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Monday Night Book Club and Open Thread

By Alexa

Good evening, and welcome to Monday Night Book Club. Tonight, I'm curious about what books you're reading, or what books you may have received as holiday gifts (asked for or . . . maybe not asked for, entiendes?)

For most of my family and friends, books are the gifts I really love giving, but there's always a little guesswork involved here unless it's my daughter, who sends her wish list to Santa Claus in Calle Ocho, and grandpa sends the list back to me.

Having said that, I'll be the first to admit that I miss Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter, The Spiderwick Chronicles and yes, even Lemony Snicket, the books of Amy's childhood that we read together and I enjoyed as least as much as she did. Now, with m'ijita in her 14th year, she's reading whatever I don't confiscate -- kidding, I'm kidding -- but not completely. She reads a lot of books from my shelves and asks me some questions I'd like not to answer at times . . . .

"Ma, what's The Ritual of C.H.U.D.?"

"Didn't I tell you no Stephen King until you're 17?"

"I just want to know what it means."

"I don't remember."

"Oh, please. I can tell you're trying not to smile. I see those corners turning up!"

"I don't know! Something about a turtle and a spider, I think? Boring book, It. Stephen King's a boring writer." (FYI: My toes are crossed.)

"Can I read The Fountainhead next, Mama?"

"Of course!"

Tomorrow is trash day, sabes? I'll just sneak my worn out, no-spine, tattered paperback into the recycling bag when she turns her back.

And so it goes at Casa Avila.
What books did Santa (sorry, that mom-talk is one hard habit to break) . . . what books did you receive for Christmas? What are you reading this week or what have you read recently?

One of the books on my wish list just happens to be a wonderful anthology of short stories by That Boring Writer (ha) Stephen King.

Just After Sunset returns to the scene of my favorite King novel, Duma Key with a short fiction that'll make your hair stand up on end, The Gingerbread Girl. This is one of King's creepiest short stories ever, in my humble opinion, but I feel somewhat compelled to tell you that in my love for All Things Duma Key, I bought the Amazon Kindle Reader a couple months before Christmas because I didn't want to wait for the book in print.

Kindle has become my least-used, least-favorite gadget. YMMV. I like to hold a book in my hands. I like to read in bed, too. Online reading, well, that's what I do for a living and the thought of reading a long fictional piece online in my jammies, sipping chamomile tea before bed and still, dork to the end, having a bookmark in one hand . . . . . not an ideal situation for me. If I want to reread something 4 or 5 pages back, I don't want to wait for my browser to reload. Or whatever Kindle calls their Browswer Thing. You never know, in time it could become something I really love, like books on tape. ("Es no me comedans! I don't need someone to read a book to me!") Well, that lasted as long as it took for someone to give me a book read by Anthony Hopkins and a long car drive. I'm here to tell you, I don't leave home without a book to listen to on trips no mo'.

Next in my gift grab bag is a book I've been wanting to read and putting off for several months. I'm happy to report Slumdog Millionaire is a total page-turner.

Vikas Swarup's spectacular debut novel opens in a jail cell in Mumbai, India, where Ram Mohammad Thomas is being held after correctly answering all twelve questions on India's biggest quiz show, Who Will Win a Billion? It is hard to believe that a poor orphan who has never read a newspaper or gone to school could win such a contest. But through a series of exhilarating tales Ram explains to his lawyer how episodes in his life gave him the answer to each question.

Ram takes us on an amazing review of his own history - from the day he was found as a baby in the clothes donation box of a Delhi church to his employment by a faded Bollywood star to his adventure with a security-crazed Australian army colonel to his career as an overly creative tour guide at the Taj Mahal.

Swarup's Q & A is a beguiling blend of high comedy, drama, and romance that reveals how we know what we know - not just about trivia, but about life itself. Cutting across humanity in all its squalor and glory, Vikas Swarup presents a kaleidoscopic vision of the struggle between good and evil - and what happens when one boy has no other choice in life but to survive.

This incredible book reminded me in some ways of Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth and Vikas Swarup has a couple of other books I'm looking forward to exploring. Like Lahiri's writing, (and also reminiscent of Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz) Swarup's voice from an unfamiliar land is one to treasure.

Last on my list for this week is a perennial favorite, Toni Morrison.

You say I am wilderness. I am.

Yeah, I saved the best for last, por supuesto. If you're interested in the history of slavery, Morrison's ability to make you feel as though you were there, and you witnessed The Middle Passage, adds some vida that we sometimes don't get in historical texts. At a slim 176 pages, this novel reads quickly. You could finish it in a few hours if you were so inclined. I "allow" myself 5 pages a day because I want to savor Toni Morrison's work, one author who always lives up to the publishers' hype.

Continuing themes that she has been developing since the start of her career, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison creates an intense and involving philosophical, Biblical, and feminist novel set in the Atlantic colonies between 1682 and 1690. Her impressionistic story traces slavery from its early roots, using unique voices--African, Native American, and white--while moving back and forth in time. The primary speaker is Florens, a 16-year-old African slave, who tells the reader at the outset that this is a confession, "full of curiosities," and that she has committed a bloody, once-in-a-lifetime crime. In a flashback to 1682, we learn that when Florens was only eight years old, her mother suggested to the Maryland planter who owned the family, that Florens be given to New York farmer Jacob Vaark to settle a debt. Florens never understands why she was abandoned by her mother.

All the characters are bereft of their roots, struggling to survive in an alien environment filled with danger and disease. When smallpox threatens a child's life in 1692, Florens, now sixteen, is sent to find a black freedman who has some knowledge of herbal medicines. Her journey is dangerous, ultimately proving to be the turning point in her life.

Morrison examines the roots of racism going back to slavery's earliest days, providing glimpses of the various religious practices of the time, and showing how all the women are victimized. They are "of and for men," people who "never shape the world, The world shapes us." As the women journey toward self-enlightenment, Morrison describes their progress in often Biblical cadences, and by the end of this novel, the reader understands what "a mercy" really means.

Brava, Toni Morrison, again. Some people thought she couldn't outdo Beloved. And I don't want to compare the two, which are very different books, but I'd happily read anything Morrison wrote and when the last page was turned, I'd always want more.

Now reading Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History, by Karl Jacoby, an exploration of one of the worst Indian massacres in American history. Shadows illuminates the clash of American, Mexican, and tribal cultures in the southwestern borderlands.

In the predawn hours of April 30, 1871, a combined party of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono Oaodham Indians gathered just outside an Apache camp in the Arizona borderlands. At the first light of day they struck, murdering nearly 150 Apaches, mostly women and children, in their sleep. In its day, the atrocity, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, generated unparalleled national attention, federal investigations, heated debate in the press, and a tense criminal trial. This was the era of the United States "peace policy" toward Indians, and the Apaches had been living on a would-be reservation, under the supposed protection of the U.S. Army. President Ulysses Grant decried the act as purely murder, a but American settlers countered that the distant U.S. government had failed to protect them from Apache attacks, and they were forced to take justice into their own hands.

And you, my friends? What are you reading, or what have you read and liked recently? I wanna know all about your bookshelves. ;)

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on December 30, 2008 (boomark / email).