China Dolls

See, Lisa. China Dolls. New York: Random. 2014. Print.

First Sentences:

I traveled west -- along -- on the cheapest bus routes I could find

Every mile took me farther from Plain City, Ohio, where I'd been a fly-speck on the wallpaper of small-town life.

Each new state I passed through loosened another rope around my heart, my legs, my arms, yet my whole body ached and I couldn't shake my vertigo. I lived on aspirin, crackers, and soda pop.

I cried and cried and cried.

Description:

So often books idealize friendships between central characters as unwavering through all circumstances and separation, a constant source of strength for times when a friend is needed. It takes a great writer like Lisa See in her newest historical fiction novel, China Dolls, to explore the truth of friendships, the variations and changes that occur between even the closest of friends over the years and events.

China Dolls opens with three young Chinese women meeting in San Francisco for the World's Fair in 1938. All are seeking employment as they try to escape from their current lives of difficult families, abuse, and dead-end careers. The World's Fair offers a few jobs for Chinese dancers, but eventually it is the new Forbidden City nightclub outside the fairgrounds that hires them for an all-Chinese floor show.

The girls become fast friends despite their different backgrounds. Ruby, defiantly ambitious and worldly; Helen, wealthy and traditional who still lives with her extended family; and Grace, the premier dancer who is fleeing from an abusive parent in a small town in the Midwest and has never met another Chinese person.

All of us, in our own ways, were doing the best we could to erase who we were. 

The world of the dance club performer is exciting and tawdry at the same time. Grace becomes an acclaimed dancer, while Ruby develops a Sally Rand-like bubble dance that vaults her to stardom. Helen creates a popular pairs dance act with the handsome Eddie, who has secrets of his own. The love and friendship of these women faces many challenges, and their relationships waver between support and jealousy as opportunities, betrayals, and secrets are introduced.

Each chapter is narrated by a different woman, offering her own thoughts and interpretation of the world she is starting to learn about. From life in a nightclub as a "pony" (chorus line) dancer to headliner stars, from the temptations of San Francisco to searches for individual identities as Chinese women in a Western world, the women reveal the world of 1938 and later years from three completely different perspectives. Each woman has secrets she keeps from the world and her friends, secrets that destroy their individual secure worlds and drive her friends away.

A woman isn't just one thing. The past is in us, constantly changing us. Heartache and failure shift our perspectives as do joy and triumphs. At any moment, on any given day, we can be friends, competitors, or enemies.

See is a talented writer fully in control of her characters and plot. She skillfully interweaves historic locations like the Forbidden City nightclub, the Treasure Island World's Fair, and Japanese internment camps into the story, making the world of the 30's and 40's come alive for those of us unfamiliar with the challenges and opportunities Chinese women faced then. And those women -- Ruby, Helen, and Grace -- become permanently etched in our minds as strong survivors, loyal, ambitious, and willing to live life.

I had made it this far without revealing my deepest secrets, and, for a moment, I forgot that to believe in dreams is to spend half your life asleep.

Great strong characters, interesting historical research and plot, and most importantly honest, clear writing make China Dolls an engrossing, unforgettable read. Dive into that world and you quickly won't want to break the bubble and return to our modern world.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

See, Lisa. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Two young girls in nineteenth century China exchange secret messages throughout their lives via notes on a fan they send to each other, sharing events in their lives, their hopes and loneliness, including the experiences of foot-binding, arranged marriage, motherhood and more. Delicately, exquisitely written.

Yutang, Lin. Moment in Peking: A Novel of Contemporary Chinese Life

Sprawling novel follows the lives of two lovers and their families for forty years in old, traditional China from the Boxer Rebellion to the invasion of Japanese in the early twentieth century. A beautiful book full of love, relationships, Chinese history, and traditions. 

Apollo's Arrow

Christakis, Nicholas A. Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. New York: Little, Brown, Spark 2020. Print

First Sentences:

In the late fall of 2019, an invisible virus that had been quietly evolving in bats for decades leaped in an instant to a human being in Wuhan, China.

