Beach House by Jane Green (2008)

I read this a couple of months ago and could have sworn I wrote up a blurb somewhere, but it's not here, so I just want to record that I read this. An eccentric older woman lives alone in Nantucket, but can't afford to maintain the large house, so she takes on boarders. We get to hear each person's story - what brings them to Nantucket - and all are looking for something. The way they all connected was a bit too much, but it was a nice story, I liked the characters and the writing.

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (2001)

This translation from Turkish is written as one of my favorite genres - art history fiction. Set in Istanbul of 1591, it tells the story of a group of miniaturists or artists that illustrate texts, full of details of the art and thinking behind the art of those days. It is also a mystery, as it starts out with a murder and it is written in a very interesting manner (there must be some name for this style), where each chapter furthers the story in the voice of a different character - well the eight or so main characters, plus the corpse, a dog, a horse, Satan, dervishes, the color red, etc.

Maybe the fault lay with the fact that I was listening to this, and I seem to do better with foreign names when I see then visually than hear them. Maybe that I am totally unfamiliar with all the stories and legends alluded to in the book. Maybe because I couldn't see the art the author was describing. (Don't I complain about this on all the art history novels?) But I wished the book was half as long. I finally checked it out from the library - originally to double check spellings of things, to flip back to something I hadn't understood, but then I couldn't take it anymore and I just read it till it was finished - faster and with the ability to skim when wanting to skip over something quickly and reread something I hadn't understood. The author is well reknown throughout Europe, winner of prizes, translated in many languages... or maybe I just wasn't intellectual enough for this book.

But not all is lost. I did get a sense of this part of the world - what, when, where WAS the Ottoman Empire? I did enjoy the stories of the apprentices coming to work for master minituarists. Coffee plays a role, considered decadent by some. Of course women have a rough time, but they actually did have the right to divorce - especially when their husband doesn't return home for years. It took me a while to catch on that the relationship between masters and apprentices wasn't all OK and that there was a lot of pedaphelia going on. One passage explained that if women walked around uncovered, men would walk around erect. And to take care of urges that couldn't be normally satisfied, they used prostitutes and young boys. Great :(

Interesting how much art development depended on the patron, in this case the Sultan. The next Sultan wasn't interested in art and illustrated texts weren't made in his time. Then there is the controversy between Muslim and "Frankish" (Europpean?) art, where in the latter individuality of the artist is encouraged, as is depiction of actual people, instead of copying old masters without variation.

The story? One of the artists is murdered at the very beginning, and we find out who it is at the very end. There is Master Osman and his studio of artists, where the best are called Butterfly, Olive and Stork. There is Enishte, Shekure's father, who has been commissioned by the Sultan to put together a unique book, and he uses all the best artists from Osman's studio. Then there is Black, who has been in love with Shekure since childhood, but who has been gone many years to war and the world. Shekure's husband has not been back from the war for four years and she has moved with her two boys back in with her father, avoiding her husbands brother. Black would like to marry her. At one point to determine which artist is the murdered, Osman requests to be allowed into the Sultan's treasure room to look at all the old books. This seems a ploy to give us a history and influences on all the books of the times. In the audio format I couldn't absorb much of this. Interesting, but not one I will recommend further.

Divine Justice by David Baldacci (2008)

This continues the story begun in Stone Cold and takes Oliver Stone out of the DC area into a small mountainous town in Virginia, as he has to lay low for killing a couple of people. Ends up uncovering a huge problem in this gentle town. All the Camel Club members participate.

Stone Cold by David Baldacci (2007)

Baldacci has become one of my favorite spy novelists. This continues the story line of the Camel Club after the Collectors (where someone is killed in the Library of Congress). The plot is too complex to even begin to retell, but someone is killing off Oliver Stone's (AKA John Carr's) former colleagues in the super secret Triple 6 division. Then we have Annabelle Conroy running from crazy casino owner Jerry Bagger, whom she conned for killing her mother.

Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley (2008)

Wasn't expecting much, but found a delightful and very funny book about our presidency and Supreme Court. Judge Pepper Cartwright is a judge, but works on TV, like Judge Judy. Since the president can't get his real candidates through, he offers Cartwright up as a nominee for the Supreme Court, and she gets the job.

Paper Towns by John Green (2008)

"Quentin has been in love with Margo for years, so when she includes him in a madcap night of escapades and then disappears, he feels compelled to search for her and to learn why she is so unhappy. This suspenseful and emotionally taut story of self-discovery and compassion is laced with smart-aleck humor and graceful prose." School Library Journal

Siberia: A Novel by Ann Halam (2005)

I was looking for children's books that could help explain the whole Soviets sending people to Siberia process and came upon this interesting book, though not what I needed. This is a science fiction story set in a post ecological disaster world, where most of it is frozen and Siberia refers to a state of mind rather than an exact place. When Rosita and her mother end up in a shack in a dismal frozen village and her mother has to work all day, and she is taught little about truth in school, it sounds too much like the experiences of my people and many others the soviets tortured by sending them off to labor camps and dismal villages in the far reaches of Siberia.

The story itself reminds me more of the Golden Compass, where kids are traveling with a goal, get in all sorts of trouble and are befriended by animals. Rosita, who becomes Sloe in school, ends up being the caretaker of the seeds of all the animals of the planet that have been destroyed by the misuse of the planet. She is sent to an awful boarding school, lives with gypsy types for a while, lands in a fur farm, etc., etc.

Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee (1995)

I picked this book up randomly off the shelf at a friend's house and then asked to take it home to finish it. This is a great glimpse into the life of Korean immigrants in New York City. The narrator is Henry Park, the son of Korean immigrants, married to a white woman, though their marriage seems to breaking apart in the beginning of the story. He has a strange job of infiltrating certain influential people's lives and reporting on them, but not for the government. Henry's current assignment is a Korean politician - John Kwang. He starts working in his campaign office and slowly becomes a valuable aide. The setting is the complex Korean community among all the other ethnic groups that try to coexist in New York. Henry's father owns a few grocery stores, others own laundries, restaurants, etc. The author does a wonderful job of describing the family relations, the work ethic, the relations with various black groups, the differences between generations, etc.

I often don't pay attention to language unless it gets in the way of the story or is childihs, but I did notice author Lee's use of language. E.g. on p. 31 "...his mother and father were just like him, thick-fingered people of the earth, human weeds, hardened and sad and always ready to burst from the drab husk of their lives with great quaking fits of emotion."

Oh, and the title is from the fact that Park has always tried to speak English like a "native speaker."

Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (2008)

I have always like Erdrich's tales, often about Ojibwe people. This was a complex tale, narrated by various voices (literally in the audio version), but interwoven into an intriguing story of North Dakota. I will need to get my hands on a physical version of the book to be able to follow all those story threads. The story starts out in Evalina's voice, who retells her grandfather Mooshum's tales, the most critical being the unjust hanging of a group of Indians for the murder of a family. The lives of all those involved and their descendants are deeply intertwined. There was a wonderful story about a violin, and I liked Publisher's Weekly phrase about it: "its backstory is another beautiful piece of the mosaic." Most of the story takes place in an Indian reservation and in Pluto, ND, a fictional place as far as I can tell, but with a funny passage on how it got its name and its fate at the end of the book. Though it tells of the intermingling of Indian and white lives, it touches a lot of themes in all of our lives. I think I liked this enough to pass it on to friends.

New Moon by Stephanie Meyer (2006)

I don't know how she does it, but again I feel like Stephanie Meyer has woven a unique tale. I know she has been compared to J.K. Rowling, but she hasn't quite created such an elaborate alternate world, as her world is still grounded in today's reality and everyone is trying hard to keep the magical and mystical aspects away from the regular humans. Bella again is thei very believable teenager, who is not only involved with vampires, but their archenemies the warewolves. This time the tale takes us to Italy, where we meet an old vampire family. All very fascinating.