Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

You know that a book is going to be a wonderfully epic novel when the first line is: "The small boys came early to the hanging." The novel lived up to the tremendous first line because it was honestly 900 pages and then some of wonderful prose.

The Pillars of the Earth was written by Ken Follett and came out in 1989. It takes place in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, England in the 12th century and the centerpiece of the novel - the thread that binds everyone in the tapestry together - is the building of the town's new cathedral. It takes place during an important period - the time between the sinking of a ship and the murder of the Archbishop, Thomas Becket (both of which play somewhat important roles in the novel). When we meet the town of Kingsbridge, Henry has already died and there is no clear heir. Maud (his daughter) and Stephen are fighting for the throne. Tom Builder, a master builder, is searching for work for his family of four (soon to be five) because the rich man whose house he was building suddenly found himself without need for it, after being rejected by the woman that was to be his wife. We also meet Phillip, a devout monk who has such a sad history (that we learn about fairly early on in the novel) and who is so kindly and smart, but naive and trusting at the same time. Lady Aliena is the third main character in the novel, and is the woman who was supposed to get married but called the marriage off.

Please don't believe the people that say that this is just a book about cathedrals and church architecture because it is so much more than that (and even though the descriptions of the architecture and the process of building were fascinating). It is also about the intricacies of history - the battles, the changes of power, the role of the church, the life of the people that lived during that period, the rebellions - and the intricacies of relationships between people. We bear witness to the tragedies and joys of the main characters and the hardships that they must so often bear. Be warned - Follett doesn't shy away from the brutality of the times either and there are a few scenes that are just awful and made me cry. I loved this book because of the subject matter and even because of the length. A must read and I can't wait to read the sequel!

Sticks and Stones by Emily Bazelon

I am a tremendous fan of Emily Bazelon - I have been ever since I started listening to her on the Slate podcasts and reading her blog articles there as well. I also loved her interview with Steven Colbert, which is what convinced me to get her new book. My husband bought it for me as my birthday present, which made it even more special!

I think that the idea for this book started in 2009 when Ms. Bazelon began writing articles on Slate about bullying and its impact on students. Social media seemed to amplify the impact of bullying on various groups and that piqued her concern and interest even more so. In this book, Bazelon attempts to define what bullying is, using three case studies, and attempts to provide some guidance to administrators and families in the hopes of reigning in bullying in the social media age.

I think that a lot of people assumed that this book would be really a self help book in disguise and it really isn't - you would know that Bazelon is NOT the self help type of journalist. She's got a really good background for this - having been trained as a lawyer. The case studies are interesting - one is a pretty famous case about the teen girl from Massachusetts that killed herself after having some nasty run ins with other teens in her school. Those teens were charged criminally as adults - a move that is still highly unusual. I loved how she used the case studies to define bullying and to provide examples of good things that were done and bad things that were done. The book itself was very well organized and made sense. It was also very readable-it was informative without talking down to people and informative without coming across as in your face, know-it-all. Her style is also engaging and I loved reading it.

This is an important book that we should all read.

The Tragedy Paper by Elizabeth Laban

This is a young adult novel that focuses on Tim MacBeth, a 17 year old albino that has transferred to a prestigious private school in upstate New York in the middle of his senior year. The motto of the school is "enter here to be and find a friend;" however, Tim has no interest in this. He just wants to finish school and move on, hopefully without drawing too much more unwanted attention to himself. Right away, Tim's plans go out the window when he finds himself falling for the homecoming queen, the "it" girl Vanessa, who is conveniently dating the most popular guy at the school. Vanessa is surprisingly sweet to Tim and really likes him as well. They begin a relationship that not too many people know about; and both are living under the Senior English project - The Tragedy Paper.

Even though this is classified as a young adult novel, you should by no means underestimate it because the novel is beautifully written and wonderfully crafted. It exemplifies the saying "Less is more," in its accessible and simple style. All of my senses were utilized, enabling me to picture the school and experience what the characters did, without unnecessary exposition. The author did a really good job in building up tension and then delivering. I felt like Laban told an authentic story that was easy to relate to.

Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

AFter reading this 2012 winner of the Orange Award, I learned that Miller studied drama at Yale and that her specialty was adapting the classic Greek and Roman myths into stage productions for modern audiences and that's when I realized that this wonderful book came "naturally" to her as a first time novelist. We are immediately transported to the Ancient Greece of the heroes that we know so well and we meet a less well known (er, ok, unknown completely) young man named Patroclus. Patroclus is a prince, who as a young boy is one of the contenders of Helen's hand and who subsequent to his rejection, killed another boy. Patroclus is, as a result, disowned and sent to Phthia as an exile to live in the palace of the king. While there, he becomes friends with Achilles, the half human/half God prince and becomes his companion. Where Patroclus is geeky and awkward, Achilles is strong, handsome and has none of the growing pains that a normal teenage boy should have. They eventually become more then companions, if you get my meaning - which is something that Achilles' goddess of a mother does not like at all.

It becomes something more than a simple re-telling. It becomes about love and betrayal and honor and pride and what happens when a person has too much of each and the lessons are told to us against the backdrop of the Trojan War. It is a war beset with massive amounts of interference on the part of the Gods, who seem fickle and are never happy with anything that happens. Miller does a magnificently seductive job of telling the story and Patroclus is very complex. While he may be pathetic when faced with the Gods and their inane ability to pull the strings of their puppet humans, Patroclus is nonetheless likeable. He's practical and down to earth - the guy that you'd be friends with because he's funny and smart and observant but approachable and humble at the same time. I really enjoyed this novel and eagerly await her next.

Broken Harbor by Tana French

This novel is one of Tana French's Dublin murder squad books. I think that she has two (that I'm sure of) and possibly another additional one out there. I liked both of the ones that I read so when I saw that she had a new one, I started salivating over it and here we are. In this novel, Mick "Scorcher" Kenned - a supporting actor from her novel, Faithful Place, published in 2010, - takes center stage in this novel. His goal is to attempt to figure out what happened in the early morning hours and which resulted in the death of two children and their father and left their mother barely alive and clinging to life. The setting is a development that was obviously intended to be upscale - the homes were designed to be beautiful and are overlooking the sea of a former resort town (that ironically, Mick used to visit with his family). The development hasn't been completed : there are shells of homes and half built homes and empty homes all over the place because the recession has hit hard and people aren't buying homes anymore. It also cost the father of the family his job and the family was struggling to hold it together.

The investigation appears to encompass all of the contacts that the family has - at various points, a close friend and the mother's sister are suspected of the brutal attack - and yet many questions focus on the insular family as well. Had the father gone insane and become dangerously obsessive with providing for his family? Was it random or were they targeted by a person who was surveilling them?

What I loved about this book was that it wasn't just another murder mystery. I felt like French was delving into complex psychological issues. She took on the issue of good people that play by the rules being ruined by things that may be beyond their control. She deals with the tenuous position that family members deal with in having family members that suffer from a significant mental illness and who are not treated, whether by choice or circumstances. Mick's sister deals with what I think might by schizophrenia - at various points she talks about hallucinations - and it's painful to watch him have to go through deciding what to do when their other sibling can't help with her and yet, he has to go work. It also takes on the dire straits that Ireland's economy is in and what happens to the people that live there.

French has created a suspenseful plot while also developing believable and flawed characters. She deals with everything from the ugliness that can be police work to the everyday struggles that people have to deal with in difficult times. And she does it in a way that is lyrical, simple and yet so moving and beautiful. A must read.

Marmee and Louisa by Eve LaPlante

I think that I fell in love with Eve LaPlante when I read American Jezebel perhaps last year or the year before. I thought that LaPlante was my type of historian - a feminist that delved into the women in America's history and then told their stories in a way that was accessible. But then I found out that not only did I love her books, but she is related to Louisa May Alcott - she is a cousin and her great great great grandfather, was Louisa May Alcott's uncle!! So, when I saw that she wrote a book about Louisa May Alcott, I was so excited and, after reading this book, I am convinced that I was Louisa May Alcott in a previous life (or, at the very least, I would totally have been friends with her if I lived when she did because she was awesome).

If you read the first of Alcott's works: Flower Fables, it is inscribed to her mother, Abigail May Alcott. That inscription states: “Whatever beauty or poetry is to be found in my little book is owing to your interest and encouragement of all my efforts from the first to the last.” It's so apparent that Abigail Alcott plays a prominent role in everything that her child did; however we know next to nothing about her and that should be disturbing. It's even more disturbing because it came to light that Louisa and her father burned her papers after her death in order to perhaps protect the families' privacy and also to protect what they believed was Abigail's straying from the script so to speak. It also has to do with the fact that nless yo were a woman like Loisa Alcott (i.e. exceptional in some way), many woman were (and are to some extent still) invisible. Their voices didn't mean mch at the time so the steps weren't taken to preserve the papers that they left.

