Sunday Caught My Interest

My dinning room table is piled high with supplies to pack for college and the last minute list of things to do grows longer. Youngest is getting excited and we leave Wednesday to begin the process of dropping him off at college and doing all the orientation activities. Eldest has had his nose buried in books and was esthetic when I brought the newest Harry Dresden book home from the library. The only thing that would have made him happier was if I had actually bought him his own copy. Himself has been really busy this week cleaning up rockets, working on trees, getting ready for the new semester and taking care of all the technological details of sending the kid off (somehow they didn’t ship the software with the new computer). As for me I have been reading a lot but having a hard time writing reviews. Oh well – from one slump to the other…

Here is what caught my interest this week:

One of the books on my very tall to-be-read stack is Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. A friend of mine loves Murakami and urged me to give him a try so I picked up this book a while ago. Having read Greg’s review of the novel this week on The New Dork’s Review of Books, I think it may have to move up to the top of the stack. It is difficult to give a short synopsis of the plot – which concerns a young teenager who runs away from home and an elderly man who is somewhat mentally incapacitated.  Greg writes, “As the stories converge (or don’t?), the reader is left to tangle with notions of metaphor, consciousness, personal identity, fate and love. It’s heady stuff, sure, but again, not completely beyond the realm of comprehension. Murakami is infinitely quotable (see quotes below) and a lot of the fun of the novel is to turn these over and over in your head to figure out meaning both on their own and also how they relate to the rest of the story.” As soon as I finished writing this, youngest asked if he could take the book to college to read – many of his friends have read it and he liked the Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Oh well, I should get it back eventually. On the post before the review, Greg talks about Murakami in general and adds that the author was an influence on Ida Hattemer-Higgins who wrote A History of History (see my review here). Although I found A history of History hard to read, I am very glad I read it and it is a novel that I keep going back to in my mind.

Kim of Reading Matters hosts a weekly interview with various bloggers asking them to name: their favorite book; a book that changed their life; and a book they feel deserves a wider audience. This week she asked Victoria of Tales from the Reading Room and she mentions Everything Passes by Gabriel Jospovici, a short book of 58 pages about the life of a literary critic, his two wives, his children, and his work. Victoria writes, “…it does so in a series of intense fragments, mostly dialogue, that somehow manage to mobilise an incredible richness of meaning, bringing together life and art, love and suffering, the sense of time passing and the eternal present we live in.” This one sounds like it might be a little hard to find but worth it.

This week’s new release is timely considering how we are coming upon the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks – Amy Waldman has written a novel called The Submission about the design contest for a memorial at the site of the Twin Towers. A jury is formed, submissions are made, and conflict ensues when it is found that the winning design was done by a Muslim. A short review of the book can be found at The Book Dwarf, a longer review is on The New York Times website, and an adaptation of the novel into a short story can be found here in The Atlantic. This looks like it may not be the easiest of reads but it sounds as if the author navigated a tightrope with grace highlighting the personal struggle as well as the wider struggles we have gone through as a nation.

Today my mother and I were talking about mentors – not necessarily workplace mentors but life mentors and how important they can be particularly for young people. I was fortunate that I had Arthur who would take me to lunch and talk to me about life and living. Then I stumbled across The Broke and The Bookish‘s review of a book called Greyhound by Steffan Piper, a novel set in 1981. Now I have actually ridden Greyhound buses in the 1980’s so it felt a little like coming home and then I read the author’s  interview on the book’s Amazon page and I am sold. Greyhound is about a cross-country journey by twelve-year-old Sebastien Ranes. Sebastien is literally dumped at the Stockton Greyhound station by his emotionally detached mother so he can travel by himself to his grandmother’s house. Sebastien is befriended along the way by a young black ex-con. The author writes about Marcus in the Amazon interview saying, “Marcus was a real person that I met on the bus. I’ve thought quite a bit about my encounter with him and the conversations that we had into the middle of the night. When you’re young, it’s the simplest and kindest of gestures that have the most effect and create the most lasting memories. A bag of pretzels can be the equivalent of much more over the passage of time. Not having good role models growing up, I often found myself reaching outward for a guide. Those are often the most dangerous because they have a limit as to what they can give back to you. Those limits are not always visible, especially when you’re young.”

Happy Reading

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