Welcome back to another year of sharing our favorite books. When I started this blog several years ago, I had to coerce others to contribute books for the blog. This time I got many contributions and I thank all of you for that. Note that Tim Dyke sent some of his favorites from his new home in Arizona. Thank you, Tim.
As far as my own reading goes, here are a couple of books written for young adults that may be of interest to adult readers (or your young adult children).
Oliver, Lauren. Before I Fall. [F Oliver]
Samantha Kingston is best friends with the most popular girl in school, dating the boy that everyone wants to date, and is expecting Cupid Day to be great, showing how popular she is by how many roses she receives. It isn't until that evening going home from a party when the car she's riding in goes off the road that she suspects that she has died. Until she wakes up the next morning in her own bed. Only it is not the next morning - it is Cupid Day all over again. In all, Sam is given 7 versions of the same day. What things will she try to change?
Shusterman, Neal. Bruiser. [F Shusterman]
Tennyson's sister, Bronte, has a new boyfriend that Tennyson can't stand. When he tries to sabotage her relationship, he gets to know the boy that the whole school refers to as Bruiser. When he inadvertantly sees Bruiser's back covered in injuries in various stages of healing, he starts to take a closer look and starts to see some very strange things happening. What is Bruiser's secret? Tennyson; his sister, Bronte; Bruiser's brother, Cody; and Bruiser all narrate the story from their own perspectives.
Some of you may remember Neal from his visit to Punahou last year and if you have enjoyed his other books, I don't think you will be disappointed in this one. Here is a book trailer that was done for the book.
Thanks to everyone who contributed for this entry of He mea hoihoi. Enjoy!
Weiner, Eric. The Geography of Bliss. [910.4 W43]
A self-proclaimed grump takes us on a trip to find the happiest country on Earth. Among the places he visits are India, Moldova, Iceland, and Qatar. Some of his findings will surprise you. Although he says he's a grump, his writing is anything but grumpy. It's actually funny and often uplifting, and makes for delightful armchair travel. And if you have actually been to some of these places, you'll appreciate "visiting" them again.
-David Del Rocco
Zadoff, Allen. Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have. [F Zadoff]
Andrew is just beginning his sophomore year in high school, and tips the scales at a little over 300 pounds. Despite this, and in order to impress a girl, he tells her that he's an athlete, although he has never played sports before. What follows is a hilarious ride through his experiences with soccer, football, popularity, and girls.
-David Del Rocco
Feiler, Bruce. The Council of Dads.
Growing up, it was explained to me that godparents were selected to look out for children in the event that something catastrophic happened to parents. After receiving a cancer diagnosis, Bruce Feiler puts a current spin on this tradition by selecting a Council of Dads to act as standby fathers for his young children. A touching tribute to friendship, values, and parenting-- along the lines of Randy Pausch.
-Malia Ogoshi
Nguyen, Pauline. Secrets of the Red Lantern: Stories and Vietnamese Recipes from the Heart.
Food is family, culture, and values digested. Found this book on the James Beard website- where I regularly troll for new cookbook recommendations. This book is an ode to one family's immigration and survival, a restaurant's unique success, and a child's journey into adult fulfillment. Add to that recipes and photos that fuel a burning desire to run out and buy ingredients. I'll definitely add this book to my Christmas list this year.
-Malia Ogoshi
Cayetano, Benjamin J. Ben: A Memoir, From Street Kid to Governor. [HC B31]
Benjamin Cayetano's autobiography provides a surprisingly engaging, personal, and compelling read from an intensely private, seemingly aloof public figure. Born into a broken home in working-class Kalihi, Cayetano documents the evolution of his intellect and social conscience amidst struggle and hardship. While the bittersweet, poignant reflections on childhood and family will speak to a broad audience, political junkies will delight in the latter sections that offer insider perspective on Hawaii politics and the dirty dealings and scandals that're the underbelly of government.
