Bigfoot Dreams

Finished January 23
Bigfoot Dreams by Francine Prose

This unusual novel follows Vera, a single mother living in New York City and working at a tabloid called This Week. Vera writes stories about outlandish creatures, weird occurrences and the unbelievable. She makes all the stories up. Her brain is constantly thinking up lurid headlines for everything she observes and lately she has been dreaming about Bigfoot befriending her and letting her see where he lives. One day the paper's photographer gives her a picture he took and Vera makes up a story about the picture, choosing names and ages for the kids portayed, names for the parents, and a profession for the father. And against all odds, the match the family's true identity. so the family is suing the paper, and Vera's job is in jeopardy.
Her daughter Rosie is at the age where she is starting to be interested in boys, as well as starting to not share everything with her mother.Vera's husband Lowell is a wanderer and dreamer and although they are still married and care about each other and Rosie, he lives out in California, so it is a surprise when he turns up one day. He seems to slide effortlessly back into their lives, but it is only temporary.
The issue with the story makes Vera look harder at her life, her losses and her gains, her skills, and she takes advantage of a connection to the American Cryptobiological Society to explore her Bigfoot Dreams more closely, and come to terms with her reality.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

Finished January 22
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover Bartlett, read by Judith Brackley

This book I picked to fulfill one of my reading challenges for the year, a book on True Crime. Of course, I had to pick one with a literary slant!
Bartlett is a freelance journalist who grew interested in the world of book theft when a friend was left a book as part of an estate that came with an instruction to return it to its rightful owner. The task wasn't as easy as she might have thought, and it led her to wonder who stole books and why. This led her to the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (the ABAA) and bookseller Ken Sanders, who took his job as security officer for the organization seriously, setting up online alerting processes and other tools to help quickly disseminate information about stolen books and people suspected of such crimes. Sanders told her about the different types of thieves: those who steal for profit, those who steal for a specific purpose, and those who steal for love.
This led her to John Charles Gilkey, a man who has stolen hundreds of rare books from book sellers across the United States, seemingly for love. Gilkey rarely resells his books, although he doesn't necessarily steal them to read either. He steals them for the image of himself owning rare books of literary merit portrays to him, that of an esteemed gentleman. He is a charming, polite conman and came up with innovative ways to steal the books that he thought "it wasn't fair" that he couldn't afford. His methods and the fact he didn't resell them often are what made him harder to catch.
But Sanders was instrumental in catching him, and when Bartlett approached him in jail, he was willing to talk. However after a while, she began to realize that instead of merely telling the story, she was becoming part of it, and had to consciously take a step back and remove herself from it to complete this book.
Her book explores the reasons people steal, the world of rare books and book collectors, and the temptations within that world.
A very interesting book.

Reading Bingo Challenge

Reading Bingo Challenge (Thanks to Random House)

Came across this challenge from Random House and couldn't resist. 
They have a YA version as well:

so I'll go for it as well.
For both, I will try to get as many as I can.

Drawing Conclusions

Finished January 20
Drawing Conclusions by Donna Leon

This novel is a quieter story than many of hers, with less food. (And usually the lovely food is one of the draws for this series.) Here, a young woman, Signora Giusti has returned home early from a trip to meet her fiance's family and certain things don't seem right about her downstairs neighbour, Signora Altavilla, not responding to her calls or knocks. She goes to use her key to see what is wrong and finds the door unlocked and, after going into the living area, finds her neighbour dead on the floor, with blood near her head.
It is the blood that decides her to call the police, and thus Guido Brunetti enters the story.
The autopsy shows that the woman died of a heart attack, and yet Brunetti can't help but feel that isn't the whole story. There are the marks on her neck, and the nails on the wall.
As Brunetti progresses in the case he gets the helpful assistance of Signorina Elettra in gathering information and his search leads to an organization that helps victims of domestic abuse, and a luxury nursing home.
His case makes him miss more than one lunch at home, but he finds the consolation of his loving wife and some champagne before dinner make up for it.