It was a chance event whose most subtle details we will probably never know. Neither the person to whom the virus gravitated no anyone else was fully aware of what had transpired. It was a tiny, imperceptible change.

Note:

[Note: This book was written and my review post started in late 2020, the middle, and maybe the most fearful  time of the COVID-19 pandemic, months before the vaccine was developed when the feeling of helplessness was high. But as the virus tightened it grip on the world, I abandoned reading his book and my review piece. Just couldn't face writing about the virus.

Now that the vaccine is available, hope is on the rise, and the investigation into the Wuhan labs has re-opened, I thought it might be time to finish reading this book as well as my review to share the author's detailed first-hand research regarding the COVID-19. My review remains as I started it a year ago, with a few updates.]

 

Description:  [written November, 2020]

 

Is it too soon to spend time reading about the origins of COVID-19? 

 

I have been restless in my reading lately: even more impatient with opening paragraphs, unsatisfied with plot, dialog and characters, and generally uninterested in sitting down for long stretches to immerse myself in a book, any book. Most of my readings recently were obtained in piles from the library, then returned in the next day out of frustration ... with the books and with myself for not being more accepting.

 

But then I came across Nicholas Christakis'  Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live and everything changed. I started to look forward to reading something again, and at all hours. I bookmarked pages in this book with interesting information, and I learned a lot about something - the coronavirus - that I realized I knew very little about.

 

Christakis directs the Yale Institute for Network Science as well as the Human Nature Lab. He is a doctor who studied the COVIS-19 virus, its origins, and its effects from its very first days. He is one of the original researchers involved with recognizing COVID-19 and gathering initial data to address the coming pandemic. With this book, you are reading data from a knowledgeable, qualified authority who was there and has studied the research in-depth.

 

He starts his chronolical book with examinations of previous virus encounters, from the bubonic plague to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-1), detailing their causes, protection against, accounts from primary sources from the age, and factors that led to world recovery. He then documents timelines dating from the first known cases of COVID-19 in China as well as in the United States, including the invasion of the virus into his own remote town in New Hampshire where he had previously felt safe due to its isolation. Routes of infected individuals are shown and demonstrates through real examples how one person can affect thousands through casual contact. 

 

In this book, terms like "Flattening the curve," "Physical distancing," and others were still relatively new. There are descriptions of various advisories issued by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) which were suppressed, and Christakis notes the results from ignoring these policies. Studies of mask-wearing were just starting to be conducted.

Some of the interesting information he relates include:

• Security at airports searching for the SARS virus originally included thermal body scans. These intrusive procedures did not identify a single case of SARS among 35 million international travelers,
  
• Droplet transmission of viruses is less worrisome than airborne particles since the droplets are heavier and tend to drop down within six feet of expulsion, whereas the airborne particles can float long distances;
• COVID also brought about some positive changes such as the cessation of automobile and airplane movement which resulted in cleaner air; and people banding together which demonstrated "the importance of collective will and helped set the stage for political activism to address other long-standing problems in society;"
• Marilee Harris, who, as a six-year-old in 1918, contracted the Spanish Flu, then caught the COVID virus at age 107 and survived both episodes.

It is a book depicting a time when the world was still unraveling the mysteries of COVID-19, searching for answers regarding social interaction and personal prevention, and with some denying the growing situation or wistfully hoping for a vaccine. New York City Mayor Bill de Blassio, on March 5, 2020, was photographed on the subway, saying there was "nothing to fear, go about your lives..." Schools were still debating whether to close, and public gatherings still took place. But on March 17, Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down New York theaters, nightclubs, and restaurants, a shocking edict that left many angry, but began the fight back against COVID.

 

This book is the real thing regarding details about COVID, with so much data that you might be wary of being overwhelmed. Rest assured, Christakis is a skilled writer, someone who can recount a myriad of facts and intersperse them with personal accounts to weave a compelling page-turner.

And so Americans were caught unprepared -- emotionally, politically, and practically. We did not even have the equipment needed, from PPE to tests to ventilators, to save our lives. But most of all, we did not have a collective understanding of the threat that we are facing....

