SECRETS OF EDEN by Chris Bohjalian

Stephen Drew is a disillusioned pastor in Vermont, where homicides are rare.  When one of his parishioners, Alice Hayward, and her husband die in an apparent murder-suicide, he decides to take a break from his profession.  His narrative is the first of four sections, in which we learn that Alice was a battered wife who had an affair with the pastor.  The narrator of the second section is the local prosecutor who soon discovers that Alice’s husband’s death was most likely not a suicide, and Stephen himself comes into the crosshairs of her investigation.  The third narrator is Heather Laurent, an author who believes in angels and writes about them.  She is drawn to the Haywards’ deaths, because her father killed her mother and then hanged himself. Other than that, her role in this novel is something of a puzzle, but there is a dichotomy between her belief in magical beings and the pastor’s waning faith.  The final section is narrated by Katie, the Haywards’ 15-year-old daughter, who was spending the night with a friend after a concert when her parents died.  Although the identity of the perpetrator did not surprise me, the juicy plot is full of other twists and turns that make for a gripping read.  This novel may not totally succeed as a whodunit, but the pastor is a fascinating character, as he navigates the suspicion that surrounds him and the doubt that haunts his ministry.

OSCAR AND LUCINDA by Peter Carey

At first I thought this book was just about gambling—obsession with gambling, gambling in secret, guilt over gambling, and passing judgment on gambling.  However, about halfway through the book, the plot becomes focused on one wager between the title characters.  Oscar develops a gambling system that enables him to attend Oxford and then sail from England to Australia in the mid-1800s.  This journey is especially taxing, as he is terrified of open water.  Lucinda, living in Sydney and purchasing a glassworks with her inheritance, goes to England to find a husband.  She fails in that endeavor and meets Oscar on her return voyage.  She is more of a compulsive gambler, with plenty of resources, but her gender hampers her ability to nourish her obsession.  The problem with this novel is that the pace is agonizingly slow.  The book finally becomes somewhat interesting, though, when Oscar embarks on an ill-advised expedition that has consequences neither he nor Lucinda, nor the reader, for that matter, could have imagined.  One thing that annoyed me about this novel is that it is so wordy that I at times overlooked important events that were buried in a lot of descriptive language, and I had to retrace to find what I had missed.  Also, the narration is actually first person, with Oscar’s great-grandson as the narrator, and each time the word “I” popped up, I had to remind myself who that was, as the vast majority of the book has nothing to do with Oscar’s progeny.

THE REIVERS by William Faulkner

My brother and I saw the movie THE REIVERS about fifty years ago when we were teenagers.  Obviously, I don’t remember it all that well, but I know that we both loved it, and reading the book has jogged loose a few memories about the movie.  Steve McQueen bears no physical resemblance to his character Boon Hogganbeck, as described in the book.  Nevertheless, as I was reading I still pictured Boon in my mind as Steve McQueen.  This novel is much more accessible than most of Faulkner’s stuff, but, even so, there were passages with incredibly long sentences that left me scratching my head.  It takes place in the early 1900s and involves the trade of a “borrowed” automobile for a stolen racehorse.  Narrated by 11-year-old Lucius, who experiences the adventure of a lifetime at the hands of the aforementioned Boon Hogganbeck, this is a coming-of-age story in the truest sense.  Lucius learns more in a few days than in all the years leading up to this adventure.  He has a strong sense of what it means to be courageous and honest, and his young life up to this point has been one of integrity and good behavior.  Now he is challenged by what he calls non-Virtue and discovers how to bring his moral character to bear on a situation that is decidedly non-virtuous.  As always, Faulkner’s writing is mostly a delight, when you can decipher it.  For example, how clever is this sentence?  “He simply drove us up to the door and put us out and drove away, pausing only long enough to give Everbe one hard jeering leer and Boon one hard leering jeer….”  Love it!

