You Must Remember This, by Joyce Carol Oates

One of the good things about reading Joyce Carol Oates' novels, for me, is that she is so prolific and I have read so few of her books. I was taken by the first I read, I don't even remember which it was, and have scooped up those that have crossed my path since. Oddly I have not ordered them specifically, just found them on shelves in used book stores and in book boxes and in bookcrossing zones.

I had not heard of this particular book and it sat on my shelf for quite some time. Finally its time came.

Some of the critics' comments, on the cover and inside, suggest that this is one of her best, possibly her best. It may be. Written in the 1980s, though, probably not. There have been so many since.

The main character is Enid Marie. She is young, growing up in the 1950s in a small town in upstate New York. The 1950s she lives through certainly remind me of those I lived through as well, although I am eight years younger than she. Small towns in this country perhaps resembled each other, wherever they were, in that time. In the fifties television was just catching on and larger incidents and political decisions were reaching the general public as never before. It was the time after the Atomic bomb and there was no escaping the speculation and the fear. I remember my own nightmares of that time. Much of this time in this novel is familiar, and not in a warm and fuzzy way.

Thus we have Enid, a bright and curious and strong child, growing up Catholic in a world when certain things were not spoken about, a cloud covered certain topics. She is a quiet child, a good child, except for a part of her known as "Angel Face", a part of her willing to take risks, a part that laughs at the world. Is it this part that finds a certain attraction to her young uncle?

Bit by bit, through her eyes and through his, we see Enid and her uncle Felix find each other, resist the pull and finally we see Felix break through when drunk and - what word do we use? molest? rape? These are true, this is what happened, yet as in Lolita it isn't necessarily simple. Yes, I blame him for not holding back, but I also see her forwardness and understand it as well.

Fifteen-year-old Enid has an affair with her uncle, twice her age. She hides it well, she feels the emotional pull as strongly as perhaps only a teen can. The two are discreet, finding places to be together where nobody cares. And so it continues. The scenes are so real as to be breathtaking. I am there when I read them, I am Enid. I know her although she is not me, not really.

We meet not only Enid but her uncle, and we follow him around on his business dealings. We meet her father Lyle, owner of a used furniture store, scraping by, and we meet, less closely, her mother, her sisters, and a bit more closely we see her brother Warren. Each is affected by the time, the events, the possibilities and the problems. Each springs to life here, genuine, accurate.

It may be that because I lived through the fifties I felt this novel deeply. I think, too, though, that I felt it because of my own character and experiences, some of which might well have been shared by others not my age. Enid's experiences reminded me of some of my own, different yet of the same intensity and with the same shame. A book that brings part of me back to myself is a book I consider great.

After Dark, by Haruki Murakami

With spare, simple prose, Murakami evokes a dream-like story, full of allegory and illusion - or is it?

The main character is Mari, a 19-year-old student who is spending the night away from home. We find her in Denny's at first. A young man comes in, recognizes her as someone he met once a while back, and sits down to talk. The talk tends to be about Mari's sister Eri. Eri is beautiful, so beautiful she apparently stops traffic. Two years older than Mari, she is the center of attention wherever she goes. Mari knows she looks nothing like her sister, and she is a serious student, presumably the genius in the family rather than the beauty.

It soon becomes obvious to us that Mari is a bit distant. She is honest and blunt, almost to the point of incivility at times. She is not used to pleasing others, like her sister, and therefore has no problem being simply who she is. As she goes through this night, having a conversation with this young man, then helping with an injured Chinese woman, later meeting the young man again, and conversing with women who work in a "love ho" ("love hotel", rooms by the hour), we find she is admired by others for her directness and honesty, for having a strong sense of herself.

Her sister, though, we get to see too, in a different way. We watch her sleep, then watch as she appears on the other side of a television screen in her room, and as she awakes, finds herself in a strange viewless room and fights to get out, to get away from the emptiness.

Mari finally tells somebody about her sister's sleeping. Through the night she seems to take in another way of seeing her relationship with this sister and perhaps of setting aside her own frustrations for a moment.

A simple tale, really, quickly read, very visual, like an art film. In its quiet way, a story about love.

The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson

Second in the three-part series by Larsson. Too bad there can't be any more!

This one is a real thriller, almost from the beginning. There is no guessing which way it will turn and who will get hurt.

We begin with Mikael Blomqvist, journalist and publisher of Millenium, a magazine that exposes the truth about a wide range of issues through extensive investigative work, discussing the publication of a "themed" issue on the subject of the sex trade in Sweden, as well as publishing a book on the subject, with his staff and the guy who is writing the book. The group gives the idea the green light and the race is on to get the magazine together and the book done in time for both to be published simultaneously.

