Title: The Glimpse Traveler
Author: Marianne Boruch
Genre: Memoir
Year: 2011
Acquired: From the publisher, Indiana University Press, for review as part of a book tour.
Rating:

Publisher Summary: When she joins a pair of hitchhikers on a trip to California, a young Midwestern woman embarks on a journey about memory and knowledge, beauty and realization. This true story, set in 1971, recounts a fateful, nine-day trip into the American counterculture that begins on a whim and quickly becomes a mission to unravel a tragic mystery. The narrator’s path leads her to Berkeley, San Francisco, Mill Valley, Big Sur, and finally to an abandoned resort motel, now become a down-on-its-luck commune in the desert of southern Colorado.

Review: The Glimpse Traveler is one of those stories about an unexpected adventure with unexpected people that seems to only happen when you’re young (or if you’re a career hippie). I’ve had a couple of these in my life, although none of them even compare to the epic road trip Marianne Boruch found herself on during a spring break trip in 1971 that she writes about in The Glimpse Traveler.

Uncoupled and curious, Marianne is a relatively unobtrusive narrator in the book. The story seems more about her companions, the road, and the experience of being young and traveling than it is about any major personal revelations or traumas. I liked that about this book — it was more a memoir of place and time than it was about the author, keeping it from falling over the line from interesting to self-involved.

I also enjoyed that the book had a distinctive writing style. Boruch is a poet and English professor, so she has a beautiful way with words. One of my favorite chapters was one where she just listed all of the things she was bringing with her (reminiscent of Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried,” I think). I love the way the things we carry can say a lot about us, as this case does:

What I took:

Ten bucks.

Two blank checks, folded down to razorblade dimension. I had a whopping $200 or so, saved in the bank. …

My University of Illinois ID, my driver’s permit. The address and phone number of my mother, faraway elsewhere, peacefully oblivious, her usual state regarding my antics since she dropped me at my freshman dorm saying: You’re going to do things I never would — just don’t tell me. As for Jack — should I write down his number too? Did I really want him called by some cop, some hospital clerk? After all, this was for emergencies, a phone number they’d find on me.

One other style thing — Boruch never uses quotation marks. While this was initially a little odd, I think it was actually a very subtle and clever way of pointing to a theme of the book, the fallibly and inconsistency of memory. Leaving out quotation marks is a gentle way of admitting she can’t remember the dialogue as it exactly happened, but this is a best approximation.

It feels weird to give the book three stars when I can’t think of anything specifically I wanted to critique about it. I think though, as a whole, the book didn’t wow me in the way some other four- and five-star reads have. I liked it, I’m glad I read it, but it just didn’t hit me enough to move it from a good book to a great or amazing book. However, people who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s or who connect more with the unraveling of the tragic mystery noted in the summary might love the book more.

Other Reviews: she reads and reads |

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!

Thank you for hanging in there with me while blogging takes a back seat to  major life changes. I don’t like putting the blog on hiatus, but I just can’t seem to find the inspiration to puts words together, and I’d rather not post than post things that aren’t good.

It seems like everything in life has become a numbers game… how many days until X, how much will Y cost, how far until we get to Z? In that sense, here’s some of what my life has been like lately:

2: Full days I have left until we begin The Big Move.
18 and counting: Boxes it took to pack all my books.

11: Books read in July.
3,696: Pages read in July.
8: Books I still have unreviewed.

72: Episodes of “Prison Break” I’ve watched since July 15 instead of reading/packing/sleeping. Wentworth Miller is dreamy.

8 and counting: AT&T “customer service” agents my roommate and I have interacted with trying to simply change the account holder name on our bill. This has still not been accomplished.
$150: Dollars my gym charged me to cancel my contract early, even though I’m cancelling because I’m moving out of the state. I’m still pissed off about this.

71: Pages read in Game of Thrones, which I’m starting to like more and more as I read.
86: Pages read in Domestic Violets, which is, so far, just as awesome as everyone has been saying it was. It’s really, really funny.

33: Awards categories for Book Blogger Appreciation Week. Head on over and register/nominate for favorite blogs for this really awesome event.
6: $0.99 ebooks I purchased from my local independent bookstore as part of Harper Perennial’s big summer book promotion. Check it out!

2.5: Hours left until my last time with out wine-tasting group, WASTED. I have a lot of stuff to get ready before then, so I’ll have to cut this off here. Happy Sunday, everyone, and I hope we’ll be able to get back to regularly scheduled programming soon.

Title: Next to Love
Author: Ellen Feldman
Genre: Fiction
Year: 2011
Acquired: From the publisher for a TLC Boor Tour
Rating:

Next to Love begins in December 1941, in the months before the first American troops are sent to Europe and the Pacific to fight in World War II. It’s a frantic time — young couples getting married before they’re deployed, families saying goodbye to husbands and sons, and women being left behind to fill the jobs men used to have. By the end of 1944, soldiers are returning (or, in many cases, not returning) home, and life tries to settle back into familiar rhythms.

The book follows three friends — Babe, Millie, and Grace — through these tumultuous times, alternating points of view with each chapter. All three send husbands off to war, and each one responds to the aftermath of the conflict in a different way. Through these women and their experiences, Feldman touches on topics like PTSD, anti-Semitism, the Civil Rights movement, women’s rights, mental illness, labor relations, and other historical and personal moments that often serve as the backdrop for entire novels.

In contrast, Next to Love doesn’t settle into any of these topics for very long — there’s just a hint of each before the story moves on to another time or place or character. For a long time, I couldn’t quite figure out why that was the case. I couldn’t figure out why the novel wouldn’t delve into any of these meaty topics, and, equally perplexing, why I didn’t seem to mind the fly-over treatment of these serious issues.

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A Note from Kim: This review is a guest post from my friend Erin, a grad student in journalism at UW-Madison, who studied science communication in the protrack MA program. Erin says she is prone to tripping her geek alarm over all kinds of topics, including physics, astronomy, dinosaurs, evolution, and the history of science. She also blogs about the science behind things in our daily lives at her blog, Astronaut Ice Cream. Make Erin feel welcome!

Here’s basically what I thought when I saw Feathers sitting on Kim’s bookshelf:

Feathers!!!!! They are awesome!

Here’s an exchange I’ve had several times since taking the book:

Me: I’m [about to read/reading/just finished with] a new book.
Other Person: What’s it called?
Me: Feathers.
Other Person: What’s it about?
Me: Feathers. Actual feathers.
Other Person: …Oh.

That’s right: this book is called Feathers and it’s about actual feathers like are on birds.

In addition to the delightfully descriptive title, the interior of this book is also pretty awesome. In 352 pages, Thor Hanson, a field biologist, looks at a variety of feather-related questions, each of which could probably be its own book, including: How did feathers evolve? What do feathers do for birds? What role do feathers play in human culture?

Hanson does a good job with restraining the potentially-almost-infinite range of his inquiries in exchange for some depth, so you don’t feel like you traveled everywhere but only saw the inside of the airports. And though some parts of the book retread what was already really familiar ground to me (the discovery of archaeopteryx, for instance), in the context of the book I was perfectly fine with covering it again, even though Hanson didn’t have much new information for me.

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