The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg ✔✔✔

This was another "quickie" - read it in two days, no less! It's a fairly recent novel about a Jewish family. Edie as a young child weighs 65 pounds, and by the end of the novel weighs 332 pounds.  Her family despairs of her, and her husband Richard leaves her as she prepares for her second surgery to save her life.  Everyone loves Edie, and Edie also loves herself, but she also just loves to eat - lots, like a round trip for junk food that includes Macdonalds and Burger King and ends with a huge meal at a Chinese restaurant.

This is a story of marriage, family and obsession in a middle-class mid-western American family.  Quite enjoyable actually, but how could she eat that much???? Do people really do that?

Illuminations by Mary Sharratt ✔✔✔✔

This is  historical fiction subtitled "A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen", a mystic of the twelfth century whom I have always admired.  On a trip down the Rhine, the abbey at Rupertsburg, which is mentioned in this novel, was pointed out to us.  Von Bingen was also an accomplished musician, and I have a CD of her works - they are beautiful, as is a collection of her writings, which I used to have - I often think I lose more books than I actually have!

Anyway, this was a really good read, very informative, and I read it in less than three days - I honestly could not put it down.  I never knew she had been an anchorite from the age of 8 until she was 38 years old - entirely against her wishes as well - her mother basically sold her to an aristocratic family to be a companion to their daughter who had had a traumatic experience and wanted to renounce the world.

Her music is so beautiful, so flowing and joyful, that I was surprised to learn how, even after she was released from her cell, she was reviled by others in the church - well, not really surprised, because we know how women were and still are - treated by the Catholic Church.

I hadn't heard of this author before either, but I was glad to find this was such a good read.  I absolutely despise historical novels which are a little too cute - or romantic - this was quite realistic.

She indeed was "a feather on the breath of God".

Cast No Stones by Kevin Machell ✔✔✔

I found this title in a sidebar ad on Goodreads - it was advertised as a bestseller in the UK and cost only $2.99 on my Kindle, so I downloaded it.  It's the author's memoir of his growing up in a small town in England - his mother, Laura, who was a young woman in the early '40s when she met an American serviceman, Harry, who fathered Kevin, never got to to see him, and returned to America after serving in Europe.  Kevin grew up completely neglected, and ostracized by others in his community, including his grandmother and some of his siblings, most of whom had a different father.  (Laura was quite a girl - and not much of a mother)  He grew up not knowing why he was so despised and didn't know anything about his father.  He was in his early 40s before he even asked his mother directly about his father - he had asked previously and she just set the questions aside, refusing to answer him.

Then he embarked and a long and eventually fruitful search to find his father, and did travel to America to meet him.  Then Laura decided she wanted to meet Harry again,too, so she came to America as well.

The story of Kevin's childhood and his search for his father was most interesting, but after that it's basically just everyday stuff, but a good insight into families torn apart by war, distance, and lack of understanding.

The book is adequately enough written, but certainly could have used an editor, although considering the fact that the author is in his 60s when he writes this, I guess he did pretty well!

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt ✔✔✔✔

I started this book a year ago and read about 1/3 of it, before giving up on it.  Our Book Club is discussing it this month, so I tried again, finished it and really enjoyed it. What I enjoyed the most was the elegant language chosen by the narrator, Eli - I called this novel a literary western because of it. For example, when Charlie and Eli are travelling west to assassinate Warm: "Charlie called over to say he was impressed with California, that there was something in the air, a fortuitous energy, was the phrase he used. " ( Page 111 on the Kindle)  Really?  I can't imagine John Wayne saying that!

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Dewitt's bang-up second novel (after Ablutions) is a quirky and stylish revisionist western. When a frontier baron known as the Commodore orders Charlie and Eli Sisters, his hired gunslingers, to track down and kill a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm, the brothers journey from Oregon to San Francisco, and eventually to Warm's claim in the Sierra foothills, running into a witch, a bear, a dead Indian, a parlor of drunken floozies, and a gang of murderous fur trappers. Eli's deadpan narration is at times strangely funny (as when he discovers dental hygiene, thanks to a frontier dentist dispensing free samples of "tooth powder that produced a minty foam") but maintains the power to stir heartbreak, as with Eli's infatuation with a consumptive hotel bookkeeper. As more of the brothers' story is teased out, Charlie and Eli explore the human implications of many of the clichés of the old west and come off looking less and less like killers and more like traumatized young men. With nods to Charles Portis and Frank Norris, DeWitt has produced a genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving. (May) 

Life of Pi by Yann Martel ✔✔✔✔✔

I first read this book in 2003, and we discussed it at Book Club that year. It was also on my list of the Best Books of 2003.  I re-read it this month to refresh the story in my mind before the movie is released later this month.

I loved it even more this time - what a story!  What a vision!  First of all, anyone who majors in religious studies and zoology at university has my admiration, especially when the zoology thesis was " a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth".  Growing up in a zoo in India, Pi had a great understanding of animals, an invaluable aid when sharing a twenty foot lifeboat with a 350 lb. Bengal tiger for 227 days!

My favorite passage is his interpretation of the Christian Story, so I quote it completely:

And what a story.  The first thing that drew me was disbelief.  What?  Humanity sins but it's God's Son who pays the price?  I tried to imagine Father saying to me,"Piscine, a  lion slipped into the llama pen today and killed two llamas.  Yesterday another one killed a black buck.  Last week two of them ate the camel.  The week before it was painted storks and grey herons.  And who's to say for sure who snacked on our golden agouti?  The situation has become intolerable.  Something must be done.  I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins is if I feed you to them".
"Yes, father, that would be the right and logical thing to do.  Give me a moment to wash up."
"Hallelujah, my son"
Hallelujah, Father."
What a downright weird story.  What peculiar psychology.

I love it!