Microbes have shaped our evolutionary trajectory since the origin of our species. Epidemics have done so for many thousands of years... Plagues always end. And, like plagues, hope is an enduring part of the human condition.

 

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Emperor of All MaladiesL A Biography of Cancer  

Incredibly detailed yet completely readable history of the origin of cancer, its changing treatments, and future. Mukherjee is a eminent researcher who draws on his own experiences treating cancer as well as the extensive literature of doctors throughout history battling the disease.  (previously reviewed here)

A Paper Son

Buchholz, Jason. A Paper Son. New York: Tyrus 2016. Print

First Sentences:

It was the day before the storm hit, the storm we'd been watching on newscast Doppler as it approached from Alaska, devouring the coast like a carnivorous planet made of teeth and ice and smoke.

The weatherpersons pointed to it, their expressions mixes of glee and trepidation, their predictions heavy with superlatives, italics, underlining. 

Description:

There is one word that comes to my mind to describe Jason Buchholz's debut novel A Paper Son and that word is "intriguing." It's a plot that cannot be predicted, full of scenes and people that are completely, unexpectedly interesting, mysterious, and slightly quirky. It is the kind of book that one cannot stop reading, becoming completely immersed in the lives and situations portrayed. And then, once we stop reading for whatever reason, the characters and story stay with you like a haunting melody or a puzzle that needs to be examined over and over in order to understand it and wonder how to solve it.

In A Paper Son, Perry Long is an third-grade teacher in San Francisco, happily giving his charges interesting assignments during the day and writing unpublished stories at night. But one day he sees in his cup of tea a vision of a small Chinese family looking off into the distance. Although the vision quickly dissipates, the people in the image capture his interest and he writes a story that night about them and their possible lives on a boat he imagines is taking the family to China.

The story appears in an obscure magazine and leads to a knock on his door from Eva, a elderly Chinese woman. Eva demands to know why Perry has robbed her family's history by telling its story. She then questions him about the fate of one of the figures in Perry's fictional story, settles in to Perry's apartment and vows not to move out until that boy is found and her family's complete story unfolded. It is up to Perry to keep writing their stories to somehow reveal an ending that solves the mystery of Eva's family.

Huh? See what I mean about intriguing?

Perry begins to experience other inexplicable situations and people. While swimming, looking into a puddle, gazing at a distorted figure in a mirror, or listening to Eva comment on the accuracy of each new chapter, he witnesses unusual daily occurrences in his life which no one else notices. For example, he repeatedly hears a mournful Chinese tune and sees a group of quadruplets playing mahjong. 

When the second chapter in "Eva's family story" appears in the same magazine (although no one had submitted it), Perry, completely confused now, sets out to explore what really is happening in his life and the "real" lives of what he knows to be fictional characters of his own creation. 

What is real and what is Perry's own imagination somehow come to life? Is it possible he is writing a story as it really happened to characters that somehow, somewhere, sometime actually were real? Each day presents new visions that challenge his grasp on reality, fiction, and his role in it all.

Absolutely fascinating, extremely well-written, and absorbing plot and characters make this a highly recommended book for anyone willing to jump down a rabbit hole into the "intriguing" world of fiction at its finest. Memorable in every aspect of the world of great writing.

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

See, Lisa. China Dolls.   

Three young Chinese women meet at the 1938 San Francisco World's Fair and become friends, if albeit different personalities. The novel follows their lives and relationships in the United States, good and wrenching, as they find their place and personality in the new country. Lovely writing with interesting descriptions of cities and people of that era. (previously reviewed here)

Figures in a Landscape

Theroux, Paul. Figures in a Landscape: People and Places. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2018. Print

First Sentences:

This was in the 1960s, when the book [The Yage Letters by William S. Burroughs] first appeared, to cries of execration by the usual hypocrites

The book is an encouragement to any prospective quester, and very funny, too.

Description:

Paul Theroux is a writer I admire greatly for his adventurous railway travel in books like The Great Railway Bazaar (Asia), The Old Patagonian Express (United States), The Last Train to Zona Verds (Africa), and Riding the Iron Rooster (China). I also knew he was a prolific writer of interesting fiction such as Mosquito Coast, Saint Jack, and Hotel Honolulu. 

