Book Review: Temple Bombing by Melissa Fay Greene

Temple Bombing by Melissa Fay Greene caught my eye at Half-Price Books because it was in the multi-cultural literature section, and I generally love that genre. I have mixed feelings about the book, despite the 5 star reviews it received on amazon.com.

Greene is a detailed author telling the true story of the bombing of a Jewish temple. I loved the historical context of the bombing among southern race relations after desegregation. However, about halfway through the fascinating context gave way to minute details on the investigation and trial related to the bombing, and at this point the detail becomes paaaainfully boring. I couldn't finish the book. It's no the fault of the author - she did a brilliant job of painting a vivid picture of the Jews in the South and how they perceived themselves and their faith amidst the culture. It's just that the trial itself really isn't all that interesting.

3 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Wow. What a book. Five stars from me.

Gilead fascinates me. I added it to my paperbackswap list because it was a Pulitzer Prize winner and several book bloggers recommended it. The stunning reviews on the back of my copy are from Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Chicago Tribune, TIME, etc. I figured it was going to be a good book.

What I didn't expect is for it to be the powerful and blatantly Christian fiction book I have read in a long, long time.

The New York Magazine review said this:

You can appreciate and admire Marilynne Robinson’s beautifully evoked novel if you don’t share her religious values: You can even be moved by it. But unless you are a believing Christian with strong fundamentalist leanings, you cannot truly understand Gilead. Lacking such faith, you’re probably not going to like it much, either. That is, if you read Robinson with the seriousness and intelligence she deserves.

Thing is, I've hardly heard anything about this novel from the Christian world, which doesn't surprise me I guess, because the Christian world is so inundated with shallow feel-good fiction. Robinson IS intelligent, and her book is packed with theology. You just won't appreciate it without being willing to really think about life. Back to the review quoted above:

To pass over it as some light fictional conceit would be to transgress against the novel’s essential meaning. The first two sentiments, for a skeptical, secular reader, are impossible to accept. To such a reader, there is nothing great or bright about suffering and dying; and some human faces, like the faces of torturers, do not possess a trace of courage, and not any sort of loneliness that would arouse love or forgiveness. Ames would test the faith of many Christians, too.

Despite all of that, Gilead is highly praised by the literary world. The reason is clear - she writes beautifully. It is the beautiful, reminiscing, meandering thoughts of an old preacher in a tiny prairie town in Kansas. At the beginning I thought it would be the kind of book that I love solely for its achingly beautiful description of small everyday things. Somehow in the midst of that beauty, Robinson ends up unraveling the complex relationships through a couple of generations of families. The central themes are the father-son relationship, forgiveness, blessing, death and life.

I highly recommend the book, but have to be honest and say that if you like easy-reading, you may not like this book. I think you have to be able to read on before you have been drawn into a plot, because this book is delayed gratification in that respect.

A few quotes from the old pastor:

I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.


To me it seems rather Christlike to be as unadorned as this place is, as little regarded. I can’t help imagining that you will leave sooner or later, and it’s fine if you have done that, or you mean to do it. This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still hope. I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love–I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence. (pg 247)

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension. (p 7)

I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it. (p 188)

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient. (p 243)

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens it eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. (p 57)

Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.

Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies
Originally uploaded by Lisaboly

Rating: 4/5

I just finished Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies". It actually wasn't the shiny Pulitzer Prize sticker on the front of the book that initially got my attention - it was some one's blog that said that this book was great for anyone that struggled to find a place to belong.

I thought.... this is the book for me!

I was a little disappointed because I expected a novel and this is actually a book of short stories. They were great short stories though. Lahiri is also the author of "The Namesake", which is a movie that I LOVE, but I haven't read the book.

All of Lahiri's stories in this book also deal with an Indian identity in some ways. A few stories were set totally within the Indian culture, but most dealt with immigration and the cultural identity of Indians in American and the UK. Lahiri seamlessly weaves each story together with a different dynamic. One story would have to do with an arranged marriage of two Indian Americans in America. One tells of an Americanized family returning as tourists to India. Another looks through the eyes of a young Indian-American girl at a man studying in the US with his family left in war-torn Bangladesh. Then there's a little white boy who is watching a newly arrived woman adjust to life in the US.

Each story weaves intense family, marriage, and generational dynamics on the tapestry of Indian culture, showing the tension of change and tradition, love and pain. Lahiri's stories are the kind that you really can't quote because the point is illustrated so completely by the story itself that it is never stated - it is just played out before your eyes. That is true fiction.

Book Review: Guerrilla Hostage by Denise Siino

Guerrilla Hostage - The dramatic story of ray rising's ordeal in the Colombian jungle
by Denise Marie Siino

Someone I work with gave me this book, which is the story or Ray Rising's kidnapping and long captivity by Colombian guerrillas. I took interest because I remember my family praying for Ray and his family over those years, and I was interested to hear the full story. I also read the blog of the daughter of another missionary in Columbia that was kidnapped, but her father was killed.

Sadly, I was disappointed by Guerrilla Hostage. It seemed to brush over too much. At times Siino attempted to get into the details of the captivity, but at times it seemed trite. Siino was an LA Times reporter, and it came across like a reporter who was used to writing brief, emotionless story took on a huge drama that was way bigger and more dramatic then she knew how to write. There were scattered stories of Ray's interactions with particular guerrillas, but the characters remained flat and never became familiar, so the interactions were mostly boring. Although we hear of Ray missing his family, the author focuses more on documenting the story vaguely then really grappling with Ray's emotions and questions. They are just stated and then left there.

Ray has a Spanish Bible through almost all of his captivity, and Siino will punctuate her stories with little proof-text revelations. Something will happen, Ray will be confused and disappointed, and then he will think of a certain verse and then Siino gives a couple of sentence long Sunday-school lesson on what it means. I struggled with this because the way the book is written, it makes it seem as though these are particular times that Ray struggled with these particular questions and was answered with this particular scripture. However, he was a captive for nearly three years and he had to leave his journals behind when he left the jungle. It seems more like Siino fitting scripture into her own story and putting these revelations into Ray's mouth rather then Ray actually processing these things himself. It seemed... misleading?

In any case, given that Ray rising was kidnapped and held in the jungle away from his family for years, this story has such potential to be powerful, but instead it felt devoid of real emotion. I wouldn't recommend it unless you already know about Ray and really want to read his story.