I mentioned in passing in May that my grandpa has been having some health problems. Last week, after a few months of slow improvement, his health took a turn for the worse. After about a week in hospice care, he passed away last Tuesday night at 84.

This is one of the best pictures of my grandpa and grandma, even if I do look a little shifty-eyed 🙂

Because I’m the family writer, I was drafted to help work on the text that will be featured on the back of the program at his visitation this afternoon. In sprucing up the draft my dad sent me, I learned some things about my grandpa that I never knew.

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In an effort to maybe, perhaps, hopefully get caught up on all the books I haven’t reviewed, I’m planning to start doing mini-reviews every couple of weeks for books that I read but didn’t have much to say about. If you have more specific questions about any of this week’s titles, leave them in the comments!

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

Many, many bloggers that I respect have deeply loves Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow; I’m afraid my feelings weren’t so unequivocally positive. The book starts out with a awesome premise: one man with two wives, each with a daughter. The second wife and daughter know about the first family, and have grown up in the shadow of two women they keeps tabs on but have never met. The story is beautifully sad in the sense that Jones reveals ways these two families could co-exist and the tragedy that brought them to their current state, but I never connected with the characters as much as I wanted to.

Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy

If there is only one thing that I want to say about Simon Van Booy’s Everything Beautiful Began After, it’s that Van Booy writes with incredible style. If you took a paragraph from this book and set it next to any other book, you’d clearly be able to pick out which is which. A sample:

Athens is a world of despair and sudden beauty.

And it was from these two conflicting moods that Rebecca found her way as a woman.

It wasn’t long before she loved the city.

And the ability to love Athens, like all love, lies not in the city but in the visitor.

The city matched Rebecca at every turn. Her books reflected in the things that took place around her — things that she noticed: a cigarette vendor giving bits of fish to cats, a sudden shower of rain, deformed children sitting calmly on the steps of churches as their mothers shook their fists at God and then opened them to passing tourists.

Rebecca felt a physical part of the city, and sensing such blind devotion, it embraced her as its own.

Van Booy’s use (maybe overuse) and grand metaphors takes a little while to get used to, but I was quickly drawn into this story of a tragic love triangle and just devoured the book. I highly recommend this one. I loved it.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

I read Rules of Civility sitting on a Zero Gravity lounger — the world’s most comfortable lawn chair — at my cabin, looking out at the lake. I think that was the perfect setting for this book, the story of one young woman making her way through the high society of New York in the late 1930s. The protagonist, Katy Kontent, is truly delightful and self-aware and so fun to cheer. I read this one in a bit of a blur, so I’m afraid I don’t remember many more specifics… but I am excited its out in paperback so I can buy my own copy soon.

Disclosure: I recieved a copy of Everything Beautiful Began After during my trip to Book Expo America this year. I bought a copy of Silver Sparrow. I borrowed a copy of Rules of Civility from my local library. 

Photo Credit: albertogp123 via Flickr

Title: Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind
Author: Alex Stone
Genre: Memoir
Year: 2012
Publisher: Harper
Acquired: From the publisher for review consideration
Rating:

Review: I have struggled for more than a month now to write a review of Fooling Houdini by Alex Stone, and I haven’t managed to write a single word. The only cause I can come up with for this reviewing writer’s block is that I’m feeling pressure to write a review that expresses just how totally delightful this book is and will convince everyone to go pick up a copy as soon as you can.

Admittedly, Fooling Houdini is a book that was almost tailor-written to my nonfiction weakness for quirky, first person accounts of secret societies and worlds I will never get to experience myself. Throw in some psychology, true crime, and history… and, well, it would have been hard for this book not to be at least mostly enjoyable. Happily, Stone more than exceeded my none-too-modest expectations for the book.

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Title: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
Author: David Simon
Genre: Narrative nonfiction
Year: 1991
Acquired: Bought
Rating:

Review: Earlier this year Boyfriend and I spent several months watching straight through all five seasons of The Wire. When we finished, I felt totally adrift and wasn’t sure what to do with myself except spend more time with the police of Baltimore by reading Homicide — a chronicle of the year David Simon spend shadowing detectives of the Baltimore Police Department.

At the time Simon was in the department, every three days two people were murdered in Baltimore. Although each of the detectives in the department has time being the spotlight, there were really three who stood out at the center of the story:

Donald Worden, a veteran investigator; Harry Edgerton, a black detective in a mostly white unit; and Tom Pellegrini, an earnest rookie who takes on the year’s most difficult case, the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl.

It’s impossible to read the book and not think of the television show, especially since both focus so heavily on the impact institutions have on individuals. In Homicide, you don’t ever get an in-depth look at the structures outside of the police department, but Simon does show how mandates like a certain percentage of cleared cases and doctoring the numbers to look better (“requests” that come from on high) impact how detectives can do their work.

Homicide is a bleak book and meanders a little bit, but it also shows off Simon’s writing chops. There are these beautiful sections where he steps out of telling the stories of detectives and just plays with the narrative. It’s hard to see out of context, but this section might give you an idea:

This is the job:

You sit behind a government-issue metal desk on the sixth of ten floors in a gleaming, steel-frame death trap with poor ventilation, dysfunctional air conditioning, and enough free-floating asbestos to pad the devil’s own jumpsuit. … You answer the phone on the second or third bleat because Baltimore abandoned its AT&T equipment as a cost-saving measure and the new phone system doesn’t ring so much as it emits metallic, sheep-like sounds. If a police dispatcher is on the other end of the call, you write down an address, the time, and the dispatcher’s unit number ona piece of sctratch paper or the back of a used three-by-five pawn shop submission card.

Then you beg or barter the keys to one of a half-dozen unmarkedChevrolet Cavaliers, grab our gun, notepand, a flashlight and a pair of white rubber gloves and drive to correct address where, in all probability, a uniformed police officer will be standing over a cooling human body.

You look at that body. You look at that body as if it were some abstract work of art, stare at it from ever conceivable point of view in search of deeper meanings and textures. Why, you ask yourself, is this body here? What did the artist leave out? What did he put in? What was that artist thinking of? What the hell is wrong with this picture?

I’m sort of a crime show junkie, so another huge part of this book that I loved was the way it made me look at those shows differently, particularly their reliance on trace evidence (which in real life never helps) and confessions (which rarely actually happen). The reality of police work in Baltimore is pretty bleak, but an addicting read. If you’re missing a fix of The Wire or have an addiction to crime chronicles, Homicide is worth spending time with.

Other Reviews:

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!