But I didn't know he was a prolific essayist as well. Figures in a Landscape: People and Places: 2001-2016 changed that for me. Here are assembled thirty essays ranging from biographical thoughts on people I know a little about like Joseph Conrad, Thoreau, Oliver Sacks, and Robin Williams to people I am completely unfamiliar with (artist Thomas Hart Benson; Nurse Wolf, the dominatrix; author George Simenon; and Albert Theroux, Paul's father). And there are plenty of unusual stories and details about each person:

In Bronx State, a state mental hospital I used to work at, I always used to carry my white coat and my identity pass, because I was never sure that if I lost it I would be able to prove my sanity. - Oliver Sacks

There are essays on so many fascinating, seemingly random occurrences that caught Thoreaux's attention enough to write about them. For example: the art and motivation for collecting Chinese "reverse glass" paintings; Thoreaux's life as a library-book reader; travel to dangerous countries; and raising geese in Hawaii.

While weighing the risks and being judicious, travel in an uncertain world, in a time of change, has never seemed to me more essential, of greater importance, or more enlightening.

Every essay is highly-detailed, insightful, deeply thoughtful, and interesting in a way that can only be described as breathtaking, entertaining and informative. Each essay is completely personal in observations, rants, and passions that are wide-ranging and, of course, never dull.

At some point, quite early ... my reading diverged and I began to live a parallel life as a reader, supplementing school books with library books I chose for myself. The required reading at school I often found dismaying, insufficient, or over-analyzed....It was School Books versus All Others, the books I was told to study and anatomize set against the books I delighted in. 

Very fun, informative, and fascinating. Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster.  

Essays on a variety of topics by the master writer, Wallace, including tennis player Tracy Austin, Kafka's humor, and of course lobsters.

Last Chance to See

Adams, Douglas and Carwardine, Mark. Last Chance to See. New York: Harmony. 1990. Print

First Sentences:

This isn't at all what I expected.

In 1985, by some sort of journalistic accident, I was sent to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine to look for an almost extinct form of lemur called the aye-aye. None of the three of us had met before. I had never met Mark, Mark had never met me, and no one, apparently, had seen an aye-aye in years.

Description:

We all know or have heard of Douglas Adams for his humorous sci-fi novels (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Restaurant at the End of the Universe, etc.). But did you know of his travel and zoological experiences looking for the rarest of animals described in Last Chance to See? No? Well, grab it right now, sit back, and prepare to be delightfully amused and informed.

Last Chance to See compiles Adams' notes written in the late 1980s with zoologist Mark Carwardine describing their travels and adventures in obscure parts of the world. Their goal is to observe a number of very rare animals before they (the animals, not Adams and Carwardine) become extinct. 

The book is filled with Adams' usual humor, mainly at his own expense due to inexperience with the world of wildlife as well travel to primitive lands. He notes that the roles of the two explorers are clear: Cardardine is "the one who knew what he was talking about" while Adams is "to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to who everything that happened would come as a complete surprise."

The animals they seek and eventually find include, as described in Adams' non-scientific words:

• Aye-aye - a nocturnal lemur that "looks a little like a large cat with a bat's ears, a beaver's teeth, a tail like a large ostrich feather, a middle finger like a long dead twig, and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder";

• Komodo dragon lizard - "over twelve feet long and stands about a yard high, which you can't help but feel is entirely the wrong size for a lizard to be, particularly if it's a man-eater and you're about to go and share an island with it";

• Northern White Rhinoceros - only 22 are left in the wild in Zaire, each weighs three tons "with nasal passages bigger than its brain.... The sheer immensity of every part of it exercises a fearful magnetism on the mind. When the rhino moved a leg, just slightly, huge muscles moved easily under its heave skin like Volkswagens parking";

• Kakapo - just 40 left in New Zealand, these flightless birds, living for centuries on an isolated island, "are generally unused to defending themselves....If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though you know that it probably will not be";

• Baiji river dolphins - "half-blind for the reason that there is nothing to see in the Yangtze. The water is so muddy now that visibility is not much more than a few centimetres.....[They are] intelligent animals whose perceptive universe we could scarcely being to imagine, living in a seething, poisoned, deafening world, and that their lives were probably passed in continual bewilderment, hunger, pain, and fear."

