Lynn Truss has written a delightful best-seller on the art of using commas, apostrophes, and semi-colons in her Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. After reading this book all I can think of is that I need to use semi-colons more often. Eats, Shoots & Leaves is both a useful guide to punctuation (primarily from a British perspective) and a witty and humorous rant against the declining use of proper punctuation in our culture. Ms. Truss frequently delves into the historical roots of many of the punctuation and type formatting standards we take for granted today.



How could a book on punctuation make it to the best seller list and stay there for… how many months has it been? One reason is by being well written and entertaining. Another reason is that those of us who read books also often like to write. Since the dawn of email and the Internet we’ve been writing much more than we would ever have expected to. As such, many of us are on the one hand appalled by the lack of proper punctuation populating the emails of those born around the same time as the personal computer, and on the other hand trying to remember what exactly those rules were that we learned so long ago. Eats, Shoots & Leaves appeals to us for both reasons; Truss lambasts the awful punctuation she sees daily while gently explaining the guidelines for doing it right.

Yann Martel spins a magical story with Life of Pi. In this book, he recounts the boyhood of Piscine Patel whose parents were zoo keepers in India. Pi is fascinated both with God (simultaneously practicing Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism) and zoo animals. When the ship he is taking with his family and some of the animals sinks in the Pacific, Pi finds himself castaway on a 26 ft life boat with an injured zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a 450 lb bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Soon only the tiger and Pi are left on the boat and Pi is left to use his wits to survive the elements and keep from being eaten by the tiger. Pi realizes that he can’t kill the tiger and must learn to become his master in order to survive the ordeal. The interactions with the animals and Pi’s journey are all metaphors for living a spiritual life. The underlying current of the book is that Pi must master his own dark-side, his fear and despair with vigilance and compassion. Much like the Buddhist saint Milarepa who finally mastered the demons who were torturing him by accepting them and befriending them, Pi masters himself and the tiger Richard Parker. There’s much more too it, but telling more would give away the story. Simply, the book left me with sense of wonder and sadness from how one man survived the tragedy of losing his family and the 7 month ordeal of being lost at sea.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is told in the first person by Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15 year old autistic boy, who sets off on a detective mission to discover who killed his neighbor’s dog. Christopher counts forward in prime numbers, can’t tolerate the colors yellow or brown, avoids strangers, is easily overwhelmed by noise or crowds, and always tells the truth.



We don’t often get a glimpse into the minds and worlds of people so different from ourselves. Author Mark Haddon takes us on a touching journey of how this boy’s world unravels and comes together again as he bumps up against the very real human failings of those closest to him. We feel his anguish and also the comfort he finds in his world of abstract problem solving. The book has several mind-stumping math problems, that Christopher delights in solving for us. One in particular, the Monty Hall problem, was really annoying. It’s the kind of problem that makes you sit down, take out a pen and paper and try to make sense of it. But you can’t. Or most people can’t. I think that is part of the interesting charm of this book. We the readers are as closed off to the world which Christopher inhabits, as he is to our world. As smart as I was in math, these problems confused me, made my brain hurt. As brilliant as Christopher is, it takes every ounce of his mental focus to take a simple subway ride. Highly recommended.

Artemis Fowl is brilliant, inventive, cunning, devious, and the mastermind of a vast criminal empire. He is only twelve years old. His father lost and presumed dead, his mother suffering from a nervous breakdown, Artemis sets out to restore his family’s fortune by trapping a fairy from the underworld of magical creatures and holding her ransom for fairy gold. Unfortunately for Artemis, he picks the wrong fairy to kidnap – Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon (Lower Elements Police Reconnaisance) Unit. When Holly’s comrades come to rescue her, things don’t exactly meet up with Artemis’ plans, or theirs.

I had little choice. Knowing how much I love Harry Potter (having read each book at least five times) and scifi/fantasy, my friend Suzanne and her three kids handed me their copies of the Artemis Fowl series and insisted that I read them. Well, it pays to have friends who know you well. These books by author Eoin Colfer are a hoot! Colfer describes his book as “Die Hard with fairies.” Yep, that sums it up pretty well. Sort of like James Bond, Encyclopedia Brown, and Grimms all rolled up in one. Highly entertaining. Artemis Fowl is the first in an ongoing series. In Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident Artemis teams up with Holly and the LEP to save his father from the Russian “Mafiya” and fight off a goblin rebellion. In Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code Artemis gets the whole world into trouble by using secret fairy technology to try to extort money from a evil industrialist.

Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City is the true story of the building of the magnificent 1893 Columbian Exposition World’s Fair in Chicago and the sociopath murderer H.H. Holmes who preyed on young women coming to see the fair. In his telling, Larson transports us to the late 1800s from when Chicago first wins the right by Congressional vote to host the fair, beating out rival New York City, through the two years it took to build the White City, to the fair itself, which brought in an estimated 40 million visitors during the short time it was open. Daniel H. Bernham, chief architect of the fair, led the extraordinary effort to build the fair, a feat no one thought could be accomplished in the time given. The fair drew the best engineers, architects, and designers the country had and forever transformed the shoreline of Chicago. The result was such a resounding success, Bernham imprinted grandeur into the minds of visitors who came from all over the country and set the course of American neo-classical architecture for the next fifty years.



A few miles away, in the Chicago suburb Englewood, a more sinister story was unfolding. Dr. H.H. Holmes built a boarding house on a full city block, complete with torture chamber and crematorium in its basement. On the first floor of the building Holmes ran a pharmacy, complete with bogus cure-alls, a restaurant, and several seemingly respectable businesses – fronts for countless fraud schemes.A handsome, arresting, blue-eyed man, Holmes charmed several women into working for him, or renting a room while in town visiting the fair. He seduced them, mesmerized them, and killed scores of them, either by locking them in an airtight vault and gassing them with poisonous fumes, or smothering them with ether-soaked rags. With several, he dissected them, removed their skin, and sold their bodies to be made into skeletons for local medical schools. He was a predator of the worst kind, a sociopath who preyed on the vulnerable, addicted to the thrill of killing.



One wouldn’t expect that the two stories – of the Fair and of Holmes – would work so well together, intermingled in their telling. But in a way, the contrast between the two draws the picture of each even more vividly. It reminds me of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, where beneath the surface of a neatly manicured lawn in happy town USA, a severed finger rots. The story of the Fair shows the best of the men of the time – their engineering feats, their artistic ambition, their incredidbly hard work, their accomplishment when working united to a purpose; where the story of Holmes displays man at his worst. Larson does a terrific job weaving both tales together, and setting a pace that makes it hard to put the book down.

Ireland by Frank Delaney is the story of a young boy, Ronan O’Mara, who in 1951 at the age of 9 encounters an itinerant storyteller, who regales Ronan and others with magical tales, blending myth and fiction, of Ireland’s past. Ronan is so taken with the storyteller and his stories that he starts a quest to find him, a difficult undertaking as the storyteller has no address – the storyteller wanders the countryside, staying with people who will feed him and give shelter in exchange for telling stories. Thus starts a life long passion for Ronan – collecting the folklore of Ireland, and uncovering Ireland’s history.

The book’s plot structure of Ronan’s search for the storyteller is a convenient container for the true gems of this novel – wonderful, colorful stories covering the breadth of Irish history, from the making of the 5000 year old tomb at New Grange, the legend and fact of St. Patrick, Strongbow and the invasion of the Anglo-Normans, Daniel O’Connell and the repeal of the penal laws, to the 20th century troubles. In every breath of this novel, the Irish gift of gab is celebrated. I listened to the audiobook version of this book and I must say that this is most captivating audiobook I’ve heard to date. (Available also at Audible.com.)The author, Frank Delaney, does the narrating. With his various Irish accents he brings the stories alive in a way only possible through the spoken word.

In Tehran, Iran, for two years during the late 1990s, literature professor Azar Nafisi conducted a secret class in her home for 7 women students. The class was about literature and read from works of Nabokov, Henry James, Fitzgerald, Jane Austin, and others. Reading Lolita in Tehran is professor Nafisi’s memoir of those years and those that came before, as Nafisi struggled to teach literature whose very characters and stories more often than not offended the Islamic authorities. Reading Lolita alternates between being a social history of modern Iran and the challenges for women to retain their dignity in a repressive Islamic state, and an inquiry into the power of fiction to open our eyes and give our lives meaning. Nafisi follows the lives of her students – their stories, fears, struggles, and triumphs – as each comes to terms with their lives and roles in the world. Ultimately many, like Nafisi, will choose to leave Iran, rather to continue to live in a culture where so much of their lives are proscribed.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is beautifully written. Anyone who cherishes literature will not only appreciate the subject matter, but the lyrical manner in which it is written. Highly recommended.

“It’s not Disney,” explained one child upon being asked why he liked Lemony Snickett’s dark and dismal Series of Unfortunate Events. Kids seem to love this book series about the three Baudelaire children – Violet, Klaus, and Sunny – whose parents died tragically in a fire and who spend most of their time trying to evade the evil Count Olaf, a master of disguises who plots to steal the orphan’s fortune. Violet is the oldest with a knack for inventing, Klaus the younger boy who loves to read and study, and Sunny, the baby with 4 exceptionally strong and sharp teeth. The books in the series have predictable plots. In each, Mr. Poe, the Baudelaire’s hapless executor, appoints a guardian who is often a distant relative of the children who proves to be incapable of keeping Count Olaf away. The adults in the stories are all fooled by the Count’s disguises and don’t listen to the children who are never fooled. It’s up to Violet, Klaus, and Sunny to figure out the Count’s nefarious plan before he can implement it and abscond with the children. It always takes the three kids working together to foil the Count’s plans.

