Yong (7/26): China Boy by Gus Lee

I read the sequel two years ago, during our first 26-in-52 pass. Finally, I get to the original. Kai Ting is the semi-autobiographical 5 year old incarnation of the author, getting his ass beat every day in the rough-and-tumble Panhandle in 1950s San Francisco, lost between worlds without any sort of anchor, neither Chinese nor American. Where he finally finds ground is in the kindness of strangers, and the YMCA. Really, the best way I can describe this book is the boy's version of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. The plot ends straightforwardly, but along the way, we share in the experience of a deepened understanding of the old culture, the poignancy of the things lost by the older generation who came here, a guttural love of Chinese food, San Francisco history, male violence, family, loss, kindness... Good stuff. Really good stuff. And all before he even reaches eight years of age.

Yong (6/26): Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

California, Oregon, and Washington secede from the United States, to form an independent nation called Ecotopia. Sounds like a leftist tree-hugger's dream come true, esp. in light of the past eight years, doesn't it? This was apparently a seminal work, in that things that are more commonly known today--the ecological unsustainability of our economy, the flaws of unrestrained capitalism, the failings of our educational system, the tears in our social fabric--took incredible foresight and self-examination to see thirtysome years ago, in 1975, when this guy wrote this book. It's seminal for how accurately he saw and predicted. And like most seminal works, the thing that makes it seminal pretty much drowns out everything else. The vast bulk of this book's 181 pages is descriptive, with a bare minimum of plot to hold it all together. It's not very entertaining, but it is interesting and relevant sociopolitical commentary.

I actually got this book for free. It came in the mail unsolicited, along with thirty copies of a flyer for an upcoming local appearance by the author, because my name must have appeared on some mailing list of teachers, and they were hoping I'd teach it to my kids. So I was a bit dubious. But it was worth the read. And Ecotopia's militarized borders with the US made a nice analogue for my passage back across from Canada, shot here at the Niagara Falls port of entry. It's strange that Canadian border agents always seem to be more rigorous than America's.

Or maybe it isn't.

Rich (3/5): The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

Ugly. God don't like ugly. And if he's in a bad mood, he'll make sure you're born into a cursed family. Throw in a cheating nymphomaniac for a wife, and you're got Quoyle, the hero of the Shipping News. The only friends he's got decide to become truck drivers and leave him behind, alone with his two young daughters. You'd think he'd crumble. That he'd surrender his remaining chips and take leave of his losses. He's even swimming upstream, returning to his family's abode in Newfoundland, while everyone else with any sense is fleeing from there to get to the big cities.

This can't be good. For Quoyle, no, it's not, but for us, it's all good. We cringe whenever he has another accident. We feel the lump in his throat when, out of obligation, he asks advice on how to raise his own baby girls. This man wouldn't know how to ask for directions if he was lost, yet in these moments, he sheds his loser shroud and rises into the realm of the ordinary. Witnessing this is like watching a man, in a burst of adrenaline, lift a car from atop a hapless victim. And watching Quoyle rebuild his life is like watching Clark Kent learn to fly. It's one of the most engaging stories I've read in the past few years.

Yong (5/26): The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

Go ahead, admire the lovely armchair in which I sat and read this book. Bought the set for my brother's kids for Christmas, started reading it myself in a Canadian library, and finished it during my two day stay at his home in Connecticut. Despite the hype, I didn't find it nearly as engrossing as say Tolkien. But it was a fun, enjoyable, low stress read. And the book actually feels more like sci-fi than fantasy, if you ignore the daemons and witches and talking bears, in that Pullman ties in real science and real history and goes out of his way to provide (plausible/coherent/alternate) explanations for real life stuff, like elementary particles and Christianity and the aurora borealis.

It's a little sad that I'm too old to completely relate to the girl child protagonist who as the hero of the story conveniently displays both ingenuity and fierce determination. But soon enough, most of us will have kids who aren't too old, and I can see how they'll absolutely love it.

Yong (4/26): The Quality of Life Report by Meghan Daum

This book had so much potential. Meghan Daum is my favorite columnist at the LA Times. I love Nebraska. And the fantasy of leaving the big city and moving to one of the small towns I've driven through is one I've, if not considered seriously, at least entertained on numerous occasions, wondered if I had it in me to pull it off. So a novel by Daum in which the protagonist does just that sounded like money in the bank. Honey, this check bounced like a bad perm on the moon.

I started this book in Michigan and forcing myself through it's uncompelling pages still saw me finishing it in Canada, not far from the A&P in the picture where I went grocery shopping with my friends in Brampton, Ontario. My supposed book binge was monkey-wrenched by characters so uniformly implausible they weren't people so much as caricatures of stereotypes of people. The last forty (of 307) pages were good. But the rest...I can't fathom how a writer of such intelligent, witty, perceptive, and deeply human columns could fall so, so flat.

So forget the book. But do check out her columns (http://www.meghandaum.com/latimes_column_2008.htm).

Yong (3/26): The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

After the last two low-hanging fruit, something a little deeper was needed.  This is a beautifully melancholy story about the immigrant experience, like you've never heard before.  From the very first words, you'd never guess this was a thirty-year old Ethiopian-American's first novel, because Mengestu's voice is utterly transparent.  There's no obvious style that intrudes, no effort of crafting words together distracts, just the story to immediately fall into.  And without starting with any sort of bang or attention grab or other cheap ploy, you're immediately immersed in the story from page one, no twenty or seventy pages of descriptives to wade through to set the scene.  I'm still not sure how he managed that.  But he did.

This isn't a happy story.   It's a normal, every-day, some-things-good, lots-of-things-bad story, where amid the gloom of the daily existence that passes for many people's lives, the little bits of occasional beauty glow luminously.  There is no American dream being chased here, only the nightmare of somewhere else that has been fled, and the ghosts of guilt that still haunt.  It reminds me of two friends of mine because the past is Africa, the present a once awful neighborhood in Washington DC that is slowly, painfully gentrifying.  Into Sepha Stephanos' passage of days enters a new neighbor, a white woman and her daughter fixing up the house next door, with whom his occasional awkward interactions bring a ray of hope into his world.