Top Ten New York City | Eyewitness Travel Guide

I loved reading this book, cover to cover! The Eyewitness Travel guides are by far my favourite in layout and information. I have read the longer guides before but this is the first 'Top Ten' city series that I've had. It is a really good guide to New York City for when you have a short time and want to see the best of. If you have a longer time, the longer guides would be better but this one will fit in my pocket, has a pull out map and I can get a good first-trip impression of the city. 

It has top ten lists on: buildings, restaurants, city oasis, cheap eats, hotels, sports events, meeting places....Very well organised.

Check out their other guides for excellent information, maps and guides to buildings. DK is the publisher and their are renown for the quality of their publications.

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Island Beneath the Sea | Isabel Allende

This is such a treat. Allende's novels is such a treat. She veers from her usual landscapes and characters to the Caribbean and the island of Haiti. The story involves whites, Negro slaves, mulattoes, quadroons and every shade in between. I learned a lot about of Saint-Domingue the original name of this island. It was a French colony, populated by rich white French, some Spanish and the imported slaves which worked in the sugar cane industry. It appears to have been one of the worst colonies for a slave to live in with the cruelty towards them incredible to read about. The novel follows the Valmorain family and their slaves and the children the master has with his wife and with his slave woman Tete. The chapters go between the voices of the narrator telling us the general story and Tete's chapters in which she  tells us her perspective.

Eventually there is an uprising and the family flees to New Orleans where they have to adapt to new ways of dealing with slavery and then to the news that Napoleon has sold Louisiana to the Americans.

It's a great story well told, and the characters are memorable as in most of Allende's novels and well worth reading.
Other books by Allende are "Eva Luna", "Stories of Eva Luna", "Paula", "Daughter of Fortune", "Portrait in Sepia", "Zorro", "Ines of my Soul", "The Sum of our Days".

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The Feast Of the Goat | Mario Vargas Llosa

This is a difficult book. Not lacking in interest and well written, but I just struggled to read and finish it. Although I am bilingual Spanish/English I found it difficult to keep track of all the major players given their lengthy Spanish names and the vast number of characters.

This is the story of Urania Cabral, a lawyer in NY who returns to her native Domincan Republic after self-imposed exile. Through her story we learn of her father's involvement in the Trujillo dictatorship and her motive for fleeing. We also have in between chapters from a historical point of view in Trujillo's voice and yet other chapters from the point of view of the subversive element plotting to kill Trujillo. We go from one narrative string to the other and it just gets a bit too embroiled in the politics and I lost sight of the humanity of the characters.

The translation is a bit wooden, nothing like the translations of Isabel Allende's novels.
All in all, it's hard work.

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The Legend of Bass Reeves | Gary Paulsen

I have read this to my kids. It's hard to find a story based on the wild west suitable for kids and inspiring to boot. This is the story of Bass, an African American who was born a slave and grew up around taxes and Arkansas in the 1850's. His mother and Bass ran the ranch for a retired ranger who spent most of his time drunk. after a violent dispute Bass had to flee and he went to live in the Indian Territories of the North. There he learned of their way of life and had twenty five years to learn their languages and culture. 

After Abraham Lincoln issued the emancipation Proclamation freeing all slaves, Bass emerged and started life as a rancher and family man. 
When in his late fifties lawlessness in the Indian territories came to the attention of the government, Bass was asked to become a Ranger. He hunted and detained hundreds of outlaws, horse thieves and criminals who victimised the ranchers and homesteaders. He worked till he was over 70, when he had gone out on over three thousand missions. 

He went on to be the constable of Muskogee where between 1907-09 there were no crimes committed due to the fact citizens respected him and criminals feared him.
This is a great story to read with or by children from about six to thirteen. i will hunt down some other books by Paulsen.

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The Glass Castle | Jeannette Walls

This book should be compulsory reading for all teens who think they have a tough life and their parents just don't get it. I think it's reassuring to say in the light of this non-fiction autobiography that 99% of us have had a pretty normal life....

The Wallis parents were hippy in attitude to life and parenting. They lived in the Arizona desert, in trailer parks, derelict stations and finally as homeless in New York. The opening scene is of Jeannette at three years of age cooking sausages on a stove and tipping the whole thing on herself and ending up in hospital. She remembers this not as a bad thing but as an opportunity to be in a safe, comfortable environment not moving around and being cared for by doting nurses. 

He mother is an airhead artist and her father an eccentric genius who is always on the verge of the next big breakthrough...if only he could stop drinking. The family moves around a lot because they have to keep one step ahead of debt collectors. Income is spasmodic and mostly rely on rent on property the mother has in Texas. 

