The roots of a conflict as unreservedly gratuitous as Rwanda’s genocide lay not in the immediate past, but in the very foundations of history, which, for Rwanda, can begin to provide explanation for the identity separation thrust upon its people.  Exploring this past is the quest of Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Willed Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanada.

Gourevitch, who claims in his introduction that “this is a book about how people imagine themselves and one another—a book about how we imagine our world,” constructs his book through weaving  both the subjective and objective.  Found in the text alongside the bits of history from Rwanda’s past and present are the personal narratives of Rwandan survivors.  One featured story is the account of Paul Rusesabagina, manager of the Hôtel des Milles Collines who sheltered more than a thousand refugees at the hotel during the genocide; Rusesabagina’s story served as the basis for the 2004 film, Hotel Rwanda. Removed from—but not unaffected by—the Rwanda outside the gates of the hotel, Paul assumed the rest of his fellow men would choose his same course of action because it seemed a natural instinct: he said, “I thought so many people did as I did, because I know if they’d wanted, they could have done so.”

Unfortunately, for every courageous story similar to Paul’s, there are many more instances of just the opposite.  But Gourevitch goes further than simply presenting the stories of the genocide; he includes a post-genocide account of a Rwanda grasping to recover the broken pieces.  Simultaneously, the reader, too, struggles with what Gourevitch explains as “the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.”  If it is clear that genocide is wrong, how can it occur so easily, particularly in our modern era, and how can countries and individuals begin to seek justice for the atrocities perpetrated?

Whether the reader has full knowledge of the Rwandan genocide or not, Gourevitch’s journalistic efforts are fascinating; it is impossible to remain unaffected.  Offering a captivating picture of the human condition, Gourevitch makes his point well known but leaves the reader open to drawing various conclusions suited to each individual’s response.  One of the many overarching themes, however, is that the implications of genocide are more  far-reaching and widespread than society can, or perhaps would like to, perceive.

“Even at their best, Christmas stories [are] no more than wish-fulfillment dreams…And yet how [can] anyone propose to write an unsentimental Christmas story?” asks the narrator of Paul Auster’s “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story.” Introducing The Ecco Book of Christmas Stories, Auster’s short story recounts the tale of Auggie Wren, whose well-meaning intentions to return a lost wallet lead an elderly woman into mistaking Wren for her grandson come to visit her on Christmas.

Delightfully obscure and strange, Auggie’s story begs to be taken for truth, although his “wicked grin” at the end of its telling suggests otherwise. This first story mimics the larger idea presented in The Ecco Book: whether the stories are fiction or memoir, “as long as there’s one person to believe it, there’s no story that can’t be true.”

Enlivening the pages of the collection are characters who breathe both reality and ordinariness into a season that so often means only gifts and “plum pudding, mince pieces, mousses, [and] puddles of melted ice cream.” There’s Charlie, the elevator operator in New York City who “[has] fourteen dinners spread out on the table and floor of the locker room,” all conned out of the residents in his building; a young man in Johannesburg for whom “Christmas Eve [is] a drunken riot”; and the teenage girl who works at the Turkey Barn for the Christmas season, learning both about cleaning turkeys and her fellow workers, whose personalities are simultaneously peculiar and endearing.

Compiled and edited by Alberto Manguel, the collection contains short works by authors as vibrant and diverse as the stories themselves, such as Truman Capote, Graham Greene, Alice Munro, Vladimir Nabokov, Itoh Seikoh, Muriel Spark, and William Trevor. In the short span of a few pages, each author succeeds in imparting emotions far beyond the traditional “connotations that the mention of Christmas evokes.” Both fresh and compelling, the tales compiled in The Ecco Book of Christmas Stories fearlessly grapple with and succeed in addressing the contradictory nature of Christmas stories.

Revolutionary Road is the account of the Wheelers’ search to fulfill their detestable emptiness, which makes them just like “the Donaldsons…the Cramers too, and the whaddyacallits, the Wingates, and a million others.” Beautiful, charming April proposes that Paris holds all the answers to their dissatisfaction; Frank imagines that she is right. Both are honest and confused and naïve: it is difficult to imagine the world in which they envision themselves living as actually existing.

