Page Eighteen

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I read Hosseini's The Kite Runner a couple of years ago; it was a very powerful book. When I heard his new novel was released this year, I knew I had to read it. A Thousand Splendid Suns may not deliver the same "literary punch" as The Kite Runner, but it's definately a book that will give you pause. This book deals with the women of Afghanistan and what they had to endure living under Taliban rule. Reading about what these women had to endure makes me feel an overwhelming sense of appreciation for having been spared a life of such unspeakable attrocities. I feel sick to my stomach even thinking that people lived and are living with anything even close to what the two protagonists of this novel had to live with. On the other hand, I think the past several years have made Afghanistan out to be a place solely of war, death, and tyranny, but Hosseini also draws attention to the fact that it was, and can be, a lovely place.

This is a sad read, but there are many moments of triumph and beauty as well.

Page Seventeen

Smoke by Elizabeth Ruth

This books grabs you from the first paragraph where Ruth describes how Buster, the main protagonist of the story, drops a lit match while in bed and catches on fire as his parents try to save him. The book chronicles Buster's emotional recovery from the incident as he has to learn how to rejoin his small Southern Ontario community as someone phyically different. To help him, he has the support of the elderly town doctor, Dr. Gray, a man who spins yarns about the Purple Gang from the 1930s in order to keep Buster focussed on something other than his physical scars and emotional detachment. It was during these excerpts where Ruth lost me a bit, but the main plot of the story reads fairly smooth and she gives you quite the interesting revelation at the end of the book.

This book was the "One Book, One Community" read for this summer. Currently, the author is traveling around Southern Ontario and I will have the chance to chat with her next week.

Page Sixteen

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

This story is written from the perspective of Christopher, a 15-year old boy who has Asperger's Syndrome. Christopher loves Sherlock Holmes, and so when he finds a garden fork stuck into Wellington, his neighbour's dog, he decides to solve the mystery and write a book about it. His investigation leads him to solve many other mysteries that pertain to his family, and leads him on the biggest journey of his life thus far.
This is the second time I have read this book. The first time I read it I didn't really like it, and this second time around I appreciated it much more (maybe because I have to teach it soon), although I still got a bit glassy-eyed when Christopher went into his many mathematical digressions. I won't pretend I know a great deal about Asperger's, so I'm not sure if Haddon did the description of a boy with Asperger's justice or not, but I like the book because it will allow students to get inside the head of a new kind of hero, and attempt to empathize with someone their age who has a disability, and also to empathize with parents of children with Asperger's.

Page Fifteen

Blindness by Jose Saramago

A man at a red light suddenly goes blind, and soon so do others. The blind and the contaminated are taken to an old mental asylum and guarded by soliders who shoot them if they try to leave. Inside the asylum, as more and more people arrive, a small group of people band together and try to survive starvation, living amongst disease, filth, excrement, rape, and violence. Only one woman's sight remains intact. Lying to the authorities in order to remain with her husband, she becomes the eyes of the reader and a witness to the horrors that have befallen her unnamed city. She also becomes the eyes of the seven people who have banded together during this terrible catastrophe, and leads them throughout the city streets after the asylum catches on fire. It becomes apparant that everyone in the city and, likely, country has gone blind. As they travel through the city scavenging for shelter and food, they pass sights that become more horrifying than those in the asylum, one hell being replaced by another.
Similar to We Need to Talk about Kevin, this book is not for the faint of heart. It is also challenging because Saramago does not use any punctuation when people are speaking, and prose often runs on without stopping. While I started to get a little impatient for the novel to wrap up near the end, I do think it is definately a book that will hold your attention and keep you thinking long after you've finished it.
"Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be as they truly are, said the doctor, And what about people, asked the girl with the dark glasses, People, too, no one will be there to see them" (114).
"Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see" (292).

Page Fourteen

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

I would never have picked this book up had I not read many reviews that praised this book. Even my own librarian said to me "Ooh, you're going to like this one!" when I went to pick it up. Classified as a "ghost story," or "mystery," or "a return to a rich vein of storytelling we loved as children," the book tells the tale of Margaret Lea, a young woman who works with her father in their antiquarian bookshop, who is asked to write the biography of a famous Yorkshire writer, Vida Winter. Winter's books are eaten up like today's Harry Potter series, and yet no one has ever been able to get the true account of Winter's life. Now, at the end of her life, frail and dying, Winter finally reveals her story.

I suppose I would agree that the book reads like an "old fashioned story," and that it is indeed a mystery (a genre which I rarely, if ever, read). However, I had high hopes for this book which were not fully met. In fact, I found the story a bit forced and a bit of a letdown to be honest. Setterfield's main contentions centering on the separation of twins and "twin-ness" became a bit annoying. In the end, merely "mildy entertaining."

Page Thirteen

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

This book was the most satisfying book that I've read in a long time. It's one of those books that you can't wait to get back to once you've put it down, and when it's done you feel cheated and left wanting more, even with its 519 pages.

The book may be difficult at first to follow, not due to the language but due to the fact that Henry, one of the main characters, has a genetic disorder which causes him to time travel, mostly due to situations or feelings of high stress (sounds sci-fi dorky, but keep with me). So, keeping track of dates and ages can be a bit confusing. Henry's time travel causes a whole heap of issues, since Henry doesn't want to time travel, does so sometimes at very awkward moments, and cannot take anything with him during these time travels, including clothing. So, he plops down in past, present, and future completely naked, having to pick locks, steal, etc to get food, clothes and other necessities. At the heart of the book, however, is probably the best love story I've ever read. Henry and Clare "meet" when they are 28 and 20, respectively, but Clare has known Henry since she was 6, when he travels back in time during his later marriage to Clare to get to know her younger self. Later, in "real time," the couple tries to grip on to a normal life, never knowing when Henry is going to exit suddenly, or for how long, or how much danger he will be in wherever he goes.

This book wins the prize of being my favourite read of the summer. I highly recommend it. Read it before the movie comes out!

Page Twelve

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

If you want to be seduced by words, read Ondaatje. This was my introduction to him, and I was immediately reeled in by how beautifully he writes. The strong presence of a poet is embedded in each line.
The plot of the book is rather difficult to explain, however. From California to Nevada to France to alternating points of view, back and forth and further back, we become folded in the lives of Anna, Claire, Coop, and Lucien and yet their stories are left dangling, like loose threads and it's up to the reader to make sense of how they all fit together. This is one book that I think would need a second read to be fully understood, but only one read is needed to appreciate the voice of Ondaatje.
"[. . .] sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third person voice protects us" (142).