In the end they go back to Virginia to where the father comes from. I thought the previous locations were depressing but honestly, that town takes the cake. It's a very dull, damp and depressed town which depends on the coal mines around it. They live in a ramshackle house with no electricity or toilet...The parents deteriorate and the kids take over the budgeting and managing of the family. it's incredible to read of the role reversal and the dreams and aspirations they have. Jeannette and her older sister begin to save to send her to new York. Eventually they both make it and begin stable lives there. They bring their brother up and eventually all become reasonably well adjusted. 
After a few years the chaotic parents arrive unannounced and ask to be put up for a while. eventually they chose to live on the streets and then squat in a building which the father rigs up with power from the main grid.

It's a remarkable book to read because it champions the resilience of the human spirit. I don't know how Jeannette and her two siblings came through all this and have relatively normal lives now. Their youngest sister did not and seems to have inherited her parents' chaotic nature. There are many stories out there about difficult childhoods and how scared and traumatised the kids are forever and how things repeat themselves. But this story is one of triumph over adversity and overcoming obstacles by dreaming and persevering. 

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The book Thief | Markus Zusak

A friend suggested I read this but I was a bit dubious given the narrator is Death! No offence but I didn’t think it would be a cheery book. Cheery it may not be but it’s an extraordinary narration of a part of history many authors have tackled. The setting is Europe before and during WW2. Death is having a boom time with the record of dead people he’s collecting all over the place.

But at one death he meets a girl who steals a book, Liesel Meminger. She is on a train with her mother and brother on the way to being delivered to foster parents. Her father is a communist and her mother chronically ill. On the way the brother dies and as they bury him the grave digger drops a book out of his pocket.

Using “The Gravedigger’s Handbook” her foster father teaches her to read and for the duration of her lifetime Death keeps an eye on her. She continues to steal books throughout her time in Germany and it brings her into relationships with very different people. She befriends the mayor’s wife and is allowed into her library of unread books.

The family takes in and hides a Jewish man who makes Liesel two books in which he tells her of his life and she is inspired to begin writing a book about her own life. Max eventually leaves and the family lives in constant fear of the Gestapo and the Nazi regime. She is in the basement reading when her street is bombed and she is the only survivor. In her distress she drops The Gravediggers Handbook and Death picks it up and keeps it. Liesel is eventually reunited with Max and lives in Germany till after the war. We are told she finds her way to Sydney, Australia and eventually dies there. Death is reunited with her and hands her the book and his most secret thought which he cannot share with anyone else “I am haunted by humans.”

The beauty of the story comes from the amazing perspective Zusak gives Death. He sees the continents in colour hues and is incredibly perceptive of human behaviour given he’s been around forever. 

Well worth reading and don't be put off by Death!

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The Behavior of Moths | Poppy Adams

I loved reading this book. It’s a very well told story, innocuous you may think, but it packs a bunch once the truth is revealed…Kind of creepy without being frightening. It has a Gothic house, family tensions and a narrator who you realise eventually, is unreliable. Vivien and Ginny are two sisters reunited after decades apart. They both have secrets that need revealing. Ginny tells most of the story. She’s a moth expert who has lived all her life in the old family mansion. She basically hides away in the attic where she plies her moth trade.

Vivien bursts onto the scene. She hasn’t been back to the house in fifty years and wants to spent the rest of her life with her sister. There are clashes and glimpses of a sinister childhood. The atmosphere tenses and things begin to unravel as we try and put the puzzle together. Ginny kept secret their mother’s alcoholism and violence. Vivien secretly believes she knows the real manner of her mother’s death…

As the sisters tussle with the unraveling of their family’s story we are drawn in and at the climactic point in the story we begin to question the veracity of the narrator we’ve come to believe. What a great read!

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The Poisonwood Bible | Barbara Kingsolver

This is a great story. It has everything in it to make us forget to eat and drink as it transports us to Africa.

There are some seriously troubled people in this book who seek redemption and who progress through life creating chaos and disturbing us at every turn. Meet the Prices, a missionary family from Georgia in 1959 who move to the Belgian Congo. They arrive full of zeal and self-righteousness. The image of them getting off the plane is indelibly fixed in my mind as it’s so beautifully drawn in words. They are wearing most of their clothes layered one on the other, with pockets full of small domestic implements…The story is narrated by the five women in the family, Orleanna who is the mother and her daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May.

The father tries to convert and change the natives. And slowly goes troppo. The children try to cope with being uprooted from southern USA to deepest darkest Africa and a father who is slowly loosing all sense of reality. There are mutinous natives, ferocious animal and murderous insects as well as the political turmoil Congo goes through in the 1960’s.

