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Intrigue, mysterious portends, and revolution are all a part of the background to The Stockholm Octavo, set in 1791 Sweden. Emil Larsson our protagonist is a young bureaucrat in Office of Customs and Excise who spends his evenings drinking and gambling in various … Continue reading
I am drawn to books that immerse me in another country and culture. It is a way to “visit” or at least look through a window and see how others, think, feel and deal with the issues that arise in their countries and cultures. The Orphan Master’s Son by Johnson gives us an 
opportunity to peer into North Korea, a place that few of us will ever have a chance to visit, which made this all the more interesting to me.
The opening chapters in this absorbing and fascinating book tell how our main character, Pak Jun Do, is recruited to capture and kidnap Japanese citizens from Japan in order to force them to teach North Koreans the Japanese language and Japanese culture. The various methods that they used to kidnap Japanese citizens off the beach or along roads close to the shore are described in vivid detail and are probably based on actual events, since North Korea has done this in the past; a fact that few Japanese can forgive or forget.
Jun Do is not an orphan, a fate that seems to be universally scorned, but his father was put in charge of an orphanage, (thus the “Master” of the title) and Jun Do grew up with the other orphans. Because his father was ashamed of his position and wanted his son to to blend in with the other orphans Jun Do gave himself an orphan’s name -a name from a list of martyrs and heroes. He named himself after a man who even though he killed many Japanese, was still distrusted by his fellow revolutionaries because of his impure bloodline and so in order to prove his loyalty he made the ultimate sacrifice and hung himself.
From this rather ignominious beginning, with his name always identifying him as an orphan, and the weight of the sacrifice that his name carries, Jun Do tries to make his way in a world full of people who are distrustful and afraid. He becomes a fisherman, and eventually becomes a “hero of the Democratic People’s Republic,” but with each step he takes the rules change, or reality changes in order to accommodate the reality declared by the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il. This causes some serious difficulties for Jun Do who in order to accommodate these shifting realities must be bitten by a shark to cover up a defection, assume the identity of a famous general, and on and on. The shifting realities are almost surreal and yet, Johnson is able to make us understand the desperateness with which these characters race to accommodate each new reality just to survive.
In one rather poignant and chilling scene an interrogator with the secret police describes how his father told him that at some point he might have to denounce his son:
“Now take my hand,” he told me. I put my small hand in his, and then his mouth became sharp with hate. He shouted, “I denounce this citizen as an imperialist puppet who should be remanded to stand trial for crimes against the state.” His face was red, venomous. “I have witnessed him spew capitalist diatribes in an effort to poison our minds with his traitorous filth.” The old men turned from their game to observe us. I was terrified, on the verge of crying. My father said, “See, my mouth said that, but my hand, my hand was holding yours. If your mother ever must say something like that to me, in order to protect to the two of you, know that inside, she and I are holding hands. And if someday you must say something like that to me, I will know it’s not really you. That’s inside. Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands.”
Since I grew up in Japan I have internalized the fear with which North Korea is held by most Japanese, yet Johnson (see interview) captures both the horrific and the comical nature of this illusory world that the Dear Leader has created in North Korea and our main character Jun Do is a person I can identify with and wanted to learn more about.
Brenda’s Rating: *****(Five Stars our of Five)
Recommend This Book To: Sharon, Ken, Keith, Lauren and Marian.
Book Study Worthy; Yes! (With Korean food of course!)
Read in ebook format.
The word “fantasy” always conjures up for me something fairy like or Disney-esque, so I have always hated using that term to describe books like Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, where although it is not located in our world, it is grounded in a hard, gritty reality where good and evil are at war. 
Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Taylor is another such book, where good and evil collide and as a result love, life and reality are suddenly not all that seemed to be. (Not really the stuff of fantasy if you ask me!)
Set in Prague in the present day, we meet Karou a young art student who along with all the usual teen age angst about who she is and what she will become carries some added secrets, like the fact that her gorgeous blue hair is not died but grows that way naturally! As we get to know Karou we find that her family consists of chimera and that she often goes on expeditions to find teeth for her guardian, a chimera named Brimstone. Karou loves her life as an art student and has made a great friend in Zuzana, but there is something missing, and Karou always feels like she has forgotten something important or that her life is not all that it seems.
Periodically Karou is asked by Brimstone to go on expeditions to find particular items, mainly teeth, for his highly secretive work, but she never can seem to find out what they are for and why these expeditions are so important to Brimstone’s work. Then on one of her errands she unexpectedly encounters an angel named Akiva and is drawn to him as he is to her. But even though their love begins to grow, the world as she knows it begins to shift and crumble and she must confront the reality of who she is along with the painful knowledge that in this world, angels and chimera have been at war for so long that the reasons are long forgotten and only hatred remains.
