Category Archives: out of things to read

The Monday Book: THE HOTEL AT THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET by Jamie Ford

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In which Jack guest blogs a book review
I don’t read all that many novels, tending more towards history or memoir as a rule. But Wendy and I headed off recently to our remote hideaway cabin in Tennessee, armed with some leftovers from ‘World Book Night’. These included Hotel, which she thought I might like.
Completely captured within a page or two, I could hardly put it down. More than that, I didn’t want to immediately start another one, in order to savor the ‘afterglow’ of Hotel. That may be the first time I’ve ever consciously done that.
The story concerns a Chinese American boy called Henry and a Japanese American girl named Keiko who live in Seattle around the time when Japanese are being rounded up and sent to ‘detention camps’ further inland for the duration of the war.
This seems like it would be a simple ‘boy meets girl’ tale in an historic setting, but there’s much more to it. For a start they are in their early teens and the relationship is (for most of the book) entirely innocent and really about childhood friendship. Hotel more explores the relationship between parents and children, and between different races and generations and all against a turbulent period in history. There’s even a search for a ‘holy grail’.
The detail and painstaking research may explain why I liked it so much. From the speakeasies of wartime Seattle to the bleak windswept detention camps of the mid-West, the author puts you right there, peering over the shoulders of the characters.
Without wishing to spoil this for anyone else, I wish there could have been at least one more chapter, though.
A very enthusiastic ‘two thumbs up’ from this reviewer!

 

The Monday Book: THREE BAGS FULL by Leonie Swann

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sheep I bought Three Bags Full while visiting my friend Tina’s bookstore PAPERBACK EXCHANGE in Neenah, Wisconsin. Tina’s shop is stuffed like ours with mazes of shelves towering to the moon, and I bonked myself on the head with this book while reaching for another. (No harm; it’s a paperback!)

When a book chooses you, you should pay attention.

Because Three Bags Full is a lot of fun. When their shepherd is murdered, the flock must sort out whodunit, but then they have to get the human herd to understand who, and how, and why. The best parts of the book are when the sheep react in very sheeply ways to things around them. They create a memorial field to their shepherd, but then they eat all the really tasty plants out of it, sheepishly. (Heh, sorry couldn’t resist.)

The language in the book has survived translation very well (being originally in German) and there are some lovely literary passages in addition to the sheep psychology:

“The sea looked as if it had been licked clean, blue and clear and smooth, and there were a few woolly little clouds in the sky. Legend said that these clouds were sheep who had simply wandered over the cliff tops one day, special sheep who now went on grazing in the sky and were never shorn. In any case, they were a good sign.”

That kind of thing. I liked the juxtaposition of what the sheep were thinking within their own limitations–their fear of blood smells, their herd instinct, their natural tendencies to forget what they were doing because of food–but I also liked the casual observations of humanity that were so easy to get, seeing ourselves as the sheep might see us:

“Maple thought optimistically that human beings, on their good days, weren’t much dimmer than sheep. Or at least, not much dimmer than dim sheep.”

Three Bags Full is a perfect beach read for someone who wants a fun, light-yet-insightful book that gives you a pleasant pick-me-up, murder notwithstanding. Two hooves up.