Neither realizes that their criticisms of post-war, suburban America often ignore the problems that lie inside themselves. Their marriage, sometimes plagued by doubts, infidelities, and nostalgia, struggles to maintain itself as the Wheelers attempt to define their individual selves.

The progression of the novel is natural and relatable: it does not crave high action or obvious conflict to push itself further. Instead, Revolutionary Road is the simple exploration of ordinary choices presented at ordinary moments and the seemingly small gestures that add up to the fulfillment of a single life.

Filled with subtle wit and ironic, yet never forced, complications, Revolutionary Road is an intimate portrayal of modern America. Within its pages are images of faded glamour, warped bits of psychoanalysis, contemplations on happiness and friendships, and both nostalgic and bitter memories of the past. Its ordinariness, evoking sad pity, hopefulness, anger, and oftentimes frustration, is striking and paradoxically complicated. It is, just as Frank describes another narrative, “a beautifully typical story of these times and this place” that never strives to be more than it presents, but its legacy will be long-felt after the last of the pages have been turned.

But Connie soon discovers that Granna’s old house, nearly hidden “under the tightly wound bramble branches and dense thorn bushes,” and her dissertation will become even more intertwined than she would perhaps like, bringing a modernism to Katherine Howe’s mystical novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, that makes it enjoyable for both the intellectual and the Halloween-crazed.

When a key from an old Bible found in the house sets Connie off on a search to discover an entirely original primary source—a book of shadows dating back to the Salem Witch Trials—odd coincidences have Connie believing that the book is more important than she originally thought.

Simultaneously woven into Connie’s story is the tale of Deliverance Dane, a woman wrongly accused of murder during the seventeenth-century hysteria that plagued Salem, Massachusetts. As the girls of Salem fall to fits, “contorted with biliousness, mouths opening and shutting like angry fish snapping at shreds of flesh in the water,” Deliverance’s plight grows grim.

Howe’s writing of Deliverance’s story feels authentic: the characters of colonial Salem speak sincerely and plainly.  Experiencing an altogether new view of the Salem panic, the reader is caught in the whirlwind of emotion and an ambiguity of moralities that overwhelmed the village during 1692.

The enigmatic book is somehow related to Deliverance, and Connie struggles to piece together the gaps of the woman’s life as everything in her own life seemingly falls apart.  Returning headaches, strange marks burned into the house’s door, her Harvard professor’s sudden fanatic obsession with her research, and  her boyfriend’s abrupt seizures that bear a  strikingly similarity to those of the Salem girls have Connie feeling the presence of something larger, something unknown, something clearly “diabolical.”

Readers will find themselves yearning to peer through the yellowing pages of Deliverance’s book, intensely curious about “monkshood, henbane, foxglove, moonwort,” and all of the other “obscure flowers” that spells require.  Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane is skillfully written with a high attention to detail, and will “magick” any skeptic into a true believer.

Most used book shops are organized by genres, which can range from the standard Mystery to the more unconventional, like Pirates or Spiritual Biographies. Once you pick a section that interests you, scan the shelves for titles that catch your eye. Searching used book shops without specific titles in mind is a great way to discover new reads and chance upon different authors.

Featured Finds

From the “Paperback Fiction” section is Jane Mendelsohn’s I Was Amelia Earhart, a lyrical exploration of the possibilities following the aviatrix’s 1937 crash in the Pacific Ocean. Mendelsohn’s piercing, imaginative, and elegant novel draws its power from the ethereal nature of flight, which Amelia, “who plays hide-and-seek with the clouds,” knows all too well.

Earhart’s Lockheed Electra frees the insecure starlet from her demanding husband, the obsessive media, and a choking mass of fans. But after a crash landing on a remote atoll in the Pacific forces Amelia and her drunken navigator, Fred Noonan, to abandon their journey around the world, Earhart becomes a prisoner to her own plane. Even as she and Noonan struggle to survive on the island under “the fruit-punch colors of the sun,” the “once magnificent Electra” consumes Earhart’s every thought.