The Series of Unfortunate Events is different from most other children’s books in that people die and miserable things are done to the Baudelaires and their friends. All the while the author is warning the reader that if you are looking for a happy ending, you need to go somewhere else. Many parents are understandably concerned that the series is too dark for their children, but kids I know love these books. Through ingenuity, courage, and coordinated effort, the Baudelaires always manage to escape from Count Olaf’s darkest efforts to capture or hurt them.

From the author:

Dear Reader,

I’m sorry to say that the book you are holding in your hands is extremely unpleasant. It tells an unhappy tale about three very unlucky children. Even though they are charming and clever, the Baudelaire siblings lead lives filled with misery and woe. From the very first page of this book when the children are at the beach and receive terrible news, continuing on through the entire story, disaster lurks at their heels. One might say they are magnets for misfortune.

In this short book alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, and cold porridge for breakfast.

It is my sad duty to write down these unpleasant tales, but there is nothing stopping you from putting this book down at once and reading something happy, if you prefer that sort of thing.

With all due respect,

Lemony Snicket

Links:
A Series of Unfortunate Events – DVD – film starring Jim Carrey as the evil Count Olaf.

Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale is an amazing true story of the adventures of a master con artist and check forger. Of all the books I’ve “read” from Audible.com, this is among the most enjoyable. In his late teens, Abagnale posed as a PanAm co-pilot, getting lifts on airplanes for free to take him all around the country and the world, allowing him to pass bad checks behind the guise of a respectable airline pilot. By the time he was caught, at age 21, he had managed to bilk his victims, mostly PanAm, of over 2 million dollars. At that was 2 million in the late 60s, when the story took place. Posing as Frank Williams, Robert Conrad, Frank Adams, and Robert Monjo, Abagnale also managed to teach sociology at a college in Utah with a fake diploma, pass the bar exam and work in an attorney general’s office, pose as a pediatrician and become a temporary resident supervisor at a hospital in Georgia.

In one outrageous scheme, Abagnale recruited, and then “hired” a group of young female college students from an Arizona University. He told the girls that they were to be part of a special PR project, where they would travel to different cities in Europe and, dressed as PanAm flight attendants, be photographed for PanAm publicity purposes. He took them to Europe, hired photographers in each city, and while the girls were getting photographed, he passed back checks.

Finally nabbed in Montpelier, France, Abagnale confessed and spent 6 months in the infamous Perpignan French prison, where he stayed naked, in a 5 foot by 5 foot by 5 foot cel, in complete darkness, with only a bucket, no drain, no running water. Not once did he see light or was able to stand completely straight (he’s over 6 feet tall.) Once released from Perpignan, he was transfered to Sweden where he did 6 more months in a prison that was more like a college dorm. A Swedish judge then deported him back to the US. Faced with the prospect of meeting US Federal agents once his plane was at the gate, Frank escaped from the plane by removing the toilet mechanism from the airline restroom, and left the plane through the toilet hatch.

The escapades described in this story are creative, daring, and sometimes just heart-stopping. My one complaint with the book is that it sort of leaves you hanging at the end. Frank manages to evade some FBI agents and then the book just stops. I couldn’t believe it. What happens next?! A little research online reveals that Frank is eventually caught and serves 4 years in a US prison. He is released with the agreement that he will help law enforcement agencies catch check forgers. Frank has since made a career for himself providing this kind of advice to companies (see www.abagnale.com). There is also a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks that came out a couple of years ago which is now available on DVD.

In Jonathan Safran’s Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close we are introduced to 9 year old Oskar Schell, a highly intelligent, inventive, precocious boy coming to grips with the loss of his father who died when the World Trade Center collapsed on 9-11. Oskar discovers a mysterious key in his father’s closet with the word “Black” written on the envelope that holds the key. He decides to interview every person in NYC’s five boroughs with the last name of Black, and sets off every weekend, on foot to find them. At the same time a parallel story is unfolding with Oskar’s grandparents, their diary entries and letters that help them come to terms with their own fractured lives, having lived through the bombing in Dresden.

Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close is wildly creative. It reminded me at the beginning of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. But Extremely Loud is much richer, and the characters’ lives in more need of repair. There is a parallel too, in the Twin Towers and the destruction of Dresden, two generations apart. This book is sad and wonderful, funny and despairing, and vibrantly alive. Highly recommended.