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526. The Sunlight Pilgrims

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Jenni Fagan

Genre:   Fiction, Dystopia

310 pages, published March 24, 2018

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The Sunlight Pilgrims is set in a futuristic 2020 and imagines the world in a new ice age.  Rather than head south as many others are doing, a grieving Dylan  heads north to bury his mother’s and grandmother’s ashes on the Scottish islands where they once lived.  At the same time on the Scottish Highlands, twelve-year-old Estella and her survivalist mother, Constance, scrape by and prepare for a record-breaking winter. When Dylan arrives in their caravan park, life changes course for Estella and Constance.

Quotes 

“When grown-ups hear a little dark door creaking in their hearts they turn the telly up. They slug a glass of wine. They tell the cat it was just a door creaking. The cat knows. It jumps down from the sofa and walks out of the room. When that little dark door in a heart starts to go click-clack click-clack click-clack click-clack so loudly and violently their chest shows an actual beat – well, then they say they’ve got bad cholesterol and they try to quit using butter, they begin to go for walks.  When the tiny dark door in her heart creaks open, she will walk right through it.  She will lie down and inside her own heart like a bird in the night.”

 “…the child of a wolf may not feel like she has fangs until she finds herself facing the moon, but they are still there the whole time regardless.”

 

“I’m going to draw up a human-rights contract that says everyone on earth must agree we are here as caretakers of the planet, first and foremost.”

 

 “She focuses, trying to absorb the suns’ energy deep into her cells so when they descend into the darkest winter for 200 years, in the quietest minutes, when the whole world experiences a total absence of light — she will glow, and glow, and glow.”

 

“It’s all borrowed: bricks; bodies; breathing — it’s all on loan! Eighty years on the planet if you’re lucky; why do they say if you’re lucky? Eighty years and people trying to get permanent bits of stone before they go, as if permanence were a real thing. Everyone has been taken hostage.”

 

My Take

I found The Sunlight Pilgrims to be a meandering slog without much to say.  It includes a completely unecessary subplot about gender identity that distracts from the cataclysmic environmental message of the book.  Skip.

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524. Trespass

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Rose Tremain

Genre:   Fiction, Foreign

273 pages, published October 18, 2010

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Trespass tells the story of the competing interests over an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel, in southern France.  The owner, Aramon has let his life devolve into squalor as punishment for his past sins.  His sister Audrun, who was vicitimized by Aramon and their father, is trapped in the torment of her past.  She loves the house and the land and can’t imagine anyone else taking possession of it.  Enter Anthony Verey, a disillusioned antiques dealer from London who views Mas Lunel as his chance to start over.  The clashing interests of these three individuals sets in motion a series of tragic events.

Quotes 

“They both knew that it was borrowed, because if you left your own country, if you left it late, and made your home in someone else’s country, there was always a feeling that you were breaking an invisible law, always the irrational fear that, one day, some ‘rightful owner’ would arrive to take it all away, and you would be driven out . . .”

 

My Take

Trespass was the first book that I have read by Rose Tremain and I was impressed.  She is a gift writer and hooked me into this dramatic story  of family love and betrayal.  There is also a real undercurrent of sadness that gives the story a poignancy and endurance.  I look forward to reading more of Tremain’s work.

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174. The Cuckoo’s Calling

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Boulder Librarian

Author:   Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Suspense

455 pages, published April 30, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

While The Cuckoo’s Calling, a murder mystery and book one of a series featuring private detective Cormoran Strike, lists the author as Robert Galbraith, that is a pseudonym.  It is actually written by J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame.  The book opens with Detective Strike hired to investigate the death of supermodel Lula Landry (known to her friends as the Cuckoo) which has been ruled a suicide by the police.  After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator.  He is down to one client, has creditors on his back, has just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.  The Landry case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers.

 

Quotes 

“Seven and a half million hearts were beating in close proximity in this heaving old city, and many, after all, would be aching far worse than his.”

 

“Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawnmowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.”

 

“You’re like everyone else, Strike; you want your civil liberties when you’ve told the missus you’re at the office and you’re at a lap-dancing club, but you want twenty-four-hour surveillance on your house when someone’s trying to force your bathroom window open. Can’t have it both ways.”

 

“Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed.”

 

“In the inverted food chain of fame, it was the big beasts who were stalked and hunted.”

 

“The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.”

