Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Jefferson's first day of school was a Wednesday, and I of course had a brain meltdown and barely got us out the door in time, so certainly didn't have a lunch packed or a book to read while I hung out in Mecosta and waited for time to pick him up. Plus, on Wednesdays, the library doesn't open until 1:0o (preschool starts at 11:30), but happily the used bookstore was open.

Spring Snow was the first book to catch my eye on entering the store. I suspected at the time and have since confirmed that it sounded so familiar because it was on Bookslut's top 100 books of the 20th century list. And I'm happy to say after reading it I feel it definitely deserves its spot on that list. I loved this book from beginning to end.

Set in early 20th century Japan, this story plays out against a backdrop of a country in flux -- where families with money and families with rank have access to different kinds of power. Where old world elegance clashes with those emulating the tastes and values of the west.

In addition to this intriguing glance into a foreign culture, are the more familiar forms of a young man's coming of age and the tragic tale of a forbidden romance. But almost all of these things seem secondary to the languid, hypnotizing style with which the story is told. One never stops to wonder how the recitation of a dream or a religious discussion or a rumination on law moves the story forward, because every word just seems to draw the reader further into the dream that is this book.

I can hardly recommend this book highly enough.

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The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel by Salman Rushdie


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I don't remember precisely where or when, but this ook was another impulse buy when I was bored in a bookstore. I'm always willing to take a chance on Salman Rushdie -- even his books that I wasn't entirely crazy about were usually enjoyable or interesting enough in some way that made them feel worth my time and investment as a reader. Also, I confess that I was drawn in by the good cover design -- the rich colors and antiqued gold look. So I bought it.

With my crazy life, it's difficult to ever give a book my undivided attention, and that was definitely a detraction in this case. For Enchantress sprawls across continents and generations, with unfamiliar names that sometimes seem to blend together. I often found myself having to flip back to remind myself which character was which.

On the other hand, there were portions of this book that were absolutely entrancing, when the story called to me every time I had to put the book down, and these sections flowed beautifully with Rushdie's magical lyricism.

But there was so much in this book that it was occasionally weighed down by its riches. Transitions from story to story, place to place and time to time sometimes seemed abrupt. Some details never seemed to connect to the tapestry and left me wondering why they'd been included at all. Then there was that ending -- strange, troubling and lacking in poetry.

In balance, I'd say that the strengths of those delightful passages were enough to earn The Enchantress high marks in my book. Had the rest of the novel lived up to these moments, it could have been near perfection.

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Collected Poems by Eavan Boland


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Jessa lent me this book years and years ago. I picked it up this summer as I suspected it might be on the short list of books she would want to take with her to Germany -- she's mentioned Boland a few times as an author whose work it is difficult to find in the United States.

Anyway, I enjoyed this poetry well enough, Boland is clearly a very accomplished writer. However, I felt that I was really missing most of it. Much of Boland's earlier poems were based heavily on mythology and traditional stories that were largely unfamiliar to me. (Darn my lack of a classical education!) Then later poems were informed by the history of Irish-English conflicts, which really I just know nothing about at all.

There were quite a number of poems more generally on womanhood, motherhood and relationships. Those, of course, I could relate to, and were lovely, some biting, and all very intelligent and skillful. But it's easy to see why Jessa, with her interest in mythology and Irish history, would get a lot more out of this collection than me.

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Ina May's Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The midwife lent me a whole stack of books (and is always pushing me to take more), but so far the only one I've read cover-to-cover is this one. And I'm wishing I'd read this before I had Jefferson.

Roughly the first half of this book is birth stories. Almost all of them are midwife-assisted births at The Farm, a village/commune in Tennessee, mostly just in homes without a lot of special equipment. Very few of the births had to be transported to the hospital, though those are represented as well. The stories are testament to what a calm and experienced birth assistant, a trust in the power of a woman's body, and the natural process of birth itself can do -- even when the mother gets temporarily hung up by fear, even with extremely large babies, and even with some fairly troublesome complications.

The second half of the book is a collection of essays by Ina May on the current state of birthing in the United States. (Primarily it's about this country anyway, there is also a lot of data from other countries for comparison.) The latter chapters are sometimes hopeful, sometimes chilling, but mostly make me glad we're trying for a midwife-assisted home birth this time.

