a long way down by nick hornby (2005)

“Some dead people who were too sensitive to live: Sylvia Plath, van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, Primo Levi, Kurt Cobain, of course. Some alive people: George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Osama bin Laden. - JJ”

Four disparate people find themselves one New Year’s Eve on Topper’s House with a common purpose: jump off from the building and put an end to what they perceive to be their respective miserable lives.

Martin Sharp was a morning television show host until he was sent to prison for sleeping with a minor. When he completed his jail time, he found his seemingly perfect life gone. No career, no wife, no daughters. He does not believe that people who take their own lives do so while the balance of their minds is disturbed. Rather, he thinks coroners’ reports should read that people take their lives “after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.”

Maureen is a 51-year old single mother tired of caring full-time for a physically and mentally incapacitated son. She can’t get used to the idea that her life is “finished, pointless, too hard, and completely without hope or color.”

Jess Crichton is an 18-year old kid who has difficulty talking to her parents. Her sister has suddenly disappeared and her boyfriend has as swiftly left her without an explanation. She can’t imagine herself waking up in the morning and she realizes that the best thing to do was to make her life as short as she possibly could. At that point, she “could feel the weight of everything – the weight of loneliness, of everything that had gone wrong.”

JJ is an American come to London who had big dreams of becoming rich and famous. His girlfriend has recently dumped him. His band, which he thought was to going to become his ticket to fame and fortune, has split up. He thinks that “suicide is supposed to be cool. It was invented for Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake”. And for JJ. He was disappointed to see that Martin, Maureen, and Jess, clearly uncool people, also wanted to jump off Topper’s House.

A Long Way Down explores the nuances of suicide in a half humorous, half contemplative manner. As Topper’s House Four (how JJ refers to the four of them) moves from 30 minutes to one year of holding off their plan to end their lives, we see that life, while it might not necessarily become better, becomes more bearable with a little help and company from friends. While we may think that it will take a happening of cosmic proportions to convince some people that life is still worth living, sometimes it only takes something simple to achieve the same. As mundane as a vacation, a ticket to a game show, or a part-time job.

Hornby is adept at keeping the four voice of Martin, Maureen, Jess, and JJ distinct and reverberating. The book has managed to put together a sensitive topic that is funny, poignant, and profound all at the same time.

water for elephants by sara gruen (2006)

Life is the most spectacular show on earth.

Water for Elephants is one of those books you can easily imagine being made into a movie. The book is fast-paced and full of color. It has a dashing hero, a pretty heroine, a mad villain, and rampaging animals. It is filled with stories of friendships, passionate affairs, tragic deaths, and geriatric woes.

Jacob Jancowski is 90. Or 93. He is in a home for the aged. One day, the circus comes to town opening a floodgate of memories. Jacob is swooped back in time when he was 23. This was the year when all changed for him in a flash. One moment, he is a young man, about to take his exams in Cornell, and life looked all rosy and promising. In the next second, he is part of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth and sharing a room in a trailer with a dwarf and his beloved cat.

Jacob will find his two great loves in this circus: Marlena Rosenbluth and Rosie (who turns out, can only follow commands in Polish). Together, the three of them will come up with a brilliant act that almost matches that of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth’s hated rival.

There are several dazzling twists and turns in this book just like in a circus. Water for Elephants will find the reader spellbound and reading long and late into the night.

Yes, a movie has been made based on the book.

on reading

Mother likes to say that I was an easy child. They could keep me quiet by placing a reading material in my crib and I could keep myself occupied for hours. Shredding the material into bits. If I really liked it, I would eat it.

I have become more sophisticated as the years have passed. I have made certain improvements on my eating habits and I can now actually read. In fact I have developed a serious relationship with reading that a considerable part of my income goes to bookstores, that I consider bookshelves as essential furniture, that it is constant struggle for me to maintain a reading-exercise balance, that a usual cause of my tardiness for appointments is that I am unable to put a book down, and that I procrastinate doing errands pending conclusion of whatever it is I am reading at a particular time. Which is why I try not to say anything against drinkers, smokers, weed enthusiasts, World Cup die-hards, or raw vegans. To each his own passion.

