A Picture is Worth...

When I was little, I had a book with a picture of a girl holding a book. On her book was a picture of a little girl holding a book. On her book...When my youngest sister was little, I found a book called Zoom. On each page, the camera zooms out and you realize some detail of the previous picture is part of a larger picture. Recently I discovered a book for my son called Flotsam. A boy finds a camera on the beach. He develops the film and finds a picture of a child holding a picture of a child holding a picture...until you see a picture of the camera's original owner.

Although it is not a picture book, Click is a book of layered stories. Each story takes us a step deeper, a stop closer, into the life of a photojournalist and his family. As each of the ten stories is written by a different author, details shift from the background into the spotlight. And back again. We zoom into a Russian prison, an Australian beach house, and a French village. Along the way, we also see the photographer's impact on his grandchildren and watch them grow into adulthood.

On a side note, the jacket for this book notes that the purchase of this book benefits Amnesty International. Let's give it more exposure.

Gin Vida

Some may go giddy over free publications like this, this, or even this. Me? I do a little happy dance when I see this for the taking at the library.

The latest edition mentions Vida by Patricia Engel. It is a collection of stories, tied together by a central narrator, Sabina. Sabina's parents are from Colombia, but she has grown up in New Jersey. On 9/11, she finds refuge at the home of her married guitar teacher. She watches her aunt die of cancer. She befriends a former prostitute. She battles anorexia. Not all at once. The stories shift back and forth in place and time and boyfriend.

Strangely enough, as I was reading Vida, I kept confusing it with another book I picked up this week, Gin Closet by Leslie Jamison. When her grandmother dies, Stella discovers her mother has a sister no one has heard from in years. Stella finds Tilly living in a ramshackle trailer - with more than a few empty gin bottles stashed in the closet. The pair go to live with Tilly's son to try and beat her drinking habit. Stella, too, has her ghosts - a former eating disorder, a married boyfriend, a string of dead-end jobs. Sound familiar?

Dysfunctional, gritty, "crazy-ass," and all those other buzz words to describe this kind of fiction apply. Trust me, you'll be hooked.

Marvelous Muddle

Precocious Victorian children grew up and came of age in a time of war. A.S. Byatt examines this age in The Children's Book. Centered around the family of Olive Wellwood, the novel follows would be potters, writers, and suffragists as they embrace and discard the burgeoning social movements of the day.

After her husband leaves the banking industry, Olive supports the family by writing scary stories for children. She leaves the upbringing (and sometimes even bearing) of her own children to her spinster sister. For each of her children, Olive has written a personalized storybook with an ongoing tale. But closest to her heart is the story she creates for her eldest, Tom. Without consulting Tom, Olive takes Tom's story public as a play. Her collaborator on the play just happens to be a fantastical German puppeteer and the father of one of her daughters.

Questionable paternity appears often in this tale. Into the muddle of an extensive cast of characters (and bedfellows) goes pages from Olive's stories, an excerpt from a randy novelist advocating free love, letters from boarding school, poetry from the tranches, and entreaties by world leaders. Out of the muddle comes an ending which ties up nicely. Quite satisfying, really.

When a Drowning Isn't the Worst Thing

Every Last One by Anna Quindlen

Mary Beth is a landscaper and mother of three. She worries about what to throw together for dinner, whether her son is depressed, and if she should be having more sex. She has best friends who call her for parenting advice and old friends that don't speak to her anymore. She fights with her daughter. She calls her mother occasionally. Then, she wakes up in the hospital.

Despite the tragedy that upends the whole thing, I fell into this life. One adage I took especially to heart (along with the recipe for chicken tetrazzini): "small children, small problems, big children, big problems."

So after reemerging from that life into my own, I hugged my son, made a cake for my husband, and read my daughter a bedtime story. One with a happy ending.

Are we there yet?

Perhaps Labor Day Weekend has you taking one last road trip with the family. If that family includes anyone between the ages of four and four hundred, be sure to pack the audio book collection of The Magic Tree House by Mary Pope Osborne.

The Magic Tree House books travel with a brother/sister team (Jack and Annie) as they visit famous historical events in their time-machine tree house. Hardly rosy, the pictures Osborne paints are tremulously vivid. You'll slip with the slanting of the Titanic as it sinks, taste the grit of the San Francisco earthquake's aftermath, and smell the blood of the wounded Civil War soldiers. And you'll feel immensely relieved as they escape each adventure unharmed but not untouched.

And who knows? With these CDs on play, "Are we there yet?" may also be history.

One Night Stand (or the other)

Apart from The Bookman's Promise by John Dunning, my night stand looks pretty bare this week. The other side of the bed is a different story. My husband always has a plethora of interesting reads.

Two I'm browsing this week when I grow tired of the whole crime scene-scene:

Supercharge Your Memory by Corinne Gediman and Francis Crinella
Do you remember Highlights for Kids? This is sort of like Highlights for grown-ups. Graphically pleasing, this book offers a smorgasbord of activities from recalling olfactory memories (remember that rotten carrot your mother put in your kindergarten lunchbag?) to redrawing abstract designs (was the squiggle above or below the circle thingamajig?). You'll have fun, fun, fun, till your Daddy takes your T-bird away.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
A fan of Mitchell (especially Black Swan Green), I swoon over everything he's written. Thousand Autumns is no exception. At almost 500 pages, this epic travels to Nagasaki Harbor and immerses us (sometimes too intimately) in the sights, sounds, and sighs of the colorful cast and crew that work for and about the Dutch East Indies Company. If this weren't novel enough, the story ventures further inland when the love-interest of the title character becomes enshrined in a remote convent. You'll be itching to find out how the last samurais face the impending interests of the British Empire.

Just Beachy

Only one more week of guilt-free beach reads. I've got a stack on my nightstand to get through.

Booked to Die by John Dunning
I read about this book in The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover Bartlett. A closet Grisham fan, I couldn't resist seeking out a detective novel about a book collector-cop turned bookseller-detective. And happy day. It's a series!

Confections of a Closet Master Baker by Gesine Bullock-Prado
This one came recommended via the "customers who bought this" list on Amazon. The teaser on the cover tells you all you need to know about this tell-all of sorts: "One woman's sweet journey from unhappy Hollywood executive to contented country baker." It was only after a few pages that I realized that the title was "Confections" not "Confessions" as she includes scrumptious sounding recipes gleaned from her childhood in Germany.

The Blue Bistro by Elin Hilderbrand
I browsed this one on the buy-me table at a local retailer. Luckily the library had it in stock as well. A quintessential summer read: girl arrives on Nantucket, girl finds job at magical restaurant on the beach, girl falls in love with...well, you'll just have to wait til I finish it.

A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer
This was a find (or rather found) on the library new releases shelf. Its cheerful white stripes and whimsical title should have clued me in that this would be one of those dark and dysfunctional memoirs. Delve into the musings of the woman married to Norman Mailer for thirty-three years if you are ready for summer to be over.