Peg's (PLT) Reading Room

Happy New Year!
Though I'm new to Club Read, I've been a lurker here for some time and love the vibe. I'm a college librarian from NYC and a cat and opera lover as well! My reading interests are eclectic made even more so by the terrific group threads and reviews I manage to get through. Though real life prevented me from reading as much as I would have liked last year, some of my favorites were:

Confusion by Stefan Zwieg
Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Part of Myself by Carl Zuckmayer
Can't we talk about something more pleasant? : a memoir by Roz Chast

Looking forward to some great reading with you all!

July 18, 2015 -- Update
-- Here it is! After months of procrastination - a list of books I've read so far this year (and some reviews).

Welcome to Club Read, Peg! I'm a fan of Skylark and Half of a Yellow Sun, and I love Roz Chast but the topic of that book is too fraught for me.

Good to see you here, Peg! I had lost track of you after our group meet up at Jacob's Pickles nearly a year and a half ago, so I'll definitely follow you here.

Nice top selection in OP. See what follows this year.

Love your opening picture! I am a cat lover too; more by necessity than choice, though. HA! Welcome to Club Read.

>Rebecca: Thanks Rebecca! It's really nice to be here. The Chast was actually wonderful. Despite its content, I found myself laughing and nodding throughout the book.
>Darryl: Yay!- So nice to *see* you and Happy New Year! It has been a kind of difficult year, as my reading of the Chast book mirrors, but, I've missed Librarything a lot and I am so glad to be back. I've starred your thread and will definitely follow.
>Edwin:Thank you for visiting. I also hope that what follows is equally good and look forward to reading the threads and reviews for introductions to books not already on my to-be-read list.
>Avidmom: Thanks for your note. It's funny how the kitties adopt us, not vice versa.

So after a bout of procrastination, here is a list of books I've read so far this year as well as some reviews.
The Circle -- My Review
The Arcanum -- My Review
To the End of the Land -- My Review
Monkey Bridge -- My Review
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand -- My Review
Dear Life: Stories -- My Review
Call It Sleep
Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors -- My Review
They Told Me Not to Take that Job -- My Review

The Circle
Dave Eggers

Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

"It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

At a time when most, if not all of our electronic activity leaves footprints and is monitored either for commercial or other purposes and we ourselves have become a society of compulsive sharers, Eggers books is a timely indictment of our worship of all things digital and our willingness to sacrifice privacy in return for contact and connection.
The story takes place in the not too distant future on the beautiful almost Utopian corporate campus of a Google-like company where a Mae, recent college graduate is thrilled to find herself beginning a new job. As she becomes more and more proficient at her job, the company urges her to participate in the corporate culture in ways that straddle both her personal and private life until they are one in the same. As she enthusiastically sheds any semblance of privacy, she is rewarded at work and finds validation and encouragement in social media through the novel’s equivalent of likes and thumbs ups. Her discarding of her privacy has consequences in her actual (as opposed to her virtual) relationships and the frightening connection between enforced transparency and tyranny and between commercial and political surveillance is clearly made in this book.
Eggers’ characters are somewhat thinly drawn, their dialog can sometimes be didactic, and I was able to figure out plot twists early on, but the story as a modern day 1984 is an easy and fun read and the story (though not as fleshed out as it could be, is relevant and does provide food for thought.

The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story
Janet Gleeson

Who would have thought that a book about the history of European porcelain manufacturing would be a fun read? But that’s exactly what The Arcanum is and it makes this history read like a novel. It is the story of a Johann Frederick Bottger, a precocious young 18th century chemist who in a misguided attempt to prove his worthiness to a King (August the Strong of Saxony and Poland) promises that he has the ability to create gold out of ordinary metals. The King orders Bottger locked away in a castle for years so that he can provide this creation for the King’s benefit. Eventually, in desperation for some freedom and to avoid execution for fraudulently representing himself, Bottger instead comes up with the formula (the Arcanum) for making hard porcelain in the manner of the Chinese. Chinese porcelain had been highly prized in Europe for its delicacy, beauty and durability. The Europeans could not replicate porcelain until Bottger figured out how. Once he did, August the Strong opened a factory in Meissen, Germany (where it still remains) which produced highly sought beautiful and delicate objects. The book details the intrigues in the factory as well as the plots and conspiracies throughout Europe in efforts to steal the porcelain formula and compete with August’s monopoly on this lucrative, highly desired and valuable luxury.

It really is a fascinating and enjoyable story and Gleeson manages to provide historical and political background as well as a real taste of life in the 1700’s in Europe. If I have one complaint about the book, it is that there are no photos of Meissen porcelain. Given that Meissen established the precedent for this decorative art in Europe, it seems that the inclusion of photos of the porcelain would have added a lot to the book and the lack of photography is a huge omission. Simply put, seeing examples of Meissen would have visually answered the question of what the fuss was all about 300 years ago.

To The End of the Land
David Grossman

Though very difficult to slog through, this is a moving story that is at once both hopeful and depressing. The book centers on two damaged people who, in my opinion are metaphors for the existential story of Israel, a country in constant struggle.