 

“When you are young, and beautiful, you can be very cruel.”

 

“There’s people who’d expect you to take a bullet for them and they don’t bother rememb’ring yuh name.”

 

“Couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself.”

 

“Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s traumatised memories;”

 

“I am become a name.”

 

My Take

When my son Nick was in Elementary School (he is currently a college student), he and I read all of the Harry Potter books together and we both loved living in the wildly inventive and fantastic world created by J.K. Rowling.  Based in modern day London, Rowling has created a different type of world in The Cuckoo’s Calling, one that I also enjoyed inhabiting during the almost 16 hours that I spent listening to the audio book version.  The Cuckoo’s Calling has everything you could want from a mystery/suspense/thriller:  compelling and real characters, a gritty plot that hums along at a rapid clip, an inside look at a world different from the one you inhabit, plenty of red herrings to keep you guessing and some surprise twists at the end.  It’s no surprise that I’m looking forward to reading book 2 in this series.

 

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146. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Boulder Librarian

Author:   Mary Roach

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Science, Medicine

320 pages, published 2003

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

I learned a lot from reading Stiff about a subject I didn’t even know would be interesting:  the use of the dead for cadavers and as test subjects (think crash test dummies) and the brain dead for organ donation.  For over two thousand years, cadavers have been involved in advancing the cause of science.  In this unique book, Mary Roach explores what happens to our bodies postmortem and it is a fascinating tale.

 

Quotes

 “The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften.  Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.”

 

“You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.”

 

“One young woman’s tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver’s hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. “The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish”, she wrote. “Did you choose the color? Did you think that I would see it? I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands. I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs I imagine. When I listen to a heart, I recall holding your heart.”

 

“It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you’d call her.”

 

“We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.”

 

“The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.”

 

“It’s the reason we say “pork” and “beef” instead of “pig” and “cow.” Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.”

 

“Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.”

 

“Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone.

They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.”

 

“Here’s the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. […] I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer control, or even participate in, anything that happens on earth. I spoke about this with funeral director Kevin McCabe, who believes that decisions concerning the disposition of a body should be mad by the survivors, not the dead. “It’s non of their business what happens to them whey the die,” he said to me. While I wouldn’t go that far, I do understand what he was getting at: that the survivors shouldn’t have to do something they’re uncomfortable with or ethically opposed to. Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased’s ashes into inner space, that’s fine. But if it is burdensome or troubling for any reason, then perhaps they shouldn’t have to.”

 

My Take

I always like learning about new things and I really learned about something new while reading Stiff.  Roach’s book gave me an appreciation for how important the use of human cadavers has been to understanding how the human body and disease work, as well as how to build better transportation options to protect the living.  We all owe a debt to those who came before us and donated their body to science and those who generously signed organ donation cards.

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100. The Invention of Wings

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Public Library Librarian

Author:   Sue Monk Kidd

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, History

384 pages, published January 7, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Invention of Wings, which is based on real people, tells the story of two girls in early nineteenth century Charleston.  Hetty “Handful” Grimke is a slave who works in the wealthy Grimke household with dreams of freedom.  Sarah Grimke idolizes her father who is a judge and wants to follow in his footsteps but is subject to the restrictions and expectations of that era placed on women. On her eleventh birthday, Sarah is given ownership of Handful and she tries in vain to free her, but promises Handful’s slave mother that she will someday accomplish this mission.  Over the next 35 years, both Handful and Sarah endure disappointment, loss, sorrow, and betrayal, but continue courageously on and discover their destiny in the process. Sarah, along with her younger sister, Angelina, becomes an abolitionist and feminist.  

 

Quotes

“My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.”

 

“We ‘re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren ‘t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”

 

“I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.”

 

“I’d been wandering about in the enchantments of romance, afflicted with the worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations.”

 

“The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-com, and you never will outpace your grief.”

 

“It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.”

 

“A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost—don’t see it, don’t hear it, but it’s always hovering round on ready.”

 

“To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”

 

“If you must err, do so on the side of audacity.”

 

“I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all.”

 

“I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn’t choose.”

 

“How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.”

 

“I said, “Where’s all that delivering God’s supposed to do?”

He snorted. “You’re right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn’t have any hands and feet but ours.”

“That doesn’t say much for the Lord.”

“It doesn’t say much for us, either.”

 

“Her name was Mary, and there ends any resemblance to the mother of our Lord.”

