Butler’s beguiling prose is hypnotic.  His detailed portraits of his characters, the description of their every move, every tick, every eyebrow raised pregnant with life-altering meanings paint a story that is moving at times but sometimes annoying (to the Book Gourmand, anyway.) Without revealing any plot lines, I think my main complaint is this: Butler reminds me of therapists of the 80′s and 90′s (or perhaps it is still so but I haven’t heard much therapist stories as of late), it is always the parents’ fault.  Although according to Freud, usually it is always the mother’s fault ,but Butler assigns a great deal of the blame to fathers.   He would be shocked to hear that studies nowadays find peers more influential than parents, or that children with horrible parents turn out to be great parents and spouses.  But I digress.

The point is that A Small Hotel, is beautifully written.  And that my eyes welled up with tears in the end, which happens rarely to the Book Gourmand.  Marriages fall apart all the time, about 50% of the time, in fact.  And I would guess that most marriages (more than 50%! hopefully) begin with the best intentions.  Butler’s novel puts one such marriage under the microscope.  What happens to the best of those intentions?  Why do marriages crumble?  Why can’t people see when they are being stupid?  These are all questions that Butler answers eloquently.  And the answers are worth finding out.  You may not always agree with them, especially if you are an armchair therapist like the Book Gourmand, but the storytelling is intoxicating.  And it might  just make you want to turn to the person nearest to you and tell them, “I love you.”  So don’t finish the book in a crowded train car.

Russian Winter begins with the tale of an aging ballerina, a once-famous dancer who had defected from Russia during the Cold War – now at the sunset of her life,  choosing to auction off her collection of jewelry to benefit a foundation she had helped began.  A recluse with few people to call as true friends and no family to speak of, we learn of Nina Revskaya’s life through her recollections of her early life in Russia.  Woven into the present day is the quest of Grigori Solodin, a professor and translator who’s has been investigating the circumstances of his birth and is convinced that Nina holds the key to the mystery of his birth parents. Of course as the reader you do no get this until halfway through the book, and at first you have to slog through pages and pages of unrelated plot lines, like the auctioneer’s bereft love life and failed marriage and ultimate coming of age and reconciliation with her mother – which I believe has little impact on the actual story line and whose elimination would have shed a few hundred pages from this lengthy tome.  Given that complaint however, Kalotay masterfully works the main plot line.  Her portrait of life under Stalin is also remarkable and poignant.  But for me the most interesting gem is the unraveling of her main heroine’s character. Her depiction of Nina’s character is marvelous in its complexity.  Nina becomes less and less the heroine one would have hoped for her to be.  In the end she is just a girl, like any girl her age, selfish, unaware, naive – unschooled in the politics of love and life.  In some ways one can fault the regime that she was raised in, the culture of distrust and suspicion that she had to live under yet the narrator shows that people can live under the same conditions and trust, love, and be loyal.  Perhaps the bigger part of the novel is how the conditions of what human beings live under can alter the outcome of a story.  Lives are lost.  Whole histories can be lost.  Where in a perfectly democratic world a misunderstanding is only a misunderstanding that can lead to a few tears, a broken heart, perhaps years of not speaking to one another, in a stricter regime, one can end up in the Gulag or worst.

I think my problem with the book arises from the fact that Alison seems to be a rather unreliable narrator.  And, she is not a very good detective, in spite of the fact that her boss believes she is and the bad guys are in perfect agreement.  We get some some very witty and acute documentation of the the world she investigates and  she presents an engaging commentary of the quirky characters she hangs out with, but by the end of the book I don’t really know who Alison Temple is.  I am not sure what she has gone through is truly real or if she is just on some drug-induced haze.  I don’t know what she truly feels or how she got anywhere on her investigations.  Best I can offer is that the universe seems to be moving her along more that she is doing any moving along the universe.  She doesn’t seem to be forging any paths but simply reacting to the elements around her.  And that’s probably what I least liked about the book.

