Paper Towns by John Green
Part of the reason I chose this book is because it has been made into a movie and will soon be released in theaters. I am a huge fan of John Green in general and was one of the millions that felt I “discovered” The Fault in Our Stars prior to the huge media craze. But for some reason I did not go into this book with high expectations. I think I almost had lower expectations because there’s a stigma in my mind that has been propagated by authors like Suzanne Collins that if an author has one wildly popular book/movie the rest of their work will progressively deteriorate. So this book was a pleasant surprise.
In summary this is the story of two teenagers who have grown up next door to each other but taken the most opposite paths. The boy, Quentin, is a rule-follower, nerdy and typical while his next door neighbor, Margo, is a wild thing. She is exceptionally popular and has a lot of power in their school social hierarchy but she is fixated on adventures and not living within the confines of “normality.”
Margo and Quentin go on one wild night of adventure and escapades which Margo has designed and then she disappears. The rest of the book is spent with Quentin struggling to follow her vague clues and track her down. Margo is a fascinating character in some ways. She refuses to follow the preset “blueprint” of life that is expected of her, skipping out just before high-school graduation and shunning college and the idea of husband, 2 kids and a dog. What I would like to know is why? And how? How did she get this way? Sure we’ve all felt the urge to run away from life. Sometimes it is easier than the living of it. But I wonder with Margo, as I do with others, what propels someone to actually leave. What is the catalyst to hop the train and finally really just check out? I think Mr. Green attempts to address some of these questions in the conclusion but he still falls short. In the end we see her not as a brave and adventurous heroine but as the most broken and fearful parts of our own longings. And I just wish quietly that someone would get her help.
I still recommend this book as a page turner and an interesting alternative to some of the rote teen romance novels out there. If you’re looking for entertainment with just a twinge of “intellectuality” this is an excellent read.
What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
This book had made so many summer best seller lists that I figured I should check it out and see what all the fuss was about. And I loved it. This is the story of a young 39 year old mother of 3, Alice, who is on the edge of divorce who falls in the gym and gets amnesia and forgets everything after 10 years ago to when she was 29, pregnant with her first child and wildly in love with her husband. Although the plot of this book can basically be summed up in that one sentence it doesn’t make for a less interesting read. The fascinating part of this book to me is in the examination of how we grow and change as people and what in our lives facilitates it. To me it highlights the many things we overlook as we charge ahead in our everyday lives. Alice finds that she doesn’t really like the person she has become: a busy, irritable mother who has forgotten to invest in the people she truly values. In contrast there are some things that she has done right such as raising her kids, developing exercise habits, and organizing and running a few large events. But she has essentially lost sight of “being” in favor of “doing” and this does not a happy life make.
I definitely enjoyed this book as an examination of a life well or not so well lived and it caused me to think about my own life and the things that are important and will be important to me in the coming years. It was a little simplistic in its portrayal of all things “former Alice” as good and simple and all things “current Alice” as wrong and overbearing. At every stage of life there are things we should hold onto about ourselves and things that we simply must outgrow. The most important message though was that the people in our lives are the most important things and our investments in other people are never wasted.
I highly recommend this book.
Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
Annihilation is the first book in a series about a strange land called Area X that holds lots of mysteries. It is akin to the land of Jurassic Park in that it is a (somewhat) contained area watched and researched by scientists and into which expeditions are sent to explore. Annihilation opens with the twelfth expedition entering Area X. The twelfth expedition consists of four females, a psychologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist and the main character from whose point of view the book is written, a biologist. The book follows their various discoveries of the bizarro creatures and checkered past of Area X. This is a slight spoiler but I’m going to go ahead with it. There’s an added layer of human interest story in that the biologist’s husband was a member of the previous expedition and as a consequence of that involvement he is dead. There, that’s all I’m going to say.
California by Edan Lepucki
California is a true post-apocalyptic novel. The main characters are a couple, Frida and Cal who have run away from L.A. which has fallen into disrepair, poverty and general ruin. The country as a whole has been pretty much demolished by various meteorological catastrophes as well as economic collapse. The only safe places that remain are cordoned off Communities reserved for the rich. The novel opens with Cal and Frida who are dirt poor, living on a homestead in the middle of nowhere. And then Frida becomes pregnant. (Not really a spoiler because it happens in the first chapter.) This will be the motivation for most of the plot throughout the novel. The couple discover that they are not alone, as they believed, but that there are people living nearby. The people nearby refer to themselves as the Land and they live on an area protected by giant metal spikes. Cal and Frida move to the land but notice that there are no children living there. They struggle to fit in and learn about what’s really going on with these strange people before there is a vote to determine if they will be allowed to stay. All the while they are not sure if they really want to stay or if Frida’s child will be allowed. Meanwhile there’s a whole other loosely intertwined plot-line with a terrorist organization called “The Group” who is trying to bring down the rich Communities. So much for the summaries let’s look briefly at how the books stack up.
Comparison of California and Annihilation
Both books have beautiful covers—not saying I bought them based on that…but not saying I didn’t.Tie-both win.
