Books read in January

Here are the books that I read in January. It was a great month to curl up with a good book on my Kindle; though, really, that is my mantra for every month :). All of the ones listed below I enjoyed. I started two books that I didn't care for at all and so I stopped reading them. Life has too few reading moments to waste them on unenjoyable books.

The Children Act by Ian McEwan- takes place in London where the main character is a High Court judge presiding in family court. The book has two main plots- one is the judge’s crumbling marriage and the other is a court case which pits religion against a possible life saving medical procedure for a child. The judge must decide whether to order a blood transfusion for an ill seventeen year boy seemingly against his and his parent’s will who are Jehovah's Witnesses. While I didn’t care for this book as much as Atonement, I still liked it. I really enjoy McEwan’s writing style/ voice.

The Cousins by Karen McManus- this YA novel ended up being better than I thought it would be. I don’t recall exactly how it even ended up on my kindle- I was showing Abby how to use the library’s website to get books downloaded to her kindle and somehow this ended up on mine. I decided that I would read the first few pages and if I liked it, I would keep reading it. I liked the first few pages so I kept reading. It tells the story of three teenage cousins who don’t know each other well. Their parents aren’t close- geographically or in any way so the cousins do not know each other. The cousins are sent by their wealthy grandmother to spend a summer working on their grandmother’s resort on an island near Cape Cod.  What makes their summons to the island especially noteworthy is that their grandmother completely disowned her children (the teens’ parents) years ago and as such has nothing to do with the cousins’ parents. In fact, the cousins have never met their grandmother until now due to the estrangement. The cousins’ parents claim to have no idea why they were disowned; the cousins hope to solve this mystery and get to know the grandma whom they have only heard about from their parents. This was a good book! Several interesting sub plots emerged and I kept trying to figure out what the parents did when they were younger to have their mother disown them. While I found the book entertaining to read, I am not sure that I would read any other books by this author. There was a good bit of bad language which I don’t like. The book was a quick, easy, plot driven read. Definitely not literature but a good escapism type book. 

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes- this book is considered science fiction and is considered a classic (by some anyway- I found it on a “100 books you should read” type article). It takes place in the 1950’s in NYC. A young man with intellectual disabilities named Charley narrates the story by way of journal entries. He is chosen to participate in a surgery that will hopefully increase his intelligence. The surgery is successful and gradually he becomes intelligent and then extremely intelligent. However, his emotional state is not prepared for his new found intelligence and he struggles- especially when he realizes how poorly he’d been treated by many people including  family members when he was unintelligent. When a mouse named Algernon, who also had the surgery, begins to lose his intelligence, he wonders if this, too, is his fate. Poignantly written, this book examines what it means to think intelligently and to love unconditionally. It is a hard read in many ways but it is very good. 

Unless by Carol Shields- the setting is a small town in Ontario. The protagonist is a writer who lives with her physician husband and three teenage daughters- well, the oldest doesn’t live at home anymore and something pertaining to this daughter forms the basis of the novel. Her oldest daughter, age 19, has stopped going to her university classes and instead sits on a corner all day in Toronto with a sign. The setting switches from the present to the past, when the mom tries to figure out what went wrong with her daughter. This was very much character driven; I’ve not read a less thrilling read in a while but I liked the book a lot. Since there was little exciting plot, I wouldn’t say there was a plot twist, rather a denouement which was quite cleverly done.  Very well written- an extra bonus for me is that is it's a fictional book about a fiction writer. I love the inside scoop on the world of publishing and published authors.

Canada by Richard Ford- Set in Montana and Saskatchewan, Canada this book is about the recollections of a man in his sixties retelling the events of his youth. When he and his twin sister were fifteen, their parents robbed a bank. The robbery was their first crime and they were caught. His twin sister ran away before she could be taken away by authorities whereas the main character, Dell, was whisked away to Canada by a friend whose Dell mom had enlisted to take him away in the event she was implicated in the robbery. This was such a good book of introspection  This book is not about the external so much as the internal and the ramifications of Dell’s parent’s ill thought of plan to rob the bank.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes- The book is divided into to parts- both take place in England. The first part details a young man's life at boarding school and then university. It focuses on his friendships particularly with one brilliant classmate and his first serious relationship with a girl. The rest of the book takes place when the man is much older- his only child is an adult. He receives word that he has inherited his late friend's (the brilliant one from school) diary and some money from his ex- girlfriend's mother. The bequest of the money and diary both come from his ex girlfriend's mother. Our protagonist is puzzles as to why he was left both items and how his ex- girlfriend's mom ended up with his friend's diary. The answers to the questions he has forces him to consider the fallacy of his recollections. As he attempts to make sense of new found revelations, he must examine his role in the events that shaped his and his friends' lives all those years ago. The book was not exciting in any way and was sad in most ways imaginable but it was so well written that I was glad I read it.