I consider a book particularly good when I start exhibiting book-mania signs. For example, when I was reading The Various Flavours of Coffee by Anthony Capella, I brought my car to the repair shop to have the tires checked. I stayed inside the car obliviously reading my book while the mechanic proceeded to look at the car. It was only when I got home that I remembered I have forgotten to check whether the mechanic returned the replaced tire (he did). I had it really bad with this book because I also remember leaving it in the car so I can read a few pages at every stop light.

Now I have noticed another peculiarity. A light bulb in my head starts to flash when there’s any mention of coffee, cafes, or caffeine in the book. Take for instance The-Know-It-All (One Man's Humble Questo to Become the Smartest Person in the World) by AJ Jacob which kept me entertained at Singapore’s transit hotel. On page 47, the narrator states that he needs to be drinking more coffee (there goes the bulb!) and adds a phrase on how coffee was discovered (more flashing!).

I realize that I need to be more discerning of what I am reading these days although I like giving new writers a fair chance. I calculated that I spend at least 12 hours in the office these days. If I spend 7 hours sleeping, that leaves me five hours every day to do as I please. Five hours. We have not even begun factoring in time spent in traffic.

I am somewhere midway between infancy and my dream-of-going-topless-in-the-Bahamas-when-I-retire-day but the strategy to keep me quiet remains the same. A good material to read.

Persistence Unlimited lists 26 advantages of reading, in addition to keeping the baby quiet:
1. Reading is an active mental process
2. It is a fundamental skill builder
3. Improves your vocabulary
4. Gives you a glimpse into other cultures and places
5. Improves concentration and focus
6. Builds self-esteem
7. Improves memory
8. Improves your discipline
9. Learn anywhere
10. Improves creativity
11. Gives you something to talk about
12. Books are inexpensive entertainment
13. You can learn at your own pace
14. New mental associations
15. Improves your reasoning skills
16. Builds your expertise
17. Saves money
18. Decreases mistakes
19. You’ll discover surprises
20. Decreased boredom
21. Can change your life
22. Can help break a slump
23. Reduces stress
24. Gets you away from digital distractions
25. You’ll make more money
26. The book is always better than the movie

(Photo from CSL Cartoonstock)

how starbucks saved my life (a son of privilege learns to live like everyone else) by michael gates gill (2007)

One could probably see my smirk a mile away when I chanced upon the title of Michael Gates Gill’s book, “How Starbucks Saved My Life (A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else)”. If it were “How Coca Cola Saved My Life” or how “Vegemite Saved My Life”, I would have made an audible disparaging remark in the bookstore to no one in particular. It did not help that the author, a man over sixty years old, by-lines his book with a reference to his forebears. But because it had some relation to coffee, I held my peace (and picked up the book).

The book is part memoir, part hard-sell ad campaign for Starbucks, and part motivational spiel.

Mike, as he would be referred to in his Starbucks circle, is a son of affluent parents who lived a charmed life from birth until his employment was terminated with one of the largest advertising agencies in the US and around the world.

I have to tell you first the redeeming parts of this book before I tear it apart. The good points have nothing to do with the strength of the book and all because of the reason that I ingest a lot of this black beverage.

One, I like the idea of how each chapter starts with a quotation from a Starbucks cup. The first chapter, for example, starts with the following quotation:

“The humble improve”
- A quote from Wynton Marsalis, jazz musician, published on the side of a cup of a Starbucks Double Tall Skim Latte

Two, Mike, as a new hire, has to take on the entire range of job responsibilities in Starbucks. So we get an idea of how the cafe operates, its company ethos, and trivia like the reason why the person at the register shouts out the order of the customer (properly referred to as a Guest) and why the personnel in charge of making the coffee shouts back the same order to the cashier. We also get to know what makes for “legendary service” – do you (1) make eye contact? (2) greet the guests? (3) thank the guest? (4) initiate conversation? (5) recognize a guest by drink or name?

Now for the bad news.

It is difficult to find sympathy for this guy. He whines that at age 53, he was unceremoniously fired from his job after 25 years of loyal servitude and after putting this job always before his family. He emphasized that he has missed holidays with his family, had no second thoughts of uprooting them if his job required him moving to another place, and had no qualms about his unavailability to his four growing children.

He then goes on to complain some more that because he was in such a depressed state, he had gotten into a habit of regularly going to the gym where he met a “not-so-young woman in her forties” with whom he had a son. This led to him telling his wife that he has sired a fifth child, unfortunately not with her. His wife, who was “clear-headed” would not stand for it and so they got an “amicable” divorce.

Then this thing about a rare medical condition which he gets diagnosed. At a time when he just let go of his health insurance which he could no longer afford. Sniff. (The rare medical condition of course turns out to be not that urgent or that serious towards the end of the book.)

Finally, at 64 years old, he got hired at Starbucks which he now calls the best job he’s ever had. The comparisons, the epiphanies, and all the name-dropping start here. He cannot stop gushing at how different the life of the proletariat is; at how mundane yet how meaningful it can be (do you see me brushing a tear away?). In the same breath that he extols the admirable virtue of cleaning a loo with zeal, he reminisces at how he once had an exchange of pleasantries with Jacqueline Kennedy.

Nope, the former American First Lady is not the only person he namedrops. He namedrops his father, who used to write for the New Yorker, a string of colleagues, neighbors, former classmates, so-called friends, Muhammad Ali, Robert Frost, E.B. White, Ezra Pound… I was afraid at some point that he’d mention next that he’s actually met Michelangelo.

It does not stop there. He wrote an Afterword where he says that a 28-year old woman came to his store and told him that his book so inspired her that she quit a job that was boring her to death and is now doing something she really loves. The three Ls which have allegedly helped peopled live better lives (after reading his book)?
1. Leap with faith
2. Look with respect
3. Listen to your heart to find true happiness

My important lesson which I have drawn from the book? If you are instinctively repulsed by a book’s title, run! (and it does not matter even if it was written by that goatherd who discovered coffee on the hills of Ethiopia.)

her fearful symmetry by audrey niffenegger (2009)

If you thought Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveler’s Wife was amusing enough but you regretted the hours you spent on it, do not bother reading Niffenegger’s next book, Her Fearful Symmetry, which will require vaster amounts of suspension of disbelief. If you considered Time Traveler’s Wife was an excellently spun tale of love which literally endured the difficulties of time and told in a skillful style the way the story jumped from one time zone to another, do not read Her Fearful Symmetry. You will be disappointed and start thinking whether you rated Time Traveler’s Wife more highly than you should have.

Her Fearful Symmetry is a story of twins, cemetery lore, and ghosts hovering between this-life and after-life. The novel opens with Elspeth Noblin’s death in a scene to punctuate the devotion of her younger partner/lover Robert Fanshaw: a tall youngish man curled around a slight, dead, middle-aged woman.

Elspeth was buried a few days later and Robert starts descending from a devastated significant other to a man totally out of control (towards the end of the book, he agreed to a macabre, if not foolhardy, plan wherein he carts away a dead woman’s body to a dead woman’s flat). A friend of Robert kindly described him as “unhinged”. Part of Elspeth’s will was that her nieces who lived in America would come to live in her flat in London for a year. Interestingly (or predictably?), the nieces Julia and Valentina Poole, turn out be mirror-image twins whose mother, Edie, is the identical twin of Elspeth.

Julia and Valentina agreed to come to London and once the twins are ensconced in Elspeth’s flat, all sorts of things happen which are supposed to make the book interesting but only succeeds in parading an array of underdeveloped characters whose purpose in putting them in the story are not made clear even after the conclusion of the novel. Even the twins admit to themselves that they were bored.

There are several untidy details in the book. What was really Elspeth’s motive in bringing the twins to London? What was upsetting Edie? Why had Jack, Edie's husband, never taken any action in all the years he knew of the twins’ trickery? Why was it that Valentina could see Elspeth but not Julia nor Robert? Did Valentina think Elspeth tricked her or did she believe that there only had been a grievous mistake? If Robert was aware he was a fool, why did he persist in frustratingly remaining foolish? Why did Niffenegger think that her readers would even find it remotely believable that a twin who wanted to disengage herself from her twin-hood state can achieve the same by plotting to fake her death, have a dead woman remove her soul temporarily, have a confused/besotted/lover arrange that her corpse be not embalmed but preserved with ice, slide her soul back to her body at a convenient time, and walk away happily ever after? In Elspeth’s words, “what a bloody daft idea.”

There is one thing clear though in Niffeneger’s story-telling. She sharply delineates the strong characters from the weak of hearts. No grey areas here. Julia is strong, Valentina is not. Elspeth is strong, Edie is not. Marijke is strong, Martin is not. Jessica is strong, James is not. And Robert is a fool.

If there is one thing which saved the book, it is the little lessons imparted imperceptibly in the middle of all the absurdities: One, no matter how weak a creature we have been made and have become, it is within ourselves to chart our life’s course. Martin, who had severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), would have had it easy if he just allowed Julia to take care of him and forget about his wife who went away. But Martin, OCD notwithstanding, managed to extricate himself from his London flat and travel all the way to Amsterdam to show Marijke, his wife of many years, that he still wanted to make his marriage work. Juxtapose this with Robert, who went dippy with Valentina, massaging her feet in public, while at the same time could not deny Elspeth, whose feet he also massaged when she was still of this life.

Secondly, we need to be careful when we wish for things. In this case, Robert wanted his Elspeth to come back to him after she passed away from this life. And in a horrible way, she did.

101 things to do before you turn 40 by kristin mccracken (2005)

Kristin McCracken makes a rundown of things to do before you turn two-score. Some of these can give you a moment’s pause, some ridiculous, some a bit harsh, some insane, and some downrightly questionable -- but all of these said in a spirit of fun. After all, haven’t we learned by now not to take ourselves too seriously?

I have a special affinity for the Italian Renaissance period but I am not riding your time machine to go there even if you paid me. The average life expectancy during that period? Forty years old.

You may also wish to thank the Universe that you were not born in Lesotho, Zambia, Angola, or Swaziland. The CIA Factbook Estimates for 2011 shows that life expectancies for these countries are 40.38, 38.63, 38.2, and 31.88 years, respectively.

McCracken's list:
1. Quit your book club
2. Bridge the baby chasm
3. Admit to everything
4. Throw an Oscar party
5. Make out with the best man
6. Eat the worm
7. Build a nest egg
8. Take your parents out to dinner
9. Date a 25-year old, one last time
10. Put a lid on it
11. Karaoke
12. Host
13. Scuba dive
14. Document your life
15. Stop the tchotchkes
16. Serve on a jury
17. Play poker
18. Musically upgrade
19. Yell at someone
20. Remove it
21. Lose the snooze
22. Pierce something other than your ear
23. Strain your brain
24. Rent the classics
25. Pay off credit card debt
26. Think outside the box
27. Do something romantically cheesy
28. Drop $50 on a bottle of wine
29. Date a musician
30. Drive cross-country
31. Control the future of your face
32. Say NO
33. Ride a Harley
34. Accentuate the positive
35. Say yes to bubbles
36. Redistribute the wealth
37. Unsubscribe
38. Confront bullies, racists, and homophobes
39. Supply your own power
40. Sculpt yourself
41. Teach a class
42. Have a kid if you want one
43. Go to Paris
44. Reunite
45. Be your own Schneider
46. Give a really great toast
47. Buy a piece of real art
48. Take a stand
49. Master a mass-transit system, but know how to hail a taxi
50. Cut someone loose
51. Vibrate
52. Enact a two-drink maximum
53. Play an instrument
54. Make a new friend each year
55. Smell good
56. Dump the gap
57. Boycott February 14
58. Take a sabbatical
59. Go fishing
60. Fill up your jewelry box
61. Kiss the frogs
62. Play matchmaker
63. Be a boss
64. Purge
65. Break your own record
66. Quit smoking
67. Sign each book you read
68. Ask a friend for help
69. Drive a car that costs more than $50,000
70. Show gratitude
71. Expose the wizard
72. Take a mental-health day
73. Discover your superpower
74. Go out to a movie alone
75. Root, root, root
76. Instead of a stage name, pick a “stage age”
77. Lose gracefully
78. Surprise someone
79. Ride in a limo
80. Hang up your binoculars
81. Let the spirit move you
82. Sleep under the stars
83. Give something back
84. Habla sie Francais
85. Throw out any T-shirts with logos on them
86. Ride a roller coaster
87. Have a male friend
88. Ditch your college furniture
89. Name something
90. Divorce your hairstylist, or at least cheat
91. Give someone else to love your favorite movie
92. Take the long way home
93. Learn to tango
94. Go somewhere that makes people scratch their heads
95. Charm your way into (or out of) something
96. Figure out what you want to be when you grow up
97. Colorize
98. Never show up empty-handed
99. Bring something back to life
100. Retreat
101. Accept that forty is the new 30

What’s in your list?

how to be single by liz tuccillo (2008)

Liz Tuccillo’s “How to be Single” immediately strikes one as unoriginal.

