The Lioness

Right off the bat, I'm  going to say that I would not recommend The Lioness by Chris Bohjalian to any of my reader friends. I've really enjoyed every Chris Bohjalian novel that I've read in the past and really suffered through this one that I read for my community book club. My guess is that we all selected this one based on having read other Bohjalian novels before.

The story is set in Tanzania in 1964. A famous actress invites 7 loved ones to join her and her new husband on their Serengeti safari honeymoon. They expect what everyone expects from a luxury safari - then and now- to be catered to in the wilds while being awed by the wildlife surrounding them. What happens is a kidnapping that we get to hear about from the perspective of each of the participants.

There is a famous "white" hunter, African guides and Russian mercenaries. The kidnapping goes terribly wrong and Bohjalian describes tragedy after tragedy after tragedy.

I'm still trying to figure out what  the point of the novel is. At one point I thought it was going to lead me to a thoughtful reflection upon race in Africa in the 1960s. He barely scratched the surface of that. There were political implications but not enough background information for me to feel as though I've learned a lot while reading the story.

The writing was good... but...

I'm hoping that our book club discussion will focus on what the author's purpose was as I continue to try to figure that out.

 

The Family Upstairs

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell is the thriller novel that my old New Jersey book club is discussing in May. They're taking things day by day and won't decide until a few days before their 20th of May meeting if they are going to meet in person for the first time in over a year or if they're going to have one more zoom meeting. On the off chance they  have a zoom meeting, I read the book. It's not a genre that I normally read, so even if I can't participate in the meeting, I'm glad I was pushed to read something out of my norm.

The novel starts with Libby learning that she's inherited a house in a posh neighborhood of London from her birth parents. We quickly learn that Libby was found in the house at the same time that 3 adults were found dead in the kitchen. What does this all mean?

The story is told from three perspectives: Libby's in the present, trying to learn what happened in the house; Henry, the son of the family in the house, telling the story from the past; and finally, Lucy tells her own story which at first seems totally unconnected to the other two. Because of the way it was laid out, it took me several chapters to really get into the groove of what was going on and who was who.

Once I did, though, I really enjoyed this book and read thru it rather quickly. It's the type of book where you keep making and revising predictions and assumptions.

Some of the characters I really liked. Others were just plain creepy. I don't want to share what book I made connections with while I was reading as that might give away some of this story. In fact, I'm not even going to label this post the way I might otherwise label it.

I'd recommend this one.

Dan Brown's Origin

I really had no idea what to expect when I started Origin by Dan Brown. The only Dan Brown book I'd read prior to this one was The Da Vinci Code. But everyone read The Da Vinci Code, right? This novel was recommended by a community book club member as a title that would be interesting to discuss. It was selected. I read the book. And then, due to family commitments, I missed the meeting! This is a meeting I wish I could have attended.

Dan Brown is a master of red herrings and very open-ended chapters. The chapters were quick and easy to read. And as you finished one, you wanted to read on to see where Brown was going. A discussion of the book would most likely include the writing style as well as the storyline.

In this Robert Langdon book, the Harvard professor and expert breaker of codes and symbols is drawn into a controversial news announcement regarding science versus religion. His former student, scientist, futurist Edmond Kirsch, is letting the world in on where we come from and where we're going. We being the human race. Edmond is murdered in the early part of the book. We read on to find out why Edmond was murdered and what was going to be in his announcement. What he had to say was supposed to damage or destroy the world's ancient religions.

Kirsch's invention, Winston, his artificial intelligence counterpart, leads Langdon and Ambra Vidal, fiance to the prince of Spain, on the quest to unleash Edmond's planned announcement as well as to figure out who killed their friend, Edmond. Some of the book is quite fantastical, but for me, it was interesting to imagine just how far artificial intelligence might go in my lifetime. This book certainly left me with a lot to think about.

Since I often forget what I've read about 5 minutes after I've read it, now that I'm mostly reading on my iPad, I've developed the habit of screen capturing pages that I want to go back to. Sometimes I'll write notes of the screen chapter so I'll remember why I thought that passage was important in the first place. It's exceptionally handy for books that I'm reading in advance of a book club discussion.

Here's what I thought was important in Origin.

Early in the book, I thought the science versus religion... or science versus anti-science was going to stream into global warming. Maybe because what he's written about scientific fact doesn't seem to jive with the dispute over global warming today.

"Science is the antithesis of faith," Kirsch continued. "Science, by definition, is the attempt to find physical proof for that which is unknown or not yet defined, and to reject superstition and misperception in favor of observable facts. When science offers an answer, that answer is universal. Humans do not go to war over it; they rally around it."

How much is truth in this book? I know the book was well-researched, but some of the modern technology is alarming.

Several years had passed since an American kid named Cody Wilson had designed "The Liberator" - the first 3-D-printed polymer gun - and the technology had improved exponentially. The new ceramic and polymer firearms did not have much power, but what they lacked in range, they more than made up for by being invisible to metal detectors.

And here is something I have thought myself quite often and have it expressed it to others very recently.

"Consider this!" Edmond declared. "It took early humans over a million years to progress from discovering fire to inventing the wheel. Then it took only a few thousand years to invent the printing press. Then it took only a couple hundred years to build a telescope. In the centuries that followed, in ever-shortening spans, we bounded from the steam engine, to gas-powered automobiles, to the Space Shuttle! And then, it took only two decades for us to start modifying our DNA!"

"We now measure scientific progress in months," Kirsch shouted, "advancing at a mind-boggling pace. It will not take long before today's fastest supercomputer will look like an abacus; today's most advanced surgical methods will seem barbaric; and today's energy sources will seem as quaint to us as using a candle to light a room!"

I realized how little I knew about Francisco Franco and how ruthless he was, all in the name of religion. Nor did I realize that Spain had a national political agreement to "forget" everything that had happened under Franco.  We must never forget!

Here's another line that jumped out at me. When, exactly, was this book written?

Fake news now carries as much weight as real news.

Edmond had a Tesla Model X specially designed specifically for him by Elon Musk. Ambra wants Langdon to watch a video - while he's driving. He embraces the self-drive mode the same way that I did when I first test drove a Tesla.

"Autopilot," she said.
The effect was quite unsettling, and Langdon could not help but leave his hands hovering over the wheel and his foot over the brake.
"Relax." Ambra reached over and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. "It's far safer than a human driver."
Reluctantly, Langdon lowered his hands to his lap.
"There you go." She smiled. "Now you can watch this Casa Mila video."

When my brother was 13, I think he snuck out of the house and bought himself a Radio Shack  Tandy personal computer. My brother is now a successful IT professional.

"Tandy TRS-80," Winston said. "Edmond's first machine. He bought it used and taught himself BASIC when he was about eight years old."

Here's another bit that I liked. And I'm not a huge fan of Brown's simplistic language. But this worked for me.

I call it 'Prayer for the Future.'" Edmond closed his eyes and spoke slowly, with startling assurance. "May our philosophies keep pace with our technologies. May our compassion keep pace with our powers. And may love, not fear, be the engine of change."

There were a few other lines that I highlighted, but as I am reviewing them, I realize a few of them are spoilers which I choose not to include here.

The Lightkeepers, NOT The Lighthouse Keepers

Each time I tell someone about the book that I just completed, my first instinct is to call it "The Lighthouse Keepers." The title of the debut novel by Abby Geni is, in fact, The Lightkeepers. It's not until about two-thirds into the book where we learn the distinction. Our main character, Miranda, is reading a book given to her by one of the scientists on the islands.

It occurred to me that the book had not used the term "lighthouse keepers." I was glad of this. To do so would have implied that the primary task of those people had been to maintain a building, a human structure, instead, the book had referred to them as the keepers of the light itself. There was something important in that. Something fundamental... ...Perhaps there were only two kinds of people in the world - the takers and the watchers - the plunderers and the protectors - the eggers and the lightkeepers.

Miranda is a nature photographer who has chosen to live on the Farallon Islands, about 30 miles off the coast of California, to take photos for a year. Having never heard of the Farallon Islands, I had to quickly look them up, at the start of the book, to see what they were all about. In a word, wild! The Pacific is wilder there than at the coast, and the wildlife is truly wild. It's wondrous as well and Miranda sees and photographs things she never imagined she'd photograph. She's living in a cabin with the scientist who have been on the island for varying lengths of time. The scientists are like a family without the warmth. The relationships are revealed as the book progresses.

It's my habit not to read reviews prior to starting a book so I my first impression was that this book was going to be about how the adult Miranda is still trying to come to terms with the death of her mother when Miranda was 14. Yes, that was a big part of the book. But the book is also a thriller.

Thriller isn't a genre I'm drawn to but I suppose with the addition of nature and photography, I ended up loving this book. I found it difficult to get into. Some evenings I had trouble reading for long and not because I was tired. It's also not surprising that last night after finishing the book, I had terrible dreams about birds attacking. Yes, there are scenes reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds in the novel. If you're frightened of birds attacking, this might not be the book for you.

The story is told through unsent letters that Miranda writes to her mother who has now been dead for decades. I love her description of why she did mail some of her letters to the Dead Letter Office of the post office. The letters give us a chance to learn more about Miranda and how badly scarred she has been by the death of her mother.

I loved all the references Miranda makes to photography in the novel. About how painters and people who draw can focus on an event and then afterwards create a visualization of the event while photographers have to be focused (pun intended) on capturing the event in the moment. She talks about the purpose of photography. At the end of the book Miranda writes this:

I have imagined my pictures to be immutable and honest, as sure as the ground beneath my feet. But now I see the truth and photography are fundamentally at odds. A snapshot is a two-dimensional representation, like a painting or a sketch, carefully prepared, framed, and cropped. It is the world represented by the mind of an artist, rather than the world as it actually is. The photographer can cherry-pick what will be included in a collection of images; they can be selected or omitted with purpose, then assembled and arranged so that, as a whole, they might suggest any story at all.

As a hobby photographer, I understand her conclusion very well. It also reminds me of things I've read about Facebook, about people portraying their lives as better than they actually are, by only sharing the wonderful photos that represent their lives. It's no wonder that Instagram now has a way to add photos in "Stories." We can take the photos we think add to our story, we crop them and edit them and end up with the story we wish to present to our audience. I'm not sure if this message will resonate as clearly with people who aren't avid (okay, obsessed) photographers but it spoke loudly to me. I don't think this is the reason why I loved the book.

Until the very end of the novel, we only learn about the other human characters, the scientists living on the islands, through Miranda's eyes. As such, they remain sort of mysterious to us. The culture of the islands is that the past is not discussed. Maybe because Miranda is different because she's not a scientist, she gets some of the characters to share bits of their past with them. That adds to the thriller/mystery.

I was not surprised by the ending of the novel. In fact, I was able to predict how it would end pretty early on. I had to read to figure out how the plot would move from point A to point B. Since I'm not a regular reader of thrillers, I can't say if this would diminish the enjoyment to someone who is a thriller reader.

As I prepare to facilitate the discussion in my community book club, I am all set to do more research on the Farallon Islands. I'll add a postscript to this post if I learn anything that I think it very important or very interesting. When a member recommended this book for the club, she said that it might not be a book that the other club members would enjoy. I'm really curious to see how many enjoyed the book versus how many didn't... or how many didn't finish reading it.

I gave this book 4-stars on goodreads.com. I loved the book but it might not be for everyone.