The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Read for: Canadian Books Challenge and What’s in a Name Challenge
In Sarajevo a cellist is sitting at a window watching his friends and neighours in line for bread when they are all killed by a mortar. He decides to go out into the streets every day at the same time for 22 days to play and Adagio for each person killed in the attack. The novel tells the story of three people living in Sarajevo during the siege in the 1990′s. Each of them is affected by the cellist and his actions. I actually found that although the book was named after him, the cellist wasn’t actually the focus of the book. It was more about living and surviving in the city during the siege.
It was interesting (that’s not quite the right term but it’s the best I’ve got right now) to read about living in Sarajevo at the time. In the past few months I’ve also read Left to Tell about the Rwandan genocide and A Thousand Splendid Suns about the Taliban in Afghanistan (and last year The Book of Negroes about slavery). I’ve known that these kind of things were happening in the world but reading about them inspires me to find out more about what really happened and why and because they are so much more modern than books I’ve read about WWII or other conflicts they hit so much closer to home. I am consistently amazed at the incredible cruelty that human beings have the ability to inflict on each other. It’s really disgusting.
I think it’s really important to read books like this and feel that disgust and anger about the atrocities that occurred. We need to remember so we can try to prevent these kinds of things from happening in the future. A common theme in these books is the people who never thought it could happen to them. That really hits close to home because that’s what I’m constantly thinking as a I read these novels. “That could never happen in Canada.” But who knows, maybe it could?
Anyway, back to the book! I thought it was well written but sometimes I felt it was a little contrived. It just didn’t feel completely sincere to me at times. Possibly that’s because it’s impossible to write a book about something you don’t know. It sounds like Galloway did all the research he could but I just don’t think it’s possible to really understand what it’s like to go through something like this unless you’ve actually experienced it. (Not that you’d ever WANT to!)
The thing that’s cool about this book is that there really was a Cellist of Sarajevo. The details aren’t exactly the same but there was a man, Vedran Smailovic, who played Albinon’s Adagio during the siege. Apparently Smailovic wasn’t too pleased about the book though!
A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle
The third book in L’Engle’s Time Quartet. I remember loving these books as a child. I didn’t like this one as much as the first two this time around. I still enjoyed it but I still like A Wrinkle in Time the best.
This book has skipped a lot of time since the last one. Meg is now pregnant with her first child and Charles Wallace is 15. As they are all enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, Mr. Murry receives a phone call from the president informing him that a South American dictator plans on starting a nuclear war the next day. The Murry family spends the rest of their evening worrying about the end of the world as they know it. After they all go to bed, Charles Wallace and Meg (through kything – a kind of mind to mind communication. She just stays in her warm bed with the dog the whole time.) travel through time making small changes that they hope will change the future and prevent the nuclear war.
Each of the times they visit are almost like short stories and I’m still not sure how I felt about this. The characters in each time were all descendants and ancestors of each other and their names were the same or similar in each story. Also, they didn’t appear in chronological order and I have to admit I found it a little hard to keep everybody straight.
Even though time travel is a huge part of this novel, I found it to be less science fiction-y (is that a word? It is now!!) than the previous two which is something that I loved about them. I also found the good vs. evil theme to be more subtle in this one (still it’s not that subtle) and somehow I liked the more obvious approach in the first two. And lastly, it wasn’t really about the Murry’s because Charles Wallace actually goes “Within” (becomes a part of the individual) the other characters in the story. And I like the Murry’s. I don’t typically choose character driven stories over plot driven ones but in this case, I’ve fallen for this family and I wanted to read more about them.
After having said all that, it probably sounds like I didn’t like the book at all but actually I did. In fact, as a childhood favourite I think it stands up pretty good to the adult reading. It’s just in the comparison to the other books in the series that it doesn’t do so well (for me)! I can’t wait until I can read these books to my seven year old. We started reading A Wrinkle in Time about a year ago and it was a little bit over his head but I think that he might be getting there. I’m almost afraid to read him some of my childhood favourites because I’m worried he won’t love them as much as I did!
She-Rain: A Story of Hope by Michael Cogdill
I’m not really sure what to say about this book. I gave it 100 pages but I just couldn’t finish. Perhaps it’s just timing but I could not get into this book. It was really just too wordy. Every time I’d start to get pulled into the story, like something was actually happening, I’d find myself bogged down again by all those words!
It really is well written though. I’m sure at a different time in my life I could sit down and enjoy what this book has to offer but right now I only get short moments to read and I think this is a book that is better read if you have an hour or two at a time to devote to it. I’m also operating on small amounts of sleep which makes it hard to concentrate on anything that’s even slightly complicated! So, I’ll put this one back on the shelf and perhaps come back to it in a few years when I’m done with small children demanding every other second of my attention.
Still Alice by Lisa Genova
Read for: Book Club
I wasn’t sure about this book when I first found out we were going to be reading it for book club – I wondered why I’d be interested in reading about Alzheimer’s. But I really enjoyed it.