Ora, is the mother of two boys who are fathered by two men, each of whom plays a central role in her life and in each other’s lives. Ora’s younger son has finished military duty but has signed up for one more campaign. Ora is convinced that if she is in constant movement, wandering “to the end of the land” without the ability of the army “notifiers” who bring families the news of combat deaths, to locate her, she can keep her son alive. She wanders the country with her son’s father Avram, a man she hasn’t seen in a long time, but with whom she and her husband had a tight and complicated bond. As a condition of accompanying Ora on her wandering, Avram must agree to hear about the boy’s (his biological son’s) life. She is compelled to tell him about the son in minute detail and in doing so brings both father and son to life through her recounting. There is throughout their wanderings, an almost manic desperation to her actions and words.

The power of words to insure and reclaim life seems to be an underlying theme in the book. Ora meets both Avram and Ilan (her estranged husband) while the three of them are in a hospital after the Six Day War. Avram is a writer and his words bring the three back to life while in the hospital. Later, during the Yom Kippur War. Avram is captured and physically, emotionally and mentally brutalized and tortured. He initially is able to maintain radio contact with the Israelis. His words don’t provide information but are non-stop verbal flights of fancy. His incessant talking (like Ora’s) is more an affirmation of life than anything else. Grossman’s writing is masterful as he conveys the desperation of both these people to affirm life and in the case of Avram, to portray through silence how he despairs of life after he is physically and mentally crushed post-captivity. Grossman seems to be telling us that as long as we can speak of life, life exists.

The book is difficult to read; it is dense and overly long, but still packs a punch. We learn about the brutality of war, the ability to hold on to hope and the need to remember and communicate. The story of these people is, no doubt, an allegory of the country itself and never sugar coats but evokes the desperation, hope and the often ruthless actions that come from a constant and complex struggle.

Monkey Bridge
Lan Cao

A monkey bridge is a perilous and precarious Vietnamese rope bridge that requires a very delicate balancing act to cross. Mai, the Vietnamese immigrant main character of Lan Cao’s heartbreaking novel has to cross a metaphorical monkey bridge as she simultaneously balances her new life in the United States with her efforts to hold on to her Vietnamese roots and history. Her attempts are complicated even more because the novel’s action takes place in the mid to late 1970’s – a time when the U.S. was trying hard to forget its involvement in an unpopular war in that country.

Mai, who came to the U.S. through the benevolence of an American soldier her family befriended, is joined by her mother, Thanh after the fall of Saigon. Her mother has a difficult time adjusting and is dependent on Mai to negotiate and interpret a completely alien culture and lifestyle. When Thanh falls ill, Mai tries to locate her grandfather, Thanh’s father, who was left behind in Vietnam. Mai hopes that his presence will provide comfort for Thanh so that Mai can leave her mother with a support system when she goes away to college.

Immigrant novels abound, but what makes this story unique is the fact that the Vietnam War was so unpopular that once it ended, Americans tried hard to forget it. Unwanted reminders of the war (such as Vietnam vets and Vietnamese refugees) were inconvenient truths who were ignored at best and more typically abandoned. As a result, Thanh makes efforts to present a carefully constructed version of her personal history to her daughter; a history that in the end, she cannot sustain.

It is noteworthy that both mother and daughter have two sets of fathers, each of whom symbolize a distinct and tragic segment of Vietnamese history. Their stories are the story of 20th Century Vietnam.

Cao’s writing is beautiful and successfully blends both ancient Vietnamese mythology and culture with American pop culture.

The author describes the physical shape of Vietnam as a seahorse. Interestingly, she uses that same word to describe Mai’s mother. Mai’s mother is the embodiment of the land and her complicated family history is the history of the country. Balancing past and present, Mai has to navigate her own perilous monkey bridge - an act that requires that she hold on to both her Vietnamese heritage and the new life she is making in the United States.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
Helen Simonson

A very charming love story set in a British village. Major Pettigrew, a retired military man is a stodgy widower who is set in his ways and in the ways of his tightly knit, insular community. With the death of his brother, he encounters a number of events that open his eyes to his life of mundane and humdrum routine. One of these events is his burgeoning friendship with Mrs. Ali, a local storekeeper of a certain age and also a widow. As he and Mrs. Ali become closer and closer, the people of the village and his materialistic and very snobby son begin to look askance at the relationship between this firmly conventional and traditional Englishman with a proud military family history and Mrs. Ali, a Pakistani woman raised in England with a very traditional family of her own. The result is a sweet mix of comedy of errors combined with biting observations on the intolerance of people usually in the name of tradition. Will Major Pettigrew and Mrs. Ali’s love triumph over narrow-mindedness? In his last stand, Major Pettigrew provides the answer in this sharp but poignant look at values and mores.

Enjoyed catching up with your varied reading.

I also enjoyed catching up with your reading. I read Major Pettigrew a couple of years ago, and enjoyed it as well.

Thanks Rebecca. I have been lurking these past few months (including reading your always wonderful reviews), and I'm hoping that I can be a bit better at participating in the coming months.

Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
Melvin Jules Bukiet

Melvin Jules Bukiet writes in his introduction to Nothing Makes You Free:

"How do you cope when the most important events in your life occurred before you were born? What does this do to your sense of time? Of authenticity? As they were ghosts in history, you’re a ghost in your own safe little suburban bedroom with cowboy lampshades. All you know is that you’ve received a tainted inheritance, secondhand knowledge of the worst event in history.“

Bukiet has compiled an anthology of writing (both fiction and non-fiction) by what he terms the “Second Generation” or 2G, that is, children of Holocaust Survivors. As someone who has read 2G works since Helen Epstein’s 1979 book “Children of the Holocaust” and obsessively searched out others such as Thane Rosenbaum, Art Spiegelman, Carl Friedman and Yossi Klein Halevi, I was eager to read this book.

The works of 2G writers are often angrier, more strident and more acerbic. There is a sense of desperate futility in that rage because many 2G’s were subconsciously attempting to “save” their parents retroactively – and there are definitely trends in how that was done – much of which is conveyed in the 2G literature. With a few exceptions, the parents, the actual survivors (including the ones who wrote about the Holocaust) seemed more sorrowful, sometimes bitter but seldom enraged. They were also determined, at least superficially, to establish themselves and to rebuild their lives. It was, I think their way of proving that they were the victors, not (only) the victims. The children, were living, breathing proof of their victory.

What I particularly liked about the anthology was its international scope - many of the included works are translations. Some of the pieces are quite moving, but on the whole, I do prefer the full-length works by these authors which tend to be more nuanced. Most of the pieces convey the underlying paranoia and suspicion imparted by the parents. That paradoxical combination of suspicion and their parent's determination to build (at least the facade of) a new and thoroughly ordinary life fundamentally defined who the 2G’s were and who they became. If there is a running theme in the works in this anthology it is growing up with this paradox.

Hi Colleen,
Thanks for your note! I really liked Major Pettigrew. It was a really lovely story.

Dear Life
Alice Munro

Alice Munro’s characters always remind me of wading into the ocean. We float along following the lead of gentle ups and downs of the waves and are lulled as we learn to keep up with the rhythm – until a huge surge crashes, smacks us from behind and washes over us. After the initial shock, we get up and swim on.

Munro’s characters in this (her final?) collection of beautiful short stories, are people who have been floating along accepting life’s rhythm even when it’s not exactly what they had imagined. They don’t seem to have big plans (although they often have ambitions). They are then confronted with large or small disappointments that they ultimately overcome with the same sense of quiet acceptance that they have shown with all the events in their lives. They continue on. There is a yielding to events in life and to fate, even when the characters themselves make the decisions themselves. Toward the end of Amundsen, one of the most perfect stories in the book, a character who long ago had been abruptly dropped by a lover, meets that lover many years later.

"Going in opposite directions. .. He called out, ‘How are you?’ and I answered ‘Fine.’ Then added for good measure, ‘Happy.’"

Characters move on, life throws out disappointment and they soldier on. Happiness is basically an afterthought.
Munro’s incisive prose is quiet and compact but manage, in a brief space to create an entire world. Most of the stories are incredibly and powerfully wise, some are just perfection.

They Told Me Not to Take That Job
Reynold Levy

I was so eager to read this book that I pre-ordered it. The reviews I read were really positive. I’ve always been interested in what goes on behind the scenes in the performing arts and Levy presided over Lincoln Center during some big events – the demise of the City Opera, the financial problems and strike threat at the Metropolitan Opera and overhaul and redesign of the campus complete with neon signs along the stairs leading up to the halls.

The book was a monumental disappointment.

Levy doesn’t hesitate to name names and to question the actions of others, but usually in what appears to be an attempt to bolster our image of his business and organizational acumen. Tsk, tsk, if only they had listened to him. He is absolutely the hero of his own story – with some grating false modesty to temper his tales of derring do. He also boasts about some of the innovations he implemented to raise funds – pricing strategies that nickel and dime concert goers as well as naming rights for large donors. Since I find these to be some of the most odious modern trends, I was doubly offended by the pride he took in implementing them. To quote Mel Brooks..it’s good to be the king.

The latter part of the book is devoted to the lessons he’s learned during his tenure as Lincoln Center’s president, wisdom he feels he should impart to the reader. Most if not all of these are standard management techniques that can be found in any Business 101 textbook.

>18 plt: Excellent review. The ocean analogy is quite apt.

>8 plt: I just read your review and saw your rating and I agree with your view. I gave it three stars for its page-turning character but you are absolutely right about the characters. Their flatness bugged me a lot. Also I found that Eggers was not too creative as he mostly described things we already have and pointed out in how far they could be harmful. But don't we know that?

Enjoying your reviews and I loved the put down of Reynold Levy's book. I am with you in getting annoyed when the author becomes the hero of his own book.

A lot of interesting books!

Too bad about the Reynold Levy book - I might have been interested in it otherwise.

Great reviews of To the End of the Land and Monkey Bridge, Peg. I own Grossman's book but haven't read it yet, so I'll try to get to it sometime next year.

Monkey Bridge sounds very interesting as well.

Darryl!

Sorry, just got back from vacation and saw your note. I recommend the Grossman book but it was a commitment. It was kind of tough to slog through.