Reconstructing Amelia

Finished January 18
Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight

This is an amazing novel about a subject that is very "in the news" right now, bullying and its effect on teens. Kate is a lawyer and single mother. Her daughter Amelia is 15 and goes to a private school with a good reputation. The two have a pretty good relationship despite Kate's long hours and the time they spend together is very much quality time.
But one day Kate gets a call from the school that Amelia is suspended and she rushes to the school. But by the time she gets there, Amelia is dead, seemingly having jumped from the school's roof. Following her initial grief, Kate struggles for answers and despite the police's initial investigation, doesn't believe Amelia killed herself. It is an anonymous text message that says simply "Amelia didn't jump" that triggers her to step back from her grief and look for what was going on in Amelia's life. Tracking her email, text messages, Facebook interactions and other clues, Kate finds that she missed a lot of what was going on in Amelia's life recently.
This book really shows how the online world and the anonymity that it can create allows bullying in a different form than what existed when I was young. This book is sad and shocking, but reads like something that actually happened. By the end, I was weeping.

A Jew Must Die

Finished January 17
A Jew Must Die by Jacques Chessex, translated by W. Donald Wilson

This short novel is based on a true story. On April 16, 1942 a group of five men led by Fernand Ischi lures a man to a stable in the Swiss village of Payerne, kill him and dismember his body.
Ischi is a man unhappy with his own life, who has eagerly come under the influence of a pro-Nazi clergyman and is eager to prove himself and send a message to the Jews in his community of what he believes will soon come to them all. He has found eager assistants in two brothers who have lost their own-mismanaged farm and thus resent those farmers and the men who buy their product, the brothers' farmhand who follows them blindly, and the apprentice mechanic from Ischi's family's garage. Ischi's character is shown to us also in his relationship with women, as despite having a wife and two children, he engages in affairs, including a sadistic one with a very young woman. We see him for what he is: a man hungry for power and revenge, with a deluded sense of his own worth and entitlements.
The author of this book grew up in Payerne and was eight years old at the time this murder took place. He went to school with Ischi's daughter, the son of the local policeman, and the son of the judge that presided over the murder trials. Part of this story is his own reaction to the events and why he felt compelled to share them in this book, decades later. Chessex is one of Switzerland's most famous writers and has won both the Prix Goncourt and the French Literature Grand Prix of the Académie Française.

Sense and Sensibility

Finished January 16
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, read by Wanda McCaddon

This is a classic that somehow I'd never got around to reading. I picked this copy up at a library conference a couple of years back and really enjoyed the MP3, having the whole book on one CD made it easy.
And it even includes an ebook version of the book, useful for going back and checking on stuff (like when you are writing reviews ;-) ).
The novel follows the Dashwoods, and begins as old Mr. Dashwood passes away. The old man had never married, and had recently had his nephew Henry Dashwood's family living with him, as Henry was who was the intended heir. They were not only living with him in hopes but also through genuine goodwill and the relationship was happy on all sides. But the old man had more recently taken a shine to Henry's son by his first marriage, and his young grandson by him, and surprised all by leaving the estate to them, giving Henry only a life interest. Unfortunately for Henry's more recently family he didn't outlive his old uncle by many months, leaving his second wife and his daughters with little financial cushion to keep them up. The son, John Dashwood soon arrived with his family and showed little of the goodwill and generosity of his father, giving little real support to his stepmother and half-sisters, although perhaps he may have done more but for his wife's attitude towards sharing, which was to not do it unless compelled.
Luckily for Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters, a cousin some distance away offered them a cottage on his estate for a modest rent and once the removed themselves there, involved them to a large degree in his social life.
The book's title is a play on the two aspects of character, sense and sensibility, and which of the characters has what amount of each quality. The majority of the novel follows the two eldest daughters Elinor and Marianne. Elinor has both qualities with sense ruling her reactions to situations and causing her to show less of the other quality, sensibility, to others at first glance. Elinor is a young woman who watches the people around her and takes a cautionary approach to situations, who is always polite and reasonable and knows that she must on occasion be polite even when she doesn't feel that way. Marianne, while not without sense, shows more of her sensibility, with passion leading her in all her reactions. She is quick to state her impressions and reacts emotionally and often without thinking what others must infer from those actions.
The book illustrates class, honor, and the interaction of characters with many different motivations. I really enjoyed it.

