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