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN by Jonathan Lethem

Lionel, the narrator of this noir crime novel, has Tourette’s syndrome, which causes him to utter nonsensical words and to touch things he has no business touching.  He works for L&L Car Service in Brooklyn, but it’s really a detective agency—kind of.  L&L’s owner is Frank Minna, who recruited all of his “agents” from an orphanage when they were teenagers.  Minna dies of a stab wound early in the novel, and Lionel decides to become a true detective and investigate Minna’s murder.  Dubbed “Freakshow” by Minna, he battles his Tourette’s every step of the way, but he is probably the smartest of the Minna men and therefore may have the best shot at discovering the truth.  Basically, this is a book about small-time wiseguys who don’t even carry firearms.  The author does a great job of generating a mood that mimics early twentieth century crime novels where the detective wore a fedora.  This novel even has a shady femme fatale in the person of Julia, Minna’s widow, who hightails it out of town as soon as she hears the news of her husband’s death.  The villains are a pair of mobsters, Matricardi and Rockaforte, known as The Clients, and the Fujisaki Corporation, which may be using a Zen studio as a front.  The conclusion of the book is a little rushed and not totally crystal clear to me, but the writing is excellent.  At one point, Lionel describes his tongue as feeling like “it had been bound in horseradish-and-cola-soaked plaster and left out on the moon overnight.”  Even if the storyline is a little thin, Lionel and his trippy exclamations are worth the ride.

THE HUMAN STAIN by Philip Roth

Coleman Silk is a classics professor at a small college.  When he innocently refers to some students that have never shown up for class as spooks, his remark is interpreted by some as racist, as the students are black.  Although he had no previous knowledge of the students’ ethnicity, he eventually resigns from his post, further cementing the appearance of guilt.  The irony of his plight is that Coleman is black himself, although he has managed to conceal this fact from his wife, children, colleagues, and friends for decades.  Near the end of the novel, his sister contrasts his behavior, in which he has divorced himself totally from his mother and siblings, with that of his brother, who has fought for civil rights.  Perhaps Coleman has taken the easy way out, in order to receive treatment equal to whites, but his whiteness is ultimately his downfall.  This aspect of the storyline captivated me, but another aspect did not.  Coleman enters into a sexual relationship with Faunia, a woman half his age, who is a member of the janitorial staff at the college.  Her ex-husband is a PTSD victim and is stalking her, putting Coleman in harm’s way as well.   I just didn’t understand what Faunia’s real purpose was in the novel, except to give Coleman something to live for after the demise of his career.  The novel is set against the backdrop of Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings, and Coleman’s affair seems to mirror Clinton’s escapades--sort of.  Overall, though, the storyline is unsettling, making it a decent read, especially with Roth’s fabulous prose, except when the author does get a little carried away with ruminations, slowing the pace down to a crawl.

BEAUTIFUL BOY by David Sheff

David Sheff writes this memoir from the perspective of a father going through hell.  His smart and charismatic son Nic becomes addicted to meth, but both father and son are in denial about the seriousness of Nic’s drug habit. Bouncing from rehab to relapse over and over again, ad infinitum, Nic’s problems become his father David’s problems, and David’s obsession with Nic’s life has a profoundly detrimental effect on the rest of the family, including Nic’s much younger half-siblings.  At one point, thanks to a comment from another Al-Anon member, David realizes that if Nic were in jail, at least David would know where he is.  David’s life is basically an endless rollercoaster that parallels Nic’s progress and regression.  At some point he has to accept the fact that Nic’s recovery is in Nic’s hands. This book may be recommended reading for parents and family members of addicts, but I am neither, and I still found it to be riveting.  I also liked the fact this book is not a tearjerker at all, and I am someone who cries over rom-coms.  It is told in a clear-eyed fashion with many musings on what happened to Nic to cause him to become an addict and what David and his family could have done differently.  The bottom line is that no one really knows the cause or the solution.  I found it interesting that bootcamp-type rehab facilities are among the least effective.  The AA philosophies seem to be the most effective, but no addict is ever cured, so that the possibility of relapse looms threateningly for the rest of his or her life.  As hopeless as all this sounds, I found this to be a beautiful book.

