Atonement by Ian McEwan

I wanted to read this book before I watch the movie. It is the story of a British family's disintegration as told by several members of the family as well as  childhood friend of theirs. There is the usual class stuff, which annoys me. Can Brits write about anything else?  But the telling of the tale from the 11 year old Briony who misjudges the relationship of Robbie with her sister Cecilia and her cousin Lola is well done. The young budding author and playwright, is convinced that Robbie has committed several crimes attacking both Cecilia and Lola. She has misunderstood the situation and Robbie is sent to prison for a crime he did not commit.  Cecilia cuts herself off from her family. I was less enamoured with the telling of Robbie's point of view when he is a soldier in France retreating from the collapse of the country during WW II after his prison sentence.  His painful retreat to meet up with Cecilia once again was a long tale and  a bit out of place.  The author relished talking about war equipment and gory wounds and frightened French peasants.  It seemed a little too easy for Briony in the end to have gained atonement through her work as a nurse in the war and telling her parents and the legal authorities that she had lied.  She continues to live a long life, but her Cecilia and Robbie die untimely deaths before the war is over.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Per Petterson, a Norwegian author, writes of a man in his 60s who returns to live in a remote cabin in Northern Norway, near the Swedish border, where he relives the drama of his 15th summer. His reflections on that summer are interwoven with a sparse daily life of walking his dog, meeting up with the brother of a friend of his from that fateful summer, chopping a tree, watching the snow fall and encountering a brief visit from his daughter.  This book shows the wounds of a man that were scabbed over for years, but are now rubbed raw again. 

During his summer visit when he was a teenager, he experiences a variety of different events which are difficult for him to piece together-- his friend's violent behavior, his father's love of another woman and the logging of his father's property. Ultimately his father abandons his family as his friend also abandons his family.  As his father says good bye for the last time (although he does not realize it) his father says...."But that's life. That's what you learn when things happen. Especially at your age.  You just have to take it in and remember to think afterwards and never grow bitter. Do you understand?"

This book was beautifully written.  You could feel the emotional struggle of this man trying to piece his life together from that summer long ago. I liked the ironies such as his father's insistence on logging the trees and sending them down the river against his best friend's advice that the timing was not good. The father's intent was to provide some income for his family which he was about to abandon. When the boy and his mother go to collect the money, they can only spend it in Sweden as that is where the bank is. The money is not very much because the timber was sold at a poor time and then the mother cannot take the money out of Sweden, but is required to spend it there. And so she does on a suit for the boy.

Collapse by Jared Diamond

Apparently I am on an environmental jag subconsciously this fall. I picked up Collapse to learn about why the societies of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Island, and Greenland had collapsed as well as some of the challenges today in Rwanda, Haiti, Montana, China and Papau New Guinea. Jared Diamond is a geography prof at UCLA and a globe trotter.  

Why have societies collapsed? According to Diamond: "The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption and waste production mean maximum environmental impact." p 509  "Our world society is on a non sustainable course." Diamond goes through a list of problems ranging from deforestation, soil erosion, and reduction of biodiversity all thanks to us.  It is pretty depressing really. I had not realized what bad shape Australia is in with its poor soils and many follies such as the introduction of rabbits, foxes and sheep onto its already non productive lands. Is there some hope? 

Occasionally, he mentions some good things Chevron being environmentally sensitive in its oil exploration and the ability of a centralized government such as China to enforce major policies such as one child. But over all the book depressed me. Okay I know I need to ride the bus more, eat locally and stop jetting around on airplanes.  This book is long and parts can be skimmed, but still worth a read if you need a sober dose of reality.

The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

My brother-in-law, Stuart, was reading this book when I visited them a few weeks ago. He kindly finished reading it so I could take it back on the plane. I used to follow the Supreme Court decisions a lot more, but over the past 10 years with the exception of Gore v. Bush, I have not paid a lot of attention. Somehow the whole Clarence Thomas hearing thing and the tilt to the right depressed me and I just turned it off. 

