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.

 

The World Gives Way

 by Marissa Levien

This book is set in the future, I assume.   It is about a space ship, rigged to look like the earth, which has been traveling for about 100 years with the destination a distant planet.

The main character, Myrra, is one of the many contract workers who are obliged to work for 50 years before they get their freedom.  She had been sold into contract work after her mother, a contract worker, disappeared.  She was five years old.  Many contract workers seem resigned to their fate but not Myrra, she is working to save money, or get married to someone who can buyout her contract and free her.

Initially she worked in a laundry and later a bakery.  As the book opens she is working as the housekeeper and babysitter for a wealthy connected couple on the ship.  One day she is summoned in the middle of the night to the penthouse by the wife of the family.  The woman commits suicide by jumping off the building, leaving Myrra to care for her daughter.  Before she dies she hints that her husband is dead and that Myrra should help herself to money/cards in the vault.

Myrra goes to her bosses office area and finds he has killed himself in the tub.  As she needs a palm print to open the safe she cuts off his hand.  She is careful to take a card that she thinks was a card for unknown accounts of his.  She sets off with the baby and tries to get out of New London before she can be caught.  Before she leaves Myrra learns that her employers probably killed themselves because the ship was going to collapse soon because of a hole in the hull that could not be repaired.

The deaths are discovered quite quickly and two security officers are sent to find her to charge her with murder and or kidnapping.  She doesn't go to the city they think she will go to.  They go to an underwater city but it starts to collapse because of earthquakes and they only barely escape.  They eventually track Myrra down and she tells them what happened and that the world is going to end but they don't believe her.

Eventually the earthquakes and collapses continue and it is announced that the ship is in danger.  The older of the two security people  decides to leave to return to his family. The other security officer, who is now an orphan as his adopted father died in a building collapse, decides to try to find Myrra.  He knows there is no point arresting her, he just doesn't want to be alone.

They eventually travel through a fake desert and reach the inner and outer hulls of the ship.  They meet someone who knows Myrra's mother and she is able to find out that her mother didn't really abandon her, she was arrested and taken to this hull area to work there.  The young security officer calls his real parents, who are in prison for a variety of crimes, they don't seem to have changed and won't believe him when he tells them the world is going to end.

As the book ends it appears the world will collapse but Myrra and Tobias are glad to be together at the end.

This was an interesting story, very well told.  It did a great job of describing this "created" earth and of the building tension as the story and the catastrophe developed.  I was hoping for a more positive ending but don't know how one could have happened given what was going on and so quickly on the ship.

However, the deaths of the two people are disc

China Room

by Sunjeev Sahota

This is another of the books on the longlist for the Booker Prize this year.  It is the story to two people, a woman (Mehar) and her great-grandson.

Part of the reason I enjoyed the book was the author's beautiful descriptive language.  The other reason was the engrossing, somewhat bizarre story.

The story takes place in the Punjab.  Mehar is engaged at a very young age, in an arranged marriage.  When it takes time for the wedding we find that three brothers in the same family will all be wedding on the same day.  The men's mother is the boss of the family.  In the culture the women are to keep covered including their faces.  In a bizarre situation the women never get to really know which of the three men is their husband.  The only time the husband's come to them is to a room, totally in the dark, where the men have sex with them and leave.

The mother in law treats all three brides as dirt and bosses them around.  Mehar thinks she knows which man is hers but it turns out she is wrong.  She is actually the bride of the oldest brother.  However, a brief encounter with one of the other brothers outside the house convinces her that another of the brothers is her husband.  They start meeting on the sly and seem to fall in love and enjoy having sex together.  The question has to be asked if this man was indeed her husband why didn't he just arrange meetings in the dark room on a regular basis.  It is bizarre that they women would not be allowed to have normal daily interactions with their husbands, not being "kept in the dark".  We do learn that the mother in law was apparently not allowed to marry the man she wanted to.

Eventually Mehar discovers the truth.  She is distraught and starts to cut herself and get ill.  She shuns her husband and he respects her wishes. She continues to have liaisons with the other brother and they plan to run away to Lahore.  Mehar gets pregnant by her lover.  The mother in law knows what is going on.  