Mendelsohn’s liberal play with actual fact makes it difficult to distinguish the historical truth from creative imaginings. The Amelia Earhart of this novel, who dubs herself “a practical escapist,” is stubborn and angry, but with a voice that is very real and incredibly insightful. “Each digression from dream to reality and back again, is a faithful expression of… [Earhart’s] character.” The pull of the prose is as strong as Earhart’s charisma, and will leave the reader floating and dreaming in his own “sudden shocks of blue” sky.

From the “Don’t Judge a Book by its Movie” section is H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, the true story of one West Texas town and its football dreams. Under the hot heat of the Odessa, Texas sun, the 1988 Permian Panthers don their practice jerseys for summer two-a-days with the hopes that come December they’ll be vying for a state championship title. A stunning piece of journalism that hits hard at every point, Friday Night Lights combines bits of West Texas history with the personal stories of the Permian players, chronicling “an America of factory towns and farm towns and steel towns… all trying to survive.”

Life in Odessa revolves around the Panthers and the Permian battle cry of “Mojo!” The meaning of Mojo is different for everyone; football is a pastime, an escape, a family, a religion, a way of life “in a land so vast, so relentless, that…you feel powerless and insignificant.”

For the Permian players, nothing else matters on
Friday night except the gridiron, where the “lights become an addiction.” But ripped away from the field, the boys are plagued with their own nightmares: Quarterback Mike Winchell struggles with the death of his father; Captain Ivory Christian can’t seem to shake his uncertainty; Running back Boobie Miles fights an uphill battle against racism and a knee injury. All the boys battle with thoughts about the end of the season, when their “emotional high” will come to an end.

For anyone who has ever stepped onto a field and found himself “dreaming of heroes,” Friday Night Lights will “[burn] with…intensity.”

Other Picks

Poetry: Cures Include Travel by Susan Rich
Entertainment: Who Wants to be Me? by Regis Philbin and Bill Zehme
Art: Norman Rockwell: 332 Magazine Covers edited by Christopher Finch
Fiction: Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee by Meera Syal

Ethan Frome

In case you’re overcome with pangs of nostalgia for New England winters and “the two feet of snow” that comes along with them, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome will quickly remind you of all the fun that happens beneath “a sky of iron.”

Though the novel is set in the grayish town of Starkfield, Wharton’s love story is anything but cold. Ethan, a young man trapped in an unfortunate marriage to the older and sickly Zeena, finds himself in a precarious situation when he falls in love with his wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver.

The tension between Frome and Mattie comes to an achingly high point when the two find themselves alone for a night after Zeena leaves town to see a doctor. Ethan struggles to control himself, “dying of thirst for her [Mattie] lips.”

Ethan Frome’s slim ninety-nine pages contain all of the surprise and irony so characteristic of Wharton’s other works, making this a love story sear despite the chill of its background.

Phantom of the Opera

For a love story that contains as much adventure as it does amour, try Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. With its vast array of tunnels and secret passages, the world of the Paris Opera is its own empire, ruled by the invisible hand of the Opera Ghost.

The Opera Ghost is actually Eric, a hideous man who makes his home in the opera’s foundation and who is treacherously in love with the beautiful singer Christine.

Christine unwittingly pledges her allegiance to the deformed Eric, who seeks to assure that the singer is kept apart from her true love, Viscount Raoul de Chagny.

The novel, pieced together like a detective story, captures the gripping terror of the love triangle between Eric, Christine, and Raoul. The supporting cast of characters includes the coarse and loyal Mme. Giry, the mysterious Persian, and the bumbling opera managers who are convinced that the dangerous antics of the Opera Ghost are actually inane pranks.

The Phantom of the Opera is a fast-paced thriller; the narrator himself calls it “the most extraordinary and fantastic tragedy that ever excited the Paris upper classes.”

Still Hungry?

If these two stories leave you anxious for some more summer lovin’, check out these titles:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Europeans by Henry James
Jane Eyre by Charlotte

So begins Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger, in which Balram, a self-taught entrepreneur, writes his story in a letter to the Premier of China before the Premier’s visit to India.

