Katherine Boo, BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS: LIFE, DEATH, AND HOPE IN A MUMBAI UNDERCITY

My pal Jody gave me this one, a compelling, well-written non-fiction about the Annawadi slum next to the slick and shiny Mumbai International Airport. Boo, a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist out of Washington D.C., spent three years following a group of people as they sift garbage, sell garbage, and have it stolen from them; are accused (falsely) of burning a neighbor and go to trial (where the stenographer doesn't understand most of what they're saying); run a school, survive a monsoon, and try to figure out who they need to pay off and who they don't (which I found completely bewildering). The title comes from a wall that divides the airport from the slum; it advertises Italianate floor tiles, with a corporate slogan running the length of the wall: Beautiful Forever Beautiful Forever. But the "divide" of Beautiful and Ugly isn't as rigid as the wall. Boo offers a nuanced picture, beyond the standard heart-rending one; she describes people who are entrepreneurial, wary, observant, aspiring, and capable, as well as corrupt and deceitful and desperate. The explanation of what happens to all the donations and efforts of well-intentioned human rights groups is pretty discouraging, however.

Adrian Wojnarowski, THE MIRACLE OF ST. ANTHONY

It looks like a basketball book, which isn't my usual pick. But the story is really an underdog tale about a high school (St. Anthony's) in New Jersey that, with very few financial resources but one very determined coach named Bob Hurley, keeps kids out of gangs and churns out amazing basketball players year after year, including Hurley's own son. The chapters aren't really sequential--I found myself wanting to follow particular students of interest, but they sort of fade in and out, around stories about Cindy (Bob's wife) going into the hospital and other events. I also felt that the "pep talks" that Hurley gives are in a different language from my own. Or the excerpts are odd, as if they're taken out of context. Or maybe I just don't understand basketball pep talks. Like this one: "Freakin' Mosby. This is a character issue right now. Well, you better fuckin' grow up. Because if this continues in the North Jersey championship game, we lose." There's one point where Beanie (one of the players) says of Hurley, "He's really confusing." I felt sort of the same way, but I have to admire a coach who sticks with a penniless program, when he could have coached college for more money and prestige, and keeps these kids on track as well as he does.

John Green, THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

BLOG should, in my case, stand for Belated Log. I've been reading and not posting ... and I've been reading books and not finishing them. I recently started Child 44, which is well-written; but it begins in 1939 starving Stalingrad and in the first chapter, a scrawny cat is being hunted as food by two children, who are then hunted as food. One dies, and the other is killed by, or near, a train. I flipped forward and things did not look up. I like to read before bed, and though I'm not a terrific wuss, I thought I couldn't hack this one. Then I tried a history of the fall of Berlin in 1945. Murder and several kinds of rape. I should've known, I guess. Again, I set that aside. Then I found Green's book, started, finished, loved it.

It's a well-written, touching and at times painfully raw YA about a girl who has cancer and the boy (in remission) whom she loves. The book has fun with an author named Peter Van Houton, who wrote a book called The Imperial Affliction about his own daughter's battle with cancer and then went off to Amsterdam to become a drunken recluse. This is how Peter takes his Scotch before breakfast: "We pour Scotch into a glass and then call to mind thoughts of water, and then we mix the actual Scotch with the abstracted idea of water." In describing The Imperial Affliction, Hazel (the narrator) says that it's not a cancer book; and this (Fault) isn't either. It skewers all kinds of beliefs about how cancer patients should be and turns Maslow's pyramidal hierarchy of needs on its side. Of the two main characters Augustus (aka Gus) is the more lively, the more obviously charming; he's like the John Cusack character in Say Anything, whereas Hazel is more the Ione Skye. But, as Gus says, Hazel treads lightly on the earth; and she has plenty of heart and wryness to make us love her. Spoiler alert: Be prepared to cry.

