Saturday, October 11, 2014

September 2014 Reading List

I lost momentum this month. I blame the move to our new house. Tried to do most of the work myself. Boxing, driving, lifting, cleaning, unboxing -- ugh! Still, I did manage to get the following read:

1. Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
2. The Gate Thief by Orson Scott Card
3. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
4. A Calculated Life by Anne Charnock
5. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Initially I got the sequel to Ship Breaker before I realized there was a #1 to the series. I'd read Windup Girl before and loved it but didn't realize this new book was YA fiction. Still, I'm beginning to realize what types of YA fiction I don't like and it wasn't far into Ship Breaker that I knew it was going to be enjoyable even if it was straightforward.  I like Bacigalupi's vision of a near-future where global warming has taken hold and sea levels have risen to wipe out much of the planet's land mass.  The gap between those with money (swanks) and those without is wider than ever before.  And this vision sets up a story between a rich girl and a dirt poor ship breaker boy.  I still have the sequel to read.

Talking of sequels, Gate Thief is the follow up to The Lost Gate that I read a little while ago.  Card takes the all-mythological-gods-are-related idea a few steps further by tying in Satan/Bel into the plot as the uber-bad guy that everyone was trying to stop in the first book.  He does a pretty good job setting this up but I have to admit that by the end of this second installment I wasn't feeling the despair that I should be this point.  Danny is down but not out and capricious Wad isn't likely to just run off without helping.  I like the stories Card creates but this one seemed a little over long in getting to the point.  Still I await what happens in book 3.

What an odd story Metamorphosis is!  We start out in the very first sentence with a matter of fact observation that our protagonist, Gregor, has become an insect overnight.  What happens between him and his family from that time and over the next few months is what Kafka explores.  Gregor is unable to communicate with his family.  Furthermore his appearance to his family fills them with increasing disgust.  The resulting alienation and eventual outcome is Kafka's metaphor for how people change -- growing up as well as dealing with social differences.  Literally the story is just weird but metaphorically it is much food for thought.

A Calculated Life also explores social differences.  A futuristic utopian society has engineered a class of humans with IQs off the charts to help in big business big data number crunching.  The key to having these hyper smart beings stay manageable is to deprive them of memories of growing up and to keep their immediate environment free from distractions.  As Jayna explores society outside this perfect control she asks more and more questions that make her behavior unpredictable.  Her growing self awareness takes her to an exciting conclusion.  Well that's the direction of the story.  In the process Charnock examines the ethics of such alteration and the growing gap between the haves and have nots.  Average.

I have a couple of books on my shelf by Lahiri and this was the first I tackled.  Its actually a collection of short stories about the cultural clash of Americans and Indians living in each place.  Lahiri draws on the pain of missing family and tradition when undertaking this journey to a foreign place.  The differences in culture basically jump out at you especially when children identify more with their new found home than from their parents' roots.  I find short story anthologies jarring with their rapid fire character changes so I look forward to reading a novel by Lahiri and see how such superb character developments unfold.

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