The writing is beautiful and sometimes funny but Alison’s character didn’t have any real hold on me.  Her story never became compelling enough because all the reader ever gets to see are glimpses of some unusual observations which become increasingly unbelievable.  With no “shared history” with the character, I became less and less interested in her story and just really wanted to end my indifference by finishing the book and hoping there would be at least some answers to the purported mysteries Alice should have been working on solving.  I wasn’t really interested in what would happen to her or if she was going to be happy or sad.  Some of the chapters in the book seem more like separate vignettes and never truly fully coalesce in the end to deliver a satisfying conclusion.  It’s too bad because I wanted the book to be really good, because Smith’s writing is worth savoring.  But for the Book Gourmand, good writing isn’t enough, I also need a good story to go along with it.

Set in Australia, the story follows Alice through a week where young Alice discovers the person she has become and tries to reacquaint herself with the children she has spent the last ten years raising (Really, are these her kids? Why are they so annoying?)  A sister she was close to at 29 but not so much at 39 becomes an unlikely ally.  And through her and others they paint a picture of Alice for her that Alice wasn’t liking very much.  I was actually prepared to hate the book, early on it seems that 39 year old Alice has become a horrible bitch, which I could believe if she started out as a bitch.  Nice people, I think, get nicer as they age.  Awful people get more awful, unless they experience an epiphany like Saul on his way to Damascus.  I don’t find too many nice people from 29 who turn into dragon ladies late in life, although I’m sure it could happen.  Liane Moriarty, however, was able to narrate a story which doesn’t seem patently false in its premise.  People do change, and the people we become at 40 are not necessarily what we might have wished for ourselves at 30.  Most people get married with the utmost conviction that the person they are choosing will be the person they will be choosing ten years and twenty years down the road.  No one fantasizes about having a glorious, short-lived marriage punctuated by a nasty divorce.  But divorce happens.  All the time actually, or rather, about fifty percent of the time.  Imagine waking up one day after an incredible honeymoon with a lover who can’t stand to be in the same room with you?  We often associate love as being a function of our hearts but the truth is it is more of a function of our brains, or more specifically, our memories.  We love (or hate) a person because of or memories of what they have done to us, for us and with us.  We can make connections fueled by intuition, instinct and chemistry – love at first sight for example, or the bond a mother feels for a newborn child, but these don’t last if they are not forged by acts that we later commit to memory.  Alice gets a unique chance to be able to critique her life and her relationships from an almost-objective third party.  She continually challenges her older self with reflections that would have been impossible had she not lost the memory of the slights and transgressions that have propelled her to divorce the love of her life.

But don’t interpret my philosophical ramblings with the actual entertainment value of the book.  What Alice Forgot is actually a perfect beach read.  Funny, poignant and absorbing, What Alice Forgot is  an easy read that can raise a lot of questions about love and marriage and fulfillment. It also reminds us that sometimes  precious love can be so easily lost and discarded in the pathos of daily life, and that sometimes, all one needs is a different perspective.

We meet Ricky Rice as he contemplates his life as he is cleaning out a bathroom stall in a train station,  just another stall in another station in the long lines of bathroom stalls in train stations that he has cleaned out all across the country.  You don’t get to wonder long about the strangeness of an introspective, philosophical bathroom janitor because not long after we are propelled with him into an odyssey that just keeps getting stranger and stranger.  Strange as well is the fact that while the books begins as a slow-moving meditation on life and its meanings and mysteries, it ends as a made-for-the-movies action-packed thriller.  In a good way.

