Going for it in America

      A Good American lived up to all its hype. The praise for this immigrant family saga by Alex George came gushing back in February. Amazon put the book on February's "Best Books of the Month" list; Barnes & Noble named it a Discover pick for  Spring; B & N also listed it as a Top Staff  Pick for Fiction in February; the folks with Oprah's O Magazine ranked it their  #1 "Title to Pick Up Now" for the same month. The buzz continued, and NPR's Morning Edition inserted it into the "Top 2012 Summer Read" collection. 
   Consider me on the bandwagon, too. I loved it.
   Like most readers, I mentally click off things that I like and dislike about books while reading, and by the end I know what I'd tell a friend or fellow reading junkie about the book. Here's how my tally breaks down: immigrant tale (always a favored story line for me), check; three generations of family drama, hardship, humor,sacrifice, heartbreak and success, check; vivid and believeable characters, check; surprise ending,  DOUBLE check.
  And then there is the nice addition of music that plays throughout the story. Another unexpected check.
   In 1904 Frederick publicly serenades Jette in a Hanover, Germany garden and their futures are sealed. The music melts her heart, and in no time the couple is in love. But all is not well with Jette's family and the pair sails to America to begin anew. They buy passage on a ship bound for New Orleans--lots more musical connections there--and ultimately settle in Missouri. The Meisenheimers go on to own a bar (with musical acts aplenty) and ever-evolving restaurants through the years, but the fellow Americans they meet along the way and the appearance and actions of their children and their children's children had me turning pages feverishly. I hunkered down with this book while we lost electricity for six hours last Sunday and by the time the Olympics came back on tv later that night, Frederick and Jette had two grown children ready to launch their own lives.
   Two days later I was done and knew it all--how all the grandchildren turned out, where they lived, how they became good Americans and the story behind the big family secret that I never saw coming.
  Immigrant stories touch my soul. The characters who land on American shores to carve out new lives and new destinies are always inspirational to me. Fictional newcomers--like their flesh-and-blood counterparts--leave everything familiar behind to find freedom and opportunity here, and so it was with A Good American.
   Interesting footnote about the author. Alex George is an Englishman who moved to America in 2003. He's an immigrant and has written an absorbing and entertaining immigrant story. He followed the standard advice to all writers---write what you know. Seems only fitting that he did something so characteristically American with all his hard work and talent---succeed wildly.
   Way to go.

The Push From the Book: each book we read leaves its mark and gives you a push: a new way of thinking, a new take on life, new ideas, new goals. Here's what this book did to me:  The book and its characters embraced their freedoms and the American work ethic. It made me see that I could and should work harder in all things. This is, afterall, America. Immigrants come here from all over the world for a better life. Do those of us born here sometimes forget America's blessings and our own potential? Yea, I think so. Not every day is July 4, but novels like this remind us of what we celebrate on that day and why we're so lucky to be here.

Read Like Rory Gilmore

 I watched snippets of The Gilmore Girls when my now 24-year-old daughter still lived at home.  The comedy/drama about a mother/daughter duo living in Connecticut aired from 2000 to 2007 and, apparently, referenced books more than I imagined.
   Here's a list of book titles the characters read or mentioned during the show's run:
http://bookreviews.me.uk/rory-gilmore-reading-challenge/

  You'll be surprised to find everything here from Anna Karenina and Beowulf to Gidget, Gone With the Wind, and Fahrenheit 451.  It's great fun to skim down the list. How many of the 250 books have you read?

