October 2014 Reading List

A slow month, book-wise.  Where does time go sometimes?  Well, I did get started on a couple of substantially longer novels which should be in next month's list once I finish them.  Here's October's:

• Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer
• The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
• Where She Went by Gayle Forman

I found Soffer's book enjoyable even if a little predictable.  For a story that revolves around a regional Iraqi recipe and cooking, I found the frequent use of food-related metaphors very clever.  The characters were well developed and had all endured their own tragedies.  However, the unfolding of how their lives were linked seemed to reveal too much too soon such that I couldn't believe the outcome was going to be where the story was headed.  But like I said, I still enjoyed it a great deal.

As I mentioned last month regarding Ship Breaker, I'd purchased Drowned Cities before realizing it was a sequel.  I need not have worried.  The only aspects of this story that were linked to the first novel were the character Tool and the post-Global-Warming future that Bacigalupi has imagined.  This novel is about war and the impact it has on this new paradigm -- especially on children and how they're used in conflicts.  The graphic nature of the narrative is all too real with our own times.  Bacigalupi is using the story to point back at ourselves and pitching the novel at a YA audience to hopefully effect change in the next generation's attitude towards the senseless loss of life we see today.  Although the story is easily accessible to a YA reader, they'd better have a strong stomach.

I had hoped to read War and Peace this year.  It now seems unlikely to happen.  So I gave myself the concession of reading Ivan Ilyich, as I had not heard of this novella by Tolstoy before.  Tolstoy begins at the end as Ivan Ilyich's contemporaries evaluate the man and then quickly moves into the life of the man as he moves forward to his end.  What struck me was Tolstoy's skill in describing Ivan Ilyich's suffering.  While Tolstoy does not mention cancer, it certainly seems as if that is the terminal illness involved.  What also took me by surprise is considering what it must've been like to have such an illness in those times where doctors could not peer inside a patient's body.  Instead we get a diagnosis like a "dislodged kidney" -- whoa.  A good if brief read.

My wife and I had another long road trip this month up to Northern California.  My wife wanted to learn what happened to Mia after she awoke from her coma in If I Stay.  So we got the audiobook version of Where She Went.  The beginning of the story is surprising given where Mia and Adam are at but once this is understood the rest of the plot is expected (hoped for?).  Given that expectation there is no doubt that Forman is a captivating writer and keeps the frustration level down while allowing the story to unfold.  Not totally my cup of tea but my wife was satisfied with the outcome.