But this book is mostly famous in our house for two pictures of a face-presentation. Jefferson was looking over my shoulder one day as I was reading this book and liked all the pictures of babies. So I started flipping through it with him looking for the pictures. Most were standard mom and baby post-birth posed shots, but on page 58 there is a picture of a baby where only the face has emerged from the birth canal, and then another of the baby right after delivery, with its poor face all smooshed and swollen. I was a little worried about Jefferson's reaction, as I hadn't intended to give him quite such a graphic introduction to "where babies come from," but he loved the pictures, and for a while developed a nightly routine of wanting to see the baby pictures before bed. At one point he even indicated the face presentation and told me he wanted me to have that baby. I told him no matter how much I loved him and wanted him to be happy, I would never wish for a face presentation.

Anyway! I loved this book. Very authoritative and informational. Would recommend to anyone interested in a more natural version of childbirth.

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Homer and Langley: A Novel by E.L. Doctorow


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I think a good deal of the reason I got so behind in reviewing my books is my reluctance to write about this one. There was a fair amount of pressure to do so -- I got this book free as a part of a publicity giveaway in advance of publication, and they even followed up with a postcard to remind me to post a review (before I'd even read the book.) So, dutifully I moved the book to the top of my to-read pile, finished it fairly quickly, then... stalled.

I simply have no strong opinions on this book. I enjoyed it enough to read quickly, yet was almost always conscious that if this book hadn't been free, I never would have read it. Based on real life peole (which I actually didn't realize while reading it), it tells the stories of two brothers who become increasingly cut off from the world, Homer by blindness and Langley by his bitterness caused by his wartime experience. They hole up in their massive house (left to them by their parents) in New York City, interacting with outsiders only rarely (but usually very memorably), and slowly boxing themselves in with Langley's growing compulsion to collect and hoard.

Now, I have some hoarding compulsions myself, but I was never able to really connect with Langley. And while the novel said some interesting things about the value of community, they were said rather obliquely, and were never in focus. So, to the reader with no previous exposure to the Collyer brothers legend, what was the point?

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FREE BOOK! Since I got this book for free, I think it's only fair that if you think you would enjoy this book more than I did, I will send it on to you for free. Just leave a comment to claim.

The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It's a very rare book review that causes me to immediately go and purchase a book. But that's exactly what I did when I stumbled across a glowing review while browsing SEED's science blogs. Clearly I was feeling a serious lack of science and critical thinking in my life that day.

While I have some criticisms of this book, most of them stem from the fact that it was written for a general audience (and I'm glad that it was) and so sometimes had less detailed descriptions of physiology than I would have liked to see. But I'm getting ahead of myself! The Making of the Fittest examines DNA evidence as the ultimate forensic proof of evolution -- rightly pointing out that DNA evidence is routinely used and universally accepted in courts of law. Which raises the question -- how can someone accept, say, the use of DNA to prove paternity, and yet not accept the overwhelming evidence provided by DNA analysis as to the mechanisms and effectiveness of evolution?

Carroll takes a comprehensive approach to proving his case -- from addressing common arguments of evolution-deniers (most notably that evolution "couldn't have had enough time" and the evolution of the human eye), showing examples both of useful genes deteriorating when selection pressure was removed and of how under similar selective pressures, many species independently evolved the same adaptations, to some interesting discussions of other historical resistances to other scientific ideas, and why this resistance happens over and over with major new ideas.

I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in evolution.

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


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is the book I was looking for earlier in the year when I bought Flight instead. Purchased at Grand Rapids downtown Schuler's when I was going out of my mind with boredom after spending all day at the Children's Museum with Jefferson. Luckily, I remembered seeing this store when we parked so I left Jefferson with Andrew and made a quick dash for some intellectual salvation. Unfortunately, while it was a Schuler's it was primarily a downtown bookstore -- the selection sucked. Heavy on book club fare and current events, very light on everything else. Nothing interesting in any featured section, so I started on my list of reliable authors. Was very pleased to find this in paperback.

Anyway, so Diary is a young adult novel about a bright boy who -- to put it bluntly -- is having his soul beaten out of him by the atrocious quality of the rez educational system. Finally a teacher tells him he has to get out before he gives up like everyone else on the rez. Which is how he ends up going to an all-white school 20 miles down the road (also his school's athletic arch-rival.)