Both books have lots of mysteries from the very beginning and the plots are based on a series of “reveals.” The main problem I had with Annihilation was that the author didn’t seem to know exactly where he was going so I, as the reader, didn’t feel I could trust him. It reminded me of the last book in a series like The Hunger Games where the author knows they have to get somewhere but even they are not sure where. It didn’t feel planned out. And the reveals were vague. Even after the biologist sees everything we’re not really sure what she saw. The reveals in California although maybe a little predictable did at least feel planned out. And they made things more clear rather than increasingly murky. Advantage: California
As far as character development goes both books were lacking. I had a glimmer of hope at one point that California was going to give me something here but in the end I didn’t feel like the characters learned or changed even when they were given the opportunity to. Maybe it wasn’t the authors’ faults…some characters are just stubborn. But I did feel like Cal and Frida were both complex multidimensional characters, Frida especially. Meanwhile the biologist (we never learn her name) in Annihilation seemed very “one note.” And that note was closed off and standoffish. Not a good choice for a main character. Advantage: California
The marriage problem was a factor in both these books. I don’t often read books about married people (I have nothing against it but for whatever reason it just doesn’t happen) but interestingly enough marriage was a key theme in both these novels. In both books the main characters are very happy and in love initially but eventually both run into problems with communication that mess up their relationships. In California the author alternates each chapter between Cal and Frida’s perspectives. What I loved about this marriage problem was that while they both routinely got mad at or frustrated with the other person they both clearly still valued the other person as well. Often we would find one or the other of them just wanting to be with the other or thinking about certain aspects they liked about the other person—even when they were fighting. This was reassuring to me and actually seemed like an uplifting picture of marriage. In Annihilation things work a little differently. The biologist and her husband had difficulties because she was introverted and he was extroverted and they communicate in completely different ways. Eventually (SPOILER) she finds his journal and realizes that he had as deep of feelings as she did and she begins to understand him better as a person. While this is somewhat comforting it is sad that the reconciliation comes after he is dead. For some reason though I never felt like their marriage was very realistic. Advantage: California
Finally, the endings of both books were very disappointing to me. Annihilation is the first in a series so I didn’t expect it to be fully satisfying. Still I found myself at the end of the book thinking “but what really happened in the book?” I didn’t feel like we had gone anywhere. And then there was the ending to California. Oh, California, how you disappointed me. I don’t know if the author was hoping for the book to take off and trying to leave herself room for a sequel but that’s definitely what it felt like. There were so many loose ends, so many questions unresolved. It felt like one of those endings where the author was running out of time and just had to wrap things up the best she could. Tie: both lose
Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay
Despite its title (the dental hygienist who saw me reading it told me “that book scares me”) this book is really not about feminism. Actually it’s a series of essays about race, gender and sexuality based mostly on reviews of the books and movies that deal with them and current events.
The opening segment is about the author, the fabulous Roxanne Gay, and the parts of the book I enjoyed the most are those where she shares about herself and gets personal. My favorite chapter of the book is about Scrabble a competitive scrabble tournament she entered. Ms. Gay writes with an engaging and definitive voice. She very competently and thoughtfully addresses sexual violence and racial tensions and although I don’t agree with her on every point (see: reproductive freedom) I find myself nodding along because the heart of the book is that we treat all people with compassion and respect. “I have never considered compassion a finite resource.” Gay writes, “I would not want to live in a world where that was the case.”
Ladies, if you don’t read anything else please just go to the bookstore and read one chapter out of this book. The chapter is “How to Be Friends with Another Woman” and it is an extremely helpful list starting with “1. Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses—pretty but designed to SLOW women down.” Another one that spoke straight to me was this “3. If you are the kind of woman who says “I’m mostly friends with guys” and act like you’re proud of that, like that makes you closer to being a man or something and less of a woman as if being a woman is a bad thing [fix it]. It’s ok if most of your friends are guys but if you champion this as a commentary on the nature of female friendships, well, soul-search a little.” The chapter finishes with some sound advice from the author’s mother “you are who you surround yourself with.”
In the end, although I found the content of the book interesting I found the author even more so. She loves Sweet Valley High, Scrabble and the Hunger Games. She seems like someone I would want for a friend. The book made me think about issues that we should all think about more and for that alone I would recommend it. But I tend to agree with the author when she says in the acknowledgements “I hope my parents don’t read this book”!
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
This book is a fascinating and hopefully written examination of how we age and how we die in western cultures. This book is imminently interesting to me because I see the aging and dying process every day I work but I strongly encourage others to read it, even if you don’t have any close contact with death at the moment I promise that you will have to deal with it eventually whether in your own life or that of a family member or friend. What is so enlightening and hopeful about this book is that Gawande does not make it about condemnation or the many things we do wrong in the medical field when we are facing death.
He brings the prospect of death respectfully forward and by placing it in the forefront demands that we deal with it reasonably without the prejudice of fear. “People naturally prefer to avoid the subject of their decrepitude” he says with a gentle wink. But “there are costs to averting our eyes from the realities. We put off dealing with the adaptations we need to make as a society. And we blind ourselves to the opportunities that exist to change the individual experience of aging for the better.” He champions the field gerontology, good hospice care and the idea of making an advance directive. There is a radical idea that should not be radical that our medical care should center around what is important to the patient and what their goals are, whether the minimizing of pain or the ability to see their grandchildren, rather than the treatment of the disease.
In no way does Gawande minimize the difficulties and confusions that abound in the dying process. In fact the book is very personal in that Gawande deals with the decisions of treatment and dying as his own father goes through the dying process. In a heartbreaking scene he describes sitting with his parents in a hospital room and discussing his father’s options and how confusing it was at each turn even though he and both his parents are physicians. He intimately understands how difficult it is to make the right choice at the right time. With tragic clarity Gawande writes:
“At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped. Such courage is difficult enough. We have many reasons to shrink from it. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage—the courage to act on the truth we find. The problem is that the wise course is so frequently unclear. For a long while, I thought that this was simply because of uncertainty. When it is hard to know what will happen it is hard to know what to do. But the challenge, I’ve come to see, is more fundamental than that. One has to decide whether one’s fears or one’s hopes are what should matter most.”
Adventurers Unite 