Ricky receives an invitation to travel to Vermont along with a bus ticket.  He accepts the mysterious invitation because like me (who downloaded the book for free), he had nothing to lose.  We learn more bits and pieces about Ricky ( a current self-described junkie) as the story progresses.  Yes, he was raised in a cult, but a cult different from the one we might have heard of in popular culture.  There is no white male leader with many wives and lots of weapons, but instead three charismatic Black women referred to as The Washerwomen and just a few weapons.  The cult is not located in the middle of Texas, or some island we have never heard, but instead, in the tenements of New York City, an urban island, if you will.  The story unfolds in tantalizing pieces. It is told against a backdrop of a full blown discussion on race, religion and politics.  And if that weren’t enough, there is the mystical side.  I won’t say more because it’s a revelation a reader needs to experience for him or herself.  I’ll just say that I was extremely surprised at the direction the book went. Surprised, but delighted.  Oh, and I forgot to mention, some parts are hilarious.  LaValle is wonderfully adroit in the art of dark comedy.  Take for example, the secret society of the Washburn Library.  LaValle manages to awe us with its mysterious ways.  He paints us a picture of an all-powerful, all-knowing, insidious institution – until we get blindsided by the fact that it has to send its snappily dressed members around on Jet Blue.  Apparently the all-powerful and all-knowing institution can’t predict stock picks, so they’re slowly going broke and has to economize just like any other blue chip institution that’s fallen on hard times.

Part of LaValle’s genius is his clever rendering of his characters.  We meet them as we would a person we have just met at a cocktail party.  We learn their name, a bit about what they do, where they’ve been, but we don’t really get to truly know them until we witness them in action.  We are shocked when they perform acts we cannot believe they are capable of because LaValle witholds their history both from Ricky, who is the narrator, and the reader.  It mirrors how we get to know people in reality.  You may think you know your neighbor until you see their name in the front page of a newspaper.  Acts define characters. Wherein we might think in this world that it is what we believe in that defines us, truly it is what you do that ultimately makes you who you are.

If the science and the personal tragedy of Henrietta Lacks and her family wasn’t enough, the author also weaves in the story of her personal journey of tracking down the story of Henrietta Lacks.  She embeds herself with the family, particularly with Henrietta’s only surviving daughter, Deborah, whose own personal journey to discovering the truth about her mother becomes intertwined with Skloot’s journalistic ambitions.  It is a relationship frayed with angst and suspicion.  Even as a reader I almost feel embarrassingly voyeuristic to be so in  intimately privy to the pains and triumphs of unravelling the threads of a complicated story.  Skloot candidly reveals even the unsavory parts of her journey, the suspicions,the mistrust, her own weaknesses.  It gives the story a different dimension but I’m not so sure it needed to be there.  Like all things, I would have been happier not knowing.  Just the facts, ma’am.  Just give me the facts.  I’m not so sure it was important for me to know about the very physical tussle between Deborah and Skloot.  It is like watching a married couple I am friends with fight publicly.  I cringe every time.  So in addition to the all the stories Skloot is narrating, she includes her own odyssey, thus exposing the more unsavory parts of her expedition, often at the expense of Lack’s family. Though it makes for interesting reading I think it diverts the spotlight from the main event, which as the title suggests, is about paying homage to the woman behind the immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks.

That being said however, I will say that Mansfield Park will not rank among my top Austen novels.  Austen’s protagonist, Fanny Price, (who I believe Austen means for us to hold as the model example of virtue and goodness given that she named her after her favorite niece) is a frustrating, timid, wallflower whose righteousness, though at times admirable, seems mostly judgmental.  Much more interesting is her “friend” (Fanny might not like for her to be called that) Mary Crawford, a forward-thinking, outspoken and lively young woman who the narrator exposes in the end to be shallow, deceitful and misguided.

Not unlike the capital of Panem of the Hunger Games, English aristocratic life revolved much around the idea of how to entertain oneself in the endless days of one’s existence.  Rich young women didn’t work.  Rich young first-born males basically waited for their fathers to die so they can take over the family business, which usually meant traveling places to meet with their employees.  Rich young second-born males served the church as ministers, and when they are ordained can write a sermon and hold mass for the villagers.  So then there is this time, those wondrous years between 17 and 23 (for women), where life can be devoted to not getting bored.  And since one can only read so many books and do so much embroidery and reality tv was not an option, all you can look forward to are the dinners with other people, long walks in your private multi-acred gardens, the occasional ball on a Tuesday or Wednesday night (the concept of the weekend activities wasn’t born yet), and the occasional three to six-month visit with a friend who has invited you to their home, hopefully someplace interesting.  Of course this is only for the rich and the occasional poor relation (Fanny Price), who are invited to come live them to keep them company.

