Little Bee - Chris Cleave. I was really excited to read this book because the copy on the book jacket promised a powerful, searing piece of art. And I really am a fan of the cover art itself. It started off strong. I really loved the story - chapters alternating between the voice of a young Nigerian refugee and an American young mother/widow. The downfall for me was that I just felt really sad at the end of reading it. I was like, "Oh, I don't really want it to end that way." And then my enjoyment of reading it was dampened by that feeling.
A Voyage Long and Strange - Tony Horwitz. I am very much obsessed with Tony Horwitz after reading his book Confederates in the Attic. He combines two things I love: travel writing and history. For this book, Horwitz writes eloquently about all of the visitors, explorers and settlers of North America that came before the well-remembered Plymouth landing. This leads us into histories of Vikings arriving, living and then leaving Canada / Maine; detailed adventures of Conquistadores like Cortez and Coronado. It was amazing to me how much of the United States had actually been visited and explored before the whiteys from England came over. But since we're Americans, we like to rewrite our history to have us as the explorers/pilgrims/adventurers in a new and unknown land. This book gave me a really good understanding of the complicated relationship that the early explorers had with the Indians. It seems that by the time the Pilgrims arrived, the Indians already knew plenty about the outsiders' propensity to kill with disease and violence. I can't wait to get all of his books - I'm hooked. You can read an excerpt from the prologue here.
A Gate at the Stairs - Lorrie Moore. I wanted to love this book. I really did. Lorrie Moore has written some of my favorite short stories; stories that make me turn dog-ear the pages and wish that I had written something as striking. However, this book almost seemed like it was written by a different author than the one I so fondly remember. It nicely captured the feeling of post-9/11 life for a drifting college student in the middle of the Midwest. The big themes were there: love, war, self-deception...it was not a bad book. I thought some of the characters were interesting and it was well-written - it just didn't do anything for me, really. It took almost half the book for me to even feel like something was happening. Then towards the end more things started happening but truthfully, it was all slightly depressing. I didn't even dog-ear a page until almost the very end, and that was for something that just made me chuckle. "If we were still English," said my father, "we'd be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road - pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway."