THE WIFE by Meg Wolitzer

What a disappointment.   Joe Castleman and his wife Joan are on their way to Helsinki so that Joe can accept a literary prize that is a notch or so below the Nobel.   Joan is not exactly basking in the glow of her husband’s success and decides on the flight over that she is finally ready to divorce him.  He has cheated on her more times than she can count, and I have to ask, “What has taken her so long?”  She abandoned her life as a coed at Smith College to be with Joe, her married English professor who recognized that she had talent as a writer.  Unfortunately, Wolitzer telegraphs the wife’s long-held “secret” way too often and too obviously.  The “revelation” at the end is not a surprise at all and basically robs Joan of all respect from this reader.  I just have a problem with a smart woman subjugating herself to her husband as she did.  I get it that in the 1950s a woman’s career options were more limited than they are today, but still, for me, Joan is totally lacking in gumption.  Every time she has a chance to spill the beans, she chickens out, erasing any shred of credibility she ever had with her children and everyone else, except Joe’s devoted fans.  Wolitzer is an excellent writer, but in this case I found the storyline to be excruciatingly painful and frustrating. 

THE SISTERS BROTHERS by Patrick deWitt

Eli and Charlie Sisters are hit men for the Commodore during the California Gold Rush.  Eli narrates their adventures in search of their next target, Hermann Warm, but Charlie is the boss and the more lethal of the two brothers.  They basically spare no one on their journey to Warm’s camp, and all this bloodshed seemed a bit gratuitous to me.  Anyway, Eli is ready to quit the business after this last job (where have we heard this before?), and he’s a bit of a softie, considering his line of work.  He passes up the opportunity for a better horse, even though his horse Tub lives up to his name in that he’s not swift of foot.  After Tub’s eye gets bashed in, Eli starts to feel guilty about his treatment of Tub but shows no remorse for the men he and Charlie have murdered.  Charlie rationalizes that those men were all bad anyway, but Warm does not fit the pattern at all.  He’s an inventor with a formula for making gold dust more visible in water, and the Commodore insists that Charlie and Eli obtain the formula before they kill Warm.  Warm and the Commodore’s scout, Henry Morris, have joined forces and found that the formula has grisly, unexpected side effects that change the course of their whole enterprise, not to mention the Sisters brothers plans.  This book is supposed to be darkly comic, but for me it was dark but not comic, especially the crude surgery on poor Tub’s eye.  I guess I felt more sympathy for the horse than the people, too, because the people are mostly despicable, after all.  Still, the story moves at a good pace, and Eli’s deadpan narration is engaging, comic or not.

ANNIHILATION by Jeff VanderMeer

I liked this book, but did I like it enough to read the other two books in the trilogy?  Probably not.  Four women, identified only by their occupations, have come to Area X as the twelfth expedition there.  The biologist is the narrator whose husband was part of the previous expedition but returned home as a shell of his former self.  Area X is the site of an environmental contamination where things become weirder and weirder as the novel progresses.  There are two main landmarks—an underground tower that some view as a tunnel and a lighthouse.  Both are very spooky in their own way, but the other members of the expedition are even scarier--an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor.  The psychologist is the obvious leader, as she has the power to hypnotize the other three into doing her bidding.  Where exactly is Area X?  What is the purpose of all these expeditions?  Why is the tower/tunnel not on the maps?  What happens when you cross the border into and out of Area X?  We don’t know the answer to this last question because everyone on this expedition, except presumably the psychologist, was hypnotized for the border crossing.  Certainly these questions are all teasers for the books to come, but I’m not sure if I care.  The movie might be worth watching, though.