So I enjoyed catching up on the 9 justices. I have always like Sandra Day O'Connor. I read her book about growing up on the Lazy B Ranch (poorly written, but an amazing story)  in Arizona. I enjoyed the tidbits in here about how she viewed attractive and unattractive behavior. As the swing vote for the Court, it was interesting to see how she, Breyer, Souter and Kennedy formed and interesting block and moved the Court for a short time more to the center from 2001-2005. Rehnquist turns out to be a good administrator processing the Court's business efficiently. Thomas, does not believe in the precedent of former cases "stares decisis".. A supporter of Ayn Rand and rugged individualism, he does not get assigned many opinions because few justices supported his extreme view.  

The politics of the religious right in pushing to overturn Roe v. Wade and pushing for Terry Schiavo to remain alive in her vegetative state, the Bush nominations of Harriet Miers and John Roberts all made for some good reading. I was most interested in how international law and the visits that Justices made abroad influenced their thinking on issues like the death penalty and the harshness of our juvenile justice system.

The current court has now decidedly moved to the right. One of the tragedies of the loss of the Gore presidency in 2000 is the shaping of the court  for the next 15 years. Yet even with his loss, it was interesting to note how over time, a number of the Republican justices, like O'Connor, shifted their politics more to the center.

Loretta Mason Potts by Mary Chase

I selected this book for our October book club as one of my favorite books from childhood.  Mary Chase, the author, is best known for her famous play "Harvey".  I love how the book begins, "Colin Mason was ten years old before he learned he had an older sister. And he never forgot this day because things were never the same again." The book is about a bad girl who leaves her family to live with a farmer and his family so that she can visit a magical world over the hill where a Countess lives in a castle with a General. The Countess loves everything that Loretta says or does. Loretta finally comes back to live with her family and gradually, her brothers and sister discover Loretta's magical world through her bedroom closet and eventually they destroy the secret of the magical world as Loretta becomes close to her mother again.

"Loretta said nothing. She had walked across the bridge this afternoon, a girl named Loretta Mason Potts.  But that girl had dropped into the stream and vanished.  Now as she looked around the forest she didn't say anything out loud.  But she asked the trees a question, "Isn't there anything, anyone, anywhere, for me just for me and no one else?" p. 116

I realized that I related to this book because I identified with Loretta who left her family in part because her mother was too busy for her because she was taking care of younger children. She found a magical world where she was adored. I have always liked closets with mysterious passageways that lead into magical worlds (shades of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). And somehow the fact that Loretta took on a different last name and that she acted badly toward all who were around her, I must have felt were daring and cool things at the age of nine years old.

It was fun to reread this book and realize why I liked it as a kid. We had a really fun book group at my house that night (see photo below) and it was fun to see the kinds of books we all liked as kids. The books people chose really reflected the personalities of our book clubbers!

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

I have occasionally read "food" books such as Fast Food Nation, Sapphires and Garlic. I enjoyed this book which sets out to examine the natural history of our meals: Industrial: Corn, Pastoral: Grass, and Personal: Forest. 

Probably the most interesting part to me was the Corn section and thinking about how we have traded the use of a natural energy source, the sun, for fossil fuels to grow our food (artificial nitrates, machines using oil to cultivate).  Our big farmers have also moved from raising a diverse set of crops and animals to focusing on just a few- corn and soy. The surplus in corn in turn needs to find new markets, which means now corn is used in many products from breakfast cereals to soft drinks (more fossil fuel to process it) and it is used to feed our livestock who no longer wander in the meadows munching grass. Then we use more fossil fuel to transport the corn products (and animals to feed lots) all over the country. It is a depressing cycle and hard to imagine breaking out of!