Meanwhile, Lisbeth Salander, diminutive but tough "girl with the dragon tattoo", has taken time off from any kind of work to assess her options. She has accumulated enough money to last her lifetime, so when she returns from spending over a year abroad she sets about getting herself another, larger apartment. Consistent with her constant paranoia, she makes sure nobody can find her. Yet she hangs on to her old apartment, and in fact offers it to an occasional lover who could use a little more room. She had cut off all contact with Blomqvist when she left the country and is not interested in seeing him again. She found she cared too much for him.

It turns out that Lisbeth's and Mikael's lives are bound to cross again, however. The sex-trade investigation leaks into parts of Lisbeth's own past. Because so many people's reputations (and perhaps free lives) are going to be adversely affected by the publication of the book, there is a good chance of danger to those involved.

In one night everything goes to hell and Lisbeth is on the run. Or, perhaps more correctly, in hiding. In different ways, Mikael, the police, and Lisbeth, as well as Lisbeth's former employer, are all trying to put the pieces together to make sense of a horrifying tragedy.

This one had me short of breath at times. I couldn't easily put it down and had to make promises to myself, to reward myself with more reading after I had done the things that had to be done around the house. I am glad I had a break from the first in the series because it increased my anticipation of the second, and now there will be another break before I read the third. During this break I intend to find out more about Larsson, about how he became such an advocate for women.

The Bonesetter's Daughter, by Amy Tan

I didn't particularly like The Joy Luck Club, finding the voices too much alike, and did not really want to read this one. However, it found its way to me and I decided to give her another try.

Again, Tan focuses on the differences in cultures and generations in China and the U.S., contrasting the "modern" with the traditional Chinese and Chinese-American. More, though, this story is about one woman, middle-aged, seeking her place in the world, reconciling her roots with her present family.

Ruth is a successful "ghost writer" or co-writer, particularly for writers of self-help books. One day she finds a picture that her mother, LuLing, says is of her (LuLing) with her mother. But then she discovers that the woman LuLing calls her mother is not Ruth's grandmother. So what happened here? Through LuLing's memories and incidents in Ruth's life we learn of LuLing's real mother, the bonesetter's daughter. As with The Joy Luck Club, the voice of LuLing is halting English, English as spoken by an immigrant from China. LuLing's beliefs, too, come from China and from her past and her parents' past.

The main difference between Ruth and LuLing is in the "mystical" or perhaps "mythical" beliefs LuLing holds, cultural stories that have made their way down several generations. Like Ruth, I found myself impatient with all of the insistence on the importance of this or that action, this or that word, on the future of a person. I personally have difficulty with the concept of living a life through belief in messages from the past, from the dead. I felt, though, that Ruth was actually more sympathetic to her mother's way of thinking than she let on. Perhaps she will eventually cling to such beliefs herself.

It's an interesting story that brings in a lot of history of China from the WWII years, as well as the continuing conflicts between native-born Chinese and Chinese-Americans.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

Although the book and its title is about Lisbeth Salander, the majority of the story involves the investigation of a woman's disappearance over 40 years before, and the investigation is by Mikael Blomkvist, a discredited journalist. Salander's story is intertwined with Mikael's until the two finally meet and connect in a way neither, perhaps, has before.

Salander is an antisocial 25-year-old woman who has been a problem all her life and is therefore a ward of the court, subject to the whims of her so-called guardian. But she is no victim. She ultimately controls others, directly or otherwise. And her appearance, small, thin, and often sullen and withdrawn, belies her sharp intelligence and instincts. She is fortunate to find herself a freelance place with a security company, where she does investigations and turns out to be the most gifted and capable investigator there. Or perhaps anywhere, given her lust for information. She is hired to investigate Mikael Blomkvist by the head of a large industrial company, Henrik Vanger, who wants to know as much as he can learn about the journalist before hiring him to investigate the disappearance of his niece. Because of this association, Salander later meets Blomkvist and assists him in the investigation.

While the plot is complex the story is really about the characters Blomkvist and Salander. Don't be misled and think it's a romance. While there is sex it is far from any kind of romance I've read. Thank heaven. The characters are absorbing, unique, believable. Throughout the book are statistics about women and violence in Sweden, which offer a hint of the underlying theme here, which is about women, strong women, and abuses of power, including violence against women. The actions and thoughts of the women read very real to me, which makes me curious about Stieg Larsson and his life and how he came to have such a passionate and compassionate understanding of women. My sister Cathy, who sent me this book, said the same thing, that she was curious, wants to know how he came to this place.

