GREAT LINES:
On the third night, she told him that once after a lecture they’d attended, she let him speak to the chairman of his department without telling him that he had a dab of pâté on his chin. She’d been irritated with him for some reason, and so she’d let him go on and on, about securing his fellowship for the following semester, without putting a finger to her own chin as a signal.
.
.
This is a beautiful collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri about the lives of immigrants and first generation Americans. The plot-lines play second fiddle to the character developments, which are exquisite. Lahiri is genius at showcasing universally felt emotions – her prose is restrained yet carries tremendous weight in its simplicity. Even though her characters are mostly of Indian descent, any person who has ever felt like a foreigner or out-of-place will be able to relate. The stories can be at times sad or heavy, but Lahiri’s insights into what it is to be human make it worth it. It is ultimately a celebration of the fullness of life. If you are looking for a deep, emotional read, this is the book for you!
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Interpreter of Maladies
GREAT LINE:
Knowin’ myself, I could always find something to get shook up over and write about.
.
.
Before I encountered Harvey Pekar’s “American Splendor,” the comics I read featured colorful fantasy with slam-bang action and the obligatory battle against world-endangering aliens. Harvey Pekar wasn’t into that. In Pekar’s comics, as collaborator R. Crumb writes in a preface, “Hardly anything actually happens. Mostly it’s just people talking, or Harvey by himself, panel after panel, haranguing the hapless reader.” The people in the stories are office workers or people Pekar meets on the street or friends down on their luck. The title of one of the pieces is “Standing Behind Old Jewish Ladies in Supermarket Lines.” Ye gods, I remember thinking, why would anybody want to read that sort of stuff! Escape from a boring life, not to get mired in one, that’s the thing, yet here Harvey Pekar was plodding through an ordinary life without benefit of cape, x-ray vision, or pointy ears. His problems had less to do with space aliens than with alienation right here on Earth. “My name has been a matter of some concern to me over the years,” Pekar says in the first story. He talks about how kids twisted it to tease, how he figured the name must be unusual, yet when he got his first telephone there were two other Harvey Pekars in the book, and finally, he asks, as though the name itself were as much a mask as any Batman wears, Does a name hide as much as it reveals? “Who is Harvey Pekar?” When R. Crumb illustrates his own writing he tends to the fantastical with bird-headed girls or melting heads, but the work he does for Pekar presents the world as a bit shabby, the people rumpled and pudgy, the only thing hiding in the shadows is tomorrow or maybe yesterday. Am I making Pekar sound like a downer? Well. He is. Sorta. But Harvey Pekar is also an optimist. He’s an optimist in the way somebody must be who every day gives life a good eye, and tries to figure out what exactly can be done with it. He always figures out something. When alien invaders and flashy costumes pall, Pekar’s practical dao is one true way through the city’s littered canyons.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: American Splendor Presents Bob & Harv’s Comics
OPENING LINE:
I am a forty-one-year-old woman living by myself, in the same one-bedroom flat where I have always lived, in a derelict building on the outskirts of Beijing that is threatened to be demolished by government-backed real estate developers.
.
.
This is a powerful collection of stories by local author Yiyun Li. Most are set in 20th century China and certainly there is a strong sense of time and place. But the dominant feature of the stories are the characters. Li’s main characters are outsiders, people who in various ways have positioned themselves away from their family members, co-workers and the rest of society. They often have different expectations for their lives than the people around them and in many ways they are alone. Through these people Li explores the themes of fidelity, loyalty, family, responsibility, isolation and loss. Each is victim as well as hero and their stories were so attuned to the human experience they made me ache.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
GREAT LINES:
By the bull that bought me, I do not know! That thing has killed six times in a night. Let him go out no more.
.
.
This is a collection of classic stories about Mowgli, a boy who is saved from a tiger as a baby and raised by wolves in the wilds of India. He learns the ways of the jungle from many teachers including Baloo the bear, Bagheera the black panther and Gray Brother, a wolf. He also has an enemy, Shere Khan the tiger. After many attempts Mowgli finally defeats him in the story Mowgli’s Brothers. My favorite story is called “The King’s Ankus.” It is a story about a golden object left in the jungle and found by thieves. As Mowgli follows their trail, he finds that all the men kill each other for the possession of this object. Along with the fables about the animals of the jungle, Kipling has also included poems in the book which are enjoyable.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Jungle Book
GREAT LINES:
Was this the answer? After all, an illusion, no matter how convincing, remained nothing more than an illusion. At least objectively. But subjectively, – Quite the opposite entirely.
.
.
Philip K. Dick’s collection of short stories muses on alternative realities centered on one bizarre concept each. All of the stories in this collection are a bit of mind-bending fun! The collection’s namesake is first. It takes the idea that a certain kind of person can accurately predict crimes that happen in the future. But what happens when the chief of the department is implicated? The next two stories pretend that technology creates the ability to modify human memories and are about what impact it would have on an individual or a company. They are fun explorations of the concept of memory and impact of our choices on our future, whether we remember them or not. The first, “”We can remember it for you Wholesale”" is the basis for the Arnold Shwarzenegger sci-fi action movie “”Total Recall”". (The story is nothing like the movie, though, so is not spoiled at all by it.) And the last is “Paycheck.” In it, Dick shows how a bag of junk can be more valuable than a pile of money to a man who has lost his memory. I really enjoyed this story because of its message about perspective.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Minority Report