Bookish Thoughts

There's a lot of WWII fiction out there. So no matter how much I say I don't want to read any more of it, I always end up with another WWII novel on my shelf waiting to be read. This one was nominated in my book club last year, although we ultimately didn't choose it. Partly because everyone was feeling a bit burnt out on WWII stories. But shortly after that, Book Riot highlighted it as one of the top rated books on Goodreads . So when I saw it at the library book sale a few weeks later, I picked it up almost without thinking. And then I spent almost a year pointedly not reading it. Even though I knew it was going to be good. And it was good. It was completely fantastic. The novel follows two sisters in France during the German occupation. They are polar opposites, and they never really get along. But each ends up working for the resistance in her own way. Despite their antagonism, they end up taking strength from each other to make it through impossible circumstances. ...

I've only read two of Isabel Allende's books, but I've already come to expect a lot from her as an author. Those two books were so good, amazingly structured and filled with fully-realized characters. I loved everyone from the protagonists to the third-string characters. Even the characters I didn't like felt like complete people, which complicated my feelings in wonderful ways. And The Japanese Lover  didn't quite measure up. I think part of it may be that she was working with a different translator. There were glimpses of the lyrical language I'd become accustomed to, but they were few and far between. But it was more than that. This book felt unfinished. It wandered and jumped didn't flow as well as I wanted it to. It tried a bit too hard to be hip to current culture in the modern-day sections (perhaps Allende should stick to historical fiction?). It felt like whole chapters were missing, chapters that would make me care more about these characters and...

This is not a book I'd typically pick up. Having picked it up, it's not the sort of book I'd typically stick with to the end. But a coworker wrote it. She gifted it to me after I read All the Light We Cannot See  and The Book Thief  in quick succession because she assumed I was interested in WWII literature. And it's not that I'm not, but there's only so much you can read about any one topic and about WWII in particular. So going in to this, I was not particularly excited to be reading about a German soldier and his time in an American POW camp. The thing is, the story ended up being pretty interesting. There was a grace and elegance to it that was fighting to get out. But it was fighting hard through rough and stilted language. As a rough draft, it's pretty good. As a published novel, well, this is the problem with self-publishing. The book is in desperate need of an editor. The problem is two-fold. English is not the author's native language. There...

This is my second time through The Book Thief , which was just as poetic and heartbreaking as it was the first time I read it. Leslie's little life is tragic. The fact that it's narrated by Death, who has taken an interest in the young girl, makes the whole thing seem grander or more important than it really is. But that just adds to the tragedy and poetry captured in these pages. I've ended up with quite a few WWII books on my shelf lately. It certainly wasn't by design. I just picked up what looked interesting at a couple of used book sales. It's been interesting and difficult to read about this historic rise of fascism given the current political climate, but it's been cathartic in some ways, too. This book in particular shows all the hidden ways Leslie and her foster parents find to resist the Nazis and brighten their lives in the midst of a war. I also appreciated reading this as a physical book this time around. The last time I read it on my kindle, an...

I was hoping for something a little lighter after All the Light We Cannot See , so I picked up this book about a woman who keeps living her life over and over, trying to get it right. Little did I know that I was diving into another depressing WWII novel, One that proved to be even more frustrating. The frustration comes from the fact that it's not clear how much Ursula remembers from her previous lives, or how much control she really has. Sometimes the changes that allow her to live a little longer are entirely out of her control - a man rescues her from drowning or the power comes back on before she freezes. Other times she seems to be architect of her own destiny, trying over and over to avoid catching influenza until she finally hits upon a solution. As her lives go on, she seems to remember more and that helps her make better decisions. But it can also be frustrating how much she doesn't remember, how little she learns from life to life. She always makes new mistakes, ...

I can't decide whether or not I like this book. It is true that it was beautifully written and amazingly constructed. It bounces between two lives, running nearly parallel to each other before and during World War II. Those lives affect each other in myriad unexpected ways, though they only intersect once, for a few brief hours. Marie-Laure, a blind, French girl, is intelligent and resilient, lending her talents to the resistence after her father is arrested. Werner Pfennig is a Nazi, so enthralled with math and radios that he is willing to do just about anything to pursue them further, including follow orders that he knows he probably shouldn't. Part of my problem with this book is that it asks me to sympathize with Pfennig. And there are times when he is sympathetic. But he's also a coward. His resistance comes too late and is arguably too little. He saves one girl, but it's mostly because he failed to save another one. And this all would have been okay, and I ...

