The Hour I First Believed

This is a novel I found very confusing--I'm not sure what the crux is supposed to be. The title suggests that the book is about the search for God, but I really didn't see much of that theme in the book until the very end.

The story is about a high school literature teacher. The beginning depicts the banality of his current and past marriages. The writing was quite entertaining as I found myself relating so much to the character's perception of couplehood. Then, the story moves on to tell a story of his wife, who survived the Columbine massacre, and her struggle to combat depression and PTSD and prescription drug addiction. As this theme unfolds, the main character's aunt passes away and he inherits the family farm and reflects on his family history, struggling to understand it all. Then his wife accidentally kills a boy by driving under the influence. She is sentenced to prison for five years, and, while the wife is in prison, the main character discovers many family secrets and that one of his ancestors was a pioneer in the women's suffrage movement as well as an end to racism.

Like I said, the story was all over the place. The beginning was very entertaining, but I just didn't understand the thesis, and got annoyed toward the end, skipping over large portions of the story.

I really enjoyed Wally Lamb's other novels: She's Come Undone and I Know This Much is True. I read them a long time ago and only remember snippets, but I believe I liked them enough to read both books twice.

How to be Good

This book starts off about a traditional marriage in which both parties have become complacent with each other. The male in the couple is extremely sarcastic--in a humorous and entirely British sort of way. The way that the couple feels about each other reflects the way that so many of my serious relationships have felt at the time. Contemptuous and boring.

But then the book changes entirely, when the husband meets a spiritual healer and changes his personality into being as good of a person as he can be. He gives away money, takes in homeless people, etc. The remainder of the book is about the wife's frustration with this change, and her debate of whether or not to stay or go.

The book goes nowhere from there. I was entertained by the first part of the book, but the rest of the book is pretty boring and there really isn't a conclusion.

Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter

This book cleverly combines the history of Abraham Lincoln's life and inserts a parodic vampire story. Initially I was highly intrigued by the subject matter, but found myself bored about a third of the way through the book. My brain tuned the words out even though I tried very hard to pay attention.

The author's writing style reminds me slightly of Christopher Moore.

I will update if/when I get around to finishing it.

The Help

The help is a novel that is set in the 60's in Jackson, Mississippi. It is about a white women who decides to write a book compiling interviews of "colored" maids and what it has been like to work for white families.

It is hard to imagine such blatant racial disparity so recent as the 60's. It depicts the rapidly changing racial inequalities of the time.

The book is a little hard to get into at first due to the prose of the black women. But once I had gotten used to it, I found the book to be a page-turner and finished it in two days.

The Winter Garden

This is a book that is about two women who grew up with a mother who is emotionally distant--to the extreme. In the middle of their lives, they learn that there is a reason for their mothers' inability to show love, and depicts a horrifying story of what it would have been like to live under the Russian dictator (?) Joseph Stalin.

It has been my experience that those who grow up with emotionally retarded parents aren't so conscious of their parent(s) shortcomings during childhood until an emotional breakdown later in life. Therefore, I found the two women characters a little annoying and unrealistic in their constant complaining about their mother.

A depressing but enlightening read.

Water for Elephants

This book set in the depression era about a man who joined the circus. Even though it is fiction, it includes many true events--a compilation of circus stories embedded in a single story.

I was very surprised to learn in this book how smart elephants are: the ability to interpret language and emotion.

It was a good read. The movie mostly follows the story line, but is choppy and had you not read the book, would have probably been confused by many small tidbits in the story.