Along the way he and Carwardine have to deal with:  

• Mosquito nets - that trap mosquitoes inside the bed area rather than outside the net; 

• Singing hippos - which use natural river banks to echo their voices; 

• Bizharzia - the second most common disease in world (after tooth decay) where tiny worms enter your body if you walk through infected water. (These facts are mentioned by Carwardian to pass the time as they slogged through yet another marshy bog), 

• Tiananmen Square - when it was still an easy, relaxed place of great beauty, speakers, music, history, and parents wandering around with children (just a few months before it became world famous for more violent reasons); 

• Rubberovers - the Chinese term for condoms which the explorers must purchase to cover a microphone for underwater recording, having to pantomime what they want to the astonishment of merchants and onlookers who offer advice and interesting solutions; 

• After shave - Adams purchases multiple bottles out of nervousness on his flight to China, then tries to get rid of them by hiding them in obscure spots, much like an animal marking his territory;

• One wild automobile driver - who continuously turns around to look at them in the back seat when asking questions, refusing to look forward towards the road until they give an answer to his satisfaction.

Their journeys can be summed up with the prophetic words Carwardine says to Adams when they meet for the first time in Madagascar: "Everything's gone wrong." Their adventures start off bad, and end even worse. But along the way they do see rare animals, meet odd and also professional people (sometimes the same person), and wonder about the future of these species ... and of our own.

Very highly recommended for anyone curious about our world, its inhabitants (human and animal), and a Mark Twain-like narrator who can describe these experiences with dry humor and piercing insight.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Quammen, David. The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

A naturalist and gifted writer, Quammen travels the world to islands to observe and record evolution and extinction. He is one of my favorite writers of the animal world.

Quammen, David Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature 

More from my favorite naturist, with short essays on a wide variety of quirky topics from mosquitoes, dinosaurs, cloning, population dynamics, mating of snakes, and much, much more. Wonderful!

Thomas, Lewis. Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher 

Short essays delightfully written about the inter-relationships of everything in the world, the beauty of each organism, music, germs, death, and poetry. Highly recommended classic in the field of biology for the non-scientist.

Lands of Lost Borders

Harris, Kate. Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. New York: Knopf 2018. Print

First Sentences:

The end of the road was always just out of sight. 

 

Cracked asphalt deepened to night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by a blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If I even reach the end, I remember thinking, I'll fly off the rim of the world.


Description:

Thus begins Kate Harris's Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. It depicts one of the author's many dangerous efforts to elude unfriendly border guards in China, Tibet, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, India, and other countries in retracing the ancient route of Marco Polo on a bicycle.

Author Harris is a confirmed explorer. From her earliest age, she had a restlessness to her dreams. Although a gifted student in biological sciences at Oxford and MIT, her ongoing goal was to take a one-way trip to help establish a colony on Mars. She even participated in a Mars simulation experience complete with desert living in regulation space suits.

Harris, a voracious reader and researcher throughout her life, always was fascinated to read about into the personalities and adventures of early explorers like Marco Polo, Magellan, Mrs. Fanny Bullock Workman, and Alexandra David-Neel. She eventually quit her research job in a windowless lab (staring at "planktonic fecal pellets" through a microscope and recording minute changes). Then, she charted a cross-continent route using ancient maps and out-of-date atlases, grabbed her childhood girlfriend Mel, loaded up their bicycles, and set off to pedal on a year-long trip from Turkey to India, following the route of Marco Polo. 

Along the way, they live on dried noodles, stale water, and the often unusual food and shelter offered from the locals who could neither speak English (and Harris does not speak their language) nor understand what the women are doing on bicycles on these high ranges. The cyclists are continually stopped by police (who mostly want to pose with the women and try out their bicycles), pushed off pot-holed highways by monstrous trucks, and even chased by wild yaks.

