Next up: Book 6 in the Big Book Read 2010: another random grab off the library shelf.

"A Hole in the Universe," by Mary McGarry Morris (2004) If you read (or saw the movie of) Mary McGarry Morris' great novel, "Songs in Ordinary Time," you must know what a remarkable writer she is. What I had forgotten, until I picked up this book, is that she is a New Englander, from Massachusetts, in fact, and she sets her stories within this familiar framework. "Songs in Ordinary Time" was set in a small Vermont town. "A Hole in the Universe" is set in Massachusetts, virtually on my own doorstep. I was jarred into this realization in Chapter 2, when a character used the word "mingya." If you've never heard this term before, I wouldn't be surprised; my understanding always was that folks who said "mingya" were 99% likely to be from Methuen, Massachusetts. Maybe Italian, maybe not. Maybe an urban myth, maybe not... But suddenly the story came alive for me.
The characters are strong and vivid, the dialogue is authentic, and the setting is gritty and terrifying.
This is the story of Gordon Loomis, recently released from prison after serving a 25 year sentence for murder, a murder committed when he was 18 years old. It is the story of his attempted re-adjustment into society; it is also so much more.
It is the story of the decline of a neighborhood, of a city; the fictional Collerton will be recognizable to residents of the Merrimack Valley as the real, decaying sister city downriver from my own hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.
It is the story of Gordon's successful brother Dennis, attempting to set Gordon on the road to a good life, but whose own feet stray from the path.
It is the story of Delores, trying to build a relationship with Gordon, who can barely maintain a relationship with himself.
It is the story of 13-year-old Jada, living in the sordid world of her crack-whore mother, struggling to hang on to something, anything, in order to survive.
And as all these lives intersect, the tension builds and builds --- I was so sucked in that by the 3rd chapter that I could literally not put the book down. I read all 376 pages in one day!
Masterfully written; highly recommended.

Book 5 for 2010: "The God of Small Things"

I plucked this book off a shelf at the library based solely on its title, which intrigued me: (I think in retrospect that it reminded me of a Terry Prachett book....) "The God of Small Things," by Arundhati Roy (1997).

At any rate, it turned out to be quite a different, yet oddly similar, experience. Again, I find myself reading a story about a wildly dysfunctional family told from the perspective of a young brother and sister. Again, this family is of an ethnicity with which I have little familiarity: This family is Indian, of India, of a grindingly impoverished area on the southern-most tip of the country, what's called the "Spice Coast."

This is an amazingly convoluted story. It moves backward and forward in time; the characters have names and family names and titles and nicknames, and it is at times a bit difficult to remember who is who; and the language is rich and dense, sometimes TOO dense. I found that it often distracted me from the actual storyline. The author -- a first-time author, although with some writing experience -- uses many, many, many metaphors and made-up descriptives ("a steelshrill police whistle," "cake-crumbled voices...") and Much Use of Capitalizations.

That is not to say that it doesn't work. It does, a lot of the time. And the story she tells is, like the others I've recently read, about Life and Death, and Family and Secrets, and Love and Madness, and all those Larger Themes.

I recommend it to those who, like me, refuse to give up on a book just because the going gets a little tough. I slogged on through; you could, too.