THE INVISIBLE CIRCUS by Jennifer Egan

In 1978 Phoebe is 18, has just graduated from high school, and lives with her mother.  She has been accepted to Berkeley, but when she blurts out to an old acquaintance of her sister Faith’s that she’s going to Europe instead, she decides to do just that.  Phoebe is still reeling from Faith’s apparent suicide in Italy and embarks on a quest to retrace Faith’s travels, in an effort to, well, we’re not sure what.  Connect with Faith’s spirit?  Confirm that her death was a suicide?  Phoebe’s impulsiveness puts her in some dangerous situations along the way, but a fortuitous encounter in Munich enables her to get answers to a lot of her questions.  One problem with the book is that Phoebe is not a likable character, and Faith, a 60s revolutionary wannabe, whom we get to know entirely through flashbacks, is even worse. Faith was always her father’s favorite, performing daredevil stunts to impress him and posing for endless portraits.  Unfortunately, the girls’ father died of leukemia at a fairly young age, enduring an unfulfilling career as an engineer at IBM.  Neither girl seems to have any sense of responsibility to their poor mother who loses a husband, then a daughter, before the second daughter abruptly takes off.  Phoebe’s sudden departure seems to be partly in response to the revelation that her mother is now sleeping with her sleazy boss, but that’s a poor excuse for childish behavior.  Despite the myriad flaws of the characters, I found the book to be a somewhat captivating adventure story, as I followed Phoebe on her solitary journey, hoping that she would get her act together sooner or later.

OUR SOULS AT NIGHT by Kent Haruf

Addie is a 70-year-old widow who decides to pay a visit to her neighbor, Louis, whose wife is deceased.  Addie proposes that Louis consider spending the night at her house, not for sex, but for company and conversation.   Thus begins a deep friendship that enhances both of their lives, but it is not without complications.  Some of their family and neighbors frown on their relationship for reasons that I cannot fathom.  Addie’s grandson comes to live with her temporarily after his parents separate, and Louis steps in to perform duties neglected by the boy’s father, such as teaching him to play ball and getting him a dog for a companion.  Neither Addie nor Louis had ideal marriages, and both made some serious mistakes.  Their budding relationship feels like a chance to do things right and enjoy their twilight years.  The dialog is pitch perfect, and Addie and Louis are so authentic in their awkwardness and grace.  The first three quarters of this very short novel are just delightful, but as is often the case in real life, those who are not happy want everyone else to share in their misery.  In this situation I’m not sure if we have just a case of misery loves company or if the motive is really some sort of belated retaliation.  Regardless of what the author intended, I hated the ending, which totally overshadowed all the beauty of the previous pages.  I don’t like feeling angry after reading a book, but this book just made my blood boil.  Call me crazy, but I found the outcome to be a little like the movie La La Land, in which the characters have to make difficult choices between two seemingly incompatible options.  Maybe I just want to have my cake and eat it, too, but sometimes I think we give up too easily on managing to do both. 

THE CEMENT GARDEN by Ian McEwan

Four young siblings—two boys and two girls—left to their own devices are definitely a recipe for disaster.  One of the fondest memories of Jack, the narrator, is of an afternoon when their parents left them unsupervised to go to a funeral.  The kids had a blast!  Then their father dies, and their mother becomes ill.  The children play doctor and engage in other questionable activities (Jack stops bathing), which become even more frequent and more warped after their mother passes away.  The kids make the decision not to tell the authorities, for fear that the family will be broken up.  They are no longer reveling in their freedom, but neither are they showing any level of newfound maturity.  Julie is the de facto leader of the bunch, since she is the oldest, but she certainly does not rise to the occasion.  Reviews have compared this book to Lord of the Flies, but this novel about children running amok is shocking in a completely different way.  A High Wind in Jamaica also comes to mind, but this book is disturbing without being violent or even scary.  Published in 1978, it’s very edgy even by today’s standards, and I dashed through it, desperate to know the fate of these rudderless youngsters.  McEwan never shies away from a topic just because it is uncomfortable, and this book will definitely make you squirm.

