Fish for Breakfast: Book reviews

Well, it’s that time again. Rob, feel free to read some other reviews here or here.

The Flower Master [Sujata Massey], I discovered Massey this summer and have read seven of her books since then. I love that the detective is a young woman about my age, that she lives in Japan, and that she notices all the Japan weirdness (off topic case in point: yesterday I went shopping. Store #1 was playing gangster rap, store #2 was playing “Mary Poppins.” The best part? Both stores were selling bath products not four feet away from each other). Okay, so, anyway, all the Rei Shimura (the detective) mysteries are smartly written, funny, and have great Japan details in them. And the detective is not a batty, nosy old retiree. So read the books, already!

Ocean’s End: Travels through Endangered Seas [Colin Woodard], I found this book interesting, although perhaps weakly researched (or weakly edited?) in places. For example, if you tell me that non-native comb jellies are eating ten billion tons of life per year in the Black Sea and that this is “more then ten times the weight of all the fish landed by all the fisherman in the world in a year,” do not several pages later repeat this same statistic, but change the second part to read “more than times the weight of all the creatures landed by all the world’s fishermen in one year.” Creatures and fish are not the same, and it looks shoddy to equate them in this way. This might be a petty criticism (too bad! my blog!), but I think it’s fair if the book wants to be an academic book. Now, whether it wants to be that or not, I was never really sure, owing to the schizophrenic way that the footnotes were presented (in the back of the book by page number). I would say that this would be a good selection for high school or college students to get them thinking about the ways human activity impacts ocean systems, except for the fact that I think Woodard equivocates more on climate change than is necessary (the book was published in 2000, after all). Still, Woodard captures an important story and sections of this book might make for a nice classroom discussion.

My Sister’s Keeper [Jodi Picoult], This book was a sad, quick read. I finished it at 3am with tears running down my face. Almost enough to keep me from ever having kids. Of course, when you start with a child suffering from cancer, you just know things aren’t going to end well. Some parts of the story were stronger than others, however. The father’s character was a bit underdeveloped in comparison to the mother’s – was this intentional (to show something about their relationship?) or just how it happened? I also thought that the mother’s sister could have been more fully developed – she was presented as a lonely working drone, sweeping in to save the family, but didn’t she have a life of her own? Furthermore, the sideline lovestory that develops was a bit unnecessary in my opinion. Also, I am not sure how one can end up a ballet teacher if one has never taken ballet as a child – or maybe I just missed the part about the character having taken ballet as a child. If you don’t like sad books, don’t read this one (strangely, I tolerate sad books much better than sad movies), but otherwise I think it’s a fine book club selection. It won’t change the way you think about life, but it is a well-written story.

A History of Cambodia [David Chandler], I read this book in preparation for our trip to Angkor Wat. Unfortunately, the Tsukuba University library didn’t have the updated version from 2000, so I read this from 1983, missing much of the recent work that has been done on Cambodia’s history, I’m sure. Chandler is a decent writer, but not the best academic historian I’ve ever read. The task is Herculean: to present all Cambodian history in 200 or so pages. The problem with such an approach is, of course, that it leaves the reader deeply unsatisfied. I was reading the book to learn more about Angkor, but the discussion of Angkor was, maybe, 20 pages or so. I did manage to learn some useful things, and we supplemented our knowledge with a book just about the temples that we bought in Thailand. I actually didn’t finish this book because I kind of felt like since the book itself stopped in 1970, it was sort of an unfinished work as well. The 2000 edition of this book would undoubtedly be better on this count, and I understand that Chandler is the leading historian of Cambodia, so his is probably the book to read.

Prep [Curtis Sittenfield], This is being hailed as the new Catcher in the Rye. I, for one, found very little that I liked in Catcher in the Rye, so this wasn’t really a selling point for me. This book did, however, speak to me more than Catcher in the Rye did. There are some interesting observations about race, class, and beauty that come out here, along with some very funny stories about the way the rich live. And while some reviewers have suggested that the main character was not very likeable, I liked her fine and even found myself identifying with her older self in places. The construct of writing about high school from the vantage point of one’s mid-twenties is, I think, a good one. The book does have an unsettling ending (perhaps much like high school?), and I think the story does lose steam in the denouement, but this is not a fatal flaw. For me, this was beach reading a cut above what one normally thinks of as beach reading. It does have a bit of a chick-lit (or, as I’ve been told to say, “books aimed at women”) cover, but I think there is more story here than that suggests [insert aphorism here]. However, based on my quick reading of the excerpt of her second book that was included in the back of this book, I don’t have much hope for the second book.

Victory [Joseph Conrad], I love Conrad. Enough said. Interestingly, I always thought that he had been a desk worker all his life and that his literature was all based on how he imagined far-flung places to be. Yet, in reading the notes at the beginning of this book, I discovered that I was wrong and that Conrad had done some serious traveling. Victory, like Heart of Darkness, is a frame story, and, again, like Heart of Darkness, it is told in such a captivating manner than one manages to forget this. This book also engages with human passions and the isolation of the tropics, and (no surprise here!) it doesn’t end well. Of course, you know this, and, of course, you can’t stop reading. My first thought upon finishing this was actually that it would make a really great movie (of course, you’d have to maybe tone down the master-servant relationship[which didn’t add much, really] as well as be careful about how one presented the island’s original inhabitants). Being not much up on Hollywood, I can’t tell you which actors and actress I would cast or even if such a movie has already been made. But this is a great story, and the lush setting makes it ripe for visual presentation.