Rumble in the Jungle

    In 2010 there was Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand's celebrated tale of Louis Zamperini, WWII airman who survives a crash over the Pacific, 40 days on a raft, and then, as if life hadn't toyed with him enough----multiple Japanese POW camps.  A year later something similar, Lost in Shangri-La. More downed WWII aircraft. More tests of strength and endurance. More real people never giving in or giving up.
  While Unbroken is the story of one man in the middle of an ocean, Shangri-La is the story of three survivors in the middle of Dutch New Guinea's impenetrable jungles with cannabilistic tribesman thrown in for good measure. One of three passengers to survive the fiery crash was Margaret Hastings, a 30-year-old corporal in the Women's Army Corps (WAC) who looked more like a Hollywood starlet than a secretary assigned to the Far East Air Service Command. An informal picture taken of Hastings in 1945 appears in the book's opening pages, and I had to look twice because I thought Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon had shown up on page two.
   Hastings, an Owego, NY, native, signed up for an atypical field trip on May 13, 1945. Each seat in the "Gremlin Special," a C-47  Skytrain, was filled for the 150-mile trip to Shangri-La, a hidden valley found in the thick of the Oranje Mountains.
 Author Mitchell Zuckoff, whose marvelous book is on par with Unbroken in my opinion,  describes the objective that day as a place time forgot. The thousands occupying the 30-mile long valley looked like something out of the Stone Age--barely clothed men and boys, women in fiber skirts, gardens and fields teeming with workers, thatched-roof huts, and pigs on the loose. It was sighted from the cockpit of a reconnaissance plane scanning the island for potential landing sites, and soon after its discovery bored soldiers wanted a glimpse for themselves. The sightseeing flights were a welcome diversion to life on the island, and that day nine WACs  and 15 servicemen were aboard for a three hour tour that took a deadly turn.
  The fate of the aircraft and the survivors made each new chapter more exciting than the next. Zuckoff used diaries and Army documents, photos, interviews and his own trip to New Guinea to recreate each step out of the burning plane, through the jungle and into the hands of the local tribesman.
   But that's just the first half of the book. Wait to you meet the rescuers--brave paratroopers and medics who jumped in for the rescue without a firm plan to return home. Miraculous.
  This book should appeal to lots of people: WWII buffs, armchair anthropologists, maybe even fans of the weekly show Survivor. I never thought I'd read a book as gripping and taut as Unbroken, but this comes mighty close. It's the perfect antidote for these dog-days of August.

The Push from the Book: each book we read leaves its mark and gives you a push: a new way of thinking, a new take on life, new ideas, new goals. Here's what this book did to me: 
  I am re-evaluating my wimp factor. It's way too high. All these survivor stories are making me feel like I need to buck up. Margaret suffered serious burns. Another passenger, Ken Decker, emerged with a deep gash in his head. John McCollum, who lost a twin brother in the crash, heroically tended their wounds and guided them to safety. The soldiers who parachuted in to provide medical care and support knew there was no exit strategy. All great examples of the can-do spirit of the Greatest Generation, correct?
   Be calm. Be cool. Be brave. I'm workin' on it.

TKO'd by The Buddha in the Attic

   There is no one main character in The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka's novel about Japanese picture brides who arrive in America during the early 1900s to marry men sight unseen. There are many characters. Scads of them. Each with a story that Otsuka melded into the first-person voice "we"  to retrace their journey, their first night as married women, their work, their children, their homes, their employers and neighbors, and eventually, their new status as traitors in the days after Pearl Harbor.
   It's a remarkable and memorable novel, and earlier in the year Otsuka won a big prize for it--- the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Buddha was also a National Book Award Finalist in 2011.  And in typical Otsuka style, Buddha is spare yet richly descriptive, small--only 129 pages--yet potent.
   It's been about 10 years since she wrote her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, a book that I liken to a quick punch in the gut. Not that I've ever experienced that, but her book took me down for the count and left me breathless. Her subject--Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps in 1942--interested me and her writing, which is lean, clean and powerful, packed a wallop of emotion.
   Her writing still lifts me up, and I find beauty in its simplicity. Here are the opening lines from The Buddha in the Attic:

     On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we'd been wearing for years--faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times.

And from the chapter "Whites":

   They gave us new names. They called us Helen and Lily. They called us Margaret. They called us Pearl. They marveled at our tiny figures and our long, shiny black hair. They praised us for our hardworking ways. That girl never stops until she gets the job done. They bragged about us to their neighbors. They bragged about us to their friends.