HIDDEN FIGURES by Margot Lee Shetterly

Virginia is a Southern state that fought integration to the point of closing schools after Brown v. Board of Education.  And yet, many talented African-Americans found work as scientists and engineers at Langley Research Center, which later became part of NASA, as early as the 1940s.  The federal government recruited black female mathematicians to work as human computers while there was a shortage of available men during WWII.  By now everyone knows about the movie that this book inspired, and I’m looking forward to seeing it.  The book addresses civil rights and segregated bathrooms and even a little civil disobedience regarding a cafeteria sign instructing black employees where to sit.  The author does a very thorough job here, recounting numerous events in the lives of several women, both inside and outside the workplace, but I had some difficulty keeping up with who was working in what department.  I found many of the personal stories fascinating, especially the achievement of Mary Jackson’s son as a soapbox derby participant, John Glenn’s faith in Katherine Johnson’s work, and Dorothy Vaughan’s willingness to work away from her husband and children for a year.  Also, I have a technical background, so that I know what double integrals and differential equations are, and I admire these women tremendously for their scientific accomplishments, as well as their courage and success as pioneers in breaking down gender and race barriers.  However, I found this book to be quite dry.  I am not a big non-fiction reader, although I have enjoyed works by Michael Lewis, Jon Krakauer, Erik Larson, Laura Hillenbrand, and Malcolm Gladwell.   The writing is very clear and informative, but this book does not read like a novel.  In fact, as one friend noted, it reads like a dissertation that has been reworked for publication.  Nonetheless, it is a story that needs to be told, and kudos to Ms. Shetterly for bringing these women’s lives to our attention. 

THE CIRCLE by Dave Eggers

The Circle is a California tech company that is taking the world by storm, and Mae wants to work there.  She lands a job in the Customer Experience department, thanks to a plug from her college roommate Annie, who is an up-and-comer there.  Mae is unbelievably efficient, achieving all of the company’s goals for social media interaction and customer satisfaction.  A mistake that Mae fears will cost her her job actually segues into an opportunity for heightened visibility at the company.  One of the Circle’s goals is for everyone on the planet, starting with politicians, to become totally transparent, i.e., wearing a camera so that everything they do is viewable by everyone else.  Privacy and classified information are no longer valued, except by a few, such as Mae’s parents and ex-boyfriend, whose email addresses Mae shares with the world, much to their chagrin.  Mae drinks the Kool-Aid to the point that she lives at the company and basically has only her on-again, off-again boyfriend Francis and Annie for friends.  But who needs friends when you have millions of people watching your every move?  Eggers has stretched the influence of social media here to its maximum, giving us a totalitarian world of information overload.  It is not appealing, but the reader can understand how Mae gets so caught up in a world that seems, on the surface, like a utopia—no more crime, no more disease epidemics, full voter participation.  She doesn’t miss what she’s lost because she can’t identify it.  This Orwellian story is also reminiscent of the TV show Max Headroom, in which the television was the all-powerful tracker of everyone’s activities.  Let’s hope we don’t ever “complete the circle.”

THE DARK TOWER I: THE GUNSLINGER by Stephen King

I don’t know what possessed me to read two fantasies in a row.  I know that The Dark Tower movie is slated to come out this summer, but I’m stopping with Book I in this series.  The gunslinger, whose name is Roland, is on a quest to find the Dark Tower (purpose:  unknown) with an intermediate encounter with the “man in black.” I thought at first that the “man in black” was Death or the devil, who has the power of resurrection, but Roland is no saint himself.  Other than Roland’s wiping out a town, nothing much happens.  A boy named Jake becomes Roland’s sidekick for part of the journey, and he seems to provide some sort of conscience, but that’s about it.  After I read the book, I went back and read the introduction and found that Stephen King wrote this book in 1970.  The author himself proclaims this book to be pretentious and demonstrating the influence of an abundance of writers’ workshops.  Is this book supposed to be about a post-apocalyptic future or perhaps an alternate universe?  Again, King gives us a few hints but not a lot else to go on, and I’m thinking the desert in question is the Mohave, and the big chasm is the Grand Canyon.  Anyway, why does Jake seem to be more informed about the past than Roland, when Jake is so much younger?  I suppose these unanswered questions have inspired other readers to continue with the series.  I know this series was inspired by the Child Rowland fairy tale, alluded to in Shakespeare’s King Lear and then immortalized in Robert Browning’s poem, but this book does not stand on its own merits, without its possibly more meaty sequels.  I can also see Tolkien’s influence, but then I struggled to get through The Lord of the Rings trilogy as well.  The movies were marvelous, though, and I hope the same will be true of the film version of The Dark Tower.

THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE by Diane Ackerman

Amid all the horrors of WWII, heroes and heroines did rise to save as many Jews as they could.  In this case, the Zabinskis—Antonina and Jan—are Warsaw zookeepers who refuse to give up.  Serving as a waystation en route to more permanent refuges, they gladly provide temporary shelter to hundreds of Jews.  They manage to save not just people but also art, animals, and a massive, meticulously compiled insect collection.  The author culls Antonina’s diaries to deliver an in-depth history of the impact of the war on the residents and structures of Warsaw.  The residents include both the human and animal varieties, and both suffer upheaval and countless loss of life.  Almost everyone who lodges in the Zabinskis’ villa at one time or another survives the war, but the animals are not so fortunate.  Ackerman minces no words in her descriptions of the brutalities and senseless killings that Warsaw suffers at the hands of the Germans.  The animals steal the show in this novel, providing both occasional humor as well as heartbreaking poignancy, as the family chooses some unusual species as pets.  On the whole, the book is very readable and historically enlightening but a little distant as far as the humans are concerned.  Even the horrific scene where Antonina believes that her son has been shot is not as moving as I would expect it to be.  In other words, the author recounts events without speculating on the associated emotional responses.  I enjoy reading nonfiction books that read like novels, but this is not one of them.  It reads like history, and I am not a history buff.  That’s not to say that this isn’t a story that needs to be told.  It is, but the telling of it may be more vivid in the movie.

THE DANISH GIRL by David Ebershoff

Sex reassignment surgery in 1930?  Yes, indeed.  Einar Wegener is Greta Waud’s husgand but identifies as a woman named Lili.  Perhaps the most interesting facet of this novel, inspired by a true story, is that Greta encourages the emergence of Lili.  Both Einar and Greta are painters, and Lili becomes a muse and a model for Greta’s work.  Einar visits several physicians for help, including one who recommends a lobotomy, as he becomes more and more despairing of ever living fully as a woman.  Finally Greta sends him to a women’s clinic in Germany, where at first he is refused admittance because he is a man.  Einar figuratively “dies” after the sex reassignment surgery so that Lili can completely divest herself of him and live freely as a woman.  Ebershoff depicts Einar/Lili as possibly having a multiple personality disorder and gives Einar/Lili non-functioning ovaries from birth.  I would have preferred that the author not attribute Einar’s identifying as a woman to any physical or mental anomalies.  (In truth, no one really knows whether Einar had ovaries or an additional X chromosome.)  The big story here, though, is how a marriage can survive and even flourish when a wife never knows if she is going to wake up beside a man or a woman.  Greta amazingly embraces both Einar and Lili but recognizes that Lili must at some point “bury” Einar.  I found it particularly interesting that Greta is able to obtain a divorce from Einar, citing the fact that he no longer exists after the operation.  Greta wants him also to be declared dead, but then where did Lili spring from?  Despite the intriguing nature of the story, I found the pacing to be slow, particularly during Lili’s recovery.  Also, Einar comes off a little flat.  Surely there is something about him that attracts Greta in the first place.  More intriguing is the question of why Einar chose Greta as a partner, unless he intuited that she would be his ally and champion when he needed her most.

