Sunday Caught My Interest

We have been having some beautiful weather – slightly crisp with blue skies. Nothing much new going on here – I did run away with a friend to do some shopping and to watch the movie The Debt which was excellent. We actually had a Saturday off from going to a running event and it felt strange to actually sleep in.I am currently reading two books for book club discussions – Catcher in the Rye (which I have never read before) and The Elegance of the Hedgehog ( a re-read for me but so worthwhile because it is so good). Youngest continues on his David Foster Wallace reading spree and will soon run out of material. Eldest took a break from reading while he adjusted to work and Himself is so wrapped up in the beginning of a new term that he doesn’t have time to read anything other than department stuff and things to grade – poor him!

Here is what caught my interest this week:

Since coming of age stories seem to be my thing this week, I found Devourer of Books‘ review of If Jack’s in Love, a debut novel by Stephen Wetta, caught my attention. It is 1967 and twelve year old Jack is from one of “those” families: his father is uneducated and unemployed; his mother works as a cashier; his older brother is the bully of the neighborhood who may or may not have murdered the town’s golden boy; and Jack himself, a genius, is in love with the golden boy’s sister.  These seem like very tough waters to negotiate especially when you are on that cusp of childhood and becoming a teenager. I will be watching for this one. Here is another review from Beth Fish Reads.

I love a good mystery series, particularly English mysteries. PD James and Elizabeth George are two authors I have on my shelves, not to mention my love for Agatha Christie. So when Dovegreyreader reviewed the second from latest in Susan Hill’s Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler series, The Shadows in the Street, and I find that she is also the author of Howard’s End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home, I immediately had to see if she was on my Library’s shelves (she is). Simon Serrailler is a policeman in the English cathedral town of Lafferton. He has an artistic bent, a fear of commitment, and is saddled with a extended family. The books are described as suspenseful with touches of a police procedural. Howard’s End is on the Landing is Susan Hill’s memoir of reading off her own bookshelves. Given that she lives in a quirky British house with bookcases scattered hither and yon, there is lots to choose from. It has long been on my TBR list – perhaps it is time I move it up to the top.

One thing I enjoy about The Elegance of the Hedgehog is its philosophical undertones and The Boston Bibliophile reviews a novel that seems to also have such undertones. In You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik, a young teacher named Will Silver uses philosophy and religion to highlight the work being discussed in his Senior English seminar at a school in Paris. Will is worshiped by his students, raises eyebrows among his fellow teachers, and is having an affair with one of his students. I like the examination about charismatic teachers, the morality discussion of Will’s behavior, and the relationship between two of the girls in the class which The Boston Bibliophile describes as “one of those toxic high school codependencies made up of combat and competition more than affection.” This looks like a challenging but terrific read, one that may well be a good book group pick.

I have never heard of the term Straight Edge music – thanks to Wikipedia it was a movement that came out of the 1980’s hard core punk scene. Straight edge is a lifestyle that promotes eating a vegetarian or vegan diet, refraining from caffeine and drug,s and not engaging in promiscuous sex,. I was reading some opening lines that Beth of Beth Fish Reads has in a posting and the lines that caught my interest were:

“Is it dreamed?” Jude asked Teddy. “Or dreamt?”

Beneath the stadium seats of the football field, on the last morning of 1987 and the last morning of Teddy’s life, the two boys lay side by side, a pair of snow angels bundled in thrift-store parkas. If you were to spy them from above, between the slats of the bleachers–or smoking behind the school gym, or sliding their skateboards down the stone wall by the lake–you might confuse one for the other. But Teddy was the dark-haired one, Jude the redhead.

These are the opening lines of Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson, a book set mainly in New York City in the 1980’s. After the overdose of his best friend, teenage Jude Keffy-Horn is sent to New York to live with his hippie pot-dealing father. Jude falls in with a group of Hari Krishnas and becomes addicted to abstinence in all forms as part of the Straight Edge Movement. This is another coming of age story, set in a turbulent time of drugs, aids, violence. It details the search for family and structure – something to build a foundation from that will last and stand the test of time.

There is nothing like a good road-trip novel and I haven’t read one since Breakfast with Buddha. Wendy from Caribousmom has found one that has caught my interest, Touch and Go by Thad Nodine. Kevin is blind, struggling to stay sober, and newly unemployed. He lives with Isa and Patrick and their two foster children. When Isa’s father is dying in Florida, the entire clan packs a station wagon, loads a coffin on top, and travels across the southern United States and the path of Hurricane Katrina. Wendy includes the following quote in her review and it alone was enough to sell me on this book:

Patrick was always threatening without filling in the blanks, so he couldn’t be held accountable. He called himself a Christian Libertarian; I don’t know if he invented the term or got it from somewhere, but it gave him a belief system (after the recovery home, anyway) that was open and rigid at the same time. As a Libertarian, he believed in maximum freedom – under God, which was the Christian side of the equation. Take it or leave it; it’s up to you whether you want to be saved, but don’t try to butt in on Patrick’s freedoms.

As a side note – The Blue Bookcase has a post on books which highlight contemporary Jewish life and culture as part of the blog’s ongoing Reading List posts. Two of these books are already on my TBR list: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Finally – how cool is this – brought to my attention by Nonsuch Book – an artist of the finest caliber has been carving sculptures out of paper and books and leaving them anonymously at various sites around Edinburgh, Scotland. The artist seems to be celebrating reading and the arts and his/her work is jaw dropping gorgeous. You can see the artist’s work in an article here.

Happy Reading!