The story is interesting on another level as well. Because it is set in Sweden and by a Swedish writer, the Swedish culture and laws are embedded in it. Books written from "the inside" rather than by an observer give us truer pictures, I suspect, of life in other countries.

I have already put the other two books in this series on my wishlist and I suspect I will just order them soon.

The View from Castle Rock, by Alice Munro

I read Munro’s Runaway and decided she was a new favorite author. So I was happy to find another of her books on the notable books lists.

This one is more truly autobiographical than Runaway, and in fact almost historical. Munro traces her own family back several generations, learns what she can about them, and tells little stories about them here, before she reaches her own generation and settles on her own stories.

She freely admits to embellishment, even breaking into the middle of a story to say, “I can’t say for sure this happened”. It appears, from her stories about herself, that she has long enjoyed embroidering, but it’s more than that. She wonders, “might this have happened?” "what if that happened?" And maybe these things did happen, if not in the precise way she imagines them.

I did not love the early stories. I was missing something, the emotional element. It was there in some cases but clothed differently, lightly touched, and so the stories did not draw me in the way the Runaway stories did. However, as they came closer to her own generation the stories filled out more, seemed to have more substance. And when she got to her own time and her own life, they are just beautiful.

It was good to have the background, too, where she came from, her distant as well as immediate past. All of it fits into who we are.

I loved her descriptions of how she felt when butted up against different “classes”, when she herself qualified as “poor”. This might be a major theme of the book, in fact. Her distant relatives were far from rich, and it was a search for a better life that brought them across the Atlantic and into Canada (as well as into the US in some instances). From generation to generation, the family members worked hard and accepted who they were and their position in life, even as they knew they had the brains to equal the intellectual elite that might at times shun them. There is pride and a sense of place here, even down to the gifts offered for Alice's first wedding.

Alice herself stands out as a child, somehow does not quite fit in. She’s attractive enough, she's bright, she's thoughtful, but she likes to indulge in activities that are seen as "time-wasting" by others in the family and by the community at large. Reading, enjoying that thing called "nature", simply being alone with her thoughts. These things are not productive. When she finds a suitor her family breathes a sigh of relief.

I most enjoyed the intimate moments, and there are many, the honesty in how Munro looks at herself, the lack of self-pity or any idea that she had ever been "unfortunate". She even manages to trade on her upbringing, to use it to surprise, even shock, others, especially when she adds elements to it that were never there. I gained a great sense of her and I like her, even envy her.

9 Dragons, by Michael Connelly

The latest in the Harry Bosch series, this one goes into territory rarely experienced by Bosch.

Bosch and his partner Ferras are assigned what appears to be a routine liquor store robbery. The owner, John Li, was killed before he could reach his gun. The killer took the disk from the digital camera for that day, but left two other disks that Li had saved. Bosch looks through the two carefully and discovers a possible motive for the killing. Along with a representative from the Asian Crimes Unit Bosch postulates a connection to an Asian triad based in Hong Kong.

A possible suspect is brought in for questioning and is arrested for extortion. Harry then receives a threatening phone call that he suspects came from a Triad member. And then a video of Harry's thirteen-year-old daughter showing her tied up and held in some unknown place.

Harry only met his daughter when she was four, and had no idea she existed before that. He managed to find a way into her life and an uneasy alliance with her mother, Eleanor Wish, to whom he was once married. Mother and daughter now live in Hong Kong, where Madeline has been learning Chinese and Eleanor works for a casino. So when Harry gets the video he heads for Hong Kong.

What follows is a breathless chase to find his daughter, perhaps more hectic than anything Bosch has experienced before. He leaves devastation in his wake and reason to pile on yet another load of regret. And as we have come to see in other Connelly books, there are twists at the end.

Harry has mellowed over the years but still has "the mission" to get a case solved as quickly as possible. This impatience often costs him dearly but also often means success in his solve rate. He still makes rash decisions and is impatient with those who do not see the job as he does, but he's more cautious, has learned from the past. He is not spending as much time castigating himself and has moved more into his role as father. It's a role that will be interesting to watch him fill.

Note: not the type book I usually write about here because I usually just write my reviews of mysteries on bookcrossing.com and nowhere else. This book is a loaner, however, not registered with bookcrossing, and I wanted to be sure I got some of my thoughts down somewhere.