Wednesday, May 13, 2015

A. M. Homes - This Book Will Save Your Life

I adored A. M. Homes's book May We Be Forgiven, and so I picked up this one - which has come to be known as a cult classic - with great anticipation. Unfortunately, This Book Will Save Your Life reads a little like the dress rehearsal for May We Be Forgiven, which was published 6 years later.  Had I read it first, I might have liked it better. And don't get me wrong - I did enjoy this book, but it doesn't have the finesse of Homes's later work.

Richard Novak is a wealthy trader in Los Angeles, living a life almost entirely independent of other people, until a health scare - unbearable, unlocalized pain - lands him in hospital and wakes him back up to the world. Over the course of the next months, he wrangles his way back into the lives of other people, performing acts of kindness for strangers, reconnecting with family members, and embracing the strangeness of life. Indeed, highly peculiar things happen to him in rather quick succession: a sinkhole forms outside his house and a horse falls into it, the Hollywood actor living above him rescues the horse by helicopter and cooks Richard dinner, he gets hit by a car, is treated by a fake doctor with remarkable insight, goes on silent retreat, saves one woman from a hapless marriage and another from almost certain death, becomes nationally known as "The Good Samaritan", rents a house in Malibu belonging to the mayor, and befriends the White Whale of the writing world, a decrepit fellow who wrote the last Great American Novel and might just be writing the next. In the midst of all this, Richard's abandoned son comes to stay. 

Interspersed in the bizarre turnings of the plot are moments of great joy, through which Richard remembers again what it is to be human. This is a book of hope and optimism, in spite of the sardonic tone Homes adopts towards the LA landscape and its jaded inhabitants.

Honestly, if May We Be Forgiven had not mirrored the plot of this book so exactly - its protagonist is a man who is jolted out of his lackluster life by tragedy, which has the effect of rejuvenating him as he is forced to interact with strangers, cope with bizarre encounters and form a new relationship with his brother's children - I probably would have found it breathtakingly original. It's just that Homes did it better the second time around (as one would hope), and that's the book I happened to read first. 

Overall assessment: 3.8 out of 5 stars. My bookclub has introduced me to the use of the full spectrum of decimal points in ratings, and I like the subtlety it allows me in rating a book. 

Memorable moments: Anhil, the owner of the doughnut shop Richard ends up in on the night he "wakes up", is perfectly positioned as the outsider in America, a Hindu immigrant whose vision of the USA comes largely from movies and misunderstandings. Much of the insight and humour in the novel stems from Anhil's left-of-centre comments.

"Americans try on the spiritual life of others like they don't have any of their own."

"Explain, why does everyone in American pretend to be blind? They practice not seeing. They get into the car and they call someone on the cell phone. They are afraid to be alone but they don't see the people around them."








Friday, January 2, 2015

What I read in 2014



The year 2014 was an amazing literary year for me, though unfortunately much of it went unrecorded on this blog. What with working full-time again, and the kids, and getting used to a new country, AND the hard drive on my home computer conking out for the fourth time since I bought it, I haven't had much time or energy left over to devote to writing and reviews. Which is really too bad, because there has been a lot to write about. This year I met my biggest (living) literary heros. Really - that is no exaggeration. I met Paul Auster and SALMAN RUSHDIE and Ian McEwan. I heard them read and discuss a variety of bookish topics, but I also shook their hands talked to them in person. It still blows my mind that this actually happened. I also funneled all the free time I DID have into reading, so that, shockingly, I managed to read 50 books this year. With a three year old and an 18 month old running wild in the house and Bibliohubby to look after (just kidding, he looks after me, really truly), with meals to cook and life to live, I feel rather proud of myself for fitting enough reading into the cracks that I accomplished this goal.

Turning back to this blog now I suddenly feel inspired again. There will be more posts soon, I promise, reviewing various books and events retrospectively and looking forward to what we can expect from 2015, from a literary perspective. But for now, here is a list, in no particular order, of the books I read in 2014.

1. Eve in Hollywood - Amor Towles
2. Life After Life - Kate Atkinson
3. The Invention of Wings - Sue Monk Kidd
4. 11/22/63 - Stephen King
5. Beautiful Ruins - Jess Walter
6. The Reason I Jump - Naoki Higashida & David Mitchell
7. The Alchemist (re-read) - Paulo Coelho
8. Freakonomics - Stephen D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner
9. Orphan Train - Christina Baker Klein
10. Tempting Fate - Jane Green
11. Timbuktu - Paul Auster
12. The Circle - Dave Eggers
13. Barracuda - Christos Tsolkias
14. The Blazing World - Siri Hustvedt
15. The Children Act - Ian McEwan
16. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
17. The Woman Upstairs - Claire Messud
18. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler
19. I am America and So Can You! - Stephen Colbert
20. The Storied Life of A. J. Ficry - Gabrielle Zevin
21. The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
22. The Family Man - Elinor Lipman
23. The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert Galbraith
24. Me Before You - JoJo Moyes
25. The Massey Murder (DNF) - Charlotte Gray
26. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - Rachel Joyce
27. The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells
28. We'll Always Have Paris - Jennifer Coburn
29. The One & Only - Emily Giffin
30. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour - Joshua Ferris
31. I am Having so Much Fun Here Without You - Courtney Maum
32. Summer House with Swimming Pool - Herman Koch
33. We Were Liars - E. Lockhart
34. Damage - Josephine Hart
35. This is Where I Leave You - Jonathan Tropper
36. Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief & Agile Introduction - Chris Sims
37. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
38. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
39. Not That Kind of Girl - Lena Dunham
40. The Rosie Effect - Graeme Simsion
41. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
42. Instructions for a Heatwave - Maggie O'Farrell
43. The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
44. Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
45. Yes Please - Amy Poehler
46. Eleonor & Park - Rainbow Rowell
47. The Strange Library - Haruki Murakami
48. Landline - Rainbow Rowell
49. Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell
50. The Book of Joe - Jonathan Tropper

It's an interesting list. Eight of these titles are non-fiction, though three of those are memoirs (of sorts) by comedians. I feel like this is almost its own genre these days. More than half of the books on this list were written by women - 28, to be precise. I am pleased about this, but it's only half the battle, of course. Harking back to a post I wrote in March 2013, reviewing those books publicly is the other half, a challenge I would like to take up in 2015. Five of the above-listed books are what I would consider to be classics - though clearly that is a complicated term, one which I may well discuss in greater depth in another post. Here I use it to mean a book that continues to be relevant and highly regarded many years (more than 50?) after its publication. Three of the books I read this year, for example, we published prior to the year 1900.

And finally, referring back to a post discussing global literature, I read books this year from nine different countries - the USA, the UK, Australia, Japan, Ireland, Nigeria, France and The Netherlands. That's not bad!

More to follow soon, I promise.

Bibliofilly x