids, neither of them could have a life, with friends, etc.  One day the brother, who seemed to be the strongest one in the family kills himself by jumping in front of a subway train.  The mother's reaction to the daughter is "get out... I don't want to see you again".  Totally devastating.

In the end of the book we find many people have been changed by reading the books on the list and it appears that Mukesh's wife may have been who shared the list.  Mukesh and Aleisha come up with a plan to have an event to invite people to the library for a drop in Wed. morning event with food, to promote the library, and in memory of the brother.

In the end it looks like the mother is making small steps to seek help.

The book was interesting in that it talked about books as escape but also what you can learn about life from books, but in the end it is friendship and connections with people that are most important.

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Bewilderment

 by Richard Powers

This is the latest book by Powers.  It is one of the books on the Booker list this year.

I read Powers previous book Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize.  As I recall, I did not like it.  I did not like the characters and I think I was in disbelief that one of the characters would turn in one or some members of the group.

This book is about an single-parent Astrophysicist.  The man's child has some un-diagnosed disorder, autisim, ADHD.  The man's wife was a high energy activist who died of cancer.  Both the man and his son remember her and miss her terribly.  The boy wants to see videos of his mother making presentations in front of government committees.  He seems desperate to stay connected to her.

The boy has frequent, sometimes violent meltdowns.  As the book opens the father and son are on a camping trip.   The boy has been taken out of school because he attacked another boy.  The father and son like looking at the stars and the father makes up stories about what life is like on some real/make-believe stars.  These planets have various lifeforms, many quite different than life on earth.  This is the father's work in real life, speculating on potential life forms in the universe.

Prior to the wife/mother's death the man and his wife are invited to take part in a scientific experiment being run by a former friend/lover of the wife.  They each are put in a booth and told to think about some emotions and their brain activity is monitored.  The woman is able to watch the images of her husband's brain activity and vice versa.

The father is really having difficulty handling his son and trying to decide if the son needs to be medicated.  In desperation he goes to the Doctor who did the experiments on him and his wife asking for professional advice about his son.  The Doctor explains they are now using the equipment to treat people to help them learn to manage their emotions.  He asks the man if his son would like to be a test subject.

The man agrees.  The therapy seems to help the boy almost immediately.  He becomes calmer.  He talks about having "people" in the machine who help him. As part of the process the boy is exposed to his mother's brain activity from the experiment she participated in.  The boy is really pleased to be connected with his mother.

The man and the boy are reading the book Flowers for Algernon about about and a mentally disabled man (Charlie) who are made smarter... so you know what is coming....  This seemed a bit lame.

In the story there is a horrific president (like Trump).  This president is intent on destroying funding on science activities. 

The only reference to Bewilderment is on Page 238 "That first Tuesday in November, online conspiracy theories, compromised ballots, and bands of armed polled protesters undermined the integrity of the vote....I wondered how I might explain the crisis to an anthropologist from Proxima Centaurti  In this place, with such a species, trapped in such technologies, even a simple head count grew impossible. Only pure bewilderment kept us from civil war"

Definition: Bewilderment: a feeling of being perplexed and confused

 The father actually speaks before a committee in support of programs he is working on but funding for a planned project is cut.  The Doctor who is working with them man's son tells him his lab has also lost its funding so he can no longer treat the boy.  The boy starts to deteriorate, his curiosity, energy declines.  

Eventually the father and the boy go camping again.  During the night the boy leaves the tent and goes out into the river. The father finds him half frozen in the current and is unable to save him.

I just read a review of the book in the New York times that says it is sentimental and not as complex as Overstory.  I think I agree.  The contrast -- the father being an astrophysicist and his speculations/storytelling about other worlds and his inability to find a way for his son to a way to happily exist in the natural, non-tech induced world was a bit of an obvious construct.

For me Powers again asked us to look at what we are asked to consider what we are doing to our planet.  While the story may have been weak I enjoyed it more/disliked it less than The Overstory.

Great Circle

 by Maggie Shipstead   

This book is nominated for the Booker this year. 

It is basically the story of two women, a fictional woman pilot who disappeared while on an attempt to circle the globe from pole to pole and and actress whose career is in tailspin who takes on the role of playing the pilot in a movie.

The book starts with a ship captain who marries a rather unsuitable woman.  She gets pregnant and has twins.  While the captain's family is sailing on one of his atlantic crossings the boat sinks.  The owner had been storing weapons material on the ship (in an effort to serve the war effort).  The captain is vilified and imprisoned when he jumps from the ship with his two children leaving the ship and many passengers to go down without him.

The father drops the children off with their uncle in Montana.  He is a somewhat famous artist and lets the kids kid of run wild.  The kids are friends with a local boy who is also somewhat on his own as his mother is a drunk.  The girl and this boy have an on again off again relationship over the years.

The uncle is a drinker and a gambler and basically gambles away the money he is given for the children's care.  One of the twins is a girl. She sees some barnstormers and decides she wants to become a pilot.  A local man, a rum runner (during prohibition) becomes enamoured with the girl and funds her flying lessons.  Eventually she marries him, feeling grateful for what he has done for her and because he bailed her uncle out of his debts.  The marriage does not go well.  She feels trapped, he no longer wants her to fly and he wants her to have a child and she doesn't want to. Eventually she flees to Alaska and sets up a flying business.  Shes always fears her husband will find her.

Her brother leaves Montana for the coast and makes a living sketching people in parks. One day he meets a girl who introduces him to her father.  Her father wants him to paint the girl and also catalogue his art collection.  The man makes his money from meat.  When he finds out the young man is vegetarian he kicks him out.  The young woman and young man are in love, the brother is devastated at the loss of his love.  The girl eventually marries someone else.

The other story takes place in the present, an actress is starring in a series of movies.  She is fired from the series when she is publicly seen out in public with another actor.  The director and writer of the series feel she has damaged the "brand".  The young woman is then offered a role in the story of the female pilot who was lost trying to circumnavigate the globe.  The actress is interested as she had read a book about the woman as a child.

The story gives more details in both women's lives.  In the end the actress is introduced to a person who has more information about the pilot because she is a relative.  It turns out that they pilot's brother an the woman he loved did hook up during WWII while the woman's husband was fighting in the war.  She got pregnant with his child. The pilot's brother was working for the U.S. military painting images of the war.  His sister thought he would be safe as an artist but he ends up getting killed while traveling during the war.

The information the actress receives indicates that the woman pilot did not die after all but reinvented her life again in Australia after crashing her plane near and island.  Her childhood friend apparently visited her in Australia but they never married.  She left her estate to her dead brother's love child.

It was an interesting story with the two intertwined lives but was a bit slow going at times.  The ending was an interesting surprise. 

As far as I am concerned this is not the best book nominated for the Booker this year, it will be interesting to see which one wins.  I will have read most of the books on the shortlist soon.