Straight Man by Richard Russo

I picked this title up out of curiosity.  The Cameron Village Library’s Evening Book Club had selected it for discussion, and after talking with the group’s facilitator, I decided to give it a try.  I chose the audio version (WCPL owns it only on cassette) for this foray into adult literature (I am primarily a youth services librarian), although I have since re-read the book in its print form.

I hated it at the beginning.  As I drove and listened, I thought, “Oh, man.  What am I doing listening to a book about a middle-aged man having a mid-life crisis?  This stinks!”  But, for some reason, I kept giving it a chance.  I am not sorry in the least that I persevered.

Straight Man is the story of Hank Devereaux, Jr.: middle-aged English department interim chair at a Podunk branch of the Pennsylvania state university system.  Hank is about as go-nowhere as a man can get, but his sly observations on the people who populate his daily existence, and his constant attempts to get their collective goat are what keep him going.  The story unfolds as Hank’s wife leaves him alone at home for the weekend. Hank proceeds to tangle with just about everybody who crosses his path, setting off a humorous chain of events that compounds minor catastrophes into one big turning point for Hank.

Listening to Straight Man turned out to be a delight.  Reading the book again in print, I found it even more hilarious.  Perhaps this is because I got to see Russo at work – I got to pay close attention to the writing, instead of just absorbing the story.  The story itself flows from its inhabitants.  Russo gets characterization just right – even his punctuation contributes to the crystal clear images of the people he’s chosen to tell his story, making Straight Man a winner for anyone who is in the market for an entertaining, character-driven novel.

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Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Every few years, humans get a reminder of the destructive power of nature.  It was hard to ignore the news coverage of the Haiti earthquake, and before that, Hurricane Katrina.  Before that, there was the tsunami that washed away thousands of lives in Southeast Asia.  There are volcanic eruptions, cyclones, monsoons, wildfires, and avalanches that threaten to take lives every year.  Imagine if these types of disasters all started to happen at once.

In Life As We Knew It, readers are introduced to sixteen-year-old Miranda through journal entries.  Her journal begins like any typical teenage girl’s. She writes about her grades, friends, fights with her mother, her new step-sibling-to-be, and her crush on a local Olympic-caliber skater. And she writes about the fuss all her teachers are making about the asteroid that’s supposed to hit the moon. They’re all excited because it’s supposed to be big enough to see with the naked eye, but not so big that anyone is particularly worried. They should have been. The asteroid is not only bigger than expected, it hits with much more force than expected. It knocks the moon out of orbit, much closer to Earth.

Almost immediately, natural disasters begin to change the Earth in ways nobody could have predicted.  Tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions simultaneously wipe out communities and create conditions similar to a nuclear winter.  Little by little, life as everyone knew it devolves into a struggle for survival.

In her journal, Miranda wonders how they can possibly survive. The situation is desperate. If only one person in her family can survive, who should it be? It’s time to choose. She longs for life as she knew it, but she has to deal with life as it is, for as long as she possibly can. How long will that be?

Life As We Knew It is the first in what is now a trilogy of books called “The Last Survivors.”  The Dead and the Gone, the second book in the series, focuses on the same events as Life As We Knew It, but focuses on NYC teen Alex as he tries to care for his two sisters.  This World We Live In, the third book in the series is due out in April.

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The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

In 1854, London, England, was the largest city in the world.  It boasted a population of nearly three million, yet it lacked many of the things modern urban residents take for granted: basic sanitation and trash removal, a public sewer system, running water in homes, emergency rooms and a public health entity with enough knowledge to ensure that all of these things worked.  So, when Baby Lewis, the six-month-old daughter of a London policeman and his wife fell ill on August 28, there was nothing to be done but for mother to tend to baby as well as she could, and toss the dirty water from washing diapers into the cesspool at the bottom of the house.  Within five days, ten percent of the population of Broad Street in Soho was dead from cholera.

