Read: Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

I just finished reading Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes, a short history of the annexation and Americanization of Hawaii.  Vowell is a thorough researcher and a captivating writer.  The book serves as a wonderful introduction to Hawaiian history that I would recommend to others who are interested in the history of the Hawaiian islands.  Here are some of the bits that made me dog-ear the pages (gasp!)

"...the Ancient Polynesians were some of the most skilled and talented natural-born navigators the world has ever known.  Which is how the natives of Tahiti and the Marquesas settled the Hawaiian islands at least a millennium ago--eyeballing stars from their double-hulled canoes for 2,600 miles.  The missionary Hiram Bingham dismissed the Polynesians' sailing expertise, writing off the migration to Hawaii as dumb luck, supposing they arrived "without much knowledge of navigation" just as "trees from foreign countries repeatedly land on their shores."  The Polynesian Voyaging Society proved him wrong in 1976, when Hawaiians sailed a replica of an ancient voyaging canoe to Tahiti in thirty-three days without using navigational instruments."

"The word for Hawaii's commoner class--the people responsible for growing taro and other food--can be translated as "eyes of the land."  Meaning, they are the stewards, keeping watch in a reciprocal family arrangement.  The land takes care of them and they take care of the land."

"According to the journal of Captain George Vancouver of the Royal Navy, in 1794, Liholiho's father, Kamehameha, made "the most solemn cession possible of the Island of [Hawaii] to his Britannic Majesty."  Kamehameha and his chiefs, Vancouver wrote, "unanimously acknowledged themselves subject to the British crown."  For this the captain gave the king a Union Jack...Kamehameha I and Kamehameha II believed they ruled a British protectorate.  This is the reason that the Hawaiian flag features a Union Jack."

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Read: Little Bee

For a moment there, I was thinking of changing the title of these book posts to "Finished" rather than "Read" because I found the word "read" a little confusing.  I meant that I had finished reading the book, but I realized to some it could mean that I'm telling you to read the book.  Right as I began typing "Finished" into the subject line, I realized that "Read" is actually perfect.  I'm telling you about something that I read, and maybe you will in turn, be interested in reading it.  Problem solved.

"We don't want to tell you what happens in this book.  It is truly a special story and we don't want to spoil it," whispers the blurb on the back of Chris Cleave's Little Bee.  The cutesy marketing and the charming cover with its scrolling cursive title is disarming to a fault.

This is not an easy book to read.  It's incredibly challenging in terms of the subject.  A reviewer from The Washington Post writes that the book "deserves a warning label: "Do not judge this book by its cover.  Contents under pressure.""

I also think that the marketing does the book a huge disservice as well.  I think it's safe to divulge a few details about the book without "ruining" it.  This book is a not a mystery, although a few mysteries are unfolded and examined within the plot.

Two strangers share a horrific encounter on the beach two years prior to the novel's beginning.  Little Bee is a teenager running for her life from her village in Nigeria when she runs into Sarah O'Rourke, an editor of a British women's magazine on holiday with her husband.

After the horrific events on the beach, the two women are separated by circumstances but reunite two years later in London.

The novel's chapters alternate narrators, so you read the story from both Little Bee's and Sarah's point of view.  I feel like this is Cleave's major strength in story telling.  He has a wonderful grasp of the language, and creates strong and separate voices for both Little Bee and Sarah O'Rourke.  It's hard not to be moved by Little Bee's will and strength.

The book isn't perfect.  I had a few issues with character development as well as the book's ending, but I found it be moving and eye opening, especially on issues of refugees and immigration removal centers in the UK.

Some of my favorite bits:

"The detention officer, the one who was looking at the topless photo in the newspaper--he was a small man and his hair was pale, like the tinned mushroom soup they served us on Tuesdays.  His wrists were thin and white like electrical cables covered in plastic.  His uniform was bigger than he was.  The shoulders of the jacket rose up in two bumps, one on each side of his head, as if he had little animals hiding in there.  I thought of those creatures blinking in the light when he took off his jacket in the evening."

"As a girl I liked what all girls like: pink plastic bracelets and later silver ones; a few practice boyfriends and then, in no particular hurry, men.  England was made of dawn mists that rose to the horse's shoulder, of cakes cooled on wire trays for the cutting, of soft awakening."

"London was fun.  Men blew through like tall ships, some of them already wrecked."

"Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm, strong, and sharp with memory.  It tastes of longing.  It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from.  Also it vanishes--the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup.  It disappears, like plantations stretching up into the mist.  I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other.  How sad that must make you--like children who long for absent mothers."

"His suit, too--it was a good one; Kenzo, I think--and it fit him well, but there was something arresting about the way he wore it.  He held his arms a little away from his body--as if the suit was the pelt of some suaver animal, recently slain and imperfectly cured, so that the bloody rawness of it made his skin crawl."

"It was the sound of the surf pounding on the beach that woke me.  Crash, like the drawer of a cash register springing open and all the coins inside it smashing against the edge of their compartments.  The surf pounded and ebbed, the cash drawer opened and closed."

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Read: The Sisters Brothers

I finished up Patrick DeWitt's novel The Sisters Brothers while waiting for my family's arrival on island.  The book follows the murderous exploits of Eli and Charlie Sisters as they travel from Oregon City to San Francisco in the 1850s to hunt down their mark.

Some of my favorite bits include:

• "My very center was beginning to expand, as it always did before violence, a toppled pot of black ink covering the frame of my mind, its contents ceaseless, unaccountably limitless."
• "I could hear Charlie in the next room, washing himself in the bathtub.  He was saying nothing and would say nothing, I knew, but the sound the water made was like a voice, the way it hurried and splashed, chattering, then falling quiet but for the rare drip, as if in humble contemplation.  It seemed to me I could gauge from these sounds the sorrow or gladness of their creator..."

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A Walk in the Woods

I know that Bill Bryson's book A Walk in the Woods has been around for a long while and that I'm totally late to the game, but I had to tell you all how wonderful he is and how delightful the book is.

I'm sure you all have already read it, and are thinking to yourselves, "Geez, what took you so long, Paige?"

I'm not sure.

I know this book has been recommended to me for ages (I think Miko from middle school was probably the first person to tell me to read it), and the book has been sitting on my parents' bookshelves for years, but I finally snagged my very own copy at the used bookstore and promptly devoured it the moment I cracked it open and read the first page.

A Walk in the Woods is Bill Bryson's travelogue/memoir of his attempt to walk the 2,100 plus mile Appalachian Trail.  Bryson admits to not being very fit or able, but his walking companion, Stephen Katz, is even less so.  The two men proceed on their difficult journey learning much about themselves, the wilderness and the importance of packing Snickers.

Bryson's book is laugh out loud funny.  Just ask Bryan.  We would be reading quietly side by side, and then suddenly I would be cackling like a deranged hyena (when I can't stop from laughing I think of Eddy the Hyena from Disney's The Lion King, yup, the one with the lazy eye).  And even though Bryan wouldn't ask what was so funny, I would proceed to read him a passage or two.  Bryson's book is well worth sharing.  Even if you all have already read it.

I now have to find everything that Bryson has ever written.

Until then, I'm reading Patrick DeWhite's The Sisters Brothers.  I was hooked on the title alone.

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