The Sympathizer by by Viet Thanh Nguyen

 Sunday, Apr. 21, 2024--San Antonio

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize among other prizes and forms of recognition.  I read about the new HBO series based on the novel and decided to read the book rather than watch the series.  It's fictional, yet each aspect of it matches descriptions of real events.  The book takes place toward the end of the Vietnam War and afterward.  The main character is a young man who is the son of a Vietnamese woman and a Frenchman who is a priest.  In the book he is a young adult who has gotten a college education in the USA and during the Vietnam war is working within the military intelligence operation as the assistant to a General while being sympathetic to the communist cause; therefore he is operating as an embedded spy.  The book is many stories tied together, though.  It's a story of discrimination since the young man is never completely accepted--is always an outlier--not considered to be a true Vietnamese nor a true westerner.  It's also the story of the war, the story of the end of the war and the harried escape, the story of being an immigrant in America, the story of what happened in Vietnam after the war, the story of the American Vietnamese immigrants wanting to retake their country, the story of the reeducation camps in Vietnam (like those that exist in all other communist countries) to break the resistance of former enemies and to keep the citizens in line--even those who fought for communism.  It is also the story of formed family since events throughout the book are built around the shared stories of 3 friends who became "blood brothers" when young and have tried to support and protect each other all their lives.  And as serious as all this sounds, there are points in this novel that are among the funniest I have ever read.  (I'll never forget what the 13-year old discovered as he stuck his fingers into a raw squid and what he eventually did!)  It's a good book which I read with up-and-down interest because it is essentially so many stories tied together as one.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.

Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjai-Brenyah

 Sunday, Apr. 14, 2024--San Antonio

Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjai-Brenyah, a finalist for the National Book Award, takes place in the near future of the United States.  The title is the name of the hottest new reality show which has taken the interest of the nation by storm.  It features prisoners voluntarily sign up for the show which requires them to fight each other to the death for a chance of prison release if they can keep winning for three years.  Different prisons around the name have their own representatives forming a "chain" in competition with the other chains.  The big stadium battles are always between members of different chains, but to keep the public's interest and introduce surprises, chains are followed regularly.  (Think Big Brother-type shows.) Technology has advanced so that there are no hidden cameras; instead, there are spinning orbs used zoom in, out and around to broadcast what is happening at any moment both during battles and outside of battles.  To add surprise actions, there are activities such as hiking/camping trips by individual chains through wilderness areas giving members a chance to turn on and kill other members of their on chain.  Most prisoners who participate die within a matter of 2-3 weeks.  There is a hierarchy of titles and privileges plus stardom to be gained the longer a prisoner stays alive.  Unlike the Hunger Games which occurred after changes in the type of national government and living conditions within the country, Chain Gang All Stars seems closer to possibly coming true since it is not so much of a stretch from what we already see in today's reality shows.  And there is the added question of why those watching as people kill each other are exhilarated.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5. 

Possession by A. S. Byatt

Saturday, Apr. 6, 2024--San Antonio

I quit reading Possession by A. S. Byatt at the 33% point even though it was a winner of the Booker Prize.  I feel it won that award because of the complexity of the story rather than for being a good story to read.  I actually quit reading at the 4% point and moved on to another book which I finished in less than 3 days.  So far, after going back to this book to see if I could stay with it, I have wasted a total of about 10 days to get only 1/3 of the way through it, and I have no interest in continuing.  The basic story of the researchers who have discovered missing letters between two authors from decades ago is interesting, especially since the two authors they have spent so many years researching have been considered to be minor poets with unique, but not very interesting contributions to literature.  (In this respect, I think the author may have been trying to criticize the narrow niches that university scholars claim as their topics of specialization.) But the author has inserted so much of these "not very interesting" poems the authors created which contributes to the book boring.  Plus the letters the poets have written to each other are mostly boring to read due to so many references to each other's writings as well as the writings of historically significant authors/philosophers in history.  Only a person who wants to go through 500+ pages that resemble a puzzle to be solved and either know the classics of literature well or want to wade through them to understand references made to them would enjoy this novel.  Anyone else completing it could have only kept pushing through to be able to say they read it.  I gave it 2 stars out of 5 and am glad to leave it behind me.

