Books for the Church Social

Look! Reviews for books I read months ago!

The Barbarian Nurseries
By Héctor Tobar

Oh, Héctor Tobar, how I love you. I may have talked about this before, but Héctor Tobar is a columnist for the LA Times and as such, is down and dirty with his subject matter every day. When he writes about the Rodney King riots, for example, I'm inclined to believe him. There's a lot to be said for artistic license, but Tobar takes unfamiliar realities and makes them personal.

Case in point: The Barbarian Nurseries is about a young Mexican housemaid who is cast into a situation well beyond her ability to control. When both adult members of the Torres-Thompson household go missing, Araceli is left with the Torres-Thompson's two small children, no money or food, and no close family or friends to whom she turn. For another maid, this problem might be solved with a few quick phone calls, but Araceli is in the united states illegally.

The tension in this book is turned up to eleven. This is one of those want-to-scream-and-throw-the-book-at-the-wall type of novels. It's a little slow rolling in the beginning, but once the boulder falls off the cliff, so to speak, it's excellent up to the final word. Tobar's novels have a rather bald-faced agenda of making the reader think about things that are important in the world (the great latino diaspora in America is, of course, one of his main concerns), which some people don't like, and that's fine, but at very least he does it so well.

A Brain Wider Than the Sky
By Andrew Levy
(Audio Book)

A book about migraines. This book is part history, part science, and part memoir. As someone with migraines, each part is interesting or valuable in its own way, but mostly just for the feeling of solidarity it gives. From a personal point of view, there were times reading this book where I cried tears of relief simply knowing that I wasn't the only one whose brain is completely haywire. It was a little like going to some sort of support group.

The history portions of the book are probably the most reassuring, both because it's a relief to know that cures for migraines are much more friendly now than they have been in the past (Drilling holes in your skull? Leeches? Why always leeches?), and because so goddamn many famous people have suffered from them. I can't even begin to name all the famous people who suffered from migraines. Nearly every founding father. Essentially, anyone you would consider a genius. I know this is an "all rectangles are squares but not all squares are rectangles" situation, but it does make me feel better, like maybe during my next migraine I'll invent some sort of giant edible hovercraft.

The most potent part of the book, for me, as a reader, is his description of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as a migraine episode. The things that happen to Alice are the things that happen to you when you're having a migraine (or taking migraine drugs): your body seems to change size, colors can seem overly bright and vibrant or dark and awful, everything seems funny and nonsensical but you don't want to laugh. You feel, when you stand up, like you're going to fall forever down a rabbit hole that never ends. Carroll had migraines, and this portion, to me, is the perfect culmination of Levy's powers of observation and research.

Jaws
By Peter Benchley

For this, I think I'd prefer to share with you a review from a reader named "Miriam" over at goodreads.com, who rated the book "2-stars":

"I went to the Monterey Bay aquarium for a teachers symposium where they generously gave us a lot of their discarded educational materials and clearance items from the gift shop that hadn't been sold in a long time. Among those items were stacks and stacks of Jaws. They didn't care what we did with them so I took a whole stack and passed them out as prizes at a church social before I had read this book.
What I learned from this book is to never pass out any book at a church social before reading it.
When I found a lost lonely copy on the back of my closet shelf, I decided that I should read this book and to my horror, I found that there is gratuitous sex and coarse language in addition to the gore in the book. "

Apparently, along with those who don't know that the movie was a book first, there are those who don't know (somehow) that the book was a movie (maybe she didn't see the giant shark swimming towards the naked lady on the cover?). We're gonna need a bigger boat.  

I don't mean to make fun of Miriam, her review is pretty accurate really, and I like the story she tells. My review? It was pretty much what you'd expect for a thriller written in the 70's. It's bloody and rather sexist, but vaguely amusing. But it's about sharks, and who wouldn't like that?

Twilight
By Stephanie Meyer

It was $1.99 on my kindle. It was god-awful. I know this isn't true, but it feels as though every single sentence in this entire book starts with the word "I."

As in, "I tried to read Twilight to see what my 14 year-old cousins were freaking out over. I got through the first book. I wanted to kill myself."