 

“He that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life shall find it.” Do not fear to lose what needs to be lost.”

My Take

I had previously read The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and enjoyed it, but liked The Invention of Wings even more.  With layers of detail on the place, time and characters, Kidd creates a world that feels immediate and real.  She also tells a compelling story that is interwoven with historical details about the Antebellum South and the movement for Abolition and Women’s rights.  I highly recommend The Invention of Wings, especially the audio version.

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97. The Master Butchers Singing Club

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Boulder Public Library Librarian

Author:   Louise Erdrich

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction

388 pages, published February 4, 2003

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Master Butchers Singing Club focuses on the intertwined lives of Fidelis Waldvogel, a World War I German Sniper and master butcher who emigrates to North Dakota after the war, and American Delphine Watzka, who is part of balancing performance act with her homosexual husband and is a reluctant caretaker of her severely alcoholic father.  The men are all in a singing club, but the action of the story centers on Delphine as she struggles to find her place in the world.

 

Quotes

“She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.”

 

“Something in her was changing as she read the books. Life after life flashed before her eyes, yet she stayed safe from misery. And the urge to act things out onstage could be satisfied cheaply, and at home, and without the annoyance of other members of an acting company. Her ambition to leave faded and a kind of contentment set in. She hadn’t exactly feared the word contentment, but had always associated it with a vague sense of failure. To be discontented had always seemed much richer a thing. To be restless, striving. That view was romantic. In truth, she was finding out, life was better lived in a tranquil pattern. As long as she could read, she never tired of the design of her days.”

 

“Delphine began to read with a mad attention when she wanted to talk to Clarisse. She saw that in her life there was a woman-shaped hole, a cutout that led to a mysterious place. Through it, her mother, then Eva, and now Clarisse had walked. If only she could plunge her arms through and drag them back.”

 

“As Delphine watched, into her head there popped a strange notion: the idea that perhaps strongly experienced moments, as when Eva turned and the sun met her hair and for that one instant the symbol blazed out, those particular moments were eternal. Those moments actually went somewhere. Into a file of moments that existed out of time’s range and could not be pilfered by God.”

 

“When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.”

 

“She slowly became convinced…that at the center of the universe not God but a tremendous deadness reigned. The stillness of a drunk God, passed out cold…She had learned of it in that house…where the drunks crashed…Things had happened to her there. She was neither raped nor robbed, nor did she experience God’s absence to any greater degree than other people did. She wasn’t threatened or made to harm anyone against her will. She wasn’t beaten, either, or deprived of speech or voice. It was, rather, the sad blubbering stories she heard in the house. Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life – disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not touching her.”

 

“Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.”

My Take

It was a pleasure to read The Master Butchers Singing Club.  While Erlich’s characters are quirky and unconventional, she infuses them with such a strong core of humanity that it makes them both fascinating and relatable.  The story meanders at times and there are a few parts that could have been easily excised.  Still, it is worth reading The Master Butchers Singing Club and I recommend it.

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96. The Dinner

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Boulder Public Library Librarian

Author:   Herman Koch

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense

292 pages, published February 12, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Set in an exclusive, high priced Amsterdam restaurant, The Dinner starts off with the polite conversation of two couples.  However, the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened. Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act which has been caught on camera and their grainy images have been broadcast throughout the country.  Despite an ongoing investigation, the boys remain unidentified by everyone except their parents.  At the end of the dinner, the couples finally confront the crisis with their children and each of them must decide what they are prepared to accept and do.  

 

Quotes

“That was how I looked at life sometimes, as a warm meal that was growing cold. I knew I had to eat, or else I would die, but I had lost my appetite.”

 

“This particular restaurant is one where you have to call three months in advance—or six, or eight, don’t ask me. Personally, I’d never want to know three months in advance where I’m going to eat on any given evening, but apparently some people don’t mind. A few centuries from now, when historians want to know what kind of crazies people were at the start of the twenty-first century, all they’ll have to do is look at the computer files of the so-called “top” restaurants.”

 

“Sometimes things come out of your mouth that you regret later on. Or no, not regret. You say something so razor-sharp that the person you say it to carries it around with them for the rest of their life.”

 

“If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn’t have to be validated.”

 

“When the conversation turns too quickly to films, I see it as a sign of weakness. I mean: films are more something for the end of the evening, when you really don’t have much else to talk about. I don’t know why, but when people start talking about films, I always get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, like when you wake up in the morning and find that it’s already getting dark outside.”