The Premier’s mission is to hear about the successes of India’s entrepreneurs for, as Balram drolly explains, “Though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, [India] does have entrepreneurs.” And who better to explain “the truth about Bangalore” than Balram, “one of its most successful (though probably least known) businessmen”?

Balram’s notions of “how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed” come directly from life experiences because, as he notes, “In terms of formal education, I may be somewhat lacking. I never finished school, to put it bluntly. Who cares!” Balram certainly does not.

The White Tiger comes to life in one seemingly breathless episode through Balram’s sincerely hilarious and brutally honest voice recalling how these very characteristics have propelled his ordinary self, on more than one occasion, into extraordinary circumstances.

Balram’s letter recounts  the entire story of his life, during the course of which he has been a chauffeur, an investigator of sorts, a philosopher, a servant, a murderer, a fugitive, and an entrepreneur, though not necessarily in that order.

In nearly every situation, Balram seems headed for near-disastrous collisions with corrupt laws, employers, government officials, and police, but his witty nature also comes conveniently equipped with determination, cleverness, and an excellent talent for blackmailing.

Though Balram oftentimes mocks these obstacles by using, as he says, “the phrase in English that I learned from my ex-employer the late Mr. Ashok’s ex-wife Pinky Madame…: What a…joke,” Adiga calls careful attention to the problems of corruption, racism, and ignorance that plague India and the rest of the world during this “glorious twenty-first century of man.”

Adiga’s commentary on these matters never slows the narrative for one moment. It is always subtle, hidden in a background “of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds in the middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies.” When Balram moves to Delhi, it is mixed in among the “buses and jeeps all along the road…bursting with passengers who packed the insides.”

Though it is summer reading only for seniors who have elected Faultlines, an English IV offering, The White Tiger, recipient of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, is raucously funny and deserves to be read by everyone.  Take Balram’s own advice: “Don’t waste your money on those American books.  They’re so yesterday.  I am tomorrow.”

Progressive yet eccentric Dr. Juvenal Urbino, unassuming and dedicated Florentino Ariza, and beautiful Fermina Daza collectively form the framework of Márquez’s story: three intricate characters caught in a complex web of love and circumstance.

Love in the Time of Cholera recounts Florentino Ariza’s patient wait for the love of his youth, Fermina Daza, as she passes the years married to the handsomely charming Dr. Urbino. The novel finds an unlikely hero in Ariza, a willowy, fragile man who possesses neither incredible wit nor charisma––just an ideological (and sometimes outrageous) sense of love that is capable of overshadowing all else.

Ariza remains “emotionally” loyal to Fermina Daza, though, in the course of his lifetime, he engages in 622 affairs with other women: widows, young girls, and even one escapee from a nearby asylum.

The near-endless accounts of Ariza’s trials and affairs, as well as Fermina Daza’s exploration of her marriage into the privileged class tend to slow the pace of the novel towards the middle, but the most significant portion of the novel’s literary merits stem not from the pace or the plot, but from Márquez’s curiously vivid and haunting descriptions of the setting.

As the plot winds its way in and out of time, the one constant is the unnamed Caribbean island that serves as the backdrop for the story. The lyrical quality of the description is almost sickeningly entrancing; the reader must take caution not to fall too deeply into the streets “full of paper garlands, music, flowers, and girls with colored parasols and muslin ruffles” lest he forget the actual narrative of the novel. Still, the effect is dazzling.

Through contrasting descriptions of the “city of the Viceroys” and “the old slave quarter,” where “everything [looks] wretched and desolate,” Márquez brings a rich history to his fictional Caribbean island city that feels real enough to be a true historical account. The reader becomes “an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia” as he experiences an inherent pull towards an island he has never known and that frankly, may only exist in the imagination of the author.

But the nostalgia works also as a literary tool, connecting the reader to the plight of Ariza, whose desire to return to the youthful days of his feverish and half-secret romance with Fermina Daza consumes almost every one of his thoughts.

Love in the Time of Cholera never moralizes; it only presents the reader with numerous situations that seem to represent the exception to every rule. Along the sensual, eccentric, quietly humorous journey, the reader will catch himself defining and redefining the traditional ideas of love, fidelity, and the human experience.