Salman Rushdie, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN

Harrowing and brilliant, but as I told a friend the other day, it's a bit like riding a bicycle downhill with your hands off the handlebars. You surrender temporal logic and just leave off expecting conventional sentences; right off, the narrator, 31-year-old Saleem Sinai says his book is "an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors." The novel doesn't follow the usual first-person-narrating-his-life line--born in 1947 in India at the same moment the country became independent, lived, and almost-died quite a few times, including a nightmarish episode in the jungle and by a sniper's bullet during the war in the 1970s. Instead, the book has its own inner logic, metaphorical and associative rather than linear. So in the chapter called "Snakes and Ladders," we get Saleem writing about his boyhood, when he liked to play the game "Snakes and Ladders" (Chutes and Ladders), although his father would prefer he plays chess because it's a smarter game; but in the same chapter, there's a rumor that a mad Bengali snake-charming was traveling the country, luring snakes out of captivity; there's a man who raises snakes for research living in a room above them; and a description of how Saleem nearly died on his first birthday and was saved by being given a mixture containing snake venom (so not all snakes are bad, unlike the game); and (though the ladders in the game go up) a servant who stole things is sent down a ladder out of the house. The effect is more like a web than a line. Another thing I loved about the book was Padma. While Saleem is writing the book, she cooks and cleans around him, and she's a wonderful, no-nonsense foil. "But what is so precious," Padma demands, her right hand slicing the air updownup in exasperation, "to need all this writing-shiting?" Throughout, the language is playful, two-edged, something to relish. "I was born ... on the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came." "Saffron minutes and green seconds." Dense, wide-ranging, and not a fast read, one to savor.
Has anybody out there read his non-fiction?

Stef Penney, THE INVISIBLE ONES

Another good suspenseful novel ... but I have to confess I liked her first (TENDERNESS OF WOLVES) better. I'm not sure why. Like TOW, this novel shifts between points of view--this one between 14-year-old JJ (a Gypsy, a Traveler) and Ray Lovell, a half-Romany private investigator who is asked to solve the disappearance of Rose Janko. It's well told, and the ending reveals a "secret" that is fair, in the sense that the clues are there, when you flip back through. But I think TOW had more power and passion behind it. Still, I'd recommend this one; it's definitely near the top of the stack of suspense/mystery novels I've read. Tana French (another favorite author, of In the Woods) wrote the blurb for the back, and this book reads (to me) very much like hers ... the troubled, drinking Rob Macky with his mess of a love life is fairly close to Ray Lovell.

Jonathan Miles, DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES

Ok, so my bookshelves are sagging and I had this idea (it being the end of 2011 and a good time to do away with the old) that I'd go through my books and find some I could donate to the local library. (They sell them at their little shop.) The problem is that I picked up this book--one I had read (according to my note on the front cover) with my bookclub in August 2009--and started reading it again. Instead of sorting books, I reread the whole thing.
Not only did I stall out on the sorting project, I think I may keep this slim volume. It's a debut novel by a good writer, about a 53-year-old failed-poet-turned-translator who made hash of his life through his 20s and 30s--married, had a kid, alienated them, spent a lot of time with Mr. Smirnoff. Now he's been invited to his daughter's wedding, and he's trying to get there, except that American Airlines has him stalled at Chicago's O'Hare, and he's going to miss the wedding (like he's missed his daughter's whole life). What starts out as an angry letter to AA turns into a meditation on his life, where things went wrong, and the difference between loving the *idea* of something and loving the thing itself. It's funny and heartbreaking all at once. He also plays with language, which I always like: "They say a watched pot never boils but baby it's tough not to watch when you're neck-deep in the pot.""I take an oversized amount of pride in the fact that I've never worn a wristwatch since my thirteenth birthday when my father gave me a Timex and I smashed it with a nine-iron to see how much licking would stop its ticking (not much, as it turned out)."
It's going back on my shelf. I need to find some books I don't like.

Jay Mathews, WORK HARD, BE NICE

An engaging, inspiring read about the two teachers who started the KIPP Schools (Knowledge is Power Program) to help low-income, at-risk students graduate from high school. The two teachers Mathews describes, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, began their careers in the Teach For America program; they're doggedly persistent and passionate, but humble, openly admitting that they don't have all the answers and that they made plenty of mistakes along the way. The book isn't polemical but offers plenty of insights about education and what worked for these teachers and these kids.