How Good Do We Have to Be? - Harold Kushner - 1.2010

This book gives a thought-provoking and inspiring look at God's unconditional love for us, and how understanding that love can shape our lives. It takes a look at the Garden of Eden and posits that perhaps God was blessing Adam and Eve by sending them out of the Garden, and not punishing them to a life of misery. This could have signaled the beginning of their true humanity, because by having knowledge of good and evil, they could choose to act, rather than just acting as all other animals do. Thus, God becomes a Being who does not punish us for our mistakes, but gives us a full measure of His love in all things as we are ready to receive it.

This idea of unconditional love is then applied to our personal relationships, allowing us to not expect perfection from ourselves, our parents, our siblings, our spouses, our children, or our friends. This releases us and allows complete acceptance of one another, free from disappointment, since disappointment comes from unmet expectations. By not expecting perfection from each other, we are more likely to see each other's actions in a pleasant light.

One great quote from the book: "When we do something wrong, because we are human and our choices are so complicated and temptations so strong, we don't lose our humanity. But we lose our integrity, our sense of wholeness, of being the same person all the time. We create a situation where a part of us, our good self, is at war with another part of us, our weak and selfish side. We lose the focus, the singleness of purpose, that enables us to do the things that matter to us. That is when we need the religious gift of forgiveness and atonement (making our split selves at one). But should we ever conclude that there is no point in trying to be good because we can never be good enough, that is when we lose everything. Being human can never mean being perfect, but it should always mean struggling to be as good as we can and never letting our failures be a reason for giving up the struggle" (p. 174).

This is one of the best books I have read in a very long time.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas - John Boyne - 1.2010

This story is told through the eyes of Bruno, an 9-year-old boy whose father is a German army officer. As seen through Bruno's eyes, his father is a very important and very good man. Bruno barely notices the inconsistencies when his family moves from Berlin to a place he calls, "Out With" (Auschwitz). He quickly becomes bored without his friends, and begins exploring the area, wondering why all of the people on the other side of the fence wear pajamas all day, and why he isn't allowed to play with them. He meets one boy, Shmuel, and begins a daily discussion with him through the fence, far from Bruno's home.

Bruno sees many parallels between his life and Shmuel's: they share a birthdate, they were both forced to move from homes they loved, etc. He also notices that he does not like the way the family's butler and others of "those people" are treated by the soldiers. He is especially confused when the butler, Pavel, claims he is actually a doctor, a soldier beats Pavel for spilling wine, and Shmuel complains about life on the other side of the fence. Bruno thinks he is lucky to have other children to play with since Bruno is alone. Bruno is also confused why and guilty that he claims he's never seen Shmuel before and denies sharing food with him, claiming Shmuel stole it.

Tragedy strikes when Bruno crosses the fence to help his friend search for his missing father.

This is a creative interpretation and voice on a frequently-explored tragedy. This is a quick read, which I highly recommend.

My Mortal Enemy - Willa Cather - 1.2010

Summary courtesy of Wikipedia

"Myra and her husband return to their fictional hometown of Parthia, Illinois, to visit their relatives. Nellie and Aunt Lydia then leave to spend the Christmas holiday in New York City with them. They live on Madison Square. They dine with Ewan Gray, a friend who has an infatuation on another actress, Esther Sinclair. Oswald receives silver-buttons for his shirt from an old Western acquaintance, and asks Lydia to pretend she gave them to him to thwart his wife's jealousy. Later Myra and Nellie go to the opera; in a loge they spot an erstwhile friend of Myra's, which makes her sad. Later they take a hansom around a park and chance upon a rich acquaintance of Myra's, which leads her to be scornful over her own poverty. They spend Christmas dinner with friends of the Henshawes - both artists and people of privilege. Later they spend New Year's Eve with artists again. A few days later Nellie witnesses the Henshawes argue; the husband takes her out to lunch. Soon after, she and her aunt are to return to Illinois. On the train, they are joined by Myra, who has argued with her husband again and is going to visit a friend in Pittsburg for a change of scenery.

Ten years later, Nellie moved into a shabby flat in a little town on the west coast, and bumps into the Henshawes. Myra is now bedridden and Oswald works fulltime; their upstairs neighbours are atrociously noisy, regardless Myra's illness. Nellie takes to visiting her at tea-time; she also takes her out by the sea. Myra expresses her regrets over her husband. (If she had not married him, her great-uncle would have bequeathed her his fortune. Instead, she eloped and he gave it away to the church.) Oswald takes to having lunch with a young woman Once, Nellie asks her why she is so harsh on her husband, and Myra dismisses her. Shortly after, her condition gets worse. She dismisses everyone and runs away; she is found dead by the seaside the following day. Her husband expresses no remorse about his wife; he loved her despite her difficult conduct. After her death he moves to Alaska and later Nellie hears about his death."

