Alix's proposed books for 2016
Ordinary Grace
by William Kent Krueger 4.6 stars
New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.
Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy unexpectedly strikes his family—which includes his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic mother; Juilliard-bound older sister; and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years.
Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.
The Book of Happiness by Nina Berberova 4.6
A brilliant book, full of the precise observation we normally associate with great poetry. We see a suicide laid out, two children kissing, a ride in the winter wind, with nothing of the cliche (or at least the previously-encountered) in the details. Berberova gives you the fullness of day-to-day experience by telling you what no one else has consciously noticed. She has lifted them from the subconscious to the fore of attention. At one level, the least important, the novel is almost mechanically planned: 3 parts, nine chapters to a part, each roughly the same number of pages. That's a superficial, static structure. The organic life of the book comes not only from Berberova's depth of observation, but from her narrative technique - a kind of "backstitching." You first encounter fragments that don't quite make sense, and as you read on, the details get filled in. It's like coming into the middle of a conversation in which you don't know the people talked about. Later, when you do meet the people, you realize, "Oh yes, that's who was meant." Berberova is particularly good at evoking the "floating" state - the feeling of the mind surrounding everything - that comes from concentrated thought. You experience it along with the characters. The book opens with a spectacular description of a suicide - an odd opening for a book about happiness. Yet the title doesn't seem ironic. It really is about not just the pursuit of happiness, but about happiness itself. One may agree or disagree with the conclusions the author reaches, but one can't deny the honesty and the perception in the effort. I don't understand Russian, so I can't comment on the accuracy of the translation. However, I can say that the translator convinces me that I'm reading great literature, and that's really the only test I care about. The English prose is both lively and beautiful, the "authorial voice" vital and full of confidence. Why Berberova was so unknown for so long, I can't tell you, but in this translation, she is one of the finest modern novelists I've read.
FIELDS OF BLOOD BY KAREN ARMSTRONG 4 stars
From the renowned and best-selling author of A History of God, a sweeping exploration of religion and the history of human violence.
For the first time, religious self-identification is on the decline in American. Some analysts have cited as cause a post-9/11perception: that faith in general is a source of aggression, intolerance, and divisiveness—something bad for society. But how accurate is that view? With deep learning and sympathetic understanding, Karen Armstrong sets out to discover the truth about religion and violence in each of the world’s great traditions, taking us on an astonishing journey from prehistoric times to the present.
While many historians have looked at violence in connection with particular religious manifestations (jihad in Islam or Christianity’s Crusades), Armstrong looks at each faith—not only Christianity and Islam, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Judaism—in its totality over time. As she describes, each arose in an agrarian society with plenty powerful landowners brutalizing peasants while also warring among themselves over land, then the only real source of wealth. In this world, religion was not the discrete and personal matter it would become for us but rather something that permeated all aspects of society. And so it was that agrarian aggression, and the warrior ethos it begot, became bound up with observances of the sacred.
In each tradition, however, a counterbalance to the warrior code also developed. Around sages, prophets, and mystics there grew up communities protesting the injustice and bloodshed endemic to agrarian society, the violence to which religion had become heir. And so by the time the great confessional faiths came of age, all understood themselves as ultimately devoted to peace, equality, and reconciliation, whatever the acts of violence perpetrated in their name.
Industrialization and modernity have ushered in an epoch of spectacular and unexampled violence, although, as Armstrong explains, relatively little of it can be ascribed directly to religion. Nevertheless, she shows us how and in what measure religions, in their relative maturity, came to absorb modern belligerence—and what hope there might be for peace among believers of different creeds in our time.
At a moment of rising geopolitical chaos, the imperative of mutual understanding between nations and faith communities has never been more urgent, the dangers of action based on misunderstanding never greater. Informed by Armstrong’s sweeping erudition and personal commitment to the promotion of compassion, Fields of Blood makes vividly clear that religion is not the problem.
The Big Picture 4.5 stars
By Douglas Kennedy
On the face of it, Ben Bradford is your standard Wall Street hot shot - Junior partner in a legal firm, 6 figure income, wife and two young kids straight out of a Gap catalogue. But along with the WASP lifestyle comes the sting - Ben hates it. He wants - has always wanted - to be a photographer. When he discovers his wife is playing outside the ground, the consequences of a moment of madness force him to question not just the design of his life but the price of fulfilment. Because finding yourself means nothing when you're pretending to be someone else. From the picket fences of yuppie New England to Montana's untouchable splendour, THE BIG PICTURE spans states and states of mind in a thrilling novel of genuine originality.
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