Pretty much all of Austen’s characters are unlikable in this novel.  Fanny and Edward seems to be the only one Austen portrays favorably and even they seem to be one-dimensional and stale.  Is there really a Baronness out there who’s entire goal in life is to sit on her sofa and do as little as possible?
What kept me reading, however,  was Austen’s vivid rendering of aristocratic life in the 18th century.  You begin to envy them at first: the servants, the balls, the dinners, the clothing, the mansions.  All these and all the time in the world to do whatever they want (write a novel, master painting, discover astrophysics).  At some point in the novel,  you begin realize that their world is truly a prison.  Marry well or you will starve to death.  Marry well, cheat on your husband and you will become a social pariah then starve to death.  Be unfortunate enough to be born as the second son and you will probably starve to death, or at the very least not get the girl of your dreams.  Even Fanny Price, in spurning a well-to-do suitor, doesn’t seem to realize the gravity of her situation (or chooses to ignore it and assumes her uncle will take care of her).  She lives in a prison (granted a genteel one but a prison, nevertheless). Yet in all her introspectiveness, and in all her moral pronouncements on other, she herself never seem to recognize the prison she is living in.

Just to round out Austen’s portrait of 18th century living, she contrasts the aristocracy with the hoi polloi by bringing Fanny to visit her true family, the mother and father who readily sent her to live with her aunt and uncle, and her eight brothers and sisters.  Now the Price family is not exactly extremely poor, they can only afford one servant – but the household is in sharp, appalling contrast to the genteel life in Mansfield Park.  Here if anything, is Austen’s stern warning (and frightening morality tale) in the importance of choosing the right spouse.  Choose wrongly and you end up with a drunk husband, a gaggle of kids with no manners, little money, just one servant, and  look older and fatter to boot than your wiser, better-married  sisters.  Though the marriage lesson is lost on Fanny, she is definitely embarrassed and appalled by her family’s way of life.  No love of her family can repress her disdain for her surroundings.  She wants nothing to do with them and would rather spend the rest of her life sitting next to her catatonic Baroness aunt helping her with her embroidery than have a chance to reconnect with her mother and siblings.  She even convinces herself that her aunt needs her and cannot do without her (probably literally dying for company as she sits on her couch), even though clearly it is her own mother with her gaggle of children who can use Fanny’s help in the house.  That, dear readers, is why I am completely disenchanted with Fanny Price and.  She passes judgment easily on others, calls them out for their shallowness, their love of theater (hello, stick-in-the-mud!), their insincerity and manipulativeness yet given the option of sticking by her poor family, she dismisses  them in a hurry so she can run back to beautiful, refined Mansfield Park – where the servants are trained and well-mannered, the gardens and horses are well-groomed, dinner is always served hot and in gracious company, and always followed by tea or coffee in the drawing room.

There are so many inconsistencies in all the characters that you feel that Austen is simply crafting their situations to get the lesson that she wants, instead of investing in any real character development.  One example is the character of Fanny’s well-to-do-suitor, Henry Crawford, who starts out as an unprincipled cad, devises a Dangerous Liaison plot to ensnare our heroine because he is bored, starts out on a long and torturous path of enlightenment because he falls in love with her, but quickly strays from it because of a quickie flirtation.  Why, Jane, why?  It seemed like a promising plot line, one thick with redemption and just screaming to come to fruition.  And then Austen ends the story with Edmund realizing that he should marry Fanny.  The end.  Why, Jane, why?  I suppose even great writers are sometimes driven and misguided by some higher agenda.  Jane Austen died young, at 42, we will never know where else she might have led us but even though I was frustrated by her characters, Mansfield Park, itself as a character, is still beguiling in her hands.