WOLF TOTEM by Jiang Rong

Chen Zhen is an educated young Chinese man in the 1960s who, with many other young urban intellectuals, goes to live with sheep herders in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, at the behest of the Chinese government.  Thanks largely to Bilgee, a wise old nomad who understands the delicately balanced ecology of the area, Chen comes to appreciate how vital the wolf population is to the continued success of the herders.  The sacrifice of a few lambs and foals to the occasional wolf attack is a fair trade-off, since the wolves keep the rodent population to a minimum.  The Chinese government, however, wants to relocate farmers to the area, and the wolves have to go.  I get that this novel is a condemnation of the Cultural Revolution, but it falls short in so many ways.  First of all, Chen’s obsession with raising a wolf cub is totally inconsistent with his reverence for the wolves and the grassland.  More annoying, though, is the author’s use of dialog to get points across about the protection and history of the land and the wildlife.  Characters sound as though they are quoting passages from an encyclopedia.  Yes, this is a translation, but I don’t think the Chinese would converse in such a stilted manner.  The book proceeds at a snail’s pace, partly because of all these sermons, and then the high body count for the animals made the book even more difficult to me to wade through.  Plus, I forget sometimes how important good writing is to my enjoyment of a book until I read one like this, which is not well-written at all.  The Kindle version is full of mistakes, particularly random repeated phrases that dangle randomly throughout the text, divorced from the sentences in which they originally appeared.  Bottom line:  The message is worthwhile, but the storytelling is not.

MOBY DICK by Herman Melville

Inspired by the movie In the Heart of the Sea, I decided to read this classic that was not required reading at my high school.  I thought this novel would be more about a marathon battle between man and nature, like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, but a lot longer.  However, I kept reading and reading and waiting for the big white whale to show up, but Melville kept me in suspense for 400+ pages.  The bulk of the book is actually a history lesson, describing whales and whaling to the nth degree.  Not that that’s a bad thing.  I actually found the anatomy of the sperm whale and its comparison of size, weight, and characteristics to a right whale to be fairly interesting.  Then we have the specifics on how a whale is harpooned from smaller boats and lashed to the side of the ship, where sharks swarm to get a piece of the action.  The biggest butchering task is the decapitation of the sperm whale, since the head contains the valuable spermaceti oil.   I also learned that a storm can disrupt the behavior of a compass needle.  There’s not a lot of action or character development, if you ask me, but the central character is Captain Ahab, who demands that his crew vow to hunt and destroy Moby Dick, the big white sperm whale who is responsible for Ahab having lost a leg.  Ahab’s singular mission is a mad obsession, as his thirst for revenge clouds his judgment, putting the welfare of his ship and crew at risk.  The occasional encounter with another ship breaks up the monotony of several years at sea, for both the crew and the reader.  When the captain of another ship comes requesting lamp oil, Stubb, the 2^nd mate, mistakes the captain’s lamp-feeder for a coffee pot.  Stubb tells the 1^st mate, Starbuck (what a familiar name!), that the visiting captain must be OK if he’s come to make coffee.  Who knew that the guys who started the ubiquitous purveyors of coffee were Moby Dick readers?

BEASTS OF NO NATION by Uzodinma Iweala

Agu is a young boy in a war-torn African country, who becomes a soldier to stay alive.  His narration in his version of English struck me as sounding very authentic, but it is a little unusual.  He endures some horrific abuses and is more than just an observer in numerous atrocities against innocent civilians, but his biggest problem is his conscience.  He tries to rationalize to himself that God will forgive him for all the people he has killed because he is performing his duties as a soldier.  The only way that he can assuage his guilt and suffering is to focus on the past—his previously carefree childhood—and on his hopes for a future as a doctor or engineer.  These thoughts, especially his dreams for the future, contrast sharply with the agony that is his current life, serving as the companion and bodyguard to the Commandant of his unit, while sacrificing his innocence to the Commandant’s whims.  I can’t imagine the impact of these types of experiences on the psyche of an adult, much less a young boy.  His deep emotional scars could spur him to great achievements, or they could be so debilitating as to inhibit his ability to have a normal life—whatever that is.  First, though, he has to survive, and, if nothing else, the kid has the will to live and is prepared to make the necessary compromises.