Devourer of Books

Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

At the beginning of May my bookclub tried something new, a ‘bring the boys’ night.  Normally the club discusses books and wine, but we decided to go instead with beer and a boy-friendly book.  For our book we chose “Gang Leader for a Day” by Sudhir Venkatesh, partly because we thought the boys would find gangs interesting and partly because it takes place in Chicago (my husband and I are the only ones from the ‘burbs, everyone else actually lives in Chicago).

As far as being a boy-friendly book, “Gang Leader for a Day” definitely fit the bill.  My husband was a bit skeptical, but once he started it, I’d come into our room in the evenings and find him laying on the bed, engrossed in the book.  He isn’t a huge reader, but when something catches his attention, he’s all about it.

Sudhir Venkatesh was a grad student in Sociology at the University of  Chicago when he got involved in a gang.  Okay, that’s a little dramatic.  What actually happened is that he went into the poor neighborhoods surrounding the U of C and began asking people what it felt to be poor and black (seriously).  Turns out that’s maybe not such a good idea, as he was basically held hostage by a gang who thought he was Mexican and a spy for a rival gang planning a drive-by.  Strange as it may seem, the kidnapping doesn’t end up being all bad.  Through it, Sudhir meets the charismatic gang leader J.T. with whom he will spend an inordinate amount of time over the next few years and through whom he will get access to the Robert Taylor projects for his thesis on the economy of poverty.

This book was really interesting and I’m glad I read it, especially living in Chicago and having taught very close to where the events of this book took place.  That said, it did disappoint me in some ways.  Sudhir’s story was very interesting, but I expected him to grow as a person or learn something during his sojourn in the projects with the gang.  Either that, or I expected that he would write his experiences with a story arc.  Either way that would have made the book more memoir-ish, since it seemed too subjective for a real sociology book.  Interestingly, this lack of growth/story only bothered the girls in our group and none of the guys.

Definitely an interesting peek int the real life of gangs and projects in Chicago.  There is some absolutely heartbreaking stuff in here, and it helps you understand how people do reprehensible things to survive.  Pick it up as an interesting study, but don’t expect really stellar writing or much of a story arc.

Buy this book from:
Powell’s.
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.
Amazon.

Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic by Martha Beck

Martha and her husband were graduate students are Harvard with a little girl when they unexpected got pregnant with second child.  As with her first pregnancy, Martha was sick beyond belief during the entire pregnancy, making keeping up with her young daughter and her classwork very difficult - especially when her husband took a job that caused him to split his time between Harvard (for classes) and Asia, leaving the country for weeks at a time.  Already somewhat looked down upon for having even one child while at Harvard, many people disapproved of Martha’s second pregnancy, particularly when they became aware that the baby she carried had Downs Syndrome.

Until becoming pregnant with Adam, Martha really bought into the whole Harvard mentality.  Although she still did her best to keep up with what was expected of her while pregnant, her priorities began to change while carrying Adam.  Part of what changed Martha was a series of very serious circumstances, all happening while her husband was out of the country.  First she felt too weak and nauseous to make food and eat for long enough that she was effectively starving herself, later in her pregnancy there was a fire in her building, at one point she began bleeding profusely.  In all of these circumstances, Martha felt the presence of some other, even mystical being(s) protecting her and Adam.  Although everyone around them expected Martha to abort the baby - even her doctors and, initially, her husband - Martha became convinced that she HAD to have him.  You do know from the beginning how this book turns out.  I believe Martha wrote this when Adam was 3 or older and she makes frequent references to what he is like as a toddler.

I read this for book club and, in general, we all really enjoyed it, although we were taken aback at just how hostile Martha perceived Harvard as being towards family life in general and towards a baby with Downs in particular (granted this did take place during the 1980s).  We also became VERY frustrated with Martha.  She was later diagnosed with an immune disease that made her so sick durnig pregnancy, it seemed as if she was trying to do everything BUT take good care of herself and her daughter when her husband was out of town.  If you are feeling nauseous with pregnancy, the solution is generally to eat small doses of whatever does NOT make you nauseous frequently.  Knowing how extremely sick she could get, we felt it was inexusable for Martha to allow herself to get to the point where she could eat when she was the sole caretaker for the baby she was carrying and her daughter.  She also neglected to go to the doctor when she was bleeding so badly, saying she knew she had been healed, which disturbed us all.

Despite some of our gripes with Martha’s actions, this was a very well-written memoir on an extremely interesting topic and I think we would all recommend it.  It certainly made for a good conversation at book club, even in a book club where I am the only one married (although others are engaged) and anywhere near children.

