Do you know how difficult it is to run and cry at the same time? Good books do that do me. And this was a good book. 

Brilliant, actually.

That’s the best way to describe it. The words themselves, the characterization, the anticipation. It’s brilliant.

Water for Elephants: A Novelby Sara Gruen is the story of Jacob Jankowski at twenty-three and at ninety (or ninety-three). At twenty-three, he ran away and joined the circus after his parents were killed in an accident. He had been studying to be a vet and was all but final exams. In the circus, Jacob encounters brutality, unexpected kindness, and love. At ninety (or ninety-three), Jacob’s in a nursing home.

The story fits well with Resurrection with it’s themes of dignity, redemption, and anticipation. Twenty-three-year-old Jacob’s Resurrection scene spread the resurrection and transformation to others. The Jacob in the end of the book is different from the Jacob in the beginning, and his transformation allows him to step in and fight for others. He may not always succeed in the way he desires, but he hands resurrection to others.

It’s a story about dignity. Gruen frames the story so that you are hit by the fact that this old man, left to drool over Jello his last few years, is the twenty-three-year-old Jacob in the circus. These stories aren’t just stories. They’re stories of people we’ve forgotten about. It made me remember sitting at tea with my grandmother listening to her stories. I wish I’d written them down.

It’s about the dignity of the outcasts. In Depression-era America, especially on a circus, midgets, drunks, and the bottom-of-the-barrell working class were the outcasts. They weren’t "needed" in society. They were easily disposed of. Because of this, Jacob becomes a Christ-figure restoring the dignity of a midget and a drunk, fighting for the oppressed, both human and animal. 

Gruen’s strongest point, I think, is her ability to build anticipation. One scene captures it: Grady has (bad) news for Jacob. In waiting for Grady to spill it, Jacob notices the two drops of grease leaking from Grady’s hamburger. Brilliance in these little details. The reader (namely, me) wants to shake Grady by the shoulders and scream at him to tell already! 

It’s also about what Gruen doesn’t write, where she holds back. I think as writers, sometimes we think we have to fill in every detail. For example, in a fight scene, Gruen doesn’t give a blow-by-blow. Rather, she focuses on the confusion of the protag (Jacob), his swirling thoughts, a moment of pain here or there, his inability to stop hitting. Rather than observing the fight as you would a movie, you’re caught up in the hero. I love this.

One more thought about anticipation (an appropos theme regarding Resurrection, I think, considering the Lent season anticipating Jesus’ resurrection and the Christian life anticipating  our resurrection): I love how Gruen works back in the first scene. The first scene is a glimpse into the future. It’s why ninety (or ninety-three)-year-old Jacob hasn’t talked about his story. And when it fits back in, you feel it coming. Now it makes more sense. Now the tears flow.

I listened to this story on audio book (hence the running and crying). I’m an audio-learner (whatever the correct term is), so this method, listening to someone tell me a story, brings the story closer to my heart. 

This settled it. Richard Russo deserves all the accolades there are to give. 

I listened to Nobody’s Fool on my iPod, and I only allowed myself to listen when running (incentive), which doesn’t happen much in cold months.

Which means that Nobody’s Fool was part of my life for a long, long time.

Yesterday, I came to the end just as I was finishing my run (on a beautiful, sunny, 70-degree day, I might add). I cried. What am I going to do without Sully in my life?

Sully is a guy who hogs bad luck. He takes whatever work he can get (when he can get it), but an arthritic knee and the worker’s comp people determine to make that a difficult task. He lives in a small-town that loves him and hates him and loves to hate him and hates to love him.

Read the rest.

I loved this book. Two families, one your typical Caucasian (loud and opinionated), another immigrants from Iran, are thrown together when they both adopt Korean daughters. It’s a mismatch, and the Iranian grandmother, Maryam, can’t understand why her son, Sami, and his wife, Ziba, want to cultivate the relationship. They, on the other hand, can’t understand why she refuses to give up her outsider perspective. It’s a beautiful story, tied together by the daily, the mundane, even, which is what I love about Tyler (who could never be mundane).
The book is anything but maudlin, but the end touched me. There I am, walking the dog, sweaty because I had just been running (and was really walking the dog because I’ve told myself that my iPod audibles are reserved for running and walking, or else I’d never take the buds out of my ears), and just past the lawn crew at the elementary school by my house, I start crying. Not the heaving, hyperventilating bawl, but silent tears.
You get so caught up in Tyler’s characters that you don’t care what they’re doing so long as you can stay with them. Finishing the book is like saying goodbye as a friend moves away.
Another great aspect about this book is the multi-cultural element. You’ve got the Iranian emigrants and the combination of some of them more or less trying to fit in and others more or less preserving their culture. It’s the old question of fitting in: with whom are you going to choose to try to fit in? How are you going to choose your identity? [This question is of interest to me because my character, Itzel, deals with the same issue, so I especially paid attention to how Tyler revealed this.] You’ve got the different parental responses to adopting from another culture: the Caucasians trying to keep their daughter aware of her Korean roots and the Iranians not worrying about it: letting their daughter wear jeans to the party, for instance, instead of a kimono. I loved the Iranian perspective on North Americans. How does Tyler do that? How does she convince you that she’s actually Iranian? Brilliant.