However, there were a number of primary sources that Eve LaPlante, who is a descendant of Abigail's brother, uses magnificently to tell the story of a woman that was smart and creative but constrained by society. I found Abigail to be a fascinating woman. She was drawn more to the intellectual to the domestic, which often lead to much emotional suffering and misery on her part. She was a strident abolitionist and a feminist, who believed that all people (including slaves and her daughters) should be treated fairly and equally - which meant that they should be able to vote and work for wages outside of the home. Interestingly, she was of almost pure Boston Brahmn blood - with judges (one of whom was a judge responsible for the Salem witch trial and who publicly renounced his actions in Salme and one of whom was JOHN HANCOCK - how awesome?!). She met Bronson Alcott in 1827 and married, much to her dismay later on in life as Bronson was, apparently, the 19th century version of a deadbeat dad. Bronson was either indifferent to the suffering that his family underwent as the result of his inability to support them, or absent, or both. AS a result, in part of necessity, she sought and was often employed - usually as a landlady, seamstress or social worker.

Louisa was exposed to this mentor during her life. And it was apparent, and compellingly argued, that it was Abigail and not Bronson, who encouraged Louisa to become the wildly successful author that she was. Many of Louisa's notes in her journal talk about how she idolized her mother. The inscriptions in her book were mainly to her mother. Her mother often was the person that initially reviewed and edited her book. Abigail was the practical and emotional support to Louisa, while Bronson was the absent leech, for lack of a better description. The book was tremendously researched. It drew upon the words written by all of the main players - including Bronson and other people that Louisa interacted with. The use of primary sources has been unparalleled in the books that I've read, at least since I've been out of college. And the book was wonderfully written - it was a coherent and lyrical narrative of Alcott and her life.

I look forward to Eve LaPlante's next books because they are wonderful.

In One Person by John Irving

So, I started reading books by John Irving way back when I was in college and a friend of mine recommended that I read The World According to Garp (a book that I should probably re-read along with The Cider House Rules and a Prayer for Owen Meany). I should probably send a very heartfelt thank you because Irving has become one of my most treasured authors of all time, and his place in my heart has grown since I learned that he's from New Hampshire.

In One Person is told from the viewpoint of Billy, who always seems to have a crush on the "wrong person," including gender bending types that one wouldn't necessarily expect a young man growing up in the 50's to confidently express a desire for (but whom Billy does). It focuses on his years as a faculty brat at a prep school in rural Vermont and then the years shortly after - I think that it's accurate to say that most Irving's attention is paid to Billy's adolescence and college years. There are big questions about what constitutes sexuality, sexual and gender identity, family and personhood. Billy is born into a family where his father is mysteriously absent - in fact, the ghost of his existence is what we end up being most familiar with; where his mother is seemingly disgusted by him (maybe because he reminds her of his absent biological father?); a kind stepfather that is actually a father; an aunt who hates anyone that doesn't fit into her (conservative) view of life; a cross dressing grandfather and a drunk uncle. The tale spans his whole life - with heavy focus on the preop school years, when he seems to have a crush on everyone from his friend Elaine, to a male wrestler, to the librarian and even his stepfather.

What I think that this book set out to do is to teach people about bisexuality and gay culture. I think it also attempted to portray the struggles that a young male teenager has in coming to terms with his sexuality on his own and the struggles that he has with acceptance in the world at large. Don't get me wrong - those struggles really struck me but what also struck me were the struggles that Billy experienced during the AIDS epidemic in the 80's. I think that, in part, it was because I grew up in the 80's and I don't remember hearing a whole lot about that - my parents didn't really talk to me a whole lot about it - but I learned a lot about it in high school and of course in college and have done a lot of reading since. That part of the book really struck me the most and remains with me a lot. I think that the parts that Irving dedicates to the AIDS epidemic is devastatingly beautiful and perhaps some of the best prose I've seen from anyone and particularly from him.

I loved this book, as I have loved most of his novels.