Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

I enjoyed listening to this book, which is about the way that an environmental anomaly makes a woman reconsider her life and the choices and options available to her. Dellarobia Turnbow, who lives on a farm in rural Tennessee with her husband and two children, wants something more than she has. At the point the story opens, she imagines this something more only in terms of a different man. But everything changes when she suddenly sees monarch butterflies on the family property. Now Dellarobia can see that what she wants might not just be a different husband, but a different life entirely--one where she can put her intelligence to use. At times I found Dellarobia to be an extremely frustrating character, but I did enjoy the path of self-discovery her character took. Barbara Kingsolver read the book herself, and she really brought the book's lyricism to life.

Un Lun Dun by China Miéville

This book was so good, it had me foisting it on people almost before I was done reading it myself. It's the story of two young girls who find themselves drawn to Un Lun Dun, a sort of mirrored version of London, where broken and un-used things often find themselves, and a world menaced by the Smog (a problem which London appears to have solved). In addition to the sheer pleasures of Miéville's inventiveness and imagination, the book manages simultaneously to send its heroine on a quest and mock the conventions of the quest genre. I might not give this to kids who haven't read Harry Potter--it's so good, they might not find Potter quite as satisfying when they get around to him!

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman

I was a little surprised when September 11 appeared in the midst of this book (although given the time line, there's absolutely no reason why I should have been). The story is marvelously plotted, and I enjoyed reading about the dot-com bubble. Perhaps the romantic ends of the book are a bit transparent, and the historical ends are obvious, but I enjoyed the plotting and the attention to social relationships. Still, I find it a little unsettling to read about September 11, perhaps because it's an historical event I remember.

Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature by Jeffrey Myers

This book contends that we ought to understand racial injustice and environmental degradation as coming out of similar Euroamerican attitudes toward the other. It marshals Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, Thoreau's nature writings, Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, Zitkala-Ša's Old Indian Legends, and Eddy L. Harris's Mississippi Solo to show both how racist attitudes can reinforce an inability to live with or understand nature and how antiracism and ecology can work hand in hand to move toward a more egalitarian society. I found the book reasonably convincing in its arguments (the environmental claims get a bit radical for my tastes at some points) and altogether an enjoyable and quick read.

METAtropolis edited by John Scalzi

This book is a collection of five stories set in a post-apocalyptic future where the city gains a whole new meaning--they offer modes of political collectivity, ways of innovation, and sustainable interactions with the environment. The stories range in location and tone (Scalzi's story in particular, "Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis," was really funny), but they work together really well (the five authors did the world building parts together). I read them instead of listening to them (they were initially written to be made into an audiobook first), but I really enjoyed this collection.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

This book has been receiving a ton of hype and attention: Jonathan Franzen's face graced the cover of Time magazine; Oprah selected the book for her book club; Jodi Picoult claims that the difference between the critical reception of her work and the critical reception of Freedom (both she and Franzen, she contends, deal with similar themes) is driven by the fact that he's a white male, so might be expected to produce Literature or The Great American Novel, whereas she's a woman who writes chicklit; pranksters stole the very glasses off Franzen's face at a reception in London; Freedom was snubbed when the National Book Awards finalist list came out; and the UK first printing had to be pulped and reprinted when the wrong draft of the book went to the printers!

After all this hype, Freedom delivers (at least) on its promise of telling a good story. While both the Berglunds struck me as overdone in their unfortunate antecedents (although part of that, I think, was that Patty narrated large chunks of her own story in a third-person memoir that both constitutes part of the text and drives a lot of the plot as an object), I found their story (with Richard Katz, Walter's college roommate)--set up in the book as the story of a typical, urban, yuppie family gone horribly wrong--was great to read. Franzen's prose works, his plot is engaging, the characters are mostly realistic (if reprehensible and hard to like at times), and the use of the memoir works surprisingly well in a formal sense. I wasn't quite sure how to read Walter's environmentalism. It reminded me a bit of Ian McEwan's most recent book, Solar, in that aspect--the environmentalism is an important plot engine, and the author takes the environmental positions of the characters seriously, but shows the characters' environmental attitudes leading them to take CRAZY and untenable actions. Surprisingly, for an American novel, there was much more concern about class (for example, in Joey's friendship with his roommate at UVa, Jonathan, the class power (or lack thereof) and class status of poor people being moved from their land in Appalachia to make the land available for mountain top removal, or in the class implications that Free Space's messages would have) than about race (although Walter does briefly engage in an interracial relationship with Lalitha, which is only commented upon by some ignorant folks in West Virginia, if I'm remembering correctly).

This novel dealt with 9/11 in mostly tangential ways. It was really most important to Joey, who was in his first year at UVa when it happened. Perhaps the local connection was what made this portrayal most acceptable to me: I have a lot of friends who were at UVa in the fall of 2001, and Joey's experience as far as school goes pretty neatly matches what they've told me, so it feels real. It also wasn't fetishized in the text. It happened, it changed some characters (particularly Joey, but it also gave some political tangles and consequences to Walter's work in Washington), and people moved on rather than dwelling (which is not to say that dwelling is bad, but rather that I've yet to see a book that dwells on 9/11 (except possibly Netherland) that hits the right emotional tone for me, and even in some books with passing references to it, I finish the book with my hackles up--for example, The Stars in the Bright Sky).

The references to UVa were meticulously correct insofar as place and experience goes (did Jonathan Franzen visit UVa to research? Undercover?), but they struck me at times as less than generous to unfair. Dressing up for football games is what makes us great (it's certainly not the football team, and definitely not after their disgusting performance last night)!

Is this book worth reading, thinking about, discussing? Without reservation, yes. Is it the next (or the) Great American Novel? If we ignore the fact that the Great American Novel is a construct, I'd still say probably not. It's one of the great novels of the year, but I think to pretend that it's somehow sui generis or unique or so far ahead of other novels that it's somehow in its own class is to do a disservice both to all the other great American fictions (and great novels generally) that are still being written and that have been written and to Freedom itself, which I think is strongest when you consider it among and in conversation with other novels (for example, there are a lot of explicit references to War and Peace running through the text).