Pollan extolls the virtues of the Virginia farmer who rotates his fields with diverse crops and allows his animals to live "free range", living and producing his food only for a local market. Organic foods have sold out to big business with clever marketing schemes about Rosie the cow according to Pollan.  One of the big sell outs is Cascadian Farms where we often stop coming back from Stevens Pass.

The last section of the book was a little bit harder to stay engaged with as Pollan seeks to create a meal that he alone has grown and or hunted. While I appreciated his description of his pig hunt and mushroom gathering, it was just not as interesting as the first part of the book.

Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet

Ever since I took a course at Evergreen on the science of the mind, I have been interested in how the brain works. This book is amazing, because the author, Daniel Tammet, who is an autistic savant is able to describe how he learns. He sees numbers and letters as shapes that do not look like numbers -- tall round short and with colors. He has numbers that make him happy like 333 and numbers that make him sad like 117. He is best known for memorizing Pi out to 22,500 digits without an error, which he did as a fund raiser for epilepsy.  He also can learn foreign languages easily, like Icelandic in a week. Daniel tells the painful story of growing up different and how he has learned to cope with his idiosyncracies in a world that did not understand him. One of my favorite parts was when he got up the courage to volunteer to teach English in Lithuania. He had never been away from home and did not like to encounter strange things. This is a great story about the people who loved Daniel (he has 9 siblings and his parents) and his own personal struggle. This guy is one of my heroes.

"People with Asperger's syndrome do want to make friends but find it difficult to do so. The keen sense of isolation was something I felt very deeply and was very painful for me. As a way of compensating for the lack of friends, I created my own...We talked about my love of ladybirds and my coin towers, about books, about numbers, about tall trees...once I asked her why I was so different from the other children, but she shook her head  and said she could not say.  I worried that the answer was terrible and that she was trying to protect me."

A Spot of Bother By Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, which I enjoyed about an autistic boy. So I thought I would pick up another book of his. This one is about a middle class British family -- the main character is George, who becomes mentally unstable with a fear of dying. He is convinced a spot of eczema is cancer. His wife, Jean, is having an affair with a former co-worker of his. His son, Jamie, is gay and has just lost his lover due to his "selfish" behavior and his daughter, Katie, who is a single mother is about to be married to someone she is not sure she loves and that her family disapproves of.  The story evolves around preparations for the wedding and the family's interactions with each other. Each one comes to find love again as the story closes. While there are some funny moments, nice descriptions and a clever clipped pattern to the story...the book really is never more than a spot of bother about a modern British family that struggles to deal with their feelings.

"His mind was malfunctioning. He had to bring it under control. He had done it before. He had lived with his daughter for 18 years under the same roof without coming to blows, for starters. When his mother died he went back to the office the following morning to make sure the Glasgow deal did not fall through."

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

This is the second book I have read by Orhan Pamuk who is a Turkish writer. I enjoyed this book, which is about a poet named Ka who is a Turk who returns from Germany to track down a woman he loved in Istanbul, Ipek, as a young man.  He visits a remote town in Eastern Turkey to write about the head scarf girls who commit suicide and gets caught up in the drama of the tension between fundamentalist muslims and the Ataturk secularists. It is a love story with a great twist at the end. Ka struggles caught between the European world and the old fashioned Turkish world. He is able to write poems again and finds love while he is in Kars. He also gets caught up in the politics and struggles with which side to support - the Ataturks who represent modern Turkey or the Islamic fundamentalists. You feel the snow and isolation through out the book. While there were times when one gets bogged down with the complicated story and who is on what side, it was a great read about the challenges Turkey and the West and Middle East face today: religion v secularism, traditional women v modern women, East v west, politics, love v duty.