We hear Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City’s (SATC) voice all throughout the narration which is easily explainable as Tucillo is the executive story editor of SATC. We see the four SATC girls in "How to be Single's" four main characters. When Julie, the narrator in the book, embarks on a hop-on-hop-off journey around the world in search of answers to her questions, we are reminded of Elizabeth Gilbert in her Eat, Pray, Love.

“How to be Single” is the story of Julie, a 38 year-old publicist who detests her job and is in a mission to find out what causes singlehood and how to cope with it. It is the also the story of her four friends, Georgia, Serena, Ruby, and Alice who are all in their late 30s and looking for The One who can make them happy, fulfilled, and complete. Georgia is recently divorced with two kids; Serena, a student of Hinduism, is a vegetarian chef for a New York celebrity family; Ruby, is a serially depressed person who has problems getting over relationships whether with people or with pets; and Alice, an ass-kicker legal aid attorney who said goodbye to the poor and oppressed after her boyfriend of five years decided to move on – without her.

Julie goes to France, Italy, Brazil, Australia, Indonesia, China, India, and Iceland in search of answers to her questions. Here’s basically what she came up with:
1. Make sure you have friends.
2. Don’t be crazy, no matter how you feel, because it just makes us all look bad.
3. Decide what you believe in and then behave accordingly.
4. Get carried away.
5. Figure out the whole sex thing –when you want it, how to get it, who to do it with.
6. Make peace with the statistics because there really isn’t anything we can do about them.
7. Admit that sometimes you feel a bit desperate.
8. There’s really so few people who have it all so try not to bother with that whole envy thing.
9. Not to put pressure on you, but start to think about the whole motherhood thing.
10. Remember that sometimes there are more important things than you and your lousy love life and get your friends more involved in helping you with your lousy love life.
11. Believe in miracles.

A big weakness of the book is Tuccillo’s use of clichés to drive home her point – poverty in India, somebody dying in a perfect family, and the suave, rich, and very much married Frenchman.

If there’s one thing Tuccillo has succeeded in “How to be Single”, it is in making singlehood sound like a dreaded disease which you need to quickly get a remedy for; and if you can no longer do anything about it, how best to live with it.

This is sad. For all the avowed “research” that went into this book, all it has been able to do was parade, from all over the globe, single women who live unproductive lives doing anything and everything to be able to find the other half that will supposedly make them whole. They are all in some suspended state waiting for the big bang. Which is really not the case.

Here’s my two cents worth: The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. But in whichever side of the fence that we are in, let us remember that the world is so much bigger than our own little selves and our own petty concerns. We don’t need the elves of Iceland to tell us that.

hope for the flowers by trina paulus (1972)

Trina Paulus’s Hope for the Flowers, is a children’s story; a good children’s story. And like generally a lot of good children’s stories, contains a story for adults as well.

Yellow and Stripes are caterpillars on a ruthless climb up a pillar. No one knows what’s up there and no one particularly knows why they are climbing this pillar. It is not a pleasant sight – caterpillars pushing, kicking, and stepping on each other. It gets more merciless as one comes near the apex. The caterpillars on that side have realized that to be able to get to the top, they have to get rid of certain caterpillars.

Yellow and Stripes have a realization and they start climbing down…

It is easy to look at Hope for the Flowers as a parable of the rat (or rather, a caterpillar) race – people scurrying to get to the top no matter the cost and the emptiness and loneliness of being up there.

If one looks closely enough, there are however, a lot of other ways at looking at the story of Yellow and Stripes. One can see it as a parable of choices – one can opt to climb up, go down, or stay put. One can also treat it as a parable of relationships - committing, letting go, faith, and second chances. Still one can view it as a parable of revolution, a parable of re-invention, or even a parable of disillusionment.

Here’s the thing about very good children’s books. One reads it the first time and understands it one way; one reads it the second time several years after and realizes that there are several dimensions to the same book. Hope for the Flowers is a very good children’s book.