It's a great introduction to Alexie and his sharp class and race observations -- and I've been using it as such, trying to get more reading friends hooked on him. Easy to read, the illustrations are wonderful (the narrator is a cartoonist), and dark, but not too dark -- it's really the perfect introduction.

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Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion by Sara Miles


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is the story of unlikely conversion: A radical lesbian activist, who spend much of her youth involved in people's uprisings in Mexico & Central America, one day walks into a church, receives communion, and is transformed. She becomes filled with the idea of "sharing the body," which for her becomes a command to feed the people. Which leads her to setting up a weekly food bank in the church, and then to helping others in the city start new food banks as well, challenging her congregation, those in her neighborhood, and even those who visit the food bank to expand their ideas of community, service, and comfort.

What I appreciated most about this book was the author's meditations on what it means to "be the body of Christ," and sharing in that call with those whose religious beliefs differed significantly from hers. (And vice versa!) It's a thought that I've been mulling over all summer, and it's helping me be less reticent expressing my beliefs around those with more conservative views (Pretty much everyone.)

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Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I resisted this book for a long time despite the appeal of its topic, largely because of its popularity as a book club book. And we all know I'm a snob like that, despite my claiming of the bookslut title. Anyway, when Tava sent me a copy, it erased most of my excuses not to read it.

I'm very glad I finally did read it. The author, through a chance encounter, develops a relationship with the people of a small, remote village in Pakistan, and pledges to build them a school. This, despite his limited income, working only enough as a nurse to finance his many mountain-climbing expeditions, incredibly limited contacts, and complete lack of fundraising experience. Still, he somehow succeeds, and goes on to build dozens of schools, despite the opposition of corrupt local organizers and mullahs, a kidnapping at gunpoint, wars and rapidly changing political climates. What he accomplishes is truly amazing, though it makes the rise of violent Islamic factions toward the end of the book all the more depressing.

Highly recommended to anyone who wants to better understand what's going on in the region, and to anyone who believes in the power of education.

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Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was finally motivated to pull this weighty tome down off of the shelf after an intriguing review by my sister of Hrdy's most recent work: Mothers and Others. An anthropologist, Hrdy uses human history, observations of our closest evolutionary relatives, and even social insects to examine what is really the true nature of motherhood. As a feminist, she is perhaps not surprised to find that much of what we have traditionally viewed as natural maternal behavior is in fact wishful thinking.

I found this book incredibly impressive and profoundly influential. Many times I've found both Andrew and I reciting anecdotes and arguments from this book in discussions on gender and parenting. (There were quite a number of sections I just had to read aloud to Andrew.)

Though I didn't always agree with her every point, I look forward to reading other work by Hrdy, and will continue to recommend her far and wide.

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So back when I got pregnant and sick, I got behind on everything. And then camp started. So while I was reading books during that time, I didn't really journal them anywhere. In mid-August I tried to remember all the books I'd read that summer in order (not that many, but still) and wrote them up in my paper book journal. But for whatever reason I never got around to updating them to my online sites. And then I got behind again. But at least today I'm aiming to catch up on those I've already journaled on paper, and then hopefully sometime I'll be able to track all the books I missed since then. Some of these reviews are pretty brief, but I was trying to catch up as quick as I could.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A graphic novel of a young woman trying to figure out her father's life in retrospect. Only in college, after she comes out as a lesbian, does she finally learn that her father is gay. A few weeks later, her father dies, leaving hundreds of questions unanswered. Her father's distance and the author's early discomfort with her own gender create a massively hollow feeling at the center of this book. It's there for good reason, but still, it's disconcerting.

This book won a lot of acclaim when it first came out, and I've no doubt that it's well-deserved. Still, it will probably never be one of my favorites.

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Daughters of the North: A Novel by Sarah Hall


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When I was last at Jessa's I reclaimed a few of my own books from her collection before her move to Germany, and at the same time she pressed this one on me, saying I'd really like it. A few days ago, I was searching for a book to read while I'd misplaced Fear and Trembling, so I grabbed this one.

She was right! I was drawn in right from the beginning, to the point that some of Sister's anger and frustration spilled over into my (male-filled) life when I was forced to put the book down for a while. Sunday I plowed through the rest of the book despite Andrew being gone and my needing to watch Jefferson all day.

