November

So Sleepy Story by Uri Shulevitz.
One children’s book author and illustrator whose works are always worth checking into (and checking out) is Uri Shulevitz.  Right from your first glance at the cover of his newest, So Sleepy Story – with its dozing house and peacefully slumbering moon set against a background of various shades of blue – you know you’re in for a treat.  It’s the tale of a house full of sleeping people and objects who are all awakened by music drifting in through the windows.  Even the very youngest child will enjoy pointing out familiar objects behaving in unfamiliar ways. (I was just beguiled by the dancing dishes.)  This is a perfect bedtime read for three-to-five year olds.

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link.
On the one hand, reading Magic for Beginners, an exquisitely loopy collection of stories, demands a certain suspension of disbelief, not unlike when you read Garcia-Marquez, Salman Rushdie, or the other magical realists.  (As Shakespeare had Hamlet note, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”)  You simply have to accept (at least for the length of the story), that there might be zombies around, or that a purse can expand to hold a complete village.  On the other hand, Link’s writing is so remarkable, her use of language so mind-bogglingly perfect, that you’re sucked into the world of the stories before you know it, beguiled by descriptions like this one, of a sofa covered in  “…an orange-juice-colored corduroy that makes it appear as if the couch has just escaped from a maximum security prison for criminally insane furniture.”   My favorite is the title story, which reminds me of the M.C. Escher picture “The Drawing Hands.” It’s intricate, wildly imaginative, and totally wonderful.  Whether or not you think you like fantasy, if you’re a fan of inventive plots and good writing – her use of language will fill you with awe  – don’t miss Link’s collection. 

Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees by Caroline Moorehead.
This should be required reading for both policy makers and anyone with even a shade of an opinion on the topic of exiles, immigrants, and refugees.  Moorehead notes that millions of people all over the world are forced out of their homelands by some variety of war, devastation, or persecution (the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates about 17 million people fall into this category). She discusses not only how the situation might be handled, but also how various scenarios play out politically and economically.  One of Moorehead’s most important insights is that where once the refugee was seen as the victim (after World War II, for example), he or she is now defined as the problem – and that way of framing the issue changes how we go about finding a solution.  Moorehead begins her book by putting the whole “refugee issue” in an historical context and looking at its economic and geo-political implications.  But equally valuable are the accounts of the refugees themselves, Palestinians, Iranians, Liberians, Mexicans, and others, all looking for a better life for themselves and their families. Thoroughly readable, Moorehead’s book is a wake up call to action on the part of those who can still feel outrage at the injustices we do to one another.

Happiness Sold Separately by Lolly Winston.
Take a successful lawyer (Elinor) and a successful podiatrist (Ted), who, after two years of infertility treatments that don’t work try to accept the reality that they will never have a child.  Elinor is so preoccupied with her sorrow that she stops paying attention to Ted, who falls into an affair (and in love) with his trainer at the gym, Gina.  Gina’s ten-year-old son, Toby, becomes emotionally attached to Ted and desperately wants Gina to marry him.  Toss in an attractive tree surgeon, a male house-cleaner, an alcoholic musician, and a concert promoter.  Mix well.  Can this marriage be saved?  Can you predict the ending? It’s not as obvious as you might think (or wish). 

Queen of the Oddballs and Other True Stories From a Life Unaccording to Plan by Hillary Carlip.
Most of the memoirs being published these days leave me feeling somewhat depressed and totally lethargic – they’re so soggy and energy draining in their descriptions of blighted lives and unfulfilled dreams.  So I was delighted to read Queen of the Oddballs by Hillary Carlip. This always entertaining, frequently laugh-out-loud memoir offers scenes from Carlip’s life as a stage- and star-struck kid and adult on the fringes of Hollywood.  Beginning in 1965, when she was age 8, and concluding in 2004 (with a look back on her appearance on Oprah), Hillary relates her experiences being on The Art Linkletter Show, taking ballroom dancing lessons with Jamie Lee Curtis, trying on various personas to see which is most interesting (everything from a dancer on Hullabaloo! to Wednesday on The Addams Family to Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s), delivering singing telegrams, and coming out as a lesbian.  Each chapter begins with a list of some of the major events of the day and ends with photographs, reproductions of newspaper stories, and even a letter from singer Carly Simon.  Fans of Haven Kimmel’s A Girl Named Zippy will want to check this one out, too.   

The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within by Stephen Fry.
If you’ve ever had a secret hankering to write poetry, or even to understand it better (how it works, how to “get” a poem), you’ll want to check this book out.  It turns out that Fry, who’s best known as an actor (Gosford Park and V for Vendetta, among others) and a comedian, is a secret poet; his newest book grew out of a belief that while talent may be inborn, anyone can learn the techniques of writing verse.  Reading Fry’s book, you’ll find yourself both charmed and educated in the ways and means of poetry, including meter, rhyme, as well as the various forms a poem can take.  The last chapter includes a must-read section called “Ten Habits of Successful Poets That They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Poetry School, or Chicken Verse for the Soul Is From Mars but You Are What You Read in Just Seven Days or Your Money Back.”  Fry includes interesting writing exercises in every chapter that should get that inner poet in all of us revved up to try our hand at an ode, a sestina, a pantoum, a sonnet, a haiku, or a limerick.