-Lara Cowell
Anderson, M.T. Feed. [F Anderson]
In M.T. Anderson's dystopic young adult novel, everyone has a feed, a digital implant that streams media 24/7 to users, rendering critical thinking and articulateness obsolete. Titus, the novel's protagonist, has spent his entire life dependent on the feed, but when he and his friends take a lunar trip for spring break, he meets a subversive, Violet, who makes him question the status quo for the first time. Wickedly satirical, Anderson extrapolates on current 21st century realities, including environmental degradation, digital dumbing-down, targeted marketing, and materialistic, self-indulgent teen lemmings who mindlessly adopt the latest fashion trends, no matter how fatuous (hey, check out my cool lesions!). He does a particularly masterful job skewering linguistic deterioration: adolescents utilize a superficial, minimalist, neo-California style sociolect, chock full of fillers, profanity, and hedges, and devoid of any lexical richness or edge, e.g. "Unit! She's meg-youch!", while government officials spout political doublespeak to obfuscate cruel truths and conceal lies. Naturally, the novel's lone radical stubbornly resists the societal language trend, protesting the debasing of English by speaking "entirely in weird words and irony, so no one can simplify anything he says" (137). Provocative and relentless.
--Lara Cowell
Courtenay, Bryce. The Power of One. [F Courtenay]
Buster, one of my freshman English Award winners and an astute, avid reader, gifted me with this novel, his "favorite book", before school let out for summer. Indeed, a terrific, affirming page-turner on every account. Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One is a classic bildungsroman, chronicling the life of Peekay (short for "Pisskopf", the derogatory moniker conferred by school bullies), a precocious white English intellectual growing up in Boer-dominated, apartheid South Africa. A classic "underdog defies odds" novel, the story celebrates Peekay's resistance against the forces that break the human spirit and his efforts to forge his identity as a pugilist, free-thinking intellectual, and activist for social justice.
-Lara Cowell
Suarez, Michael. Daemon.Freedom.
After devouring the Millennium Trilogy, a fellow-geek friend of mine recommended Daemon and Freedom. Not exactly post-apocalyptic, but dangerously close this book totally appealed to the video game lover in me and scared the daylights out of the humanitarian in me. I really am not lazy to give a brief synopsis, but this book is so plot and setting driven that I don't want to give anything away!
-Kori Lyons
Tower, Wells. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. [F Tower]
I'm a little "embarrassed" to admit why I liked this collection of stories so much ... they're all incredibly insane. The book is gifted its title from a story of Viking pillaging that the most neurotic New Yorker would love and maybe even relate to ...
-Kori Lyons
Vizzini, Ned. It's Kind of a Funny Story. [F Vizzini]
I saw the movie at Kahala this past weekend and was inspired by this "no depressing tale of depression." I walked out of the theater feeling like I had gained some insights, but felt like the characters were lacking and longing for a book that would fill in the color. Well, turns out the movie was based on a book! (What movie isn't these days?) While "technically" YA fiction (I love YA by the way,) this book is beautiful and deserves to be enjoyed by adults and adolescents alike. The author's gift to me was a reminder to "think less and do more" ...
-Kori Lyons
Yamashita, Karen. I Hotel.
This is a collection of loosely related stories all connected by the I Hotel. Yamashita's opening line is, "I'm Walter Cronkite, dig?" and so the book traces historical events and social upheaval. It's not for everyone, but this former Asian American studies undergrad really enjoyed being swept away by the powerful stories.
-Kori Lyons
From Tim Dyke:
I hope it is not presumptuous of me to add my reading recommendations to your blog even though I no longer work at Punahou. I just have always enjoyed our conversations about books, and thought I would throw in my two cents. I am in graduate school now and this semester have read The Odyssey, The Inferno, Antigone, the works of Sappho, Chekhov, Munro, Basho and others. I thought it might be overbearing and pretentious if I talked about all those books, and besides, Punahou teachers don't need me to tell them those are good works of literature. This list, then, is made up of books I have either read "for fun," or for school and found so interesting that I couldn't resist writing about them. Here goes, in no particular order:
Franzen, Johnathan. Freedom. [F Franzen]
This book has generated a lot of buzz. Time magazine put Franzen on the cover and called Freedom "the great American novel." Atlantic listed an article on its cover titled "The Case Against Jonathan Franzen" and called out the book for being boring, derivative, and pretentious. In graduate school I have noticed that the general consensus seems to be that Freedom is over-praised, and my professors have made the case that the general path of American fiction is finding its way back to sequential plot, uncomplicated narration, and investigation of the lives of middle class white people after years of post-modernism and multicultural narratