Title: Hope Street, Jerusalem
Author: Irris Makler
Genre: Memoir
Year: 2014
Publisher: HarperCollins
Acquired: From the publisher as part of a book tour with TLC Book Tours
Rating:

Review: There is something very familiar about the story in Hope Street, Jerusalem. As I read, I kept feeling like this story — a workaholic woman moves to a foreign country where she finds love and adventure — is one I’ve read before. But for the most part, foreign correspondent Irris Makler made this straight-forward plot really shine with her engaging writing and effective balance of personal and professional storytelling.

After spending several years living and Russia and reporting on Afghanistan, Makler picked up, again, to move to Jerusalem. During her time in the city, she covered suicide bombings and the chess game between the Israelis and Palestinians. She also, for nearly the first time, falls in love with an Israeli musician many years her junior. Makler and Raphael also adopt an abandoned dog, Mia, who creates her own sort of havoc in the vibrant, unpredictable world of Jerusalem.

One of the best things about this memoir was the balance of storytelling. Makler spends a lot of time writing about herself, Raphael and Mia, but also does a nice job explaining the political and religious issues at play in a city as contested as Jerusalem. It’s not a comprehensive look at that area, but it’s detailed enough that I felt like I learned something while I was enjoying a truly engaging story about a woman, her boyfriend and her dog.

Unfortunately, I had one considerable disappointment with the book. Makler starts the story out with a truly horrific incident when she was seriously injured by a thrown rock — six weeks with a jaw wired shut and long-term facial damage — while out covering a protest in the Old City of Jerusalem. It’s a very specific, personal incident that illustrates the difficulties and danger of life in Jerusalem. She then jumps back in time to talk about how she arrived in Jerusalem with, I thought, the expectation that the memoir would eventually get back to the attack and her recover. Unfortunately, Makler barely returns to the incident which makes the ending feels shallow compared to the importance that this moment was given at the beginning of the book.

Hope Street, Jerusalem is a good read, especially if you haven’t read many memoirs by female journalists before, but the relatively traditional plot and lack of detailed closure left me feeling like it was a good, but not great, read.

Other Tour Stops: (Feb. 25) Kelly’s [Former] France Blog | (Feb. 26) WildmooBooks | (March 4) Every Free Chance Book Reviews | (March 6) My Bookshelf | (March 10) Lisa’s Yarns | (March 11) West Metro Mommy | (March 13) Ms. Nose in a Book | (March 14) The Book Wheel | (March 19) Svetlana’s Reads and Views |

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!

One of the things that I love about switching to mini-reviews for fiction is that I don’t need to take notes or think too hard while I’m reading, I can just enjoy a book. The only problem with that situation is that when I feel somewhere in the middle about a book — as I did with both Attachments and A Tale for the Time Being — it’s hard to remember exactly why. But I pulled out my thinking cap and, I hope, have some thoughts to share with you about what I liked and didn’t like about a couple of piece of contemporary fiction.

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder know that somebody is monitoring their work e-mail. (Everybody in the newsroom knows. It’s company policy.) But they can’t quite bring themselves to take it seriously. They go on sending each other endless and endlessly hilarious e-mails, discussing every aspect of their personal lives.

Meanwhile, Lincoln O’Neill can’t believe this is his job now- reading other people’s e-mail. When he applied to be “internet security officer,” he pictured himself building firewalls and crushing hackers – not writing up a report every time a sports reporter forwards a dirty joke.

When Lincoln comes across Beth’s and Jennifer’s messages, he knows he should turn them in. But he can’t help being entertained-and captivated-by their stories.

By the time Lincoln realizes he’s falling for Beth, it’s way too late to introduce himself.

Attachments is probably not a book I would have picked up if not for an enthusiastic review by a fellow book lover and my total adoration for Rainbow Rowell’s most recent book, Fangirl. I bought the ebook of Attachments a couple of years ago and started reading it, but the story didn’t grab me so I never finished it.

I picked it up a second time a few weeks ago when I just needed something frothy and ended up reading it in a single day. It was a sweet, diverting book, although it didn’t grab onto me the way Fangirl did – maybe Rowell’s style is more suited to YA characters? In any case, I liked both Lincoln and Beth and thought the style of the story – alternating from emails between Beth and Jennifer to chapters about Lincoln – was a fun storytelling device. I didn’t love the book, but it made me excited to pick up Eleanor and Park sometime soon.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace – and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox – possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

I thought A Tale for the Time Being was an ok book… but I think my “meh” reaction is a case of a disconnect between what I expected and what I ended up getting. The early sections of the book are very down to earth – so real and current that, in the back of my head, I started to think of the book like I might think about a work of nonfiction. For example, I just read a book that was, in part, the story of the process of investigating and telling a story; in this book, there’s a sense of process as Ruth tries to uncover the mystery of Nao and her diary. I was thinking one thing, then book twisted and gave me something entirely different.

