Do the A-Z author challenge

I am thrilled to report that I finished my Z book on January 31! I enjoyed The Shadow of the Wind well enough. For any book lover it has an intriguing premise: a preadolescent boy is taken by his father (who runs a bookstore) to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books where the boy is allowed to pick out any book he likes. Imagine a building full of labyrinthine bookshelves containing the last books of their kind – a booklover’s paradise! The boy chooses a book called The Shadow of the Wind, and becomes so entranced by the book he tries to find other books by the same (deceased) author. But it turns out he has the very last copy of any of this author’s works . . . all copies of everything that author had written had been searched out and systematically burned. And simply having possession of the last copy entangles the boy in this web of intrigue.

So I enjoyed the premise. Also, stylistically, Zafon works lots of aphorisms into this novel, which I enjoyed from a craftsmanship perspective.

On the downside, there were a lot of characters to keep track of. And the present-day plot with the boy mirrors the back-story plot of the deceased author’s life, so that doubling of the plot was also confusing at times. Also, I figured out the mystery character’s identity pretty early on in the book, so the suspense was sometimes lacking, for me. Still in all, this book was an enjoyable enough read.

I finished Revolutionary Road on December 23. This novel is about a young married couple who are immature, and who most like to get drunk and argue. They believe they are destined for greatness but somehow the man has ended up working (or slacking off in) a corporate job in marketing for a company that makes and sells business machines; somehow they’ve ended up living in the suburbs. They suffer a lot of alienation and self-loathing about the way their lives are turning out.

While the book itself is well-written, and the narrative takes shifting points of view that were interesting to read, I did not care for either of the main characters. I am surprised that the movie that is based on this book is being released in December. Unless the movie has a different ending than the book, this does not have the kind of uplifting ending that you would expect for the holiday season.

I finished Sky Burial on December 16. Sky Burial is haunting . . . . A young Chinese couple are both doctors in the People’s Liberation Army in the late 1950s. The man is assigned to go to Tibet. A short time later, the woman gets his death notice from the army. She determines to go to Tibet and find out how her husband died (secretly she believes he is still alive). In Tibet, she is taken in by a nomadic Tibetan family and spends decades searching for her husband. She becomes like a Tibetan, including becoming Buddhist.(Because so very much time passes without very much changing for the character, this novel reminded me of Waiting by Ha Jin that I read for my J author.) After a great amount of time has elapsed, she and her traveling companions find a hermit whose life was saved by the Chinese-doctor-husband, and he (the hermit) can bring closure to the story. The woman returns to China to try to locate her parents and sister, but it is now the mid-1990s and everything in China has changed. We are left with the sense that she is not reunited with her family, either. So her whole life has been spent searching.

I enjoyed this book for all its descriptions of Tibet: scenery, culture, and so forth.

I am pushing to get clear through the Z of this Challenge by December 31, so immediately upon finishing X, I started Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.

I completed the novel by my W author on December 13. Love and Other Impossible Pursuits was splendid! The first-person narrator, a 30-something woman who’s in grief because her baby died of SIDS, is curmudgeonly. She is the type of person who pushes people away from her. But her sense of humor is wickedly funny, and she does have some tender moments of genuine affection for her friends, her husband, her stepson, so I was able to stick with this narrator and care about what happened to her as the story went on.

The story is also exceedingly well-written. The narrator makes lots of little connections about people and events throughout the story, and a couple of nice epiphanies. I think the 5-year-old stepson’s dialogue and interests is spot-on.

I finished The Book of Secrets by M.G. Vassangji last night (December 2). It’s an historical novel that takes place in Kenya and Tanganyika from 1913 to 1988. It has war, romance, intrigue . . . the plot and characters kept me interested throughout the book. It is somewhat well-crafted, but there were times when the author summarized events and perhaps the book would be stronger had these been shown and not summarized. The novel has a first-person narrator who is piecing together the historical story that begins in 1913 in a diary that he (the narrator) has found; things are revealed to the narrator through the diary, through meetings with people, through letters one character wrote to another, and so this way that the story unfolds I thought intriguing.

I finished the novel S. on October 17. Updike pretty much dominates the U section in the bookstores. I had mixed feelings about picking a novel written by him: I have read several of his short stories in the New Yorker that I’ve really, really liked, and an equal number that I could not stand; I also recall a memoir piece that was published in the New Yorker that I thought was exceptional (although now I cannot recall what the topic was). I had tried to read Rogers Version at the time that it came out, and found it completely unreadable.

I had meant to read S. some years ago, but never got around to it. The subject matter of it has always appealed to me: a 42 year old woman runs off from her philandering doctor husband and joins an ashram that is loosely based on the cult of the Baghwan Sri Rajneesh. The topic of cults has long fascinated me. There is a lot of discussion of yoga in this book (some of it quite tongue in cheek) and, given my recent interest in yoga, I enjoyed that, too.

The book is an epistolary novel, in the form of letters (or sometimes tape recorded messages) written by S. (Sarah) to her former husband, her friends, her shrink, her dentist, her mother, her daughter, and so on, explaining where she is and what is happening. The first letter, to her former husband, explains that she has left him; the voice is so formal and stilted, I did not think I could read the whole novel. However, given the context, the formal, stilted voice makes sense, and later letters are more casual. Often the voice is very witty. The plot unfolds in a predictable way, but the letters are soooo interesting that I could not put this book down.

I did not like the twist at the end about the true identity of the guru. Otherwise, the ending was very satisfying. Overall, a really good read. Glad I chose Updike, after all.

