Best Books Read in 2008

I started thinking about the books I’ve read over the past year and realized this is a pretty tough decision. For non-fiction books Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Renin was certainly the most inspiring. I laughed the most reading the short stories by Ryan Boudinot collected in The Littlest Hitler. Of course, I may be biased as he writes about my hometown and a summer job I once had. My latest favorite mystery author is Ian Rankin, although Kate Atkinson comes in a close second.

I did not read a book this year that would knock anything off my top ten favorite fiction books. The book that came the closest was The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. Any suggestions for good fiction books out there that I missed?

Bat 6 by Virginia Euwer Wolff

The Deschutes County Public Library is doing something a little different for this year’s A Novel Idea. For the past five years one book has been selected with the idea being that the entire county will read it, and the book will hopefully generate community discussion and interest. For past choices, see this blog post about last year’s choice, The World to Come. However, this year three books, a memoir, a young adult book, and a children’s book, were chosen.

I started with the young adult novel, Bat 6, simply because it was readily available. This book initially did not sound that interesting to me as the story revolves around a sixth grade girls’ softball game. It is told in turn by both members of rival teams as they gear up for their annual game. This game is unique as it has been played since 1899 and this year, 1949, is the 50th anniversary of that first game. However, with a Japanese-American girl home from the internment camps on one team and a girl whose father was killed during the Pearl Harbor bombings on the other, the game does not go as anticipated.

I found it an interesting book, and, of course, it reminded me of one of my favorite books, Snow Falling on Cedars. I would be curious to know how well this plays to the intended audience. Will sixth graders appreciate the book? The consequences of a simple softball game are pretty serious and extend beyond the team players to the people in the towns involved. A quote from the author on the back page of the book: “Our daily news is filled with children doing horrifying thing, and I’m fascinated by the question: What is it we notice about these kids but decide not to acknowledge?”

Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith

In general, I am not a fan of poems. I don’t usually get them, they’re often difficult to read, and can be too short to get into or long and rambling. However, I’d seen multiple good recommendations for Patricia Smith’s poems. She was also at The Nature of Words last month. I wish now that I would have gone to see her reading.

The poems in Blood Dazzler are set in New Orleans as Katrina approaches and devastates the city. The poems are in chronological order often with a report from the National Hurricane Center about the status of the storm or other factual information. For me this really helped to tie the poems together. The images of the storm coming are intense. From “She Sees What It Sees”:

And the levees crackled,
And baptism rushed through the ward,
Blasting the boasts from storefronts,
Sweeping away the rooted, the untethered,
Bending doors, withering the strength of stoops.

I began to wonder about Patricia Smith. Was she in New Orleans during Katrina? Her book jacket says she lives in New York. How could someone who wasn’t there capture these images? Her website didn’t really enlighten me: http://wordwoman.ws/index.html. Regardless, these are amazing poems in the way they convey the rage, terror, and helplessness surely experienced during Katrina.

From a poem titled “34”, referring to the nursing home where 34 bodies were found:

They left us. Me. Him. Our crinkled hands.
They left our hard histories, our gone children and storytells.
They left the porch creaking.
They left us to our God,
But our God was mesmerized elsewhere,
Watching His rain.

I started reading these poems the same day our newspaper had an article titled “Long after Katrina, Children Still Suffer” by Shaila Dewan. A telling sentence: “After more than three years of nomadic uncertainty, many of the children of Hurricane Katrina are behind in school, acting out and suffering from extraordinarily high rates of illness and mental health problems.” It is hard to believe that kids have lost years of schooling because of Katrina. What is going in the state or federal government that has allowed this to happen?

if they are roses by Linda Falcone

Linda Falcone writes a column for The Florentine, an English language newspaper in Florence, and this book is a compilation of her columns. It took me a little while to get into it as each column is only 2-4 pages long. I generally prefer novels to short stories and these columns are ultra-short snapshots of life. if they are roses is subtitled the italian way with words, and Falcone uses an Italian phrase in each column to illustrate a cultural trait or difference. The topics of her columns range from cooking pasta to American movies, money, fashion, food, and soccer along with others.