Late in the book there’s a moment that is decidedly “un-real” (maybe magical realism, although I’m honestly not sure if I’m using the term correctly) that caught me off guard and affected how I felt finishing the book. I think if the book had stayed “real” I would have ended up loving it, but because of the twist I felt like the ending didn’t match what had come before it, which left me a little bit disappointed. That’s not entirely fair to the book, I know, but that was my reaction. That said, I loved Ozeki’s writing and I am excited to try another of her books.

Time and Place // 5:45 p.m. at my desk… this is the fourth weekend in a row I haven’t been traveling, which is glorious.

Eating and Drinking // I caved on my cravings and stuffed my face with salsa con queso and tortilla chips all weekend. For the moment, I’m just drinking green tea.

Reading // This week I finished A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki and started Hope Street, Jerusalem by Irris Makler, a memoir by a foreign correspondent in Jerusalem. I was really enjoying A Tale for the Time Being until there was this section of magical realism (maybe?) that I didn’t quite get. I have to think about it more. I’m reading Hope Street, Jerusalem for a book tour this Thursday, so I’m hoping to finish it up tonight.

Watching // Last Sunday I binge watched the rest of season two of House of Cards, which was exactly what I needed that day. It also turns intentional binge watching may actually be good for you, in some cases, which I find validating. I wanted to watch something new yesterday, so I started and finished the first season (three episodes) of The Bletchley Circle, a series about four women who worked as code breakers during World War II who reunite to catch a serial killer. I’ve always had a think for books on code breaking, so this show was great. It also inspired my next read, The Secret Lives of Codebreakers by Sinclair McKay

Listening // I adored this parody of “Let it Go” called “Just Don’t Go” — watch it!

Blogging // This week I posted reviews of two great books: Elizabeth the Queen by Sally Bedell Smith and Trapped Under the Sea by Neil Swidey.

Hating // Nothing. I have been in a great mood all week, thanks in no small part to the three wonderful, warm days we had mid-week. It was above freezing! Snow was melting! I went outside without a coat on (although I live in Minnesota and we’re crazy about how soon we abandon winter clothing)! It was glorious.

Loving // I bought new sweat pants and some new slippers that are actually boots. They are amazing.

Avoiding // I was scheduled for federal jury duty in two weeks, but I got a letter this week that it was postponed until April. Given the current staffing situation at my day job, this is amazing news. I guess I’m not technically avoiding it since I still have to go eventually, but avoiding for now?

Anticipating // I am going to Los Angeles in April to visit my dear friend Florinda (of The 3R’s Blog) and go to the LA Times Festival of Books. We want to organize a blogger meet up, so if you are in the are let me know and we can start to work something out!

Happy Sunday, everyone! What are you reading today?

Title: Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness
Author: Neil Swidey
Genre: Nonfiction
Year: 2014
Publisher: Crown
Acquired: From the publisher for review consideration
Rating:

Review: I’m sort of garbage at writing book summaries, so I’m just going to quote part of the back of the book on this one because it’s nice and concise and I’d rather focus on telling you how awesome this book is:

A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of “black mayonnaise.” Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as “beach whistles.”

In the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel—its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench—to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, a team of commercial divers was sent on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in; not all of them came out alive.

So… this book is great. Read it. The end.

Ok, just kidding, not the end. I know that I need to say more than that to persuade you that a book about the administrative and political failures behind a major infrastructure project is a great read.

Journalist Neil Swidey really nails this book by focusing almost entirely on the people who were most affected by the big picture failures of this project, the five commercial divers who were tasked with going into the tunnel late in the project to solve a problem that was only a problem because the bigwigs involved couldn’t come up with a more sensible compromise.

These men — DJ Gillis, Dave Riggs, Billy Juse, Tim Nordeen, and Donald Hosford– were used to danger and getting the job done in the most inhospitable conditions. But they were asked to work in a place with equipment that on investigator later described as “an eighth-grade science fair project gone horribly wrong.” Swidey anchors the book in their stories, which kept me turning the pages.

Part of what I loved and appreciated about the book is the way it made me, as a reader, think more carefully about the workers who make major projects happen. It’s easy to get focused on the politicians and engineers and managers who imagine, design and oversee projects… but the real work is done by people who, largely, aren’t given a voice. Swidey gives a voice to those workers and shines a light on the way managerial decisions affect safety and morale.

The book is incredibly detailed, but I appreciated all of the information. There are a lot of moving parts to these projects and this story, and Swidey doesn’t skip or skim over any of them. He brings a lot of character and personality to the five divers as well as the other major players of the book. I thought it was a really terrific read.

Special Giveaway!

I don’t normally do giveaways, but I enjoyed this book so much that I was excited when the publisher, Crown, offered one copy to giveaway to a reader. To enter the giveaway (open to U.S. residents only — sorry!), please fill out this form. The giveaway will be open until 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 22.