Code Name Verity  is one of those books that I feel like everyone's been talking about for years. But for all that people were gushing about this book online, I managed to avoid hearing anything specific about it for a while. Then a few keywords entered my subconscious: female fighter pilots, female friendships, spies. I knew I had to read it. It's difficult to talk about this book. It deals with spies during WWII, so right off the bat you've got an unreliable narrator. As the details of her situation become more clear, it also becomes clear that something big is coming. But it's impossible to discern what that something is. Suffice it to say that this book was amazing. It deals first and foremost with female friendship, but it also focuses on women's war effort during WWII. There are female pilots and radio operators, interrogators and spies. It's refreshing to get a book that focuses on this side of the war effort, bringing to light things that have been o...

The second half of Art Spiegelman's  Maus , a comic book about his father's experiences was a Polish Jew during WWII and the lasting effect they've had, mostly concerns itself with Aushwitz. All told Spiegelman's father, Vladek, spent just under a year in the prison camp Aushwitz. He worked various jobs, including as a tinsmith and fixing shoes, trying to stay one step ahead of the ovens. Throughout this he was doing his best to bribe guards, both to secure enough food for himself, and to do whatever he could to keep his wife alive. This story is juxtaposed against the present day, where Vladek has become a stingy man with failing health and serious marital problems with his second wife. Art's tumultuous relationship with his father is the real core of this book. He struggles to understand his father and how he came to be the man he is. He worries about portraying him in a negative light, but also wants to stick to the truth as he understands it. This is a reall...

I first read Maus back in high school (or college? I must have been college, because I'd borrowed the books from a friend and ended up having to mail them back to her) and I've been wanting to revisit it ever since. It is, in some ways, yet another holocaust book. But there's enough of a unique perspective here to make it an important addition to that specific genre. This is the story of Art Spiegelman coming to terms with his father's experienceas a Polish Jew during WWII, with the loss of his mother, and with the strained relationship between his father and his father's second wife. The framing of the story portrays a series of interviews between Art and his father, where he struggles to get the story chronologically, while also struggling with how to present the story. He's particularly concerned with the fact that his father embodies the stereotype of miserly Jew, and he doesn't want to give the fire any more fuel. By addressing it head o...

When I was two years old, my dad broke his leg. He shattered his femur while skiing. He was in a cast for over six months while it healed. I don't really remember any of this. There are pictures, of course. But it happened when I was so young that it just became a bare fact. Something that had no real impact on me. When I was 14, we read A Separate Peace for school. My dad was excited about the assignment; it's one of the only times I can remember him being excited about a book. It wasn't until I finished it that I understood why. Finny breaks his leg in exactly the same way my dad did. Well my dad had a skiing accident rather than falling out of a tree, but both of them shattered the bone. Unlike my dad, Finny dies from his injury, during complications in the surgery. After I read the book, my dad told me that the whole time he was lying in prep for surgery he was thinking of Finny, terrified he would meet the same fate. This was one of the first tim...

No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace A Thread of Grace is about Jewish refugees in Northern Italy during World War II. But like Mary Doria Russell's other books, it's about so much more than that. Tapestry is a good word to describe this book. There are a lot of characters, and their stories weave together to paint a picture of the last two years of WWII. The number of characters is a bit overwhelming at the beginning, but Russell is so good at creating distinct people that it doesn't take too long to begin sorting them out. There's also a list at the beginning of the book that outlines the characters, their aliases, and their basic relationships. The list is helpful, though I accidentally spoiled myself for a plot point via one of the descriptive aliases. The book tells the amazingly true story of many Italians' simple refusal to report on their Jewish friends, family, and neighbors. The book is d...

I first read Slaughterhouse Five for an assignment in high school. Afterwards, the only parts that stuck with me were the time travel and the aliens. I was actually confused the first time I saw it referred to as an anti-war book, because I honestly didn't remember there being anything about war in it at all. The fact that I read it as part of a literature on war assignment didn't quite register with me. Most of the other kids read  Catch-22  or  The Things They Carried  or  A Farewell to Arms . My teacher actually recommended that I read  Slaughterhouse Five ; I don't think it was on the approved reading list. So I read it, and I do remember liking it. Some of the philosophical musings about time and free will stuck with me, even if the war bits didn't. The only part of the book that I really remembered was this passage describing Billy's limited perspective of time: The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were lookin...

How do I even being to review The Book Thief ?  I've been reading it at a pace of about two chapters a day with the Mark Reads project.  Mark Oshiro, who runs the blog, reads and reviews books a chapter at a time.  The Book Thief has incredibly short chapters, hence the accelerated reading speed.  He's already read the entire Twilight saga, the Harry Potter series, The Hunger Game s trilogy, and is now finishing up The Book Thief .  Next he starts on His Dark Materials , followed by The Lord of the Rings .  He's also working his way through Infinite Jest , which I gave up on pretty quickly, but may eventually revisit.  Reading these books along with him is a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it. He also runs a sibling site called Mark Watches , in which he does the same thing with episodes of television shows.  Past projects include Firefly and Doctor Who , the current project is Avatar: The Last Airbender , and the announced future projec...