The Tulip Eaters

Finished January 15
The Tulip Eaters by Antoinette van Heugten

This novel begins with a violent scene in Houston, Texas, but we soon move to The Netherlands and find that the story has its origins there as well as its conclusion.
Nora is a pediatric intern who comes home from work one day to find her mother shot dead, a man she has never seen before dead as well, and her infant daughter missing. She can't think of who would do such a thing and her heart is torn between the loss of her mother and the worry over her daughter's welfare and whereabouts. The police find the man's hotel room with a false Dutch passport as his identification. Nora knows that her parents came from Holland after the war, but doesn't know of any current contacts of her mother from the country or what someone could want with her mother or daughter.
As Nora goes through her mother's possessions she finds old identification information for both her parents that seem to indicate they were on the side of the Nazis during the war and that her father may have murdered a Jew. Unable to sit and wait, Nora uses her own contacts in the Netherlands to access war history documents to try to find out if someone related to the murdered man may have enacted their revenge in this manner.
The story here is great, but the writing less so. Melodramatic in spots with quick changes in emotion and forced actions by the characters, this book could have been so much better with some helpful editing.

Fat Girl

Finished January 15
Fat Girl by Judith Moore

This memoir is not a happy one. As this author says, it is her story and her family's story. It is about the food they ate. It is about their unhappiness. As she says, "This is a story about an unhappy fat girl who became a fat woman who was happy and unhappy." She found her story difficult to tell, and at times it made her ill to write about it, but it also gave her relief to get the experiences out. She doesn't want people to feel sorry for her, as she doesn't feel sorry for herself. But I have to say that at times I felt sorry for the child she was. Children have less control over their experiences than adults, and her child self tried certain strategies, but always seemed an observer of her own life, wishing and dreaming of different lives but never able to understand what she could do to get there.
She says that while her childhood lacked love for the most part (her uncle seems to have provided the only consistent positive adult presence in her life, with his many friends, pet names for her, and general kindness. She did have the occasional other adult or child in her life who was kind, a neighbour who took an interest or the girl Glenda in her hometown who made sure she had people to sit with at lunch and got introduced to others. But she seems to be unable to know what to do with this kindness and it doesn't seem to have made a difference in her situation.
She calls herself a solitary and I think she is right. She seems the type of person who doesn't make connections either through her own actions or taking advantage of others' actions toward her. I think it is that that makes me feel sorry, sorry for a life without true connection to others.

Touch

Finished January 13
Touch by Adania Shibli, translated by Paula Haydar

This novella is a very unusual book. The main character is only identified as "the girl" and all the other characters have equally general descriptors. As one slowly gathers, the girl is the ninth and youngest daughter of a Palestinian family. Her story ranges from everyday occurrences, such as interacting with her siblings and spending time with her family and the neighbour she begins a relationship with, to experiences more specific to her situation such as watching her family mourn her brother and participating in a funeral procession. She seems both part of things and an observer. In one scene, she is ostracized by her sisters, left on her own while the other sisters spend time with their mourning mother. She craves silence, but also wants to know and understand what is going on, but only seems to find out pieces of things, like overhearing family members discussing the massacre at Sabra and Shatila.
The author has won awards for her writing, and the way she uses language her shows why. The translator also is skilled to be able to convey such a story to us.
Moving and seemingly simple, this story begs to be reread as soon as you finish it.