Taylor’s descriptions are lush and vivid. She creates this world of angels and chimera with authority and as a result you are drawn into it. Karou’s friendship with Zuzana is a strong thread in this story and at least initially it is through that friendship that we learn to care about Karou. Taylor is especially adept at making their conversation sound like typical teenagers-full of snarky and pithy comments and made it fun to read.
Brenda’s Rating: ****(Four Stars out of Five)
Recommend this Book to: Lauren, Sharon and Marian.
Book Study Worthy: Not really.
Read in ebook format.
Check out another review of this same book!
Out is a dark book. Noir is what they call it, but really it is just dark and disturbing. It is a story-a tragedy, about a group of Japanese women who are trapped in their lives; trapped because they are women, trapped because of their circumstances, and trapped because they have no choices. They all became friends because they work the night shift at a bento factory in the outskirts of Tokyo. One of the women, Yayoi, is married to a brute of a man and in a burst of courage and anger she kills him before he can beat her one more time and then seeks the help of her friends to figure out what to do with the body. One of the women, Masako, rises to the occasion as if she was born to it. She is cool, and logical, and leads the others in helping to cover up the crime, giving Yayoi the means to move on. But disposing of the body is just the beginning, and as the other women begin to make critical mistakes and selfish choices, Masako has to confront a police investigation and the violent criminal underbelly of Japan as she tries to extricate herself and the others from suspicion.
Written in 1997 and translated in 2003 this prize winning book opened up the lives of Japanese women in a way that had never been done before. Kirino uses the voices of these characters to let us see women’s lives in Japanese society with a directness and clarity that is astonishing and heartbreaking. The lack of choices and the limits that being a wife, mother and caretaker of the elderly places on these characters, means that their lives are full of despair and hopelessness. The darkness that permeates this book begins from that despair and hopelessness, and we are never quite able to shake it. Although not written particularly as a feminist manifesto, this book is a long drawn out cry for help and begs us to understand the quiet desperation that many Japanese women experience in their day to day lives.
I grew up in Japan so I am often drawn to works by Japanese authors. But because I know Japanese I am also pretty picky about the translations I read. Translation is tricky since something that can sound profound in Japanese can sound simplistic and pedantic in English. Which is why Out by Kirino is such a joy to read. Snyder’s translation hits the mark on every level-he gets the nuance, he gets the darkness that permeates this book without it becoming sappy. The edginess, the courage, and the vulnerability all shine through.
Brenda’s Rating: ***** (Five Stars out of Five)
Recommend this book to: Sharon, Marian and Lauren.
Book Study Worthy? Yes, but it is a very disturbing and challenging book!
Read in book form.
To categorize Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra as a detective novel is so limiting it hardly
does it justice, but in reality it is about a Sikh detective and his encounter with the most wanted gangster in all of India. But it is is also a story about love and betrayal and what makes it so remarkable is that the characters and the story are played out against the rich diversity of India and its cultures and that context plays a significant role in this sweeping novel about crime and punishment.
From the opening paragraph where Inspector Sartaj Singh and his sergeant Katekar are called to the scene of a domestic disturbance where Fluffy the wife’s dog has been killed in a spectacular fashion, the characters, the writing, the story and India herself engage you and never let go. Sartaj Singh is the only Sikh detective on the force in Mumbai. Now that he is over forty and his marriage is over he is looking for something to make his life meaningful. And then he gets a call-an anonymous call that Ganesh Gaitonde, a notorious gangster, is holed up in a white, square, cement bunker in another part of the city and wants to talk. Sartaj goes and tries to reason with Gaitonde to get him to come out but in the end the bunker is breached and all that is left in the rubble are two dead bodies.
Intermingled with the story of this larger than life gangster and how he came to be in the bunker and the reasons he killed himself, is the story of Sartaj and the loneliness he feels since his marriage broke up and how his constant encounters with the worst in people are beginning to weigh him down. He is struggling to find a way to connect with something good, positive and real in his own life and as he begins to look into the causes of Gaitonde’s suicide, he begins to “emerge from his cave,” and engage with life again.
