For One More Day - Mitch Albom

I recently went to the funeral of a 20-year old woman, which in itself is a tragic and devastating thing. One of her sisters gave a beautiful eulogy in which she talked about having a vivid dream during which she and her sister had a conversation. The dream was so real that she woke up feeling content - happy that she had that extra time with her sister, and hoping that the coming years would bring many more of those dreams so she would have even more time with the sister who was taken from her far too soon. That idea - of having just one more conversation with the person you love is something I think anyone who has lost a loved one can related to. Just that chance to see them laugh again, to tell them you love them, to ask them about their day and tell them about yours - it's a really powerful and real need. Albom's book is about just that. When former major league baseball player, Chick Benetto, tries to commit suicide, he comes face to face with his mother - who died eight years earlier. What follows is an account of Benetto's relationship growing up with his mother. There are a series of heartbreaking vignettes about the times his mother stood up for him, and conversely the times he failed to stand up for her, as Benetto comes to realize the importance of their relationship and the meaning of events that seemed incidental to him as a child. Albom's books, while simplistic on one level, are often difficult to read on an emotional level - they are a reminder of the mistakes we've made, and an urging to fix them before it's too late. As with Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, this was one that took no time at all to read, but has kept me thinking long after I finished.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie

In looking for good books about the Native American experience, my friend Sam introduced me to Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian from the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. This Young Adult novel is written as the memoir, complete with hilarious illustrations, of Arnold Spirit, Jr. ("Junior"). Junior, born with water on the brain and different enough from his peers to merit constant teasing, is certain that he needs to do something to get off the reservation. And so he makes the courageous decision to attend an wealthy all-white high school off the reservation. Somewhat autobiographical, Junior explores his frienship on the reservation with Rowdy, the son of an abusive alcoholic, as well as his own incredible accomplishments on the basketball court (which at times makes one question the truth-telling of the narrator). Junior falls in love with a white girl, misses his sister who has run off to get married in Montana, and continually seeks to find his identity between two worlds - both in which he is seen by everyone as the other. Through humor, Alexie portrays all the heartache of growing up on the reservation - all of the difficulties faced by Native American youth, and the effects of hundreds of years of oppression at the hands of the United States government. I read this book in a one hour sitting, though it's one that I think I will probably go back to pick apart more slowly later. Amazing on so many levels - but a particularly fabulous example of how insightful and powerful young adult fiction can be.

The Sushi Economy - Sash Issenberg

This falls into the category of: seriously, there's a book about everything out there. Awhile back, I read a great review for The Sushi Economy, an exploration of the burgeoning popularity of sushi around the world - and the evolution of tuna from fodder for cheap cat food to a modern delicacy. Issenberg approaches the issue from every angle - from Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market where auctioneers sell pounds and pounds of fish every morning to the hip LA restaurant sushi bars. Issenberg looks at the fishing trade itself - the various ways for farming and pirating tuna for legal commercial trade, as well as on the black market. This is a thorough study of the globalization of sushi, and interesting to the extent it answers the question of how such a seemingly strange food has gained such wide-spread popularity. But, at the end of the day, it's a book about the globalization of tuna - and while there are interesting factoids here and there, overall, it just didn't float my boat. Though it did put my in the mood for a big fat ninja roll.

Noah's Compass - Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler is one of my comfort-read authors. She's written 18 novels over 46 years, and I've only read a handful, so when I'm in the mood for a quick read that I know will be satisfactory, I turn to her. Noah's Compass is her latest, but definitely not her greatest. It is the story of recently laid off elementary school teacher, Liam Pennywell. In his new stage in life, Liam decides to downsize to a small apartment where on the first night he is knocked unconscious by a burglar and taken to the emergency room. Unable to remember the details of the attack, Liam becomes obsessed with this small window of memory, causing him to reevaluate his life path up to that point and beyond. We meet Liam's three daughters, an ex-wife, and a new love interest - all in his attempt to just get his bearings and find his new direction. I found the dialogue between the characters particularly irritating and unrealistic. At times there seemed to be too much going on with the different relationships between the characters, nothing quite getting resolved or addressed adequately. At the same time, I suppose, it is a realistic account of what an aging man's life would look like - not neatly in parts, but all over the place. It was definitely the quick read that I ancitipated, but not nearly as satisfying as other Tyler books I've read.