 

“The first thing that struck you about Claire’s plate was its vast emptiness. Of course I’m well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but there are voids and then there are voids. The void here, that part of the plate on which no food at all was present, had clearly been raised to a matter of principle.

It was as though the empty plate was challenging you to say something about it, to go to the open kitchen and demand an explanation. ‘You wouldn’t even dare!’ the plate said, and laughed in your face.”

 

“I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? How many fathers who humiliate their children? How many morons whose breath stinks like rotten meat but who refuse to do anything about it? How many hopeless cases who go on complaining all their lives about the non-existent injustices they’ve had to suffer? Look around you, I said. How many of your classmates would you be pleased not to see return to their desks tomorrow morning? Think about that one family member of your own family, that irritating uncle with his pointless, horseshit stories at birthday parties, that ugly cousin who mistreats his cat. Think about how relieved you would be – and not only you, but virtually the entire family – if that uncle or cousin would step on a landmine or be hit by a five-hundred-pounder dropped from a high altitude. If that member of the family were to be wiped off the face of the earth. And now think about all those millions of victims of all the wars there have been in the past – I never specifically mentioned the Second World War, I used it as an example because it’s the one that most appeals to their imaginations – and think about the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of victims who we need to have around like we need a hole in the head. Even from a purely statistical standpoint, it’s impossible that all those victims were good people, whatever kind of people that may be. The injustice is found more in the fact that the assholes are also put on the list of innocent victims. That their names are also chiselled into the war memorials.”

My Take

I didn’t know what to expect when I started listening to The Dinner.  At first, it seemed like a clever, satirical commentary on our societal preening and pretensions.  However, as the story unfolds, The Dinner becomes a commentary on the callousness of society at large and it delivers a stinging indictment with rhetorical flare.  An interesting book by a talented writer.

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92. Her

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Harriet Lane

Genre:  Fiction, Thriller, Suspense, Mystery

272 pages, published January 6, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Emma and Nina, the two main characters in Her, appear to have very little in common.  As a relatively new mother, Emma is isolated and exhausted.  She has mixed emotions about leaving her job, her marriage is strained and her self-confidence is on the decline.  Nina, who is sophisticated, generous, and effortlessly in control stands in stark contrast.  When the two women strike up an unexpected relationship, something seems a bit off.   We soon learn that there is more to Nina then meets the eye and a dangerous game of cat and mouse develops.  

 

Quotes

“Emma is the engine of this home, the person who propels it forward, keeps everyone fed and clothed and healthy and happy—and yet she’s entirely alone within it, and getting lonelier with every item ticked off her checklist. This is what it comes down to: the flat-out invisible drudgery of family maintenance, the vanishing of personality as everyone else’s accrues.”

 

“Over time, I’ve come to see that so much of a personality boils down to confidence: whether you have it, or not.”

 

“I once heard someone on the radio saying that a bee is never more than forty minutes away from starving to death, and this fact has stayed with me because it seems to have a certain personal resonance. My children are in a perpetual proximity to catastrophe: concussion, dehydration, drowning or sunstroke. Keeping them safe requires constant vigilance.”

 

“I turn my back and look out to sea, the sun so low and molten that my eyes fill with tears, and yet I can feel it: a cooler wind is coming in, the edge of evening approaching. Dusk is gathering along the coast, in the coves and quaysides and marinas, where in an hour or so the long strings of coloured bulbs will twinkle and sway; and then it will pass over us-like a visitation: a plague or a blessing….”  

 

“I found the final plot twist unsatisfying, as plot twists often are: nothing like life, which – it seems to me – turns less on shocks or theatrics than on the small quiet moments, misunderstandings, or disappointments, the things that it’s easy to overlook.”

 

“I’m already someone else, but the person I turn into at these low points is someone I never imagined I could be a few years ago: someone with a hot knot of fury where her heart used to be.”

My Take

There are several things that I really liked about Her.  First of all, it’s a page turner.  Lane infuses the story with a something is not quite right creepiness that makes you want to learn more.  Secondly, I really liked Lane’s writing style.  She is a pleasure to read.  Finally, the set pieces of London and the French countryside are two places that I love and Lane does a great job capturing these locales.  Highly recommended and an especially good vacation book.

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