I finished reading Digging to America on October 8. In the past, I’ve read several of Anne Tyler’s novels. While I enjoyed Digging to America, I don’t think it was as good as some of her previous novels; in this one, all the characters were pretty superficially handled. One thing in its favor, though – it was new territory for Anne Tyler. (Generally, in Anne Tyler’s novels, a person leaves her or his family and starts over, alone. Digging to America is about two couples, a white American couple and an Iranian-American couple, each of whom adopt at the same time an infant from Korea, and how the two families’ lives intertwine afterward, so it is very different subject matter for Anne Tyler.)

This marks the 20th book as I work my way from A to Z. I’m happy to be nearing the end of the challenge, but at the same time thinking I will do it again. Now to find a U author….

I finished reading On Beauty on Sunday, September 21. I thoroughly enjoyed this book; it won an Orange Prize and I think that win was well-deserved. I especially enjoyed the author’s skill with writing dialogue. All of the dialogue just snapped, crackled, and popped!

I finished The Ambidextrist on July 17. This novel is very tightly-written. I found it really compelling.

This novel intertwines two storylines. A stranger rides into town, and his storyline intersects with the storyline of an adolescent coming of age. The stranger is Scott, a homeless man, recently arrived in Philadelphia. To earn money, Scott has discovered that drug companies will pay human subjects for drug trials. He claims to be ambidexterous (hence the books title), which he seems to think carries a cachet (almost like a superpower or something), and he also thinks that ambidexterity will make him a more interesting subject for the drug companies. Note that he never actually does anything in the novel that requires he show that he is ambidextrous (he is not truly grounded, it could just be some of his rambling talk), and, in fact, the author drops all mention of ambidextrousness about midway through the book.

Scott keeps running into Terrell, one of a group of four 13-year-old boys who are hanging out, unsupervised, over the summer with time on their hands. Scott initially strikes up a conversation with Terrell because Scott is attracted to Terrells older sister. Their paths have crossed in an art museum, not too long after Scott has signed up for a drug trial. They are standing by a little machine that monitors humidity in the museum; Terrell wants to know what it is. Scott tells him its a lie detector, and says, ‘You have to test people all the time. You have to test strangers, but most especially your friends.’ Within the context of Scotts experience, he is blurting out what is uppermost on his mind, since he is a test subject and, as a homeless person, he has had bad experiences with people who have befriended him. But for Terrell, this remark takes on huge significance.

Terrell and his three other friends then spend the rest of their summer testing each other. At first they give each other tattoos using ink from a ballpoint pen, but as the summer wears on, their activities escalate into crimes, each one getting slightly more violent. For a time I thought they might kill Scott, or another of the homeless characters, and I could not stop reading to find out how it would all end.

I thought the author handled extremely well (1) the issues of trust, (2) capturing without judgment the quality of the homeless man’s inner experience, that Scott is trying to hold himself together but nevertheless being not quite all there, and (3) how adolescent boys dare each other and can do something in a group that none of them would have been brave enough to do on his own.

I finished my “Q” novel, Blessings, on June 29. I have been limiting my A-Z readings to novels published in 2000 or later, and there did not seem to be a lot of Q authors from which to choose.

A teenaged couple abandons their newborn baby on the doorstep of Blessings, the country estate of a wealthy 80-year-old widow. The baby is found by the young man who works as caretaker. The young man, by the way, is recently out of jail where he served 10 months for being an accomplice to a robbery. He immediately becomes a loving father to the abandoned infant, has visions of raising her with opportunities he never had, etc. Over time the widow finds out about the infant, and having the baby around brings a little more life and energy into her reclusive life.

I never really accepted the premise of this book: that the young man, not too long out of jail, would become an instant, doting father. It was just too much of a stretch of the imagination for me. All along when reading it I would be thinking: A baby has to have immunizations, how is he going to get those? How is his fantasy of her future school career going to work out if you have to have a birth certificate to enroll your child in school? About three-quarters of the way through the book, the author thinks of these things, too . . . and it turns out the 80-year-old widow can call on the favors of her 90-year-old friend who is a doctor and still (?!) practicing medicine for the immunizations. These are only a few among many, many points where things were a stretch of the imagination.

In terms of writing style, the author chose an omniscient narration, and chapters are sometimes in the point of view of the widow, sometimes of the caretaker, sometimes of other characters; the widow spends much time recalling her past, and any scene that begins in the present for her will go flashing back hither and thither and yon, and I found that flashing around exceedingly frustrating to follow, as if the present plotline were not getting anywhere. I found some of the flashbacks useful for explaining the widows background, but others of them just seemed pointless. For these reasons, I marked this book as Not Worth It on my All Consuming list.

This is not to say that there were not some good moments in the book – there were. (a) There is a sentence early on in the book where the widow recalls her high school science teacher saying that Einstein had shown that all time takes place simultaneously. I found that sentence very explanatory and it allowed me to forgive the author for all the flashbacks written for the widow. (b) There is a chapter from the caretakers point of view where you see how he was in high school, the social status that he and his family had, what the expectations were that the various kids in town would grow up to be this or that kind of person. And that chapter was very moving. It laid a foundation for all of the caretakers hopes for the better life he wants for the infant he found. (c) When the widow had been about nineteen years old, she had had affair with a married man and became pregnant. The era was WWII; the choice that was open to her at the time was to get married right away; a friend of her brother volunteers to marry her. He does; then he goes off to war (and is killed). To keep people in town from counting months and figuring out that the pregnancy happened before the wedding, the mother sends the girl off to the family vacation estate, where she ends up living in a sort of semi-seclusion for the rest of her life. So the novel raises this tension between what a young girl with an unplanned pregnancy would do a couple of generations ago, versus what was done by this other young girl who abandons her baby at the start of the novel. I found some of this exploring of social mores really thought-provoking.

But one sentence, one chapter, and one provocative sub-plotline were not enough for me to mark this novel as worth consuming.