Here she addresses money: “It could just be me, but I’m convinced you can tell a lot about a culture by the way it talks about money. After all, money may not make the world go round, but it certainly coaxes people to turn corners quickly. Find out how a country talks about cash and you will discover its system of values.”

And here is an example of a commonly used phrase that a non-native speaker may have a hard time deciphering.
“Magari is versatile to the point of being reversible, and it can cover the entire spectrum of future possibility. For highly probable scenarios like ‘Do you want to come over for dinner tonight?’, magari is ‘Yes, I’d love to.’ For daring propositions that have ‘impossible’ written on them in red, magari means ‘nice idea-but no way.’
If you plan on living in Italy long, you’d best get used to this ambiguity. The Italian language often leaves room for interpretation, and words sway with the mood as if conversation were a sudden summer breeze.”

This book would be an excellent gift if you know a non-native heading to Italy for an extended time period, or for anyone dreaming of doing that.

Mother on Fire by Sandra Tsing Loh

Have you spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about where your child will go to kindergarten? Sandra Tsing Loh dedicates a year of her life to working out that problem. Reading this book will make you grateful for the choices you have and that you don’t live in LA. Or, at least that is how I felt.

The author’s tumultuous year includes being fired from NPR for saying an obscenity on air as well as trying to get her daughter into various schools. She almost gets her daughter into a private, religious school, but then the school decides her daughter should do another year of preschool. She lucks into a very exclusive school that costs more than $20,000 a year and deals with that stress of deciding whether to do that. And, of course, there is a confusing lottery system to get into magnet schools as well as the public school possibility located three blocks from their house.

This memoir is funny, mainly because the author lets you in her head. Loh’s husband is delegated to be in charge of finding a kindergarten. However, when she finds a preschool flier sitting in the van for an informational meeting that night she springs into action. The informational meeting, pre-registration required, is directly after the Spring Fund-Raising Committee meeting, both of which the same person happens to be directing. Here’s how Loh finagles her way into the meeting:

" 'Hey Joan! I’m just leaving twenty dollars for our two Spring Fund-Raising Jamboree tickets and—Hey is there still room to volunteer on the committee? The fund-raising committee! Love to be on that!'
'YOU want to be on the committee?' Joan’s glazed look turns into one of incredulity.
Feeling a little stung to be found out, here I actually attempt to rewrite—or at least re-interpret—my conspicuously non-committee-volunteering-mother history, all in one mangled run-on sentence. I fabricate something about a big writing deadline I have had, for several years, which all at once I am abruptly clear of, and so of course now will return to my original plan of TOTAL CO-OP PRESCHOOL INVOLVEMENT."

So, Loh, after all the extra volunteering efforts, ends up at the meeting where frantic parents discuss all the drawbacks of the LA public schools. This does not help her peace of mind.

Besides the kindergarten issues, the author has a meltdown while giving what is supposed to be an inspiring talk to Marymount College students. She is the college writer in residence, but the students are surprised to hear that she is not the huge success they imagine.

“ 'Each of the books I’ve published were at some point deemed a failure by some twenty-two-year-old publicist in New York named Jennifer. They were all named Jennifer. All my Jennifers —they’re a bit like my discarded wives. My Jennifers were all graduates of Brown, they deserved so much better than me as an author, they had such beautiful hair, beautiful educations… They’d been groomed to have much bigger successes. But I and my incorrigably midlist work destroyed them.
Somewhere, in some hip bar in Manhattan, are my Jennifers, about thirty-three now, still cutting great figures in the dark, but with hard lines around their mouths. It is my career that put them there.' "

You can imagine how her somewhat bitter comments go over with enthusiastic twenty-year-olds.

Loh has a somewhat manic style with lots of exclamation points and words in all caps. She is not shy about her takes on her friends, her Chinese father, and her husband among others. She adds in crazy hand drawn graphs and timelines. Mother on Fire is subtitled A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting. It is a good, quick read and, since I can’t imagine any search for kindergarten being more dramatic, will make you feel more relaxed about any upcoming school decisions you may have.