Buy this book on Amazon.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Okay, so wow.  I guess Trish and Amy were right about this book.

“The Hunger Games” is set in a dystopian future/alternate present(?) of the United States.  Instead of the country with which we are familiar, now all that is left is Capitol City and 13 districts surrounding it.  Oh, except that District 13 was annihilated when the districts attempted to revolt against the Capitol as a show of the Capitol’s power.

After the ill-fated rebellion, the Capitol instituted the Hunger Games to remind the districts of their power on a yearly basis.  Each year, one girl and one boy are selected from each district to participate, with the odds of being chosen ‘favoring’ older kids from poorer families.  Kat’s family is certainly poor since her father, a miner, died, but she never imagined that her younger sister would be selected as a representative, a ‘tribute’ in the games.  When Prim is selected, Kat volunteers to take her place without even thinking and is thrust into the world of the games, an arena in which 24 teenagers compete to survive and to kill off their competition, to be the last person standing and be the champion, all televised for the enjoyment/subjugation of the populace..  Think Survivor meets The Running Man meets The Most Dangerous Game.

Against her better judgment, Kat ends up in an alliance with Peeta, the boy tribute from her district, playing at being star-crossed lovers to win the approval of the audience and a greater possibility of sponsors and gifts that will help her survive.  As her feelings for Peeta become more complicated, so too does the thought of her possibly having to kill him in order to survive and win the games.

I knew all along that I was enjoying the book, although I didn’t really pick up on just how much I was enjoying it until it ended (the fact that I read the whole thing in 24 hours during the work week should have clued me in).  I suppose I was too caught up in it to even realize that I was so caught up in it.  When Collins left me with her cliffhanger ending, I wanted to yell “no!” and curse the fact that the sequel, “Catching Fire,” won’t be out until September.  “Catching Fire” isn’t even in my library’s system yet, so I’m currently checking every day, waiting for it to be added so I can get at the front of the holds list.  However, I’m actually tempted to go ahead and preorder “Catching Fire” from Amazon, something I’ve only ever done with the last Harry Potter book, because I just want that badly to read it.  (Okay, since I wrote this, “Catching Fire” DID become available at my library, I’m the 8th hold on 5 copies, although I’m still tempted to preorder this, Harry Potter 7-style).

“The Hunger Games” is a young adult book, but with enough depth, character development, and excitement for adults.  I’d tell you to go read it now, but perhaps you should put it off until September, when you can jump straight from “The Hunger Games” to “Catching Fire.”

Buy this book on Amazon.
Preorder the Sequel on Amazon.

Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour, translated by Sara Khalili

“Censoring an Iranian Love Story” is unlike any other book I’ve read.  I suppose it could be compared to the movie within a movie aspect of “The Princess Bride,” if “The Princess Bride” was, at its heart, about the difficulty of literature in Iran.

The main character of “Censoring an Iranian Love Story” is actually a fictionalized verion of the author himself.  If I am not mistaken, he was living in the US by the time he wrote this novel (written in Farsi and translated to English), but it is written as himself still in Iran trying to make his living as an author.  The story itself is composed of Shahriar attempting to write not just an Iranian love story, but one that will actually get published and distributed, one that will get past the government censors.

We actually read Shahriar’s story as he writes it, that of two lovers named Sara and Dara and their attempts to meet under the oppressive regime.  Large portions of their story are crossed through and rewritten as Shahriar attempts to write what will be deemed an ‘acceptable’ love story.  In many places Shahriar explains why he has crossed out passages, often venturing into Iranian history, politics, and historic literature and culture.

I found “Censoring an Iranian Love Story” absolutely fascinating, providing a look at Iranian society such as I’ve never seen before.  It was by no means a fast read, but definitely a worthwhile one, and particularly timely given the recent Iranian election.

Buy this book from:
Powells.
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.
Amazon.

Mei-Ling Hopgood is the author of the memoir “Lucky Girl” (see my review) and has been gracious enough to provide me with this guest post while I’m busy with baby.

Has your family read it?

I get this question a lot from readers of Lucky Girl, a memoir about my reunion and relationship with the family in Taiwan that gave me up for adoption. In 1997, I was reunited with my birth parents, six Chinese sisters, a brother who my birth parents adopted, another sister who was also given up and raised in Switzerland and tons of in-laws, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles. In the book, I describe my 10-year quest to get to know this colorful bunch and understand the decisions, twists of fate and sad turn of events that made me who I am today.

People are curious to know if my Chinese relatives have read Lucky Girl. My answer is a complicated “kind of.”