My Enemy's Cradle - Sara Young

Set initially in the Netherlands during WWII, My Enemy's Cradle is the story of two cousins: Anneke - the perfect one in love with and pregnant by a German solidier, and Cyrla - the half-Jewish poet hiding her religion in the hopes of avoiding the camps she can't quite believe actually exist. With Cyrla's identity in danger of being discovered, she is given the opportunity to take Anneke's place in a German Lebensborn - or maternity home for women pregnant with the children of the Aryan nation. The catch is that once the children are born, they are taken from their mothers - sometimes adopted by Nazi families, or in the case of those who are deemed less than perfect, simply executed. Throughout the novel, Cyrla struggles with choices, her naivete clouding her judgment and convincing her that she will be able to escape and be with her family and the father of her child. As a reader, knowing what we do about how dangerous Nazi Germany was for suspected Jews, and the horrific realities of the concentration camps, it is difficult not to become frustrated with Cyrla's seeming stupidity. But, Young does a fabulous job of writing a character who simply could not know the truth, until it is revealed to her little by little. Things with Cyrla's relationships in the end come together a little too neatly, but a little happiness among all the horror was appreciated. Despite the brutality of a couple scenes, and the constant underlying fear of rape by SS soldiers and other inhumane acts, I generally felt this book would have been appropriately classified as YA. Cyrla is easy to relate to as a teenage character. I have read countless WWII stories, but the Lebensborn was new to me - this was an interesting persepctive on devastating time in our history.

Lowboy - John Wray

Lowboy takes place in the subways of Manhattan, and tells the story of Will Heller, a 16-year old paranoid schizophrenic who has disappeared from a mental health institution intent on solving the problem of global warming by reuniting with the girl who got him into all this trouble in the first place. The narrative alternates between Will's own jumbled first-person account, and the story of his worried mother attempting to help the police find her child. I'm interested in learning more about the author's background with schizophrenia and the research he did to write from the perspective of a character suffering from this disease. The chapters about Will do an amazing job of recreating the world of someone driven by an obsessive need, who hears voices, and sees the world just a bit differently from the average preson. As a reader, I could feel Will's urgency and frustration. The chapters involving Will's mother and the detective who is searching for him were also quite interesting. I found myself so annoyed by the detective who is determined to paint Will as a dangerous criminal - and my heart ached for his mother who wants so desperately to protect her child. The story unravels in a way that doesn't entirely satisfy, though the nature of the relationship between Will and his mother plays out in a way that made me want to go back and read the entire book over again with new insight. While there's a lot of movement in this book, there isn't a great deal that happens in terms of plot. What I found most interesting was the method of the storytelling, and Wray's attempt to get inside Will's mind in an effort to understand a very tragic and difficult disease.

Reality Hungry: A Manifesto - David Shields

I'm not quite sure how to describe this book. The basic premise is Shields's belief that our culture is obsessed with "reality" because we rarely, if ever, experience it. To make his point, Sheilds launches into an in-depth discussion about memoirs. People ostensibly read memoirs because they want "real" stories. But, memoirs by their very nature are distorted reality - they contain the memories of the writer, not necessarily verified reality, but the facts as one remembers them, with the impressions and viewpoints of the individual at a given point in time. They are not objective biography. Despite this, people are up in arms when they realize that a given memoir has been exaggerated or fabricated (James Frey receives a number of mentions in the book). Sheilds discusses this phenomenon in a variety of other media, including the most obvious, Reality Television. People are fascinated by reality television, yet it's clear that many (if not all?) of these shows rely on scripted plot-lines and manufactured drama. The most interesting (to me) aspect of this book is that it is made up entirely of passages lifted from other sources. Shields has managed to put together a basically coherent argument about the state of reality, by compiling writings of other individuals. As he says, it wouldn't make sense to write a book about lies, without including a few lies. Because of the way the book is written, it does come across as a bit of a hodge-podge at times. Nonetheless, I did think it raised some interesting arguments about the nature of truth and reality, and why people are obsessed with truth in a world where we can never be sure to actually have achieved it