" ...it snows only once in our dreams. As he watched the snow fall outside his window, as slowly and silently as the snow fell in a dream, the traveler fell into a long-desired, long awaited reverie; cleansed by memories of innocence and childhood, he succumbed to optimism and dared to believe himself at home in this world." page 4

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

Danielle, Marina, Julius are all friends from college living in New York and looking for love and fulfilling jobs at the age of 30. Marina's family - her father Murray, her mother, Annabel, and cousin, Frederick aka "Bootie" all factor into the plot.  It takes a long time to get to a point in the book where moral dilemmas present themselves. Danielle begins an affair with Marina's father, Murray the erudite writer/speaker, Bootie becomes Murray's secretary and writes a magazine piece to uncover the "real" Murray. Marina marries an Australian who is about to launch a hip magazine. Julius moves in with his perfect gay lover.

 9/11 in NYC blows apart their world and forces each of the thirtysomethings to address the pathes they have launched on with some poor choices to take action in ways that they had not anticipated including nicely unwrapped up endings such as the disappearance of Bootie and Luddy Marina's new husband leaving for England. While I would give this book a "B" overall for the self absorbed plot of 30 year old mostly spoiled brats...the ending was worth the slog through.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The book starts out well with Snape betraying Harry to "He Who Must Not Be Named". One of my favorite sentences is on the first page, "..his blunt features sliding in and out of sight as the branches of overhanging trees broke the moonlight." We learn that Dumbledore is not the perfect role model we had earlier thought...taking care of his brother and sister after his mother died prevented him from traveling with a chum and achieving the greatness he thought he should attain. So the plot thickens.

Alas Harry, Ron, and Hermione then spend a great deal of time dithering from place to place in the cold English countryside in a tent trying to escape Mr V and the Death Eaters while Harry tries to figure out what his mission is that Dumbledore has given him -- is it to get rid of the Horocruxes or to piece together the 3 Deathly Hallows to beat Mr V? At this point I am missing Hogwarts and evil happenings and the professors with their crazy classes.

Finally after a lot more dithering and visiting his parents' grave site and a few close encounters with evil, Harry and his chums  go to Hogwarts. They meet Dumbledore's brother. The big battle is staged with some excitement. And yes our hero is triumphant. Snape turns out not to be an ape- he loves Harry's mother, Lily. Harry is willing to face death for his friends. He has people who love him and Mr. V does not and therefore can never win without a "heart." How can it be otherwise with lots of youngsters reading it. No one really important dies - darn! (Unless you count Dumbledore from the last book and Snape in this book).

The epilogue is very unnecessary -- do we really need to know Harry and Ginny and Ron and Hermione marry and have kids and send them off to Hogwarts? Too neatly wrapped up for my tastes. But it is sad to have the 7 books at an end. Dave wrote a few sneaky things in this book. He fooled me at first. How dare he spoil my first edition??

Harry Potter books in print in the U.S. by title--

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - 29 million
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - 24 million
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - 20 million
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - 19 million
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - 17 million
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - 17 million
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - 14 million

To date, over 350 million copies of the seven books in the Harry Potter series have been sold worldwide.

Girl's Sleuth by Melanie Rehak

I really enjoyed this book. It discusses the syndicate/creator and writers of the Nancy Drew series from the 1920s through the 1980s. It had an old fashioned feel to it that took me back to reading when I was a kid. Nancy Drew was a great role model for girls- she was smart, drove a cool car, and did not go off to marry her boyfriend. While the stories are incredibly formulaic and goody two shoes, they were welcome to the tom boys who for years could only read boys on adventures. (Okay I confess I still mostly preferred the boy adventure stories)

Harriet Stratemeyer is the main person at the syndicate who nurtures Nancy Drew over the many years (her father actually started the series along with Uncle Wiggley and others).  Her own life was atypical in its time as she went to work despite the fact she had four children and a husband who was successful financially. It was interesting to read about all the writers who ghosted for the Carolyn Keene name, especially Mildred Wirt Benson. These writers were not allowed to claim they wrote the series. Harriet Stratemeyer has to work with evolving the stories to meet the changing times-- world war II, the civil rights era, etc. She also had the challenge of dealing with her difficult sister, Edna, who was a partner in the syndicate but who relocated to Florida midway through her life.