As we sped down the pass, every little bump and divot and pebble on the road blurred together into a pavement of pure concussion. Such is the price you pay to reach forbidden Tibet; pain in the legs, in the butt, and in the brain, which can't conceive a coherent thought because all it knows is the jackhammer jolting of the body and bike to which it is connected.  

But through all the adventures and challenges thrown at them, the women kept up their spirits, recording their daily feelings and trials with a camera and a notebook that eventually was turned into this book. They had plenty of time to consider the world around them as well as their place and purpose in the world. And oh, the descriptions of their observations and musings are wonderous, philosophical, emotional, colorful, and truly insightful.

The night air was cool for July and laced with the sweet breath of poplars and willows that grew in slender wands beside the river. No clean divisions between earth and sky, light and dark, just a lush and total blackness. I couldn't see the mountains but I could sense them around me, sharp curses of rock. The kind of country that consists entirely of edges.

And the places they bicycled. They pedaled and groaned and camped on such locales as:

[the] Tibetan Plateau, that upheaval of rock and ice and sky, but also the Pamir Mountains, where herds of sheep with improbably huge horns dodged avalanches and snow leopards with elegance close to flight. And the Taklamakan, a shifting sands desert dwarfed only by the Gobi and Sahara whose name, according to legend in not literal translation, means 'he who goes in never comes out'....Even more compelling than far-flung mountains and deserts were the stars above and beyond them, distant suns lighting who knows what other worlds.'

I always wonder when reading books such as this which depict exploration, survival, perseverance, and challenges, just how well I might do if faced with the same situations. In the case of Lands of Lost Borders, it is clear I would have given up on the first 15,000-foot climb up a mountain of potholed switchbacks. All the more reason to admire Harris and Mel's fortitude, but only from my cozy chair.

What is the point of exploring if not to reveal our place in the wild scheme of things, or to send a vision of who we are into the universe? A self-portrait and a message in a bottle; maybe no other maps matter....After all, the Latin root of the word explorer is "ex-plorare," with "ex" meaning "go out" and "plorare" meaning "to utter a cry."

Happy reading.

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Beagle, Peter. I See By My Outfit.   

In 1965, two men decide to ride small motor scooters from New York to California (don't ask why). En route, author Beagle describes the people, environment, and culture in a witty, detailed, friendly manner that makes you want to hear every observation he is willing to share.

 

 

Everything I Never Told You

Ng, Celeste. Everything I Never Told You. New York: Penguin. 2014. Print.

First Sentences:

Lydia is dead. 

But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.

Description:

Grim, powerful first lines are exactly the kind that force you to continue reading. And Celeste Ng's novel Everything I Never Told You does not disappoint on any page. 

It is a sad story set in a small college town during the mid-1970s, a story of one family's tragic loss of their teenage daughter Lydia who they discover has drowned in a nearby lake. But why did this happen? Who caused her death? Could it have been avoided? And what does her loss do to each member of her family?

Underlying this simple tale are the swirling currents of race discrimination, alienation, parenting, loneliness, spoiled relationships, and individual coping strategies when dreams blossom and die. 

Lydia, along with her older brother Nath and younger sister Hannah, are children of James, a Chinese father who is a history professor at a small college, and Marilyn, who is white, a housewife, and once was James' student. Wracked by guilt and sadness over Lydia's death, all four family members look for answers from each other and outsiders like the police and Jack, the unsupervised trouble-making teen living across the street. 

Jack smelled as if he had just been out in the woods, leafy and green. He smelled the way velvet felt, something you wanted to run your hands over and then press to your face.

With chapters narrated by different characters, individual past histories including Lydia's are slowly uncovered. Each person is full of secrets and surprises that show these people to be a very ordinary family but made up of individuals who are unique in both good and troubled ways.

Marilyn smiled back, a fake smile, the same one she had given to her mother all those years. You lifted the corners of your mouth toward your ears. You kept your lips closed. It was amazing how no one could tell.