At this time the fight for Indian Independence and Independent Punjab state is gaining strength.  The mother tells her eldest son that he should offer his brother as a soldier.  The man and Mehar are caught just as they are planning to leave.  Mehar is put in a room with locked bars, we don't know anything of her life after that other than she has 5 more children from her actual husband.  Mehar often wonders what happened to her lover, if he is alive or dead.  Her husband visits him in prison but doesn't tell her he has seen him.

Mehar's husband does seem to forgive her infidelity, he gets the house painted her favourite colour, he is willing to accept her rebuffs at first.  You have to wonder if she ever came to accept/respect him.  However given the locked bars on her room I am doubtful.

The second part of the story is about the young university student, great grandson of Mehar.  His parents had moved to England.  They and the boy are scarred by the verbal and physical attacks on them because they are immigrants.  The boy is on a summer break from uni.  He is a drug addict.  He stays with an uncle for a time and is misdiagnosed with dengue fever.  His aunt doesn't really want him around because of neighbourhood gossip,  He agrees to go to the old family home on a farm.  The house where Mehar was imprisoned.  His uncle sends him food.  He reluctantly starts to clean up the place a bit and deal with his withdrawal symptoms.  He is befriended by a local woman doctor and a local teacher.  They visit him, help him get the place painted etc and become friends.  The boy know that the room he is sleeping in was where his great grandmother was imprisoned but he doesn't seem to be interested in finding out the story although he does hear local gossip.

At the end of the story the boy wants to tell the Doctor he loves her but discovers she probably is having a relationship with the teacher, at least that is what the local gossips say.  It doesn't matter because the female doctor has been assigned elsewhere and he has to return to uni, where he has had failing grades.

We learn at the end that he does go back and has a couple more drug relapses but eventually gets clean. It was an interesting story, just surprised the young man wasn't more interested in getting to know more about his great grandmother.

I think the book is about isolation and imprisonment, real or psychological and unrequited love and the consequences.

The Madness of Crowds

 by Louise Penny

I looked at a couple reviews of this, the latest Louise Penny book.  The descriptions included: "her darkest book" and "difficult to read".  I think I have to agree on both counts.

This was a very powerful book, more than just a mystery, I think it ventured into social commentary and discussion of the value of a life and what could justify murder, who can you trust, and can you trust yourself.  She said that the book was partially triggered by people suggesting she write a book about the covid pandemic.

The book takes place just after the pandemic and people in Three Pines are rejoicing in being able to socialize again, hug again.  Armand Gamache is given a strange assignment.  He is supposed to coordinate security for controversial speaker who will be coming to speak at a local university gym.  This doesn't seem to be an appropriate job for him and his team.  The speaker is travelling with her Assistant who has been a best friend since childhood.

When Gamache does research and finds out that the speaker has a fanatical views and is very popular on social media and amongst fringes of society he gets concerned and tries to get the Chancellor of the University to stop the event.  She pleads that universities need to air all opinions and won't cancel.  We later find out that the speaker is a fried of hers and that the Chancellor actually booked the hall but under a fake name.  The speaker is a statistician, who was hired by the government to write a report.  The report is so shocking the government refuses to release it.  So the woman takes her message to the Internet and gains a big following.  She is proposing that the way for the economy to grow after the pandemic is to eliminate all the vulnerable (handicapped and aged).  This strikes a nerve with Gamache and his son-in-law who has a daughter with Downs Syndrome.  The son-in-law has been wrestling with his feelings about having a handicapped child.

At the event there is high security, people are searched for weapons.  Gamache, because he wants to protect Jean Guy for the message of the speaker and the support she gets from the crowd, orders Jean Guy to stay outside the doors of the venue.  But Jean Guy does go inside.

While the speaker is speaking a firecracker goes off. This frightens the crowd.  Shortly after gun shots are aimed at the stage.  Gamache falls on the speaker to protect her.  They discover the shooter is a local man, not known to police, they don't initially know how the gun could have gotten into the building.  When Gamache finds out Jean Guy did not follow his instructions he is furious.

