What I've Read Lately

Books 35 through 39 of 2007:

Troy: Shield of Thunder, by David Gemmell. This is the second in a proposed trilogy, but sadly, Gemmell died before completing the third. I enjoyed this one, but it left me wishing I knew more about Homer's writing. I wasn't automatically noticing all those characters and saying, "Oh yeah, I remember that." The main ones, yes, but not even all that many of them. What I liked best about this was the way the character of Odysseus would take ordinary events and turn them into fabulous, mythological stories. The origins of the Circe story were particularly entertaining.

A Certain Justice, by P.D. James. I've read this book before. I love P.D. James' novels about Adam Dalgliesh. She's very good on class in England and her characters are all hyper-aware of where they come from, their accents, and how they feel inferior to other people with "better" origins. The funny thing is that I never remember who actually did the murder, so I can read them again and again.

Playing for the Ashes, by Elizabeth George. Can you believe Elizabeth George is American? I hardly can. She is so amazing at writing like a Brit. This one is pretty distasteful in places. I even learned a couple of new-to-me British bad words - and if you consider that I went to high school in England, you'll see how surprising that is.

Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood, by Ann Brashares. In this one, the Traveling Pants girls are nineteen or so, and in my opinion it's now out of the middle school zone occupied by my students, not just because the heroines are older, but because the content really isn't appropriate for them. Middle school girls will still, I'm sure, read it avidly. And it's very readable.

The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth. I've never read a book quite like this one. The genre is called "alternative history," but this won an award for historical novels, as well. The premise is that in 1940, instead of Roosevelt being re-elected, Charles Lindbergh became President of the United States. Philip, the protagonist (yes, he's called Philip Roth, just like the author), is a Jewish boy living in Newark, and this is the story of how events play out for his family. It's completely convincing, and Roth makes some very good observations about history. Here's one: "And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as 'History,' harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic." And later: "'Because what's history?' he asked rhetorically when he was in his expansive dinnertime instructional mode. 'History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in his house to an ordinary man -- that'll be history too someday.'" It's scary to think that one small shift in events could make everything turn out so differently, but that's what this book is about. I wonder how Lindbergh's family reacted to it - he certainly doesn't come out of it very well. Roth includes a section of documentation on all the major characters who are historical, and many of Lindbergh's words and actions do lead one to believe that he might have done the kind of things he does in the book, given the chance.