  Can you hear the music of her words? But what efficiency as a writer! I feel their isolation and anxiety on the ship. I am seasick with them on page five and homesick with them on page 17. These stories of young women who left Japan  from 1908 to 1920 to marry Japanese immigrants in America ultimately concludes with the theme of Otsuka's first novel--internment camps for Japanese Americans.

   

   Neighbors peered out at us through their windows. Cars honked. Strangers stared. A boy on a bicycle waved. A startled cat dove under a bed in one of our houses as looters began to break down the front door. Curtains ripped. Glass shattered. Wedding dishes smashed to the floor. And we knew it would only be a matter of time until all traces of us were gone.

   I regularly seek out books about Asian women. Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club pushed me in that direction years ago and since that time I've read many books about women from patriarchal cultures who face desperate situations and survive and sometimes flourish. Memoirs of a Geisha, Chinese Cinderella, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan are among my favorites. Even before I read it, I knew The Buddha in the Attic was a natural fit for me. 

  This small book is tiny enough to stash away in a purse or tote bag if you're travelling light for a weekend away. You can easily tuck it inside a beachbag or carry-on luggage.  I can't insist that you read it but I'd like to challenge any woman to open it up and resist its first few lines. Keep reading, and you'll be like me. Knocked down and breathless. Otsuka's got quite an upper cut.

The Push From the Book: each book we read leaves its mark and gives you a push: a new way of thinking, a new take on life, new ideas, new goals. Here's what this book did to me: 

    Simple response. I uttered many prayers of thanks for my life, my courtship, my husband. I did some digging before writing today's blog entry and listened to a bit of  a WHYY radio interview (http://www.julieotsuka.com/media/) with the author. Otsuka explained that these first meetings between the picture brides and their husbands were often a "first date for life" because divorce was not an option in Japanese culture at that time. Some of the matches were doomed from the start and the new brides endured harsh husbands, family life and working conditions. They had no options and for that I felt pangs of sorrow while reading. The women were strong and stoic and inspirational. Maybe some of that will rub off.  An inner-strength tune-up is always appreciated.

Snapping the Slump

  Ever been in a reading slump? I just pulled myself out of one, snapping a pitiful 0-for-5 streak of abandoned books that spanned about four weeks. I was the Phillies of the library world. Struggling. Sputtering. Trying to figure things out.  
    But I kept hacking away and taking my swings until one day last week the ball flew out of the park. At long last readers, I connected with a book.
   If you find yourself in a midsummer book funk, try The Snow Child, by first-time author Eowyn Ivey. I’m not sure if it was the title that drew me in on a steamy day or the frosty vibe of the grey and white cover art or the positive reviews I’ve been reading on several book websites. All of the above? Possibly.
      The novel is based on a Russian folk tale about a childless couple that builds a snow child during the winter's first snowfall. It magically comes to life but disappears each spring, only to return the following winter. Mabel and Jack, Alaskan homesteaders living near the Wolverine River in 1920, have an empty home, stale marriage and diminishing pantry. Mabel comes close to suicide in the opening pages, but not long thereafter, the couple’s own snow child arrives. The mysterious, sprightly child runs through the forests with uncanny speed and confidence and offers gifts of berries, homemade baskets and trapped game for the near-starving couple. Her visits are unpredictable but over time the blond, blue-eyed girl comes to trust the couple and becomes part of the family, at least during the winter months.
   There’s a strong fairy-tale thread that runs through this entire book, but it never overtakes the story of Mabel and Jack‘s ongoing battle with the elements, their farm, even their skittish horse. There is harsh Alaskan reality at the novel’s core that kept the story of the fanciful snow child in check. There are trees to fell, fields to plow, seeds to sow, wood to cut, chickens to feed, bread to bake. And half the time it’s cold, dark, snowy and lonely. One thing’s for sure. Alaska, 1920, is no place for the faint of heart, and Ivey gives her readers the total northern exposure experience.
   The author lives and works in Alaska and conjured up the territory so convincingly she’s being compared to Willa Cather, whose fiction has also been a dependable source for understanding the look and feel of the real American prairie. As compliments go, this one must give Ivey the goosebumps, no matter what the temperature in her backyard.

