Currently Reading

Reading: My Two Polish Grandfathers, by Witold Rybczynski.
Listening to: Blasphemy, by Douglas Preston.

Monday, October 20, 2008

National Book Awards Finalists

The National Book Foundation has announced the finalists for the 2008 National Book Awards. The fiction list is:

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)

To see the nominees in Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature, go to the 2008 Awards page.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Man Booker Prize Winner Announced

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, has won the 2oo8 Man Booker Prize. For more information, see the announcement on the official website.

Review: Home


Home, by Marilynne Robinson. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. ISBN: 0374299102)


Too much is left unsaid in this beautifully written book. Two of Reverend Boughton's eight adult children -- Jack, the black sheep, and Glory, the youngest -- have returned to the family homestead, due to difficult circumstances in their lives. They are all very careful of one another's privacy, and they tiptoe around discussing the events that have brought them home to Gilead.

Ultimately, caution and taciturnity become frustrating, both for the characters and for the reader. The stingy hints that Jack and Glory share about their lives initially provide some dramatic tension, but the habits of concealment become almost annoying in the end. The book closes with some elucidation of the reasons for Jack's angst, but we never really learn much about the details of Glory's troubles.

Nonetheless, it is a pleasure to read the words that Pulitzer Prize winner Robinson puts together to deliver this somewhat unsatisfying story. Her sentences are simple, but they are crammed with thought and analytical insights. She is not just a great writer; she is also a great thinker.

If you enjoyed Gilead, the author's previous work, you will recognize the Boughton family. In this story, it is Reverend Ames and his family who are the secondary characters. Enjoy this book for its writing, but don't expect too much from the story.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Review: A Voyage Long and Strange (Audio)


A Voyage Long and Strange, by Tony Horwitz. (Digital Audiobook read by John H. Mayer)

Horwitz challenges traditional American teaching on the discovery of America and America’s first European settlements. Using a combination of primary research (e. g., the writings of Columbus) and interviews with modern-day descendants of European settlers and Native Americans, he pokes holes in what we think we know about such touchstones as Plymouth Rock and the first Thanksgiving.

Realizing that he, like most Americans, had little understanding of what happened between Columbus’s “discovery” of America in 1492 and the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth in 1620, he sets out to fill in the blanks. Along the way, he travels from Newfoundland and the early Viking settlements of A.D. 1000; to the earliest (1565) permanent European settlement in the continental U.S. (St. Augustine, Florida); and he follows the trails of the Spanish conquistadors through the American Southwest. He spends a good bit of time focusing on John Smith and the Jamestown settlement, which predates Plymouth and the Pilgrims.

While Horwitz’s writing is wry and filled with amusing stories about the odd characters he meets in his travels, his history of early U.S. settlement is filled with violence, devastating illnesses, disasters, and greed. Horwitz concludes that the inaccurate and whitewashed version of American settlement that we learn about in school is more myth than history, but that we can expect the myths to prevail.

I listened to this title using the downloadable audio service powered by OverDrive, available online at my library, Lackawanna County Library System.