Author Steven Johnson recreates the outbreak in this book, subtitled The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.  Told in narrative non-fiction style prose, The Ghost Map explores the lives of those who died from the outbreak, as well as the lives of those who worked to put an end to it.  In this story, two heroes emerge: Reverend Henry Whitehead, the local clergyman who knew everyone in the neighborhood, and Dr. John Snow, a respected local doctor and avid medical researcher.  As the death toll mounted in Soho and began to spread beyond the borders of that neighborhood, Snow and Whitehead collaborated on a theory concerning the spread of the disease that eventually led to vast improvements in the handling of water and waste in the city of London.

Johnson’s fast-paced narrative will draw you into the tragedy of the 1854 cholera epidemic and triumph that later arose thanks to the persistence of two local heroes.  It will also make you grateful for the modern conveniences of city life that we so often take for granted.

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My Old True Love by Sheila Kay Adams

If you don’t know who Sheila Kay Adams is, it’s about time that you found out.  Simply put, she is one of North Carolina’s most gifted storytellers, authors and musicians.  Originally from a small Appalachian community in Madison County, NC, Adams honed the gift of storytelling and folk singing passed down to her from generations of her family, as well as people in her closely-knit community.  I had the extraordinary pleasure of hearing Ms. Adams tell stories and sing at a luncheon several years ago, as she was promoting her book My Old True Love.

With its roots in Adams’ own family history, My Old True Love is the story of the Nortons and Stantons of Sodom, North Carolina.  Arty, the story’s narrator, looks back on her family’s story from the year 1919, when she herself is “older than God’s dog.”  In her mountain-tinged narrative voice, Arty relays a history of hard times and laughter, love and heartbreak beginning in the years before the Civil War and lasting just past the end of that conflict.  Through Arty, we meet her brother Hackley and their cousin Larkin, who have been raised like brothers, sharing a love of the ways of their mountain and for the traditional ballads that ring through the hollows and across the balds.  When the two come to love the same young woman, the result is as heartrending as the old songs they know so well.

Having only listened to Kate Forbes’s masterful audio recording of this historical novel, it is hard to imagine reading the story in print, especially because Adams relies on the traditional ballads to tell parts of the story.  Forbes’s voice rings true both as narrator Arty, as well as in the singing of the ballads that Adams uses to bind her story together.  This audiobook will have you sitting in your car, in the driveway, listening to the end of a track or a chapter, and will leave you longing for more when it is over.

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Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

Obsessive fandom is not new territory to British author Nick Hornby. His first book was a chronicle of his own obsession with the Arsenal football club.  Hornby knows firsthand what it is to be a number one fan, and he brings this knowledge to his latest novel, Juliet, Naked.

Tucker Crowe, a reclusive singer-songwriter is the object of obsession in Juliet, Naked.  The novel takes its title from the newly released acoustic, unfinished recording of Crowe’s final album, which appears twenty-two years after Crowe stepped out of the spotlight.  The recording is sent just prior to its general release to Duncan, a small time professor of media studies, and majorly obsessive Tucker Crowe fan. The arrival of Juliet, Naked is an event that sparks the ultimate breakdown of Duncan’s relationship with his longtime girlfriend Annie.

Duncan and Annie have very different takes on this “new” album. When Annie asks Duncan to post her response to his own, first, exclusive review on his Tucker Crowe fan site, Duncan does so reluctantly.  Less than twenty-four hours later, Annie has received an honest-to-goodness response to the review from Tucker Crowe himself.  As her clandestine email relationship with Tucker develops, her relationship with Duncan crashes and burns when he reveals his real-life affair with a colleague.

Hornby has made a name for himself writing realistically flawed characters in search of redemption.  Juliet’s characters are hilariously poignant, mainly because they could be any of us.  Perhaps what’s best about this novel is that none of the characters seem to find exactly what they’re looking for, and Hornby makes that okay.

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