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

 Sunday, Mar. 31, 2024--San Antonio

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune is the first in a set of two books dealing with a group home for magical children.  (I think the author must have loved Harry Potter!)  In society, there are normal people, and there are those born with magical powers.  For the "good" of the majority, the government has set up special homes for those who are magical--to keep them separate from everyone else.  They also have implemented a "See something, say something" campaign to make sure that no magical person escapes the system.  Linus Baker is a case worker for the government who is sent to investigate the "orphanages" (although the children are not necessarily orphans; some have just been removed from their parents) where magical children are housed.  He has done this for 20+ years, living a rather bland life, following the rules of his job with fever, and feeling good about himself for always putting what is best for the children first in his field inspection reports.  He is "married" to the rules and regulations after all these years.  In the book, though, he is spent on a special mission to a unique home--one he didn't even know existed.  It is on an island just of the coast and having only a few children.  One of them is very unique, and the governing board is worried that the child could be a danger to others.  He is the Antichrist--the very young son of the devil.  Linus tries to do his inspection by-the-book as an objective evaluator.  But that is hard.  The children are fascinating.  They want to hold his hand.  They want him to go on their weekend exploration adventure.  And the two adults on the island with the children are just as casual and want him to use their first names.  With a month on the island to gather information and do his report, it becomes harder and harder for him to resist the pulls on him--the joy of being at the sunny seaside instead of the rainy city, the joy and humor of the irresistible children, the skills he observes the two adults using in teaching and guiding the children, and even the attractiveness of Aurthur, the man in charge of the home.  At the same time, the nearby coastal community, even though the residents are paid to ignore the home and its occupants, there are grumblings and the residents are more and more fearful as they hear rumors.  Soon Linus begins to wonder if the administrators who assigned him this job have an ulterior motive for having done so.  It's an interesting book written for both children and adults.  And it has some ties to political happenings in today's world.  I wouldn't call it great literature, but it is a good read.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Tuesday, March 26, 2024--San Antonio

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson is an unusual novel that was named one of the top 10 fiction novels of the past decade by TIME.  What makes it different is that it involves multiple versions of the protagonist's (Ursula's) life story and the way that minor changes may affect the future--sometimes significantly, but sometimes not so.  Ursula is born into an upper-middle class family in England in 1910.  The story restarts over and over with a concentration on the ability of Ursula to recall incidents from the future in the previous versions of the story (sort of a reverse deja vu situation) allowing her to make alternative decisions in the retelling.  The early part of the book covers her birth, the shooting in Sarajevo, and WWI setting the stage for understanding the retelling-aspect of the alternative life choices Ursula makes in the repeated versions.  The majority of the book then involves revised versions of stories regarding her life during WWII.  It's a complicated book--not only because of keeping track of the revisions but also due to the vocabulary I didn't know and the frequent quotations/statements in various languages beyond English (Latin, Italian, German, etc.).  Fortunately, I read the book on a Kindle, and the touch of an unknown word would often give a pop-up definition and it wasn't necessary to be able to translate the foreign language usage.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.

Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen

Sunday, Mar. 17, 2024--San Antonio

Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen was a finalist for the Lambda Award in the category of murder mysteries and was named a best book by Amazon, Buzzfeed, etc.  It takes place in San Francisco in the 1950s.  The protagonist is a cop who is gay and, therefore, leads a mostly closeted life.  He asks a friend in vice what bars they are raiding each evening that he wants to go out and makes sure he goes elsewhere.  But one night his friend is off duty and they raid where the protagonist is.  He is caught in a restroom stall with another man and with both having their pants down.  He is forced out of the police department and is considering suicide when a mysterious woman contacts him to work for her as a private investigator to solve a murder.  She doesn't want to go to the police or just any private investigator, because she lives a "hidden" life in a compound with other queer characters, and the woman who was murdered is her "wife."  The book emphasizes how dangerous it was to be gay at that time, how most gays lived a "hidden" life, how difficult it was to be out to anyone, etc.  The investigation takes the former cop to the compound where privately, everyone is a part of a chosen family while maintaining a public profile of being a regular family--mother, son, son's wife, son's private secretary, etc.  The book was very easy to read in two days.  The writing was simple, but the mystery was complex.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5. 

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

Saturday, Mar. 16, 2024--San Antonio

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng is historical fiction set in Penang, Malaysia in the early 1900s--just before and just after WWI.  Penang was a major crossroads city in Asia at the time and Malaysia was a British colony. The story brings together a number of interesting events that were happening in Penang at the time--a mystery murder by a prominent British female, a visit by the noted author Somerset Maugham visiting within the English community while looking for tales that he could turn into new stories for publication, and a visit by the Chinese revolutionist Sun Yat-Sen who is trying to raise money within the Chinese community for his next attempt to overthrow the Chinese government and establish a democracy there.  Woven into all of this are other aspects of life--stories of elaborate parties, stories of greed resulting in both success and failure, stories of hidden intrigue and history, and stories of affairs between persons from different cultures, affairs between people from the same cultures, and homosexual affairs by men who have married to try to cover their sexual orientation at a time just after the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde.  Knowing Penang from having visited there twice, I was fascinated by the book which was long-listed for the Booker Prize last year and I didn't want the story to come to an end.  I gave it 5 stars out of 5.