Though still quite entertaining, and a definite-must read if you’ve already started the trilogy, I was just a bit disappointed in the lack of complication and depth of this third installation. Without trying to blow any endings, much of what were critical choices that caused much soul-searching for Katniss in the first book becomes simplified for her. Can we really believe the kind of man Gail becomes in this book? Or is he developed by the author in this way so that we can feel good about the choices Katniss makes?

Granted, perhaps I should leave the more in-depth analysis for the next book in the queue (Mansfield Park), but Collins first book had begun with so much introspection and social commentary that I had expected her to carry it to the bitter end. That being said it’s still entertaining, which I guess is what it’s all about to begin with.

So I gave myself a break, only to be lured once again into that stomach-churning, skin-crawling plot of events that Collins has designed for her readers.  What relief that the violence in the second book is mostly confined to violence to helpless senior citizens!  I speak ironically here, unless you miss my tone, but I do recognize that the graphic violence here is a bit more tolerable because they are done not to innocent babes, but adults who have lived fuller lives, taken more risks, lived longer in general.  Though violence in general should never be tolerated in a civilized and humanitarian society, I can see why violence and cruelty can exist.  We tolerate degrees of it differently.  To take the life of an innocent child is abhorrent, but the life of a grown adult full of sins and imperfections, perfectly acceptable.

Collins continues her story of the impending rise of a revolution of Panem and Katniss Everdeen’s struggle to obey creepy President Snow (who doesn’t seem to age) and keep her family safe and the unwelcome revelation that she is becoming the growing symbol of the revolution.  Amidst it all is the bizarre love triangle that she is entangled in between Peeta, her fellow victor and savior, and Gale, her childhood friend.

The book doesn’t disappoint in its delivery of action-packed scenes and in Collins ever-fertile imagination for the creation of truly cruel and unusual terrors.  In the end, though Katniss’ character sometimes waivers and disappoints in the evolution of her philosophical musings and the writing seems hurried and lacks the poignancy and depth of the first book (Don’t they all? Note to Editors: Stop rushing your writers to complete the sequels!) , I still don’t hesitate to pick up and read the third one because at this point, I just want to know how Collins is planning to end it all.

Paris to the Moon is  a compendium of Gopnik’s essays on Parisian life and life in Paris for his young American family.  A writer for The New Yorker (that explains the highfallutin’ language), Gopnik and his wife and one-year old son moves to Paris for the same reasons everyone who moves to Paris usually have.  It’s a great beautiful city and it would be cool to have a child who speaks fluent French.  Gopnik follows a long tradition of American writers who move to Paris because it’s super-cool.  Gopnik records his observations on everything from the difficulties of procuring an apartment in Paris (if you’re a foreigner as opposed to a high-level official procuring apartments for his family and friends), to the simple pleasures of his son riding a carousel in Luxembourg Gardens.  Everything is profound.  Nothing is mundane.  Even the mundane becomes profound.  I think what is most fascinating to me is how dated Gopnik’s book seems.  He lived in Paris from 1995 until about 2000.  He writes about the the Parisians love of their cell phones when he arrives in Paris in 1995.  In New York at the time, apparently, few people owned cell phones and New Yorkers certainly didn’t walk with around the streets with cell phones glued to their ears.  He observes then that the love of cell phones seem very French.   How false his observations seem now, only sixteen years later.  Will anyone under 25 even believe his was ever the case?  Gopnik writes of getting 400 pages of faxes at his apartment and his wife’s quest for a Parisian Kinko’s so she can make copies. Only sixteen years and already he seems to be writing of another era.

Interestingly, the book doesn’t really make me want to move to France.  Luckily, it hasn’t discouraged me from visiting.