There are many rich characters in this book. We sympathize with Gaitonde as he tells of his betrayal, we are touched as Sartaj as he begins to fall in love. and even minor characters like Sartaj’s partner Katekar and his wife, or Sartaj’s mother all add to this depth and believeability of this story. Without a doubt one of the main characters in this book is India herself. The descriptions of life in the city of Mumbai and the way people live and go to work and eat are all so vivid and real. The author uses words and phrases from the various Indian dialects throughout the book adding authenticity to the dialogue and descriptions as if he has lived or been in these situations himself. (Link to interview ) But even though we are solidly in India, the story is accessible and connects us to those universal human feelings and motives that we all share: joy, passion, love, betrayal and hope.
Brenda’s Rating: ***** (Five Stars out of Five)
Recommend this book to : Ken, Marian and Lauren (who went to India!)
Book Study Worthy: Perfect, especially if you eat Indian food while you talk about the book!
I read this book in hardback! (900 pages!)
I began reading books by Gruber a few years ago. The first was The Book of Air and Shadows, the next was The Forgery of Venus. Both were very good and so I was excited to read this new book The Good Son
. Unlike his first two books which had artistic and historical references,The Good Son is solidly in the here and now, albeit in Pakistan.
Sonia Laghari and eight fellow psychologists are traveling to a symposium on peace, when the bus they are taking is attacked by Islamic terrorists and they are all captured. Sonia who is a Jungian psychologist who converted to Islam and has written several controversial books, soon becomes the leader of the kidnapped group and must use her knowledge of the language and religion and even some Jungian dream analysis in an effort to keep herself and her group alive. Meanwhile Sonia’s son Theo, who serves with the US military doing black ops, hears of his mother’s plight, and decides that he needs to rescue her. The story weaves back and forth between these two characters, with flash backs so that we begin to see the frayed family ties, the father who has abandoned his culture and family of origin for that of the West and the cost of Sonia’s fame and success to their family. We also learn that Theo, in an attempt to understand his roots, became a fighter for the mujaheddin.
The tension in this book keeps escalating as Sonia tries to negotiate with her captors and Theo tries to figure out how to rescue his mother. The psychological aspects are extremely interesting, as Sonia uses her knowledge of religion and culture against her captors but also among those in her own group as they try and hold it all together in the face of imminent execution.
Theo wrestles with the legacy of his family while being pulled into rescuing his mother and tries to reconcile his need to help her with his own sense of being abandoned by her as she pursued her career. Even as we are being pushed to a crescendo and military action begins for the rescue attempt, I was not prepared for the revelations that ensued. Gruber, deftly switches the train tracks and suddenly all is not as it seems.
After I was finished I kept wondering about Sonia and Theo. What is the nature of the relationship between a mother and son? What motivates a person to commit acts of terror? What is a good son? I’m still not sure about the answers to those questions, but what I do know is that this was one of the best books I read all last year!
Brenda’s Recommendation:*****(5 Stars out of 5)
Recommend This Book To: Ken, Keith, Sharon, Marian and Lauren
Book Study Worthy? Yes!
Read as an ebook
As we begin the New Year (2013!) I wanted to take a moment to look back on my year of reading and talk about the most memorable, the “so-so” and my new discoveries for this year.
I read 84 books this year, down a little from last year’s 87 and 2010”s 103 books. I seem to fluctuate like this depending on what goes on during the year and what books catch my interest.
I began the year by reading 1Q84 by Murakami. 
I really wanted to like this book about an alternate universe with strange little people and a ominous religious cult, but I found it very difficult to get through its nearly 800 pages. Needless to say my year did not start out well!
But the the year was redeemed by Gruber’ s, The Good Son,
a powerful book about terrorism and the events and experiences that can create in someone the will and mindset to do these acts. I hope to review this book more fully in the this year, but it was one that stayed with for quite awhile.
And then for completely different change of pace, I read a quiet grown up love story- Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by 
Simonson. A lovely story about a retired English gentleman who falls in love with a lovely Pakistani widow and the cross cultural barriers and prejudices that they both have to surmount as their relationship deepens.
After that lovely book I am embarrassed to admit that I succumbed to all the hype and read the three volumes of Fifty Shades by E.L. James.
They are as compelling as people say, because I read them like I was eating popcorn! They pull you in, move right along and keep your interest. I am truly intrigued by this phenomenon. I find it quite amazing that in this post-feminist era the younger generation finds books which explore submissive sexual behavior by a woman so popular. At any rate, if you haven’t read them, I think they are of interest purely from a social phenomenon perspective. (Ahem!..just like you read Playboy for the articles!)
In the historical novel genre I seem to have concentrated on English history. I read several of Pennman’s
series on England- Time and Chance and Devil’s Brood and Hollick’s The Kingmaking and I am the Chosen King. Although these authors may not be as well known as Bernard Cornwall, I really enjoy their style and find their books well written and historically informative. Cornwall’s Death of Kings was another great installment in his Saxon Tales series. I also read the last two books in Iggulden’s Mongol Empire series, Khan: Empire of Silver
and Conqueror which were fascinating. This is a series well worth reading if you want to read about something other than western history!