I won't spoil the details of the exploration of this family's inner workings and the unraveling of details around the death of Lydia. Suffice to say, it is not a thriller-style book about roving murderers and violence. Rather it is a riveting, highly personal novel of one family's interaction as a group and as individuals during their formative years in a difficult social environment. Their dreams, their losses, and their coping mechanisms for dealing with feelings of loneliness, frustration, and isolation are powerfully portrayed by Ng's spare writing, with plenty of secrets and twists up to the very last pages.

Before that she hadn't realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Ogawa, Yoko. The Housekeeper and the Professor

The very quiet, personal narrative of a Japanese woman who becomes the housekeeper for a retired professor of mathematics. Their relationship and gradual unfolding of their inner strengths and lives is satisfying on every level. (previously reviewed here)

See, Lisa. China Dolls

Story of three young Chinese girls during the 1938 World's Fair in San Francisco, trying to make a living, enjoy their new friends, and preserve their individual identities in this very foreign world. (previously reviewed here)

The Museum of Modern Love

Rose, Heather. The Museum of Modern Love. Chapel Hill: Algonquin 2018. Print

First Sentences:

He was not my first musician, Arky Levin.

Nor my least successful. Mostly by his age potential is squandered or realized. But this is not a story of potential. It is a story of convergence....It is something that, once set in motion, will have an unknown effect. 

Description:

I know virtually nothing about performance art and artists, but that ignorance on my part is taken care of by Heather Rose in her newest novel, The Museum of Modern Love.

Based on an actual MoMA performance by the artist Marina Abramovic in 2010, author Rose imagines the minds and relationships of individuals experiencing a performance art piece. In the Abramovic performance, she sits along at a large table with an empty chair across from her. The public is invited to, one at a time, silently sit across from her and stare into her eyes for as long as they desire, then make way for the next person. Abromovic returns their look without a change in her expression, barely blinking, never talking. 

In the novel, Arky Levin, a composer undergoing an unexpected separation from his wife, stumbles into the Abramovic MoMO exhibit and is transfixed. He returns daily, studying the artist and the people who observe her in the art piece. Gradually, he even meets a few of them and we learn their stories, as well as the background of the artist. What Arky and the other public viewers experience tries to explain the goals and power of this style of art and its effect on their own lives and minds.

Pain is the stone that art sharpens itself on time after time.

Of course, there is the question of whether Arky or his new acquaintances will ever have the strength to sit down at the table across from Abramovic. If they do, what will they experience? They all have observed people leave their time at the table with Abramovic in tears, visibly shaken, although nothing has happened that anyone can see. Theories from the viewers abound about the artist herself: How can she sit so still without any reaction? How does she eat or control bodily functions during the hours sitting at the table? Why is she doing this piece? What does she hope to accomplish in this performance and with her other pieces (such as her months-long walk over half the length of the Great Wall of China just to meet her partner and break up with him)?

As I write this, it sounds like a very slow, uninteresting novel. But actually it is an oddly compelling narrative and insight into the minds and relationships of ordinary people, and how they (and the artist) react to a performance art piece over 70 days. Author Rose provides discussions about art, artists, and personal lives that show this static art performance to be full of life, expectation, goals, disappointments, and change. As a bonus, this book also offers the most interesting description I have ever read: a stream-of-consciousness narration from a person in a coma regarding what it feels like to be so attached and unattached to the world. 

I really enjoyed this off-beat novel for its quietly defined characters and their struggles with relationships and loneliness. Through their stories, I also was able to learn something about the purpose and power of performance art.

Even after all this time, the sun never says, "You owe me." Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole world. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Carey, Edward. Observatory Mansions.   

Another oddball book about a performance artist, this one who acts as a living statue and poses in public areas with people who want to take their photo with him. He also steals inconsequential, yet personally important items from people for his museum in the basement of his ancient home which also houses a variety of equally odd characters. 

Lost Gutenberg

Davis, Margaret Leslie. Lost Gutenberg: The Astonishing Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey. New York: TarcherPerigee 2019. Print

First Sentences:

A wooden box containing one of the most valuable books in the world arrives in Los Angeles on October 14, 1950, with little more fanfare -- or security -- than a Sears catalog.

