The Housekeeper and the ProfessorShort and compact, funny and heartwarming. Set in Japan, the story is about a brilliant mathematician with short-term memory loss (he can only remember things for precisely 80 minutes) and the relationship he develops with his housekeeper and her ten year old son.
Synopsis: He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.
She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professors mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeepers shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.
The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.
Hurry Down Sunshine A New York City based writer chronicles the summer when his fifteen year old daughter is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Though the topic is quite dark, I found it riveting and couldn’t put it down. The writer presents a fascinating account of his daughter’s spiral into psychosis and the underground world of mental health clinics.
Synopsis: Hurry Down Sunshine tells the story of the extraordinary summer when, at the age of fifteen, Michael Greenberg's daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sally's visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city's most sweltering months. "I feel like I'm traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to," Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not dream of or imagine.
Hurry Down Sunshine is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to her — her brother and grandmother, her mother and stepmother, and, not least of all, the author himself. Among Greenberg's unforgettable gallery of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary dreams. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshin e holds the reader in a mesmerizing state of suspension between the mundane and the transcendent.
American RustAnother book I couldn’t put down. Two teenage boys, best friends, from Pittsburg who find themselves caught up in a murder. The boys are talented, one excels in academics, the other in sports, but both choose not to go to college and end up wallowing in their desolate, poverty-stricken town. The novel unfolds like a film with an interesting mix of characters and strong dialogue. I wouldn’t be surprise if the novel is made to a movie one day.
Synopsis: Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, a lush landscape as deceptively promising as the edifices of the abandoned steel mills that once provided the livelihood of generations, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation that arises from its loss. From local bars to train yards to prison, it is the story of two young men bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories, abandoned homes, and polluted river. Evoking John Steinbeck's novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence, and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.
The Corrections
The Corrections I remember trying to tackle this book when it first came out in 2001 and disliking it. The writing seemed too clever and over-blown, and I ended up abandoning it after the first chapter. Recently, I gave it another shot, and it went down much better the second time. The novel is very funny and very scathing. It is about a Midwestern family who hate each other and who are forced together one Christmas when the father falls ill with Parkinson’s. The writer, Jonathan Franzen, has a brilliant way of describing the ways that families get under our skin.
Synopsis: If some authors are masters of suspense, others postmodern verbal acrobats, and still others complex-character pointillists, few excel in all three arenas. In his long-awaited third novel, Franzen does. Unlike his previous works, The 27th City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992), which tackled St. Louis and Boston, respectively, this one skips from city to city (New York; St. Jude; Philadelphia; Vilnius, Lithuania) as it follows the delamination of the Lambert family Alfred, once a rigid disciplinarian, flounders against Parkinson's-induced dementia; Enid, his loyal and embittered wife, lusts for the perfect Midwestern Christmas; Denise, their daughter, launches the hippest restaurant in Philly; and Gary, their oldest son, grapples with depression, while Chip, his brother, attempts to shore his eroding self-confidence by joining forces with a self-mocking, Eastern-Bloc politician. As in his other novels, Franzen blends these personal dramas with expert technical cartwheels and savage commentary on larger social issues, such as the imbecility of laissez-faire parenting and the farcical nature of U.S.-Third World relations. The result is a book made of equal parts fury and humor, one that takes a dry-eyed look at our culture, at our pains and insecurities, while offering hope that, occasionally at least, we can reach some kind of understanding. This is, simply, a masterpiece.
Do you have any summer reading picks? (Books that you already read and enjoyed or plan to read?)
Do you have any summer reading picks? (Books that you already read and enjoyed or plan to read?)