Alice is a super smart, famous Harvard professor of linguistics when at 50 she is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The book is really just about her struggle with her declining memory. It shows a little bit about her family’s struggle as well but what I liked most about the book was that is was told from Alice’s point of view. It was really interesting to see inside her mind and hear her thoughts as the disease progressed.
I’ve never had any experience with Alzheimer’s. My family has a strong cancer history but I’ve never had any family member with Alzheimer’s. It was quite an eye-opener for me to read this book and really understand how frustrating and depressing this disease would be to have or watch a family member struggle with. In the book, right after her diagnosis, Alice states that she would rather have cancer than Alzheimer’s. I had actually thought that myself before she even said that. The thing about Alzheimer’s is that there is no fighting it…and there aren’t really any amazing treatments either. The other thing that would be tough is that if you have the particular gene that Alice has, you have a 100% chance of getting the disease. The gene that is inherent in my family only carries an 80% chance of developing the disease (which isn’t great statistically but I’ll take it over 100%!).
At first I had a couple of complaints but I think I’ve resolved them. First, the book became increasingly choppy and less detailed toward the end and it seemed almost like Genova had just gotten bored and just wanted to get it over with, but then I realized that because the story was told from Alice’s point of view, it totally made sense. Of course things would be more choppy and less detailed because her life probably seemed like a series of small moments – she was basically living entirely in the present with really hardly any memories of the past. The second complaint I had is that is seemed like there was a lot of technical stuff. Normally, I don’t think this would have bothered me but I was trying to read the book quickly (I forgot about book club and didn’t start reading the book until the morning of – oops!) and I just didn’t need all that extra. But it wasn’t overly complicated or in depth so I don’t think it would bother most people.
The other thing about reading this book is that it’s made me oversensitive to lapses in my own memory. I’ve been very sleep deprived lately so there are a lot of gaps in my memory and after reading this book I started to realize just how many things I was forgetting but I also noticed where the strengths are in my mind. I’m really good at remembering dates and appointments (I have a calendar but hardly ever look at it) but I’m terrible with names (which as a teacher is a terrible thing!) and my vocabulary is definitely suffering lately. It also reminded me of a migraine I had once. I get regular migraines with no memory loss but once I had one and I couldn’t remember people’s names, including my cousin, a colleague, Tylenol and my own son! It was really scary not being able to remember my own son’s name, I can’t imagine going through that on a regular basis.
Overall it was a great book – I learned a lot. The book club discussion was great. There was a lot to talk about. There are several people in my club who have family members with Alzheimer’s and they all thought it was very realistic. I can’t wait to read her next book, Left Neglected, about a woman who suffers a brain injury and no longer perceives information coming from the left.
NutureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Read for: This review from Dreadlock Girl
Wow! I loved this book and I think everyone who has kids or works with kids or ever plans on having kids should read it. So basically this book is about child studies with a twist. They’ve found a bunch of research that actually turns what we are used to thinking about kids completely upside down. They’ve examined studies with results that are quite often exactly the opposite of what was expected and then analyzed those results and follow-up studies to determine why exactly they were so surprising. The different topics covered are intelligence and how it is related to praise and amount of sleep, race, lying, sibling relationships, teen rebellion, self control and language development. Remember a while back when all those Baby Einstein videos were recalled? One of the chapters explains why that happened and why those DVDs have been associated with smaller vocabularies in young children.
I was amazed at the insights into children and the way they learn and develop and I can’t wait to try some of them out on my own children. I found this book to be informative but also really interesting. With all the information they’ve crammed in there, it could have easily become tedious and boring but it wasn’t at all. I also think it was really well researched. I can’t say for sure not being an expert in these fields but everything they said made a lot of sense to me and there is nearly 100 pages of notes and references at the back of the book. I’d love to read more about this kind of children’s research!
Generation A by Douglas Coupland
Read for: Canadian Books Challenge
It is in the future (the near future according to the book jacket) and the bees have all disappeared. Then randomly (or not as it turns out) five people across the globe are stung. Each of them are then brought into special isolation rooms to be studied to find out why they were stung and how this information could be used to bring back the bees. I found this part of the book interesting but then it took an odd turn. After the stingees are sent back to their normal lives, they are again gathered up, and this time brought together on a remote island and told to tell stories to each other. Then there are a bunch of their short stories in the book (which I’m sure had some deep meaning to the story but it wasn’t readily apparent and I just didn’t feel like thinking that hard to figure it out). Then after all that weirdness, there’s some zombie references and then you find out why the bees disappeared and how the scientists plan on getting them back.
So, how did I feel about this book? I’m still not sure. It’s taken me a while to get to this review because I’m still deciding what I think. I did enjoy the first half and I was satisfied with the ending, but the middle part was strange. And I can’t decide if the beginning and the ending make up for the strangness of the middle. you know?
As always with Coupland, though, there were definitely parts that made me laugh out loud and many of his characters were pretty witty which made for enjoyable reading even in the weird parts. I think overall it was a decent book and it wasn’t too long or deep so I can see past the middle part (which wasn’t bad – just different and isn’t that just typical Coupland?)
Note: I’m labelling this as dystopian fiction because it kind of has that feel, but it’s not typical dystopian either.