The Push From the Book: each book we read leaves its mark and gives you a push: a new way of thinking, a new take on life, new ideas, new goals. Here's what this book did to me:  It kept me reading outside the box. Novels relying too much on folklore and fairy tales usually disappoint me. Earlier this year I grabbed Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, which Ann Patchett called “a marvel of beauty and imagination.” It didn’t strike me the same way, and I wanted to abolish anything like it for the foreseeable future. Good thing I let that notion pass. I would have missed something special had I put The Snow Child back on the shelf. And no doubt my slump would have continued.

Going With the Flow

  I like flow charts. This one has a summer reading theme, and you're bound to find something you like among the 101 titles featured here. From the bloggers at teach.com, I say thanks for this creative way to give reluctant summer readers a kick in the pants. Those of you who like to read will also enjoy the suggestions. Classic and contemporary fiction and nonfiction selections are included, so have some fun going with the flow:

http://teach.com/great-educational-resources/summer-reading-flowchart

Remember, lots of the books in the chart are available right here at Bethel. To locate classic lit, make a left at the fish tank and find the stacks on the right.

 

A man. In an eggcup?

    Perhaps it was the title, The Man Who Lived in an Eggcup, that caught my attention or the fact that a physician wrote it, but this collection of essays about doctors and patients and their successes and failures is among the most interesting pieces of nonfiction you can borrow from our library at the moment. Amazon has 10 published reviews of Dr. John Gamel’s book, and each glitters with five stars. Bethel-Tulpehocken is the only system library to own it, so I suggest you get your hands on this book now before other Berks County readers request it and it’s gone for a few weeks.
    If you don’t like stories about illness and injury or hospitals, skip it. It’s not for you. From time to time there’s gory detail, but it’s required to understand the full scope of the patient‘s condition, the challenge facing the doctor and the probability of a happy ending. Squeamish readers, then, might pass.
    All those left standing should make an appointment with this book. Dr. Gamel, a semi-retired ophthalmologist, has written 17 absorbing stories, and each one thrusts you into hospital life so completely you swear there’s a sharp scent of alcohol coming off the pages. His tales take you from the bedside of a dying cancer patient still addicted to cigarettes to a treatment room where cutting-edge laser surgery saves the vision of a teenage diabetic. The book is just as entertaining as House and reminiscent of the old-school medical drama St. Elsewhere. Healing surrounded by heartbreak, sadness, absurdity, joy and humor.
    But let’s get back to the man in the eggcup, essay number one. It’s the story of a man who needed both legs and hips amputated after a massive infection from a decades-old injury. Naturally, there's a more involved backstory, but the end result was that he lived--happily, gratefully-- in an eggcup-chair mounted to a wheelchair. It’s a triumphant story, which includes information about this rare surgery as well as conversations with the patient who pleaded to have his wasted lower limbs removed. “The Man Who Lived in an Eggcup” was perhaps the most bizarre, yet most uplifting story I’ve ever read.
    Essay collections like this one are sometimes overlooked in bookstores and on library shelves because they don’t have the hype of new novels or the publicity machine behind established authors. So I’m doing my part to spread the word. Take it off the shelf, read, and like the docs say, “Call me in the morning.”

The Push From the Book---each book we read leaves its mark and gives you a push: a new way of thinking, a new take on life, new ideas, new goals. Here’s what this book did to me:             
           I’m able to walk, bike, pull weeds, sit at the computer, write an essay, hang out the wash, make a meal, drive myself to work, clean the toilet and bathe. After reading this, I have an even greater appreciation for the basics in life that many cannot perform for themselves because they are too sick. Health, indeed, is the greatest of gifts. And, I’ll try to be a better patient and heed my doctor’s advice. So many of us don’t.