Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller

I read this memoir in about four hours of uninterrupted time on two recent flights.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book, not just because I found the author engaging and interesting but also because he is a kindred spirit -- a Christian with some unorthodox leanings.  I would say Don is a liberal Christian because I am more political than the author, who tends to be more mystical and spiritual than I am.  Nonetheless, we agree on an awful lot, which made this a good, quick read for me.  I don't read many Christian authors who avoid cliche as studiously as Don Miller.  I liked his style and personality coming through the pages.  I wondered if he might be less liberal than he was letting on, whether he was dark-skinned or light-skinned, whether it had all gone as smoothly as it was told.  In the end I decided those labels and doubts didn't matter.  Don seems to me to be genuinely trying to represent Jesus in his own unique way.  I don't use the word unique lightly.  I think Don's stories are personal, true, unembellished, and his own.  I really came to see Jesus in a different light because of this book, and I can give no higher praise.

Feed by M.T. Anderson

This satirical young-adult novel caught my eye in the bookstore because it had been nominated for the National Book Award.  I wasn't aware at the time that the National Book Foundation had a category for YPL, or Young People's Literature, but I am glad I picked up the book anyway.  Feed takes the current commercialized Internet, facebook, and texting, and fast-forwards into a future where people have constant streams of information fed directly into their brains.  The feed has infiltrated so much into the culture that it is the dominant force in the people of the novel's lives, and its influence commercializes everything. The feed offers mostly advertising information to its users, including lingo and images, and the pieces of the feed that are included between chapters illuminate the extent to which even political speech is dumbed-down. In this future, space travel to the moon and Jupiter is also relatively easy, people can "feel" their credit being taken from them, and radiation lesions are commonplace. These facts are taken for granted, and no one seems to question things very much

The language in the novel at first is jarring, not just because it is "typical teen"-speak, but also because it has future slang in it.  After a while, though, the slang is easy to decipher, and doesn't become much of a barrier to enjoying the story, at least for this reader.  There is plenty of crude current-day language in the novel, too, which may stop some parents and does stop me from recommending it for young readers.  The novel tells a boy-meets-girl story, with the twist of a hacker invading "the feed" at a party in the first few chapters. The teens at the party who were affected by the hacker end up spending some time in the hospital to ensure their feeds are still working -- an episode that doesn't stop the main character, a teenage boy, for very long, but which has lasting consequences for Violet, or Vi, his main romantic interest.

The novel is written from the boy's perspective, which is shallow and self-absorbed, as most of us are.  The boy's perspective is an extension of the feed, in some ways, and Vi tries to teach him to resist it.  Vi's character fascinates the boy due to her "old-fashioned" vocabulary, common sense, and wit. She was home-schooled, and her father is a former professor whose vocabulary is even more old-fashioned. I related to the father, as an old fuddy-duddy who loves some old novels/literature and tries in some ways to resist the pull of technology on our lives. The boy sees the father as behind the times, and he is in many ways.  However, even the father cannot resist the feed completely, and he tells his own story toward the end, explaining why he felt he had to provide the feed to himself and his family.

The novel has a somewhat cliched plot buried in all its satirical commentary on consumerist culture.  It is definitely a YA novel, but the thoughts it provokes make it worth reading.  I enjoyed the author's take on where we are headed, and wondered what kind of nightmare the culture can produce if some of the novel's predictions become true.  I ached for the characters by the end.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The narrator of The Book Thief first encounters the title character in three awful moments when she witnesses a death. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator describes these moments in fragments, focusing on the color of the sky in each moment -- white, black, and red.  The reason he gives for describing these moments this way is that he needs a distraction from his job -- that is, carrying the souls away from human beings when they die.  The novel never describes where these souls may be going or how the narrator came into existence -- save that for a bigger book, say The Bible -- but the wry humor and astute wisdom in the voice of the narration, along with the heart-rending story itself and the numerous insightful descriptions of life, make this a book worth reading.  The setting is Nazi Germany and the title character is a lonely girl who learns to read and write, but please do not confuse this book in any way with the diary of Anne Frank or with typical young adult literature.  The novel avoids the fiction world's formulas and digs deeper into what it meant to be a child in Nazi Germany, even a non-Jewish child, than any fictional work I have read.  It also approaches the concentration camps obliquely and shields young readers in some ways from the worst horrors of that time, as fiction can and non-fiction cannot.  Instead of describing the mass murder in institutional terms, as a non-fiction work might, the novel treats it much more intimately.  The staggering number of souls lost in World War II and the Holocaust (or Shoah, the more appropriate term) is mentioned, but the primary aim of the novel is not to catalog the horrors but to put a human face on the suffering.  Liesel Meminger, the title character, experiences joy, learns to love, and experiences loss, all within the overwhelming presence of Nazi Germany. She learns to fight for herself and her friends, not just with fists but also with words, as well as acts of compassion.  She is a heroine who discovers who she is through language, but it is not an intellectual story -- her first book theft is closely tied to her brother's death, and her adoptive father helps her learn to read it in the middle of the night when she awakes from her nightmares about that death.  The most intense emotions of the story (at least for this reader) come from this father-daughter relationship, but there are many other relationships in the story that pack an emotional punch or reveal some surprising truths.  The narrator is somewhat detached from human emotion, but his observations are coming from the perspective of a reader who has read and re-read Liesel's story, interweaving it with his own.  He has insight into Liesel's story, he is not detached from it, and it is this glue that brings the story to a satisfying close, even in the midst of grief and death.  The novel is highly recommended for those with some understanding of Nazi Germany, although I probably wouldn't use it to introduce the subject to young readers.  A non-fiction work like Night or the diary of Anne Frank might be more appropriate for teens who may not grasp the reasons for the ominous overtones of the novel.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

I saw this movie halfway through reading the book. Which I suppose is appropriate, since the interlocking stories in the novel all get interrupted except the one in the middle. The novel is constructed to be a Russian doll that splits open to reveal another doll inside, recursively.  The stories are the dolls, and the author lets his audience in on his tricks through meta-comments in the stories.  The main character of one story finds a copy of the preceding story torn in half, for example, then says to his pen pal how frustrating it is to lose a story halfway through -- he compares it to an interrupted love affair.  The style of the novel is jarring -- just as the reader starts getting used to the 19th Century reconstructed journal's style in the first story, it stops mid-sentence.  (I also read this book on a Kindle, so it wasn't as easy to flip to the end or skip the boring parts.)  The language is frequently stilted, purposely so, and aims at high art. The stories also jump forward in time with each interruption, so the author takes us to two futuristic settings, two contemporary settings, and two in the past.  These stories have great plots with many twists and turns, and though I did get lost a little in the theological discussion of the 19th Century story, which also centers on the Pacific slave trade, I found that I wanted to know how all the stories would turn out in the end.  The stories in the novel are sadder and stranger than in the movie, as they almost always are.  I enjoyed them, even though I knew, or thought I did, how they would end.  Having seen the movie in that sense helped sustain me through the jolts described previously.  However, it was hard not to put the movie version back into the novel in my head once I had seen it, so in that sense the movie was a hindrance.  I would have loved the book more if I had read it all the way through first.