Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

Check this book out at the library to read at least the first chapter. Min Jin Lee does an amazing job of capturing the family dynamics while introducing the four members of the Han family. This chapter is told from four points of view. Casey Han is the central character. She is living at home after recently graduating from Princeton. Her younger sister, Tina, is on break from MIT. It would appear to be every parent’s dream to have two such bright and successful daughters. Leah and Joseph, the parents, married, had Casey and Tina right away, and then immigrated to the United States. They manage a dry cleaning business. The author pulls the reader in and it becomes obvious that this family dinner is heading in a troublesome, but not unanticipated, direction. It is clear that each family member has a role to play and knows what is coming.

The story continues following Casey as she struggles with what to do in her life after college. Her conflicts with her boyfriends, her interactions with a businesswoman who has repeatedly helped her, her financial issues, and her continuing struggles with her family are the backdrop to her main struggle with choosing a career and getting along in the larger world. Here she reacts to a kindness from her boyfriend’s mother. “Casey swallowed, unable to speak. Her parents had never said anything like that in her entire life. Korean people like her mother and father didn’t talk about love, about feelings-at least this was how Casey and Tina had explained it to themselves for not getting these words they wanted to hear.” (pg 75) She spends a great deal of time thinking about her clothing. This is not something that I am into, but I could appreciate her view. “Through clothing, Casey was able to appear casual, urbane, poor, rich, bohemian, proletariat. Now and again, she wondered what it’d be like to never want to look like anything at all – instead, to come as you are.” (pg 219)

The story is told from multiple points of view. At times I wished the story would focus more on Casey rather than, for example, the thoughts of her mother’s choir instructor. It is a long story and does not keep the intenseness of the first chapter the whole way through. As I was nearing the end of the book, I started to wonder how everything was going to be wrapped up. I realized that like real life, the story of Casey Han, her friends and family, her co-workers and acquaintances, was not going to end neatly. And that was okay. It is a good read, especially if you are in the mood for a longer book.

The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas

The End of Mr. Y begins with a very vivid and accurate depiction of a poor graduate student. Ariel Manto is obsessed with many things, including theoretical physics and obscure writers. At a conference she meets a professor who shares her fixation on the author Lumas and decides to undertake graduate studies with him. At the start of this book Burlem, the professor, has been gone for months; he’s vanished. By a series of unexpected happenings, including a building collapsing into a tunnel, Ariel stumbles upon the last book by Lumas, which has the same title: The End of Mr. Y. The book is very rare with only one known copy. It is also rumored to be cursed.

Following the book’s instructions Ariel ventures into homeopathic remedies that lead her into the troposphere. The troposphere is Lumas’s term for the world of the mind. It is possible to move from mind to mind in this space. The book becomes a thriller with former agents from America trying to retrieve the book so they can make more of the remedy to enter the troposphere. The agents are after Ariel physically and in her mind. They employ KIDS to try and hurt her mind. She is saved by a mouse god named Apollo Smintheus. Ariel is helped in her endeavors to escape the agents by Adam, a former priest.

This book has some really great descriptive writing in it. The intertwining descriptions of quantum theory and religion are interesting to read, especially the multi verse versus the godverse theory. This is rare to find in a novel. I personally found the story much more interesting when it stayed in the physical world than in the troposphere. Ariel’s interactions with her lover, Patrick, are complex and seem to not correlate with the actions of an intelligent person. She keeps referring to what’s happening as only happening to her body so it doesn’t really matter. She would prefer to live a life in books, “Real life is physical. Give me books instead: Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of the book; I’d give anything for that.” (pg 117)

I’d highly recommend reading this book if you’re interested in science or religion or simply in how other people’s minds might work. As I mentioned earlier, I was not thrilled with the troposphere part of the book. I also was disturbed at the idea of the KIDS being autistic kids who were sent out to perform missions. However, the descriptions in some parts were intensely real with Ariel being able to feel the pain of the mind she was inhabiting. Here she is in her housemate’s mind, “I was facing the door; I’d placed myself there like a little welcome mat ( ) waiting for him to wipe his feet on me. So he sat there sipping his coffee, looking beyond me to the wall, covered in postcards from Paris, and I just watched people leave like bacteria looking for a new host to infect.” (pg 176)

Free Fire by C. J. Box

Somehow I had never heard of this author until Free Fire was published. It is the seventh in a series of mysteries staring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett. The game warden’s wife, Marybeth, and their two children are also well-developed characters. The language is not eloquent, but to the point as in this example.
“But in a job where nearly every man he encountered in the field was armed as well as pumped up with testosterone- and calling backup was rarely an option- playing dumb was a survival skill. And Joe, much to Marybeth’s chagrin, could play dumb extremely well.” (pg 76)
It is very much a departure from many mysteries in that the action primarily takes place far removed from where most people live.

