Book Review time!

We lost power today with all the wind, so I had lots of reading time , since it was too scary to go outside and too boring to look at a blank TV. I started, and finished, a detective novel Suz gave me to read called Oblivion. It's about a private eye who starts a case, but then halfway through the book has a brain leak or something because of a tumor, and has to spend the rest of the novel trying to figure out what case he was working on. It was pretty good, I'd recommend it, and the idea was neat.

In order to read that, I decided to give up on one of two other books that I've been reading for a couple months. Coincidentally, I've been reading two very thought provoking, but very sad (auto)biographies (unusual for me since I normally stick to fiction). One is called Wild Swans, and it's by the first modern Chinese woman to earn a doctorate from the UK. It's the story of her family, first of her grandmother getting her feet bound when she was two, sold off to be a concubine and then widowed, then married (as a proper wife) to a Manchurian doctor, who's family then disowns him and his son commits suicide because he wants to marry a former concubine for love, instead of thinking of his family's honor. It just sort of spirals down from there, as the family then has to deal with the communist revolution tearing everything apart. Right now I'm at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and it is really truly awful. I only knew a little about the communist revolution before reading this book (which is banned in China, by the way), but it is really shocking what went on.

Zookeeper's wife is about the owners of a zoo in Warsaw hiding Jews during WWII, although I think that's sort of a misleading title because 1) yes it was a zoo, but not for most of the book after all the animals got shipped away by the Germans and 2) the most interesting character is the actual zookeeper, who does all this cloak and dagger resistance stuff. The wife is merely the one who kept the journal that the biographer found, and the book is, I think, a disjointed collection of anecdotes and happenings, and it's hard for me to stick with it. The anecdotes will start and end in the middle of chapters, and I never know what's the "main idea" of a chapter or a paragraph because it's all over the place. Just when something starts to get interesting, the narration veers off to something totally different and I get lost. For example, she'll spend two chapters introducing a new person, and then nothing happens with that person again except that they move into the zoo and fit in very well with the family life. I don't know, I found it hard to read, despite my interest in the topic.

Wild Swans is really good and very well written. Zookeeper's Wife, not as much, so when the combination of the two really started getting to me, I realized I had to give up on one of them. So, Zookeeper's Wife is going back to the library. Maybe I'll reread Harry Potter next, but not the last one, that was pretty depressing, too.