In this near-future dystopian vision, global warming has raised coastlines and temperatures, the economy has crashed, people have been herded into urban centers, and England is engaged in some unnamed war with far flung enemies. All women are fitted with contraceptive "regulators," subject to surprise inspection, and reproduction is by lottery. One woman finally has enough, so she flees her "official" existence in search of a women's community high in the mountains that she's been fascinated with since childhood, but has little idea if it still exists....

In many ways this book is the opposite of Door Into Ocean's Sharer world -- with incidents of torture, military training, and the final violent uprising, but in both books the women are wiry, strong, self-sufficient, living at harmony with their ecosystem, and in control. Could the women of Carhullan have staged a successful non-violent campaign of resistance? It's hard to say.

Both worlds have strong representations of women, and also people of color (perhaps Daughters more pointedly in the case of the latter.) Daughters also speaks strongly to the kind of power and self-control so alluring in glossy ads for the military. Of course, the Sharers also had that strength, though they went about completely different means to achieve it.

In the end, it is perhaps startling how much the two groups of women have in common.

Highly recommended.

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Daughter of Elysium by Joan Slonczewski

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Not exactly a sequel, Daughter of Elysium is the second book in the Elysium cycle, following Door Into Ocean. Like Door, Daughter takes place on Shora, but many centuries later. Several new "races" of humans are introduced: the beautiful and long-lived but detached Elysians, to the Goddess-worshiping, family-centered, martial arts experts from Bronze Sky -- the Clickers, the impoverished & overcrowded L'liites, the testosterone-dominated Urulites, and the servos -- who aren't actually human, but may or may not be sentient.



This is a very ambitious bit of SF -- there are a lot of balls in the air and I'm not sure I believe that she lands them all soundly. Then again, some may be deliberately left alight for the next book in the series? I don't know. That aside, it was nice to be back in the Sharer world again, though most of the worldview this time was filtered through the eyes of the Clickers. Much of the focus in this book was on reproduction and population management. It was somewhat frustrating that there was a complete absence of the theory that given the empowerment of women and a stable economic environment, women will limit their own reproduction and population growth will tend toward zero. Still, there were interesting ideas here and intriguing characters aplenty. Enough to make me seek out the next book in the series, anyway.


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Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I put this book on my Paperbackswap wishlist ages ago (Probably from an ad in the New York Review of Books). I received it just before my train trip to Virginia, and it seemed like a good travel book, so I brought it along and ended up reading the whole thing on the outbound train. I was right -- it was a good travel book. A collection of short stories taking place in pre-WWII China & Hong Kong, it seemed a backward trip in time, as they were arranged with the most modern storyline first, each following story seeming to progress more into traditional families and characters, though I would guess all took place within a decade or two of each other in time. Although occasionally the narrators were male, the sum effect was a grim picture of the few options open to women in the social roles at the time. One notable exception was the story of a male college student, trapped between the contradictions of his high social class, his shame at his parents' opium addiction, and the abuse suffered at the hands of his father. But even this misery was the result of his mother's entrapment in a loveless marriage, and his tumultuous feelings had disastrous consequences for a female classmate, so perhaps it was the exception that proves the rule. Masterfully written and stereotype-defying, it would be a worthy read for any lover of literature.


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Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Okay, actually I read most of this book last year, but then it disappeared mysteriously -- until I finally discovered it behind the couch! It took a while to get back into the train of thought I'd left weeks (months?) ago, but I was very glad to finally finish it.

This was a life-changing book in many ways. It was one of those perfect books just two steps ahead of the reader's brain -- I was more than ready to agree with nearly everything contained within. And that covers a lot of ground! From research suggesting that exposure to nature is essential to a child's development to how sprawl and lawsuit-paranoid land-use policies have restricted this access to groups working to bring exposure to nature into the schools and into neighborhoods to play quality in "traditional" playgrounds vs natural areas to the effect of teaching environmentalism with an exclusively global focus while neglecting local flora & fauna and a sense of connection to place... It's exhaustive! But never exhausting. Each chapter spawned new ideas and grew new connections in my brain. The author made a deliberate effort to focus on causes for hope and suggestions for action, which I well appreciated.

