I know, I know.  I’ve already blogged about an Aimee Bender book.  Zita has blogged about her, John P. has blogged about her.  Well, that’s because she’s great.  I recently read her first novel An Invisible Sign of My Own in two afternoons.  This novel is about Mona Gray, a young OCD math teacher who struggles with making a commitment to anything (or anyone) ever since her father came down with a mysterious illness.  As he quits doing the things that he loves, so does Mona.

She’s forced to face her fears after becoming an elementary school math teacher.  For one, a student who latches onto Mona divulges that her own mother is sick with cancer, and for two, Mona begins to fall in love with the young, eccentric science teacher.

My favorite passage in the whole book is the one in which Mona first begins to realize how she feels about the science teacher.  She finds him outside, hiding from parents on Back-to-School-Night, and blowing cigarette smoke-filled bubbles.

I tensed my wrist, and taking the cigarette up to my lips with my other hand, sucked in. The smoke waited, patient, in my mouth, and I raised the swirling bubble with my arm, and released the smoke in a stream into a hold of the wand. It whooshed out of me: white, intimate.

I got ready to seal up the bubble and he was watching. I could feel him waiting, and I felt the bubble wobbling, and smelled the bucket and breathed in the smoke and I knew right then that mine would work. Mine would seal up, take off, and rise over our heads. A beautiful shuddering pearl in a sphere.

I felt him waiting for me, and I wrecked it. (pg. 109-110)

-Kaycie

I had quite a stack of books to read, but I picked up C and an hour and a half later, I was engaged, finally making myself put it down shortly before midnight. I picked it up again this morning, and I hardly ever give myself permission to read during the day! This should say a lot about how I am loving the weird and unusual and captivating C.

Now, how lucky am I to open the Internet while ago only to learn that C has been shortlisted for England’s prestigious 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction? In fact, it is favored 2 to 1 to win! WOW! So, it won’t be long until I finish this one! By the way, the Englishman McCarthy is already popular for his first novel Remainder, which I’m now sure I will also read. He also wrote Tintin and the Secret of Literature.

In a nutshell, and I am only halfway through C, keep in mind, the novel revolves around a very dysfunctional early 1900s English family, in which the parents pretty much let the young daughter and younger brother choose their activities without any supervision. The father teaches deaf children at their estate by instructing them how to recite classical literature, particularly the tales of Persephone and other gods and goddesses of the classical Greek underworld. In fact, once annually, he stages a Greek pageant in which the pupils, who are fully costumed by the deaf mother of the family, slowly and painstakingly recite their assigned lines. All the parents of the students attend, being oh-so-proud of the progress their precious, previously non-speaking children are making. One more thing about the very strange mother, she is also highly involved in the cultivation of silk worms, who feast on the mulberry trees on the English estate, and she even chooses native berries to dye the silk all sorts of vibrant colors, and she likes poppies the best!  So, the preteen daughter and younger brother have free reign, so to speak, their parents being highly involved in their own interests, both being non-traditional parents. The housekeeper is the one who seems to watch over the children at all, this being very sporadic, at best.

As the years pass, the reader watches the highly intelligent young girl, now a mature teenager, develop an extreme and detrimental interest in bizarre science experiments and in the natural science field in general, including beetles and all kinds of botanical growth, while the brother “Serge” becomes equally enamored of the telegraph and the use of the Morse code, so much so that he communicates with the entire world! Tragedy strikes, which I will not let out of the bag, and Serge is sent to recuperate at a European bath which is run by a mad doctor.

This is how far I have reached! Stay tuned for the final blog on this remarkable and provocative novel whose vocabulary, setting, plot, and character development serve to make me realize  the merit of its nomination for the Man Booker! How glad am I that C jumped out of the stack at me last night!

Click here to read Part 2 of Nan’s blog

-Nan

I was very excited when I heard that Sara Gruen had a new novel coming out this fall.  I loved Water for Elephants and I know that many of you did also.  I began to read some of the reviews coming out about Ape House and they were very mixed…some loved it others hated it.  Being a bookseller as long as I have been I knew that they only way to know about this book was to read it myself.  Last week I got my chance because I got an advance copy from my lovely reps from Random House.  I went home on Thursday, ate some dinner and started reading and I finished Ape House on Friday!  I thoroughly enjoyed myself while reading  this book.  Do I think that everyone that loved Water for Elephants will love Ape House?  No, they are very different novels but I do think that everyone should give it a chance.

This is the story of a family of Bonobo Apes.  Sam, Bonzi, Lola, Mbongo, Jelani and Makena are part of an experiment to study their capability to have relationships with each other and humans.  In fact they have been taught American Sign Language and can communicate with Isabel, a scientist at the Great Ape Language Lab.  There is an explosion at the lab that injures Isabel and “liberates’ the apes.  After she leaves the hospital Isabel begins her search for the apes and comes to find out they have been purchased by man who has started a reality show called Ape House.   Isabel realizes that to save her “family” she must enlist the help of those she has never been able to fully connect with…her own kind, humans.  She enlists the help of a lab assistant, a reporter, a vegan protestor and a ex-porn star with plans of her own.

This is an article I found with Sara Gruen about why she wrote Ape House:

Sara Gruen on Ape House

Right before I went on tour for Water for Elephants, my mother sent me an email about a place in Des Moines, Iowa, that was studying language acquisition and cognition in great apes. I had been fascinated by human-ape discourse ever since I first heard about Koko the gorilla (which was longer ago than I care to admit) so I spent close to a day poking around the Great Ape Trust’s Web site. I was doubly fascinated–not only with the work they’re doing, but also by the fact that there was an entire species of great ape I had never heard of. Although I had no idea what I was getting into, I was hooked.

During the course of my research for Ape House, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Great Ape Trust–not that that didn’t take some doing. I was assigned masses of homework, including a trip to York University in Toronto for a crash course on linguistics. Even after I received the coveted invitation to the Trust, that didn’t necessarily mean I was going to get to meet the apes: that part was up to them. Like John, I tried to stack my odds by getting backpacks and filling them with everything I thought an ape might find fun or tasty–bouncy balls, fleece blankets, M&M’s, xylophones, Mr. Potato Heads, etc.–and then emailed the scientists, asking them to please let the apes know I was bringing “surprises.” At the end of my orientation with the humans, I asked, with some trepidation, whether the apes were going to let me come in. The response was that not only were they letting me come in, they were insisting.

The experience was astonishing–to this day I cannot think about it without getting goose bumps. You cannot have a two-way conversation with a great ape, or even just look one straight in the eye, close up, without coming away changed. I stayed until the end of the day, when I practically had to be dragged out, because I was having so much fun. I was told that the next day Panbanisha said to one of the scientists, “Where’s Sara? Build her nest. When’s she coming back?”

Most of the conversations between the bonobos and humans in Ape House are based on actual conversations with great apes, including Koko, Washoe, Booey, Kanzi, and Panbanisha. Many of the ape-based scenes in this book are also based on fact, although I have taken the fiction writer’s liberty of fudging names, dates, and places.

One of the places I did not disguise or rename is the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They take in orphaned infants, nurse them back to health, and when they’re ready, release them back into the jungle. This, combined with ongoing education of the local people, is one of the wild bonobos’ best hopes for survival.

One day, I’m going to be brave enough to visit Lola ya Bonobo. In the meantime, in response to Panbanisha’s question, I’m coming back soon. Very soon. I hope you have my nest ready!