Code-named "the commode," it was flown from London via regular parcel post, and while it is being delivered locally by Tice and Lynce, a high-end customs broker and shipping company, its agents have no idea what they are carrying and take no special precautions. 

Description:

I suppose if you have no interest in the historic creation of the first book published with movable type, the Gutenberg Bible, there is no need to read any further in this review. For me, however, Margaret Leslie Davis' Lost Gutenberg: The Astonishing Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey, was a tremendously interesting history of a one specific Gutenberg Bible, its fabulously rich owners, and the quirks found inside this masterpieces of design, paper, binding, lettering, and illustration.

Printed around 1465, the Gutenberg Bible represented the first printing of a major book using metal movable type. Movable type had been used in China in the eleventh century, "but proved unwieldy, given the written language's thousands of distinct ideograms." Gutenberg developed the process of pouring liquid tin and lead into a mold to reproduce exact duplicates of each letter that could be arranged and re-arranged for printing, and even melted down later to create new letters. He created new tools necessary to actually print a book: frames to hold the type in place; presses that insure even pressure to push the paper down on the type on each page; and smear-proof, long-lasting ink. 

Gutenberg's inventions created a system that could print any number of books relatively quickly and cheaply, especially when compared to the alternative - hand-lettering each page. Before Gutenberg, a Bible might take two years to produce. With the constant demand for Bibles from monasteries, convents, and churches, Gutenberg made the business choice for his first movable type project to be the printing of the multi-volume,1,200-page Bible, "using 270 different characters -- punctuation as well as upper- and lowercase letters and letter combinations." 

Lost Gutenberg follows the life on one particular Bible, nicknamed "Number 45," and its owners throughout history. Lost Gutenberg also traces the huge fortunes of its world's ultra-rich owners who purchased, exhibited, or merely relegated Number 45 to massive shelves of a personal library, forgotten as just another expensive possession. Then there are the sadder stories of lost fortunes and the breaking up of world-class rare book collections for the owners of Number 45. 

Here are just a few of the facts I learned:

• Gutenberg Bibles still have bookplates from various owners pasted inside their front covers. (Seems to me like stamping "Property of.." on the Mona Lisa);
• Paper for printing was first moistened so it would absorb the ink better;
• There are 6-10 tiny holes in each page. Paper was "folded and pierced around the edges with a needle, providing guides so that the print would be impressed at exactly the same place on the front -- and back-- of each page";
• Even though the print lined up exactly on each side of the page, nineteen pages have one or two more lines than the standard 42 lines of text; 
• Some versions of the Bible had strips of velum extending beyond the pages to be used as thumb markers to index and allow faster access to specific sections.

Author Davis describes how, in 1980, new technology of lasers was used to study the composition of ink in Number 45. These lasers sent a data-gathering beam 1/10 the size of a period to help researchers understand how the 500-year-old ink still looked fresh. Researchers also found variations of ink between pages, demonstrating that printing was done on separate presses for different pages. Gutenberg had created the first assembly line. 

And today? At a 2015 auction, eight leaves (sixteen pages) from a Gutenberg sold for $970,000. Therefore "...each leaf of the Gutenberg Bible could be valued now at an extraordinary $121,250...it is conceivable that a two-volume Gutenberg Bible consisting of 643 leaves (1,286 single pages) might be priced at almost $80 million."

I could go on with more details about this particular Gutenberg Bible, but instead urge interested readers to grab onto The Lost Gutenberg to better immerse themselves in the history about this fascinating volume, "the world's most important book," its current fate and current fates other existing Gutenberg Bibles. 

The first mass-produced printed books, after all, are unlike any other thing in the world. Little else that we have produced is so rich with story, with lifelines that flow through one object -- and bind us together in the pages of human existence. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Mays, Andrea. The Millionaire and the Bard.   

This documents life of Henry Folger and his obsession with and quest to possess all existing copies of Shakespeare's original First Folios. Highly recommended (previously reviewed here)