The People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks

People of the Book is a wonderful story woven between reality and fiction.

Courtesy of Wikipedia:

"The story focuses on an imagined past of the still extant Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest surviving Jewish illuminated texts.

The novel tells the fictional story of Hanna Heath, an Australian book conservator who is responsible for restoring the Haggadah. The story alternates between sections set in the present day with Heath and other sections showing the history of the Haggadah.^[4]

Told in reverse chronological order, the story follows the Haggadah backward in time as it travels across Europe, from war-torn Sarajevo to the book's origins. It also explains such clues as missing silver clasps, preserved butterfly remnants, and various stains and spots, which are all eventually explained as part of the manuscript's long history."

The Thirteenth Tale - Diane Setterfield

Perhaps the best book I have read in awhile.
Characters (courtesy of wikipedia)

• Margaret Lea: a bookstore owner's daughter, whom Vida Winter asks to write her biography
• Vida Winter: a famous novelist who has eluded reporters as to her true past, and is now ready to reveal her secrets to Margaret
• Isabelle Angelfield: the younger of George Angelfield's two children and the mother of twins Emmeline and Adeline
• Charlie Angelfield: Isabelle's older brother, who harbours an obsessive passion for his sister
• Emmeline March: the less violent, more complacent twin
• Adeline March: the angrier, more aggressive twin
• Aurelius Love: a resident of the Angelfield area who befriends Margaret
• John Digence/"John-the-dig": Angelfield's longtime gardener
• The Missus: Angelfield's aged housekeeper
• Hester Barrow: governess to Adeline and Emmeline
• Dr. Maudsley: the town doctor who attempts to help the twins
• George Angelfield: Charlie and Isabelle's father, who ignores the former and dotes on the latter after his wife's death
• Mathilde Angelfield: Charlie and Isabelle's mother, who dies giving birth to Isabelle
• Judith: Vida Winter's housekeeper
• Dr. Clifton: Vida Winter's doctor

SPOILER ALERT: Contains summary of book.

Margaret is the adult daughter of the owner of a rare-book store in (London?) sometime near the present. As a young girl she was playing at home (alone for the first time) and discovered a small tin of important documents under her parents' bed, including 2 birth certificates for the same day: one is contains her name, the other is accompanied by a death certificate. Upon discovering that she had a twin, Moira, who died when the two were surgically separated, she begins to understand the incompleteness she has always felt.

Since that time, her relationship with her ailing mother has been strained, and her father is her boss, co-worker, and only friend. When Margaret's birthday rolls around, he always presents her with a store bought cake, a card signed "Love, Dad and Mum," and a few books he has picked up specifically for her at auction throughout the year - all within the bookshop where she both lives and works now. When she was a child, he would whisper "Happy Birthday" to her and play a game or two, while intermittently caring for her mother upstairs who always got one of her "headaches" on this day.

Margaret has begun writing brief biographies of obscure people. At the opening of the book, she is contacted by Vida Winter, the most prolific writer of novels at the time, in the form of a letter. Miss Winter, who has never told an honest story regarding her origins, is now dying and wishes Margaret to write her biography. After a great deal of complications, Margaret agrees. She temporarily moves into Miss Winter's home, and Miss Winter begins to tell her story, from the beginning, in pieces each day as time and her health permits.

Miss Winter begins by describing her family's gothic and mysterious past in their estate - Angelfield. Her grandmother died during childbirth, leaving her grandfather to grieve her with an infant daughter (Isabelle) and son (Charlie) basically orphaned. When he refuses to eat or leave the library, the housekeeper/cook (The Missus) decides to bring Isabel to him. He begins to dote on her unfailingly, and things seem to improve. However, Charlie has a terrible habit of torturing animals, and he soon begins to torture Isabel with her permission.

When their father dies, Isabelle is courted by and marries Mr. March, and they move away. Charlie is furious, and he begins taking advantage of multiple women from around Angelfield. Before long, Isabel returns home with twin baby girls after the death of her husband. She is mentally unsound, and stays at all times in her room, which leaves the twins to be raised by the Missus and John-the-Dig, the gardener. It soon becomes clear the twins are not like most children. They speak only to each other in a made-up twin language, and they create mischief throughout the area by stealing from people's kitchens and gardens. Eventually, they steal a pram with an infant inside because they want to play with it. When the mother turns around to find it missing, the whole neighborhood comes out to find her baby. They find the baby lying in the weeds, and this incident becomes the final straw.