This particular mystery is set in Yellowstone National Park. Joe has been fired from his normal position of game warden in the Saddlestring area, but has managed to become known to the new governor as someone who stirs things up. The governor hires him to investigate a mass shooting in an area of Yellowstone, which is now being called the Zone of Death as the shooter is released on a technicality. The park is under federal control so the governor sends in Joe unofficially.

The plot is convoluted and involves the unique setting of Yellowstone with its geysers, paint pots, and wildlife in all forms. The book can be read on its own without reading any of the preceding mysteries. However, there were enough hints to prior activity that I felt compelled to read the rest of the books in the series. Also, I wonder what will happen to the Pickett family in the future and look forward to the next in the series. I liked these mysteries so much that I'm adding Box to my list of top ten writers of mystery series.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Imagine a world where crazed fans battle over whether Shakespeare really wrote those plays or where the removal of a minor character from a classic book is a national crisis. Thursday Next is a Literary Tech in England in 1985 and her job is to protect books. She faces some complex personal issues such as whether she should forgive the man she loves, Landen Parke-Laine, for telling the truth about her brother during the war. This is the ongoing war, in its 131st year, between England and Russia over the Crimean Peninsula. She faces some incredible issues in hunting down Acheron Hades and battling the Goliath Corporation. Here she has told Landen that she is too busy to go out with him.
“I could see he didn’t believe me. I couldn’t really tell him I was on the trail of a master criminal who could steal thoughts and project images at will; who was invisible on film and could murder and laugh as he did so.” (pg 118)

This book is a crazy mix of fiction, science fiction, action thriller, and a whole new genre where books are at the center of life. The science fiction part is well done and interesting. For example, Thursday’s uncle invents a car that can change color and even become invisible using liquid crystal technology. This is just one of many of his inventions and another, the Prose Portal, becomes important to Acheron as well as the Goliath Corporation, and potentially devastating to literature everywhere. The Eyre mentioned in the title refers to the book Jane Eyre. The characters in Jane Eyre become endangered characters in this book.

This is the first in a series of books with Thursday Next as the protagonist. I enjoyed reading this book with its many convolutions and look forward to the second in the series, Lost in a Good Book. I wonder if the author can continue to invent such outrageous scenarios. I did think that some of the characters in this book spoke in clichés, especially Acheron, and whether this was on purpose by the author or not, it did not help develop them as characters. The action also slowed down dramatically at the end of the book.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

I picked up The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America for a couple reasons. First, it was recommended in a writing group I belong to as a book that everyone in a diverse book group liked. Next, a book group I am in picked it as one of the books to read this fall. Third, from what I heard it was a murder mystery set at a World’s Fair. I like mysteries, in general, and decided to read it earlier rather than later.

I was quite surprised when I found the book at the library in the non-fiction section. I had not realized it was a true story. I assumed I would be interested in the mystery part and not really in the World’s Fair part when I realized that was going to be mainly about building the fair. It turned out to be quite the opposite.

I never would have picked up a non-fiction book about the World’s Fair in 1893. Adding in the secondary story did prick my interest enough to start reading the book. I’m glad I did as it described a part of American history and a profession (architecture) that I had very little prior knowledge or even interest in. The impact of the Columbian Exposition of 1893 was enormous. Products introduced there or innovated during the building of the fair included spray paint, Cracker Jack, the Ferris Wheel (an amazing story on its own), and the zipper among many others. The pledge of allegiance was even written for the dedication day.

The inspiring story of building the fair is alternated with chapters about a serial killer. There is no mystery as Erik Larson makes it clear that Holmes is a killer from the beginning. Holmes (an alias) is in Chicago at the time of the fair and builds a hotel ostensibly to house visitors to the fair. No murders by Holmes ever happen at the fair, so I do not think the book is aptly titled. Holmes and the fair never really intersect except when he takes a current wife and her sister there. I do not like reading about true crime. It has none of the uplifting spirit or resolution of fictional mysteries where the perpetrator is usually caught before too many evil things happen. I felt that the book alternated between a soaring, grandiose story and a sordid, tragic one.

I would recommend reading this book and skipping the chapters on Holmes, unless you like the true crime genre.