I would recommend this book to anyone. Anyone with kids or who knows kids. Anyone interested in nature or the environment. Anyone interested in education. Anyone interested in changing the world and who dares to hope.


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Bicycles: Love Poems by Nikki Giovanni

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Appropriately, I bought this book on Valentine's Day, at the Book Mark in Mount Pleasant, killing time after our dinner at China Garden before it was time to pick up Jefferson from free child care at New Life church. Not only is it Nikki, but the cover called to me as a clear echo of her earlier collection, Love Poems, out in '97, which I discovered in college and was the true dawning of my love for her.



This book of poems is very much the same. The poet is a little older, a little wiser, but still joyful, still with a lust for life. Even in her most sorrowful poems, there is such love underneath the pain.



Not only do I adore Nikki, I want to be Nikki. I want to be able to react with such grace and such love. And of course, I'd love to be able to write about it so cleverly afterwords. And to bear up so cheekily under a love unrequited! Not for Nikki any stereotypical tearing of hair and rending of garments, but almost... merely, perplexion. That capability I envy, even if it turns out somehow it's faked....


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In the Forest: A Novel by Edna O'Brien

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book was very well-written, but still I can hardly help but be angry that I read it.



Based on true events (or inspired by?) In the Forest is the story of a boy destroyed by the system intending to help or "correct" him. Only after a few glimpses at this destruction, we meet him as an "adult," when he returns from a recent stint in prison to his hometown, where he will murder a young mother and her child, along with a priest.



There are many reasons why I am angry with this book. The first is that once O'Kane's fascination with the mother became clear, I was propelled to keep reading, quickly, as if the fact that I didn't put the book down would mean that the searchers would find her in time (whether or not the victims died is left in suspense for many chapters, until close til the end of the book), that she and her son would be tired, and dehydrated, maybe wounded, but alive. But all of that suspended hope was for nothing. There was no redemption for the victims, no redemption for the killer, I hated the villagers for not reporting the abduction... The book was about hell. Hell on earth. And I just didn't realize that was what I was signing up for when I started the book, somehow.



Others may not find this book so upsetting. Indeed, most of the reviews I have seen for this book are overwhelmingly positive. But as the mother of a young child, this isn't the kind of experience I want to walk into unknowingly.


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The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I continue to love the Penguin Great Ideas series. Though the simple inclusion of a date of original publication would be very nice.



Anyway, the book is a discussion of governments. Ideal governments vs. real governments, the best government for a given state, the nature of governance and governors. The historical and mythical examples were interesting, but in many places the extent to which various theoretical constructs were being compared got a bit tiring. Despite all that, there were more than enough points to ponder to make the book worth the reading.


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Flight: A Novel by Sherman Alexie

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was feeling sad about the number of Sherman Alexie books I haven't read, so I made a bookstore run and picked this one up. Yesterday morning I grabbed it as we were getting in the car for a trip, and by the time we were home that afternoon I had finished it. In between I did a lot of crying, developed a major headache and a mild sense of nausea, all of which I'm blaming on this book. It was horrific, filled with rage and blame and fury, and yet somehow infused with hope.



It's the story of Zits, whose father abandoned him at birth, and whose mother died when he was six, and who has bounced through twenty foster homes, in and out of jail and juvenile halfway houses, and finally ends up on the street with a hyper-intelligent homeless teenage sociopath. But a radical action allows him to slip through time, seeing history up close and personal through the eyes of a white FBI agent, a Native American youth, a white "Indian tracker," among others.



These glimpses become an eduction of some uncomfortable questions: Who else has the right to such fury? Yet, what are the consequences of this fury? Where does it end? Where did it begin? And can any of this be redeemed?



This novel is an amazing feat. Only Alexie could have pulled it off.


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Okay, this posting GoodReads reviews thing seems to be pretty awesome. No more looking up ISBNs on amazon and posting complicated urls! Of course, this also means that if anyone is motivated to buy one of these books from one of my reviews, the referral credit will no longer go to my sister, but how often did that ever really happen?

Delicious Laughter: Rambunctious Teaching Stories from the Mathnawi of Jelaluddin Rumi by Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I've been reading Rumi so long that most of these stories and poems are now familiar to me. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this as an introduction to Rumi, but anyone just starting to get into him who likes the bawdy stuff would find this a favorite.


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