The townspeople approach the doctor and ask him to intervene. He visits the home to assess the situation, and has Isabelle institutionalized. Charlie refuses to leave his room after that.

Dr. Maudsley decides to hire a governess for the girls. When Hester enters the home, she brings order and cleanliness with her. The Missus is quite elderly and unable to keep up with all of the housework since most of the staff has been fired over the years. Hester cleans the entire house, finds the keys to each room and locks those that are unused, and establishes regular meal times.

After a few months there, she consults with the doctor and they decide to separate Emmeline and Adeline. The doctor takes Adeline home with him, and Emmeline stays at Angelfield. Their experiment fails miserably - initially they are both silent, but soon Emmeline begins to improve. As Hester and Dr. Maudsley consult with one another one day, the doctor's wife catches them kissing. Hester leaves Angelfield immediately and the twins are reunited.

Not long after, Isabelle dies in the institution, and Charlie leaves the nursery for the first time and disappears. Vida finds him dead in an overgrown gazebo one day, having shot himself. She, however, keeps this information to herself to avoid having Angelfield taken over again by outsiders.

Soon after this, we discover that Ms. Winters is not one of the twins, but their nameless cousin, illegitimate child of Charlie. Her impoverished mother abandons her at Angelfield, and the househelp take her under their wings. Hester never realized there were 3 girls.

The Missus dies first, and John-the-dig is murdered when someone (Adeline) tampers with the latch on his ladder.

Before his death, John-the-dig hired a neighbor boy to work in the gardens, and this boy and Emmeline fall in love and have a child, although the boy leaves without knowing Emmeline is pregnant. When Emmeline begins to give all of her attention to her son, Adeline becomes jealous and violent, and tries to burn the child in the library fireplace. Vida finds the child and saves him, running him to a neighbor's house and leaving him on the doorstep. She then goes back to the house which is engulfed in flames and drags one of the twins out, believing it is Emmeline. She, however, never finds out which twin it is. The other twin perishes in the blaze.

Throughout the time she is gathering the story, Margaret makes a couple of visits to Angelfield, where she meets Aurelius. Eventually, they discover that Aurelius is Emmeline's son.

This story was filled with plenty of suspense and miraculous style.

Ruby Holler - Sharon Creech

Ruby Holler is about 13-year-old twins, Florida (girl) and Dallas (boy) who are abandoned on the doorstep of an orphanage as infants. They are very active and get into a lot of trouble, so they never last long in their foster home placements.

The Trepids who run the orphanage are emotionally abusive and neglectful. Sairy & Tiller Morey, a kind old couple take the twins home saying they want one of each of them to go on a trip with them.

In the long run, they don't go on their trips, but in the mean time, they decide to keep the twins.

Z is the Moreys' neighbor. He is hired by Mr. Trepid to find out where the Moreys keep their money. He, however, remains faithful to the Trepids, and in the process, finds out the twins are his children through his ex-wife who left him without his knowledge that they existed.

Not a thickly-plotted book, but the characters were nice.

The City of Ember - Jeanne DuPrau

The City of Ember is the first in a series of four books. Ember was created hundreds of years ago by "The Builders." It receives its only light from lightbulbs which are on from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. daily. People are beginning to get nervous, however, because the supplies are running out, and beyond their city there is only darkness. Lately there have been more and more power outages.

This book begins on the day when the 12 year old students are choosing their lifelong jobs. The mayor visits their classroom, and each child is able to draw out an available job at random. Doon is very disappointed and even angry when he draws the messenger job, but Lina wishes she had drawn that job instead of pipeworks.

After class, Doon offers to switch with her. Lina is elated. Doon wants the pipeworks job so he can try to get access to the generator to keep the town running. Lina's parents are both deceased, and she lives with her grandma and toddler sister, Poppy, above their grandma's store; partway through the book, their grandma also dies and they move in with a kind woman, Mrs. Murdy. Doon's mother is deceased and he lives with his father above his father's store.

Lina and Doon both enjoy exploring. Doon soon finds a locked door down a darkened tunnel below the city, and Lina begins to gather other information without realizing its importance.

One day, Lina notices her sister chewing on a letter from a decorative box her grandma pulled out of their stuffed closet. She tries to decipher the letter, and with Doon's help (and Clary's help - a matronly friend who runs the greenhouses), she discovers the letter is a set of instrucitons for leaving Ember. She and Doon take a dangerous journey down the underground river, and climb up and out, discovering that their entire city is underground; for the first time, they see the moon and stars and sun, trees, grass, animals, birds, etc. They can't go back the way they came, so, they drop a letter down another opening they find, and that letter is picked up by Mrs. Murdy.