What I'm Reading Now

I'm reading a bunch of stuff to review for my SF book columns. My favorite part of writing these columns is that I get (1) free books and (b) early access to books. Like, for example, I have an advance copy of Audrey Niffenegger's sequel to The Time Traveler's Wife, which I have been waiting to read for literally decades. I also got Claire North's new book, and Laurie Frankel's new book, and --

ANYWAY.

Here's what I have been reading which aren't books for my review columns.

T.J. Klune, We Burned So Bright

A black hole is about to swallow the entire solar system, including Earth. What do you do with your last few weeks? Don and Rodney, who lost their emotionally troubled son some years earlier, make a road trip with his ashes, mourning his loss as well as the end of the world. Good writing here, but don't expect a happy ending.

I've been following Klune since his self-publishing days, and this was readable, but I can't really recommend it, unless you like to feel unhappy.

David Lodge, Changing Places

My favorite book by Lodge is Nice Work, a novel that follows two people, a university lecturer and a captain of industry as they "shadow" one another at work. This lets Lodge compare the two different worlds of the academy and the factory, which lets him have a lot of fun. Here, in this early novel -- which I am reading for the first time, because the public libraries I had access to before never had a copy -- he does something of the same, having a British professor change places with an American professor for six months of one academic year.

The novel was first published in 1975, and is set in 1969. But a lot of the circumstances it concerns itself with (student protests, people fleeing the US to seek abortions in the UK, problems with granting tenure) still apply, or I guess I should say apply again. Lodge seemed mostly to be fascinated with the difference in sexual mores in the two countries -- Britain being more staid, and California more sexually unbound. This part of the two societies is that which interested me least, frankly, and I wish he had spent more time on the differences in the academic worlds, or the different standards of living, or anything except who is fucking who. Though that was probably a big deal to Lodge, back in 1975, I don't know.

The book is also slightly meta, with interviews and news stories and film scripts scattered throughout; and the ending isn't an ending. The book just quits.

Anyway. Readable, but not as good as Nice Work.

Lauren Hough, Monster of a Land

In this non-fiction book, Hough refits a van into a camper of sorts, and with her dog Woody Guthrie sets off to follow in the footsteps of John Steinbeck, driving around America with her dog. I love road trip books, and books with dogs, and Travels with Charlie, so I snapped this one up.

As with Steinbeck's book, the real subject matter here is America and its people. Steinbeck ended up down in New Orleans, where the schools were being integrated and people were yelling hateful things at six year olds. But before that, he talked to a lot of people and saw a lot of the country. I especially enjoyed his time in Texas.

Hough, who starts in Texas, also talks to people. She ends up in Colorado, spending an isolated week at a lake and realizing she's lonely -- weird, because mostly she doesn't like people. As she travels through the high plains of the Dakotas, Montana, and a bit of Idaho, she meets a lot of people who are also living out of their vans or cars, and a couple who are walking around the country on foot. Student loans and a broken economy are the main culprits, though Hough admits that substance abuse plays its part. She also meets an Evangelical family (Idaho) where the kids are clearly being abused.

The dog is great, and Hough has some important points to make. I would have liked more of the trip, though, to be honest.

Fair warning, I had terrible nightmares after reading this one straight through, all in one day.

Lisa Unger, Darkness My Old Friend

This one is a mystery novel. I think I must have read another book in the series -- not this one -- because some of the characters and the setting seem familiar to me. It's set in The Hollow, a small community in upstate New York, with a small enough population that pretty much everyone knows everyone else.

It's a little too well written and complex to be a mystery novel, if you know what I mean. But there is a mystery: a missing woman in the past, and a missing woman in the present, plus a guy who used to be a cop and, having retired, is now taking care of the people who live around him. He's the one who acts as the private detective. It reminds me a little of Tana French, except her writing is more compelling.

The characters are well done. The pacing is a bit slow, and the mystery is pretty dark (hence the title, I guess). I liked it well enough that I've put a couple more of Unger's books on hold.

Rumer Godden, Greengage Summer

I can't decide if I like Godden or not. I read another one of her books a month or so ago, In This House of Brede, which I remember being entranced by. That's a story about a woman who joins a community of nuns, and how it goes for about a decade. I like hearing about worlds I will never enter, which was part of the attraction of that one.

This was follows four British children, ages four to sixteen, who end up stranded at a French hotel while their mother is in a French hospital with what sounds like sepsis. It's set six or seven years after the end of WWII, I think. In any case, there's a French orphan in his midteens whose mother apparently went with soldiers, leaving behind this kid and a younger half-sister, who the boy has lost track of.

There's quite a bit of French dialogue, which I enjoyed being able to read, and a bank robber, and French cuisine. A kind of a Lord of the Flies summer -- no one is taking care of any of the children here, not the British kids and not the French orphan. They have to take care of themselves, while bad things are clearly happening around them.

I enjoyed this, but it hasn't convinced me to read more Godden, which is a shame, because she wrote about a billion books. If I liked her a lot, that would give me reading  fodder for quite some time.

Leonora Chu, Little Soldiers: An American Boy, A Chinese School, and the Race to Achieve

Leonora Chu is a reporter, now based in Berlin. Back when she wrote this, she and her husband were living in Shanghai, where they decided to put their three-year-old son in a prestigious local preschool. The book is about Chinese schools, with that school as one example and less selective schools as others. Chu is appalled by the (to be fair, appalling) authoritarian nature of the pre-school, in which kids are manhandled into obedience, threatened and force-fed and shamed.

But she has to admit, after she looks at how Chinese children behave as they continue their schooling, that this appalling harshness leads to good results. At one point, she compares an American middle-school math class to a Chinese middle-school math class. Clearly, the Chinese students are better able to think about math, to solve problems, and to learn. But are they better at humanities? Well, yes. They're better at that too. Having been forced to memorize poems as very young children, they have a richer, deeper knowledge base to work with. Also, Chinese schools demand a lot from their students, and (sometimes) get it. 

Chu does show us what happens to the school children who can't do the work, or who come from bad schools, and how these kids have almost no chance to succeed in China. In particular, she writes about the children who grow up separate from their parents, raised by grandparents in the country while the parents work long hours in some city, or at transient labor. These children, whose grandparents are often illiterate, mostly do not do well in the Chinese system. I'm not sure that America does any better with its poor or difficult children though.

This is very readable, and Chu presents the evidence fairly. I think her thesis is that Chinese schools turn out children who are afraid to stand out or to defy authority. I'm not sure that's what her evidence shows, though. If you're interested in education, you might have a look at this one.