From the beginning, the extent of our language and cultural differences has been dizzying – at times funny, but often terribly frustrating. I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, Mich., and speak English first, Spanish second and only started learning Mandarin after I met my family. My birth parents, originally from Kinmen Island, speak Mandarin, but their first language is a dialect called Holo (most commonly known as Taiwanese). My sisters in Taiwan speak some English, thank goodness, so we muddled. But there were countless times during our visits over the last decades in which I felt like Bill Murray’s character in the movie Lost in Translation, when a Japanese photographer’s rambling directive gets translated into a few words. I always knew I was missing so much.

This communication gap could be entertaining: the misunderstandings, the over-acted pantomimes and many sisterly Three-Stooges-like exchanges. One that immediately comes to mind happened during my first trip to Taiwan. I had heard the woman who was translating for me say many times: wo bu zhedao. So I asked the sister who sat next to me in the backseat of the car, “What does wo bu zhedao mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Wo bu zhedao. Am I saying it right?”
“Yes.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
This went on for a few minutes before another sister turned around from the passenger seat and said: “Wo bu zhedao means I don’t know!”
Other times, the language barrier was a much more difficult issue. To this day, even though I’ve studied Mandarin, I can’t hold much of a conversation alone with either biological parent. I’m forever at the mercy of my sisters’ translations, so I know only what they choose to tell me. For a long time, some of them didn’t want me to know the family’s dirty secrets and even those that did were conflicted because they wanted me to accept our family. I kept pushing and, fortunately, there were so many sisters (with independent minds and mouths) that someone was bound to fess up.  Family drama very much impacted who would talk and translate for me. I wanted to ask my birth father, for example, to clarify some basic facts about our family history, but the sister who lives with him was not speaking to him at that time. No one else wanted to call him either. I’d have to ask him on a visit later.

Despite these challenges, I was determined to get the story right, for myself and the book. It was easy on the American and European side – my American mom and brothers, Swiss sister (who speaks better English than I do) and anyone who had more than a bit part in Lucky Girl read early manuscripts and offered feedback and corrections. I tried to do the same for my birth family, sending copies of the manuscript to Taiwan by email and snail mail over and over. My Australian brother-in-law read and offered help, but I got an excruciatingly slow response from my sisters. A couple kept saying they were reading the manuscript, but had nothing to add. Impossible, I thought. Months went by, and I kept begging. I understood  –they had their own jobs, kids and lives, and I myself couldn’t imagine reading a manuscript in Chinese – but couldn’t wait forever. I finally sent my Australian brother-in-law True and False questions, which he read to my sister, who read them over the phone to my birth mother. True or false, Ma was in the vegetable patch when the bombs fell.

As a journalist who has fact-checked her own investigative pieces word-by-word, the potential imprecision was maddening. As a daughter, it was exasperating and sometimes flat-out depressing. A big part of my journey was accepting this imperfect puzzle of a personal history – holes and all – as my own and moving forward. Just as I’ve had to come to terms with the limitations of my emotional relationship with my birth family, I’ve accepted the limits of what they can and will share with me and how much they could contribute to my book. At least some of my sisters say they and Ma are proud that I’ve written Lucky Girl. Whether they will ever really “read” it remains to be seen, and I’m fairly sure they will never understand the nuances if they do. But in the end, this is my side of our story, the truest version that I know.

www.mei-linghopgood.com

The Luxe by Anna Godbersen

I have heard the Luxe novels described by some as a turn of the century book-version of Gossip Girls, although I haven’t really watched Gossip Girls, so I’m not entirely sure how accurate that is.  From what I have read, though, I would guess that that is a fairly accurate description.

“The Luxe” is primarily the story of the Holland sisters, Elizabeth and Diana, who are members of New York’s high society, but are in danger of losing their places after finding out that their father’s death has left them with very little money.  In an effort to shore up her family’s fortune and place in society, the girls’ mother arranges Elizabeth’s engagment to the fabulously wealthy and mischevious bachelor Henry Schoonmaker.  However, with Elizabeth’s affections elsewhere, Henry beginning to fall for Diana, and Elizabeth’s best friend Penelope wanting Henry for herself, things begin to get a little dramatic.

I liked “The Luxe,” but I didn’t really love it.  I think the problem was that it was just a little too Gossip Girls for my taste, since I’m not a fan of the show.  That being said, it was a very engaging plot and a pretty quick read.  Although it wasn’t my favorite, I’m not sorry I read it (particularly because I got it from the library) and will probably go ahead and read the rest of the series from the library.   It was very interesting as a glimpse into turn of the century socialite life, but those of you who do like shows like Gossip Girls will probably like it better than I did.

Buy this book from:
Powells.
A local independent bookstore via Indiebound.
Amazon.