The 8:55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames.
Eames combines his 2002 train journey from London to Iraq with a look back at the life of mystery writer Agatha Christie, who took the Orient Express on the same 3,000 mile journey in 1928.  (Fans of the book or movie Murder on the Orient Express will find much to explain its genesis here.)  Eames is a delightful travel companion – well read, personable, not whiny, able to remain calm in the face of late trains, and overlook rude behavior and bad food.  He revels, as all good travelers do, in good company, good food, and interesting scenery. Since Eames’s journey took him through the Balkans and into Baghdad on the eve of the second Gulf War, there’s enough here to keep political science junkies interested as well.  I also enjoyed running across the occasional Britishism in Eames’s writing: describing the Serbian army, he says that they were “put on the back foot straight away,” and talks about people “under the cosh of the Turks.” 

They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators by Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and David Lefer. 
I very much enjoyed learning about all the men and (the very few, unfortunately) women profiled in They Made America.  The writing is lively, the essays are filled with lovely little factoids, and the subjects range from the obvious to the little known, from “the heroes who got America going,” to those who are still at work in the digital age.  Evans is especially interested in those men and women who took an invention (often someone else’s) and turned it into something practical that made life for the everyday family easier or even more interesting.  His examples include John Fitch, the inventor of the steamboat; Leo Bakeland, the Belgian immigrant who developed plastic; Ida Rosenthal (another immigrant, from Russia), the dressmaker who first popularized the brassiere; General Georges Doriot (who came from France to get an MBA at Harvard), developer of the notion of venture capital; to the more well known, including Estée Lauder; Edwin Land; Ted Turner; Bill Gates; and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google.  Not only does this book make for fascinating reading, it’s also a wonderful gift for any fan of history or biography, as well as any budding inventor.  

Epileptic by David B.
If you’ve been curious about the phenomenon of graphic novels, you’ll want to take a look at Epileptic, an outstanding example of the genre.  It’s the (true) story of the author’s troubled childhood in France when his older brother developed grand-mal epilepsy as a pre-teen and his parents fell prey to a disastrous series of alternative healers and spiritual gurus in a futile attempt to cure their son.  In response to the deteriorating circumstances of his family life, David, then known as Pierre-Francois, began drawing the demons that he imagined were leagued against him and his family.  Appropriate for older teens and adults, this moving coming-of-age tale is not to be missed. 

Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto.
What’s a 43-year-old seemingly terminally single, very attractive New York cartoonist to do when, after decades of dating, she finally meets Mr. Right; when her career finally seems to be taking off (her cartoons are appearing in both The New Yorker and Glamour, for example, with some regularity); when she discovers a lump in her breast, is diagnosed with cancer, realizes that she’s let her health insurance lapse, has surgery, and undergoes chemo and radiation?  Why, write a graphic novel about the whole experience – from joy to tears and back again.  Which is what Marchetto does in this book that combines Sex in the City with General Hospital, and does so with grace and humor, managing to be heartwarming yet not soppy. 

The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay.
I don’t cry over a lot of books, but I have to say that the ending of The Lions of Al-Rassan nearly did me in.  Kay has written several outstanding alternative histories (he spoils you, in fact, for almost all other writers in this genre).  Here he re-imagines Moorish Spain, with two different cultures (slightly disguised but clearly Muslim and Christian) at war, and a young woman physician, Jehane (neither Christian nor Muslim), caught between the two strong (and let’s be honest here, the really good-looking, utterly fearless, and totally captivating) men who represent each side.  Kay doesn’t shirk from presenting the violence and treachery that attend such conflicts, but he also shows how love can blossom in even the most unlikely of times and places.  While I was reading the novel I kept thinking about Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Ballad of East and West”:  its last four lines are particularly apropos, and I would bet anything that Kay knows the poem well.

Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss by Brad Matsen.
Descent takes us back more than 70 years to the great story of naturalist William Beebe and wealthy adventurer Otis Barton’s successful attempts to go deeper into the ocean than anyone had ever descended before.  Barton designed a “bathysphere,” a steel ball with a four-and-a-half-foot circumference, hanging from a wire rope, which depended for its ventilation on the two men waving a palm leaf fan during their submersion in the ocean.  In the years between 1929 and 1934, Barton and Beebe, in more than 20 dives, explored the ocean down to a depth of nearly half a mile, many times deeper than anyone had ever gone before.  Matsen writes well, and he captures not only the sense of adventure (and real danger) that these two men faced, but also explores their personal relationship, which was quite dicey (in fact, they ended up not speaking to one another).  (In one of those examples of the unexpected joys of reading, I learned that one of the wives of womanizing Beebe was none other than Elswyth Thane, the author of a series of historical romances that’s high on my list of guilty pleasure reads.)