As the girls grow up they become aware of the complexity of the natives and their culture and embrace them. The father, however, cannot. Eventually tragedy ensues and the Price women flee and leave him to his folly. Their story is followed through to the 1990’s.

It’s a brilliantly written book a story which delivers at every turn. Kingsolver has a wonderful gift for poignancy and storytelling.

I went on to read all of her books and have enjoyed them all.

“Prodigal Summer”, “The Bean Tree’, “Pigs in Heaven’, ‘The Lacuna’.

Oscar and Lucinda | Peter Carey

There is a visual richness in this book, a sumptuous to read. I loved the easy way in which Carey’s writing translates so well into my imagination. It’s the story of Oscar Hopkins, an Anglican priest and Lucinda Leplastrier who has bought a glass factory. On the boat over to Australia they find out they are both compulsive gamblers. Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot transport a glass church from Sydney to Bellingen, a remote settlement four hundred kilometres away. This bet changes their lives for ever. The Australian landscape and Carey’s style are moving and engrossing. The story is well told as are most of Carey’s books. 

Well worth a read. And the movie with Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett is wonderful.

Burnt Shadows | Kamila Shamsie

This book is a bit weird, not in style but in scope. And although the structure holds together I wonder if Shamsie was trying to tackle too many good ideas in one book.

It starts on the day the Bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, 9 August 1945. Hiroko is a young woman in love with Konrad, a German living in the city. He dies, she moves to India to meet his sister who has married a British lawyer in Dilli. This move happens months before Partition and the formation of Pakistan. Hiroko marries an Indian and then moves to Pakistan. In all this the story has a lot to say about race relations, religious differences and the development of modern society through tragedy, displacement, invasions and nationality. 
Hiroko has a son who feels like a misfit and with his gifting in languages becomes embroiled in the conflicts between Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and America. These strands all pull together through the character of Hiroko and her relationships with the other main characters. She moves to New York and then 9/11 happens....As you can see, there are lots of opportunities to comment on conflict and war, immigrants and  nationality. 

I kept asking myself if it was too much but have come to the conclusion that the strength of the characters encourages us to keep being engaged with the themes. 
As a matter of interest, the burnt shadows of the title are the shadows one can see now on walls in Nagasaki and Hiroshima which are all that is left of people. They were totally consumed by the Nuclear Bombs and as the shock wave passed through them it imprinted their shadow on what was behind them. I have seen them in Hiroshima and it is the most startling and moving memorial I have ever seen. Shadows that show us the utter barbarity of war. This is Shamsie's fifth novel. She is one of Pakistan's most famous authors.

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I Know This Much Is True | Wally Lamb

This book was my introduction to Lamb’s novels. And I really loved it. He’s a great storyteller with believable characters who are quirky and live impossible lives.

This is the story of Dominick Birdsey and his schizophrenic twin brother Thomas. His life is a constant search for his identity and his place in a family dominated by his step-father Ray. Dominick finds and reads his Sicilian grandfather’s memoir and discovers his family’s roots and its darkest secrets.

There is a lot going on with the characters. Thomas is unstable though on medication and Dominick takes it upon himself to see him through hospitalisations and the horror of self-mutilation. Dominick's only child dies of SIDS and his lover's child ends up with HIV.

Lamb's skill as a storyteller is putting all these characters on the page and making the story plausible. Through larger-than-life people he lets us explore different outcomes from the ones we might search for in real life.

The reason I like reading this book is the mixture of characters and their exploration of themes we can all relate to like our desire to belong, being alone, wanting to be loved and accepted. Through their lives we can come to appreciate a different perspective on our own introspection. This is a very satisfying read.

It’s also worth reading Lamb’s other novels. "The Hour I First Believed", "She's Come Undone", "I'll Fly Away"

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A Gate at The Stairs | Lorrie Moore

 I really enjoyed this novel as it is well constructed and well written. From the start there is a niggling sense of impending doom. I was alert to what might happen just around the corner. The style of the story reminded me of Anne Tyler, but more tense.

The main narrator is Tassie a young woman from the Midwest USA who is going to college in a slightly larger town than the one she grew up in. Her family is dysfunctional. Her mother seems to spend a lot of time convalescing in bed. In a rural town full of farmers Tassie's dad is mocked as he is a hobby farmer growing eccentric crops for restaurants in the big city. Her brother Robert seems full of potential but encumbered by his small-town view of himself so goes off into the military seeing this as a bright future. He is deployed to Afghanistan. 