As the story goes on various people who are interviewed don't tell the police the truth.  For example a local retired academic, who is known as something like the bad saint, does not tell them he was at the event, standing next to the gunman and did nothing to stop him from firing.  We later find out that this academic, early in his academic career, was working for a scientist who conducted devastating experiments, bordering on torture on psychiatric patients.  This work was funded by the FBI.

An additional character in the story is a young Sudanese woman who is visiting Three Pines.  She is a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.  Everyone of course expects her to be saintly because of all her work fighting for refugees, women and children.  However, she is very ascerbic.

As the story goes on we learn that the Speakers mother was a victim of these scientific experiments and committed suicide after she came home from the treatments.  She left behind the Speaker, her handicapped sister and her husband.  A few years later the sister dies, Gamache comes to suspect she was murdered and the father commits suicide.  He sends a letter to the Chancellor (who at that time was a close friend) asking her to give the letter to his daughter.  He does not admit to killing the daughter.

Gamache tells the Chancellor to take the speaker and her assistant and have them stay at her place for their safety.  Instead she brings them to a New Year's Eve Party in Three Pines.  The assistant is found murdered, bludgeoned, just after midnight.  They are trying to figure out if she was killed on purpose or was mistaken for the speaker.

In the end it turns out that the speaker actually killed her assistant when the assistant confessed she had smothered the woman's sister to get the women freedom.  There is a confrontation in which the speaker has a gun on Jean-Paul and he has a gun trained on her.  He is tempted to use it on her and she seems to be seeking "suicide by cop".  Added to all this conflict we also learn more about the Sudanese woman and the murders she committed to escape capture and save others.

The book is very intense, Gamache and Jean-Paul wrestle with whether they are being truly logical in handling this case or whether their emotions are colouring their judgment.  Gamache of course always thinks he is logical so the thought that he might not always be is a test for him.

It isn't just about murder, it is about the right to life, is murder ever justified? when you see something bad happening and you don't act, how we expect "good" people to be saints, and they're not necessarily.  It is about lies, truth, loyalty we think we owe to friends, emotion, logic and the insanity of crowds, a commentary of current social media.  She threw everything into this story,

No One is Talking About This

 by Patricia Lockwood

This book is one of the books on the Booker Prize Longlist this year.  It is about a woman who is addicted to Internet Social Media.  She is seen to be a guru and is invited to speak around the world.  The book portrays all the nonsense with mis-information in social media, the striving to get attention by controversial or even ridiculous posts. The woman ignores her husband.  At one point she agrees to have her phone locked in a mini-safe so she can't go online but she doesn't even last a day and begs her husband to unlock the safe.

About this point I was ready to give up on the book.... it is too much like real life right now and we don't need more crap on the Internet.

She is on a speaking tour when she gets a message from her mother that something is wrong with her pregnant sister's foetus.  She rushes home.  It turns out the baby has Elephant man disease.  There is discussion about aborting the fetus but is is a late stage pregnancy and the laws of the country would have dire consequences for the parents and doctors if this was done.  While doctor's understand why the parents may wish to do this they are eager to find out what happens with the baby if it survives.

The baby survives and the internet addict forgets about the internet.  She and all the family are in love with and engrossed in this beautiful, blind, deaf, deformed child.  They are excited to see her beautiful blue unseeing eyes grow bigger when they cuddle her or play music to her.  At one point it is proposed to sew her eyes shut... don't know why.  But when it comes time to do it the doctor says he can't won't do it... wouldn't do it if it was his child.  The main character has been taking numerous pictures and videos of the baby throughout its short life on her phone.

The child's days are numbered, they all know this but they spend as much time as they can with her until she eventually stops breathing.  

As the book ends the author has been speaking at a conference.  While she is speaking, she has really been thinking about her niece.... She is invited for a drink.  Then it says someone "lifts" her phone from her pocket.... and she feels lighter.... Not sure what this ending is supposed to mean.

This was a difficult book but the author really did a great job of switching from the internet addiction and the need for attention in the cyber-universe to the preciousness of an individual life.

She did a brilliant job.  I am glad I stuck with the book.