Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

  Jai, the 9-year-old resident of a slum on the outskirts of an Indian city like New Delhi is the most adorable detective I have ever come across. Jai lives in a one room house with his older sister and loving parents. His mother keeps house for a demanding "hi-fi madame" in the fancy apartments towering above their basti; his father is an optimistic construction worker.  His neighborhood is crowded with goats, chickens, bazaars, trash, a single toilet complex with a long, contentious queue, and neighbors too numerous to count. While Jai's parents work all day, Jai and his friends have the run of the place accompanied by all the joy of being an unchaperoned 9-year-old with limitless imaginations. When Jai's friend Bahadur fails to return to his mother and father, Drunken Laloo, Jai appoints himself chief detective. His main qualification is that he has watched nearly every episode of Police Patrol  on TV. His skills will be important because the local police remain s...

Alexandra is a hard-driving commodities trader who uses her transfer from London to Shanghai to search for (love and) the history of her mother. Alexandra was raised in Australia by her loving grandparents after her parents were killed in a car crash. Alex's grandparents survived World War II in China when no other country in the world would accept Jewish emigres fleeing Austria and Germany. Thus, Alexandra's mother is Chinese, having been "adopted" under mysterious circumstances while Alexandra's grandparents were surviving Japanese occupation of Shanghai. Yes, the plot is convoluted. The characters, unfortunately, are stereotypes. Because Alexandra is of Chinese descent, she, like her mother, are good at math. Alexandra's grandparents are saints, absent any bad habits or negative features, and bursting with nothing but love and encouragement. Alexandra finds a love life within days of landing in Shanghai with a man with a strong chest, a musky smell, and...

A boy immigrates from Vietnam with his war-scarred mother and schizophrenic grandmother. Together in Hartford, Connecticut, Mom works exhausting hours in a nail salon while her son becomes fully American. Mom never learns to read English, so this book acts as a letter from son to mother. It is a letter she will never be able to read. Growing up in Hartford's slums and working summers as a tobacco picker, Little Dog, as he is called, absorbs drugs and his burgeoning homosexuality. Little Dog's recounting of the stress of learning a new language, of renting on the wrong side of town, of being picked on for having yellow skin and a pink bicycle ring so true it is hard to imagine any part of this being fictional.  If you are a fan of poetry, Ocean Vuong, is a soaring, visionary, prize-winning poet whose language elevates a simple story of immigration and coming-of-age into a Homeric epic. If, like me, poetry is not exactly your thing, a 285-page saga, like Icarus flying...

Lara Prior Palmer was not just the first woman to win the cross-Mongolia horse race, she was also the youngest, capturing first place at the age of 18. It seems anyone can enter, and on a whim, without training, but a general knowledge of horses, Prior Palmer entered the race as a better post-high school adventure than entering college. Racers traverse 1,000 km of Mongolian steppe by riding one semi-wild pony after another. Chafing, blisters, sunburn, falls, diarrhea, drunk Mongolians, injuries, and exhaustion overtake more than half the competitors every year. And yet, as they say, she persisted, enduring all those calamities.  What emerges in this memoir is a woman who can communicate with horses in ways I did not know were possible, probably a compensation for her relative inability to interact with people. Prior Palmer's internal dialogue appears on paper with the wisdom of a woman double her age and craft of a writer with four times her experience. Her ability t...

In 1931, in the British colony of Malaya, an aging British physician asks Ren, his 11-year-old houseboy to fulfill his dying wish. Find his missing finger within 49 days of his death and bury it with the rest of his body. The doctor dies and Ren begins his search, only the finger, blackened with age and preserved in a glass vial in a rural Malayan hospital is desired by several people at once. The finger might or might not contain supernatural powers, not so far-fetched in 1931, in Asia, where superstitions seem as reliable as modern science for explaining random acts of life. Night tigers attack night wanderers without warning. Philanderers and adulterers, as if deserving of punishment, are struck down by mysterious illnesses. Fortune and misfortune fall upon native Malayans and British ex-pats whose lives intertwine in hospitals, rubber plantations, storefronts, dance halls, trains, and secret rendezvous spots. While the voices of characters don't feel distinct, the characters...

Pachinko is a Japanese gambling game that is part slot machine and part pinball. Fleets of small steel balls tumble past obstructions before dropping into collection buckets worth money or disappearing into worthless drains. Much of the game of Pachinko depends upon the interaction of the player with the loud, musical, highly chaotic descent of a group of balls launched (the player chooses the speed, but not much else) onto the playing surface. Pachinko is a lot like life. A Pachinko machine. An operator adjusts the pins that determine where the balls land. Min Jin Lee delicately and with great sensitivity envelops the lives of four generations of a Korean family. Their saga begins under the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 1900s. The second and third generations live most of their lives in Japan as second class citizens, roundly despised by most Japanese nationals. In Japan, the Korean family of the story copes with Japanese discrimination, depending upon the characte...

Look at Afghanistan's neighbors and you will begin to understand its historical importance.  Iran, to its immediate west captured Afghanistan when Persians ruled most of this part of the world, but they were not the first.  Coming from the west Alexander the Great Hellenized central Asia before the Persian Empire ever existed.  Afghanistan has also been conquered by Mongolia (Genghis Khan), China, Russia, Great Britain, the United States, and the Taliban. Which is why Steven Tanner's military history is an interesting lens with which to focus upon a country surrounded by towering, cave-riddled mountains, impassable deserts, and Siberian winters.  For all its rich detail, however, the overriding observation is one which most of us already know:  Afghans are tribal.  Their origins are in isolated mountain villages, their interactions with one another rare, and with the outside world rarer still.  They unify only to disperse invaders and then retrea...