Tassie needs money to live away from home while at college so applies for a job babysitting. The couple who engage her are trying to adopt and want Tassie to be part of the process. Here is where the tension mounts. Sarah and Edward seem OK but there is an underlying unease about them. Sarah is a chef who owns her own restaurant. Edward is a scientist. They end up adopting Mary Emma, an African American toddler. Tassie bonds with  Emmie as her parents become busier in their jobs and have less time for her. 
Through the story line a lot of discussion is woven in. It is definitively a post 9/11 story and the characters engage in quite a lot of dialogue regarding race issues, Islam, the state of the Nation. 

Sarah gets together with other mixed race families in the small town and they start a support group which is used as a forum for the discussions. 

Yes, tragedy and disappointed ensure. All is not well in the Midwest!
I think this is a good read, satisfying and low key though it keeps your attention.

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The Colour | Rose Tremain

I really enjoyed reading this book because I learned so much about New Zealand’s early European history. It’s the story of Joseph and Harriet Blackstone who emigrate from Norfolk to Christchurch, NZ. 

As I live in Christchurch  was great to be able to visualise their journey and arrival and consequent travel around the province of Canterbury. The harsh land they settle on nearly destroys them. The animals freeze to death in the middle of winter. It’s a tough life and the sudden discovery of gold lures Joseph away from the land and away from Harriet. 

The rest of the story is poignant and well told as each searches for survival, for meaning and love. The pursuit of happiness and meaning in a new land form Harriet and Joseph and they make choices which in turn form the character of the colonials.

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Eva Luna | Isabel Allende

As soon as I started this book I was hooked and unequivocally sold on Allende’s prose. This is the first of her novels that I read and I loved it. Of course I went on to read them all. Eva Luna is the story of a young Latin American girl who discovers
love, friendship and success through her incredible ability as storyteller. 

Eva Luna is an orphan and learns about life through meeting the people in her barrio who give her the wisdom she needs for life. The urchin who commits petty crimes and later leads a band of guerrillas; a local Lebanese who takes her in and nurtures her; the transsexual eccentric who educates her in the ways of the world; her godmother who's mind is gone and thus lives in a world populated by all the saints in her calendar. In the characters we meet a version of a South American country which is rich in it's social make up. Rich, poor, sophisticated and the simple minded are all beautifully portrayed. 

I really enjoy the way these stories capture the likeness of people and situations. 

If you enjoy this novel read "The Stories of Eva Luna" which continues the story of her life. 

“Paula” tells the tragic story of Allende’s vigil by her daughter’s bedside through a fatal illness. She recounts her family history for Paula, just in case she can hear. In "My Invented Country"  she tells of her family’s history in Chile and subsequent escape to the USA because of her family’s political affiliations to Allende. “City of the Beasts” is a short novel for older children. There are many more titles.

I have read Allende in Spanish and in English translation and both are fabulous.

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The Anthologist | Nicholson Baker

Here's a book I wish I'd read when I was doing English at high school. Although it's a novel it is very much a book about poetry. Paul, the protagonist is putting together an anthology of rhyming poetry but is unable to write the preface for it and this fills his whole life with uncertainty. His partner leaves in frustration but Paul thinks she will be back so focuses a lot of his attention on how to lure her. Paul's life is stuck in between everything, his days static and full of poetry. He sees everything in the context of poems he's read. He is obsessive about it and talks to the reader about poetry and so it becomes quite a didactic novel.

In between the instruction we get the narrative of his days, a book reading he's dreading, a trip to Switzerland to a conference and the handyman work he does just to pay the bills. Also the mouse who visits him in his kitchen every night.

I'm a bit ambivalent about this novel. I liked learning about poetry but I found Paul a bit too obsessive and his passive attitude a bit tedious. It's worth reading quickly and maybe going on to read some of the poets he mentions.

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In Praise of Slow | Carl Honoré

This is a brilliant little book which went a long way in changing my philosophy of how to live life…SLOWLY. The Slow movement was born in Italy so it’s got to be good! It’s not about doing everything slowly but about getting the most out of everything we do rather than rushing and glossing over the top of all we do. The movement espouses slow cities where more space is given to footpaths and parks and is challenging modern urban designs.

Honoré explores the Slow Food side of things, where it’s the journey not the destination which is important. Growing produce, finding quality ingredients, cooking food ourselves with friends and sharing it as an experience or occasion rather than a fuel stop.

This book really starts to make sense and I can see how well the Slow movement ethos can be applied to any aspect of life.

I really enjoyed thinking and rehashing the daily in life to accommodate more quality rather than quantity into my lifestyle.

Thoroughly enjoyable read and very thought provoking. Something for everyone in chapters titled ‘Food: Turning the tables on Speed’, ’Sex: a lover with a slow hand’, ‘Leisure: the importance of being at rest’, ‘Children: raising an Unhurried Child’, and more.

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