Goodnight Nobody (Jennifer Weiner)

Chick-lit. Nice enough. Some quite funny satire of life in the suburbs.

The Color of Water – A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (James McBride)

The subtitle annoyed me already – how is it that in this country a child of one black and one white parent is called black (as if the white part somehow doesn’t count) instead of mixed?

Anyway, most of the book, I enjoyed: By telling the story of his Jewish American mother who had 12 children with 2 consecutive black husbands, James McBride also tells part of the social history of America of this time (from the 40ies to the present day). By going against the grain of defined racial differences, her story highlights a lot of them. What I enjoyed beyond the obvious issue of race and multi-racial families was to learn something about being poor in America in times past, when being poor didn’t necessarily mean coming from a wrecked family background or living in high crime areas. Nice contrast to the present day black poverty account of “Gang Leader for a Day” (below).

A friend once told me: If you want to teach people from your own experience, you have to tell them a story without spelling out the moral of the story. And that’s why I only enjoyed most and not all of this book. If he could have resisted the urge to explain what this all means to the reader and just stopped when the story was done, it would have been a much stronger book.

Dead Heat (Dick Francis and Felix Francis)

As always (Dick Francis has written more than 40 of these), there are a lot of horses, some crime, a guy who would prefer to just mind his own business but gets drawn into solving the crime, a beautiful woman etc. I quite like the fact that, because he has written so many of them, any time I am in the mood for one, I can read one. And they are so un-memorable, that I’m not even sure whether I read this specific one before or not.

However, the biggest benefit of reading this particular one is a cool quote:

“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.” Abraham Lincoln

One mystery that I couldn’t solve though: Why did they put a big picture of father and son Francis on the back-cover, where the father looks like he’s of rather poor health and doesn’t quite know where he is and the son wears one of his father’s ties (far too short for his huge frame)?

Gang Leader for a Day (Sudhir Venkatesh)

An amazing book on many different levels: A very authentic insight into American gang culture but also a pretty honest description of the complexities of long term field work.

Sudhir Venkatesh describes his first day of field work as a sociologist interested in urban poverty: He walks up to some young guys in the social housing projects with a questionnaire that asks: How does it feel, to be a young poor black man? Very bad, bad, so-so, good, very good. Obviously they can’t imagine that he means that and instead of answering hold him hostage for a night because they suspect he belongs to a rivaling gang and is there to check them out… Finally the local gang leader says: If you really want to understand us, don’t come with your stupid questionnaires, you have to hang out with us. And to everybody’s shock, the researcher comes back the next day and says: Here I am, I’ve come to hang out. And that’s how 10 years of field work and friendship start.

I enjoyed every page of this, also because Sudhir Venkatesh doesn’t make himself sound like this great clever guy but takes us with him through naive mistakes, ignorance and hustling and his fascination as well as his disgust with the gang members and their social system.

The Working Mother’s Guide to Life – Strategies, Secrets and Solutions (Linda Mason)

This book is the result of a big survey among working mothers and gives a great and un-judgemental insight in the many different ways that working mothers manage. It’s a pleasure to read and has some helpful concepts. I found it interesting to think about what type of mother and what type of worker you are and what strategies work best for who you are. Are you a “strategic planner”, “camp counselor”, “earth mother” or “passionate spirit”? Are you a work/family blender or separator?

By giving a lot of space to the individual moms and their stories and points of view, this book becomes very inclusive and embracing of all different kinds of styles. Which is refreshing in a market where so many books could be called the “One-and-only-parenting-solution”.

Something borrowed (Emily Giffin)

I’m seriously tempted to change my own rule about noting down each and every book I read…

Chick-lit. Doesn’t matter if you read it when dead tired because the baby is crying all night… as it’s no waste if you don’t remember what you read…

The Quiet Girl (Peter Hoeg)

I tried to tell a friend about the story of this book and after a few sentences she interrupted me: “That sounds like you just woke up from a weird dream that you only half recall.” That’s what it felt like, reading it: An out-of-luck clown with exceptional hearing is looking for a little girl with a gift for silence, who is one of a group of kids who are all special because they were pronounced dead after their pre-term birth, but there was a rainbow when they were born and thus they came back to life and now they seem to be able to cause earthquakes… or maybe just predict them? An evil business consortium and an order of nuns try to use the kids for their own causes etc. A lot of musical and philosophical quotes and even though by page 100 I still didn’t know what all this was about, I kept on reading, which is rare for me.

Everyone loves Smilla, I do too. And his “Borderliners” was one of my favorite books when I read it years and years ago. “History of Danish Dreams” on the other hand left me about as confused as this one, but I didn’t have the patience to finish it. No idea how many stars for this one…

Murder Plays House – A mommy-track mystery (Ayelet Waldman)

Sometimes I crave a good old portion of McDonald’s french fries. You know exactly what you get, sure, they are salty and greasy (but not old-fat greasy) but you were hungry before and are not afterward, no surprises, no complaints. That’s all I have to say about this book.

The Natural Laws of Good Luck – A Memoir of an Unlikely Marriage (Ellen Graf)

How do you love someone you cannot know?

Everybody who loves has to somehow deal with the fact that you cannot move into your lovers mind or heart and live there comfortably, exploring every corner and deep lake of it. But if we love within our own culture and comfort zone, we tend to forget this and just assume that we mean the same thing when we say the same word.

Ellen Graf’s memoir of her marriage to a Chinese man with whom she doesn’t even share a common language when they get married, is located at the other end of the spectrum. It leaves me amazed to see that, yes, you can love and be together without ever even hoping to know each other. And though I’m not quite sure what it teaches me, I’m reading it with the feeling of learning something important.

“I wished we could go somewhere slightly removed, a one-dimensional waiting room between processional order and connecting wires of daily life and a disassembled realm where schedules and toasters have no use. I smiled to think of us wandering stress-free there with our life folded up in our pockets, paper milk crates and a paper pond, like the immortal Chang Kuo-lao, who kept a paper mule in his breast pocket. When he wished to ride, he sprinkled the paper with purifying water to make it flesh again. He always rode backward, facing the mule’s tail. If we were immortals, we could disappear for a while, return when we felt up to it, and never add to our suffering by taking ourselves too seriously.”

Free Food for Millionaires (Min Jin Lee)

Casey Han thinks and talks about money, fashion, brands, how much things cost that she owns and that other people own all the time. She overspends without restraint on fancy clothes which are described in great detail. Why is it then, that “Free Food for Millionaires” is not a boring fashion catalog or chick-lit and keeps me reading while I should actually be asleep already? I think it is because Casey is not obsessed with consumerism because she is superficial but because of her stubborn wish to leave her poor Korean immigrant childhood behind and reinvent herself according to her potential, not her family background. Trying to go her own way, she makes so many obviously bad decisions that you want to slap her at times – but still you can’t help but wish for a happy (or at least not disastrous) ending.