As for police procedurals, thrillers, or detective novels, whatever you want to call them, I heavily indulged in a recent discovery, Karin Slaughter. She writes about a small town pediatrician living in Georgia who also serves as the county coroner. Sara is a wonderful character, richly detailed, neither strong or weak, saint or sinner, but a lovely person-someone you might want to invite to dinner. In each novel she is confronted with a new crime, and her involvement with the local police and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, in solving these crimes as well as her developing romantic interests are compelling and addictive. I read ten of her books this year. Triptych, Fractured, and Fallen
were all extremely good! There is a new one out now, Criminal, which I can’t wait to read. (Hint! Hint! I just want Amazon gift cards for my birthday!)
In addition to Slaughter’s books I found two new authors that I am really enjoying. Both are Scandinavian which adds an interesting cross cultural dimension to their books. Kaaberbol’s The Boy in the Suitcase
opens with the chilling discovery of a young boy drugged and packed into a suitcase which has been left in a public locker. The main character is a woman who works with refugees especially woman and children who have been abducted or kidnapped and who wrestles with her own demons and compulsions which make her both motivated and vulnerable as she struggles to help this boy. Lackberg is the other author whose Ice Princess and The Preacher
have made me a loyal fan. Her novels are set in a small coastal town of Fjallback where Detective Hedstrom and his wife Erika Falck work together to solve crimes. I read somewhere that Fjallback is a real town and that thousands of visitors come every year and tour the places mentioned in her books and I can attest that I am ready to go there on tour myself! I initially sought out both of these authors while going through Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series withdrawal and they more than lived up to my expectations!
Although I read mostly fiction this year I particularly enjoyed Manhunt by Bergen and the Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Cahill both of which I reviewed but who both deserve another plug. They were both extremely engaging and informative.
Well, that gives you some idea of how my reading year went! I hope that I will hear more from each of you on what books you enjoyed and whether my suggestions were informative, interesting or helpful!
Happy New (Reading) Year!
PS Sorry for the draft posting… still trying to figure things out!
For my first Christmas posting it seems appropriate to talk about the wonderful book by Barbara Robinson called The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.
For years now, our family has read this out loud as part of our Christmas celebration, either reading portions of it in the week leading up to Christmas or all in one sitting on Christmas Day. Robinson’s portrayal of the culture clash that occurs when the Herdman children (known for burning down sheds and terrorizing the kids at school) decide that they want to be a part of the Christmas pageant because they heard that there were free desserts, is both funny and poignant. The book is narrated by a very smart, observant girl whose mother has to step in and take over the Christmas pageant after Mrs. Armstrong, “who was so good at giving orders that she was naturally in charge of everything,” fell and broke her leg. The Herdman’s add their own brand of chaos to an already chaotic pageant asking impertinent questions and comments like, “You mean they tied [Jesus] up and put him in a feed box? Where was the Child Welfare?” As the story unfolds we see the Herdman children begin to listen to the story of what happened so long ago and begin to understand the deeper meaning of Christmas and the other children in the church who have heard the story so many times begin to hear and understand the story differently too.
I have to confess that I cannot read this book without getting choked up at the end. Somehow this book captures the best of what Christmas means, and I am touched every time as I hear the Christmas story come alive for the Herdman children. After all, the angel must have said to the shepherds; “Shazam! Unto You a Child is born!”
Brenda’s Rating: *****( Five Stars out of Five)
Recommend this book to: Sharon, Keith, Ken, Marian and Lauren
Book Study Worthy: No
Read in paper.
I first encountered Cahill when I read “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” the first volume in his “Hinges of History.” It was a joy to read! Cahill likes to use themes in writing about history and he takes seemingly simple ideas and shows how they moved history forward. “Mysteries of the Middle Ages”
is now the fifth book in this series and in it he describes the forces and ideas that emerged in the medieval period which became the seeds of the modern world.
Cahill begins with the exploration of the city and times of Alexandria and the influence it had on both the medieval and modern era with its emphasis on reason, thought, mind and rational inquiry. But Greek thought and philosophy, he argues, was only the “mold” for our modern world, and it was the content from ancient Jewish and Christian sources which emphasized the heart and body rather than just the mind and intellect, and focused on the consequences of moral action and interaction that flowed into and first “jelled” in the medieval period and became the basis of our modern world,
Cahill uses various examples to make his point starting with the cult of the virgin which resulted from the Catholic Church’s exploration of the the theological consequences of a god who was incarnated and became a man. With the recognition that this incarnation occurred as a result of Mary giving birth to Jesus, there arose within the art and liturgy of the church an expression of adoration and awe for Mary, which became known as the cult of the virgin. The honoring of Mary became in some sense the window through which other women then could be valued and honored as well. One of the earliest of those women was Hildegard of Bingen a famous anchorite of the 12th century who became powerful in her own right as the Mother Superior of her own order, and a valued and thoughtful adviser to Popes and Kings. Powerful, because of her holiness, she became an example to women that they were capable and valued.
He explores through Dante’s Divine Comedy, how the idea of the consequences of the way we live our lives, the way we are in relationship to others matters and that it is those actions that the soul carries with it -a distinctly Christian view point which was in contrast to the Greek view that the soul only carries its education and culture into the other world and nothing else (Plato.)
Using St Francis of Assisi, Peter Abelard and Heloise, Thomas Aquinas, Giotto, Cahill describes how through their faith, art, and their intellectual curiosity they moved beyond the framework of Greek thought and understanding into a reality based affirmation of the body and its senses and the idea that our perceptions were generally accurate and reliable. Thus giving way to the idea that observation and rational thought processes could be used to understand the world around us- the basis of modern thought and science.
This change toward a more incarnate sense of who we are can also be seen through the changes in artistic expression from the Greek and Byzantine stoic and static Christ against a colored background to the art of Giotto that shows Christ in a particular time and space, anchored in the world, and shown with a range of expressions.
This is the way history comes alive for me. To find ways to trace themes, or to find points when history changes because of an idea or a thought or an artistic expression, and Cahill is masterful in explaining why it matters. This book was very informative, intriguing and full of pictures and stimulating ideas. It was a joy to read!
Brenda’s Rating: *****(Five Stars out of Five)
Recommend this Book to: Sharon, Keith, Ken and Marian
Book Study Worthy: Yes
I read it in paper and recommend using only color e-readers.
When I picked up 
this book last year I knew it had to do with vampires and a US military experiment gone haywire. But that hardly even scratches the surface of what this book and this series is about. Once I started reading it I couldn’t put it down. The characters, even the vampires in all their heinousness were real and had dimension. The Passage begins with six year old Amy Harper Bellafonte, who we are told becomes the Girl From Nowhere, the One who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, but at the beginning was abandoned by her mother at a convent. As the story continues with the use of flash backs, news reports and other materials we find out what has created this world. The experiment gone awry and the spread of the vampiric contagion that caused the collapse of government and society and the release of the “twelve” as they multiply and destroy everything in their path. Until we reach the book’s present-a post apocalyptic world where small outposts of humanity live scattered across the country trying to stave off attacks from vampires; their only weapon being the lights that they can shine around their walls. As time passes of course, the generators that make that light are slowly dying from lack of parts and fuel and the precariousness of their existence is only to real for the people in these outposts. Peter Alicia and Theo who are part of the guards of this small colony are struggling to find ways to preserve their lives, all the while knowing that it is unlikely once the lights go out. In order to save their small outpost it soon becomes clear that they will need to leave its safe confines and find ways to survive beyond the walls.
In the second book in this series, The Twelve
, just released last month, we are again pulled into our story by flash backs, news reports and even radio transmissions which tell more of the story of how this came to be. We also meet up again with some of the characters from the first book like Amy and Alicia, Lila and Peter but also some new ones like Danny the autistic bus driver, and siblings April and Tim. We begin to see more deeply in to some of the characters we knew, such as Lila who lives in a never never land of denial. As for Amy, we begin to see the relationships that molded her, and the gift that she carries that binds her to the vampires even as she tries to save humanity from them. In flash forwards, we see that Amy is honored and ‘scripture” is created to retell the story of her actions to save humanity. It is eerie to see how truth and the miraculous merge in the this scriptural retelling of the story.
In interviews Cronin has stated that the idea of this book began with a conversation with his then 9 year old daughter who wanted him to write a book with a female heroine. In that he as definitely succeeded, but this is more than a vehicle for a female heroine, it is a richly cast multi character world with many wonderful male, female and even vampire characters, who help us think about what is the essence of a society? What makes us brave or weak and what makes us human?
Brenda’s Rating *****(Five out of Five Stars for both books.)
Recommend this book to: Sharon, Ken, Keith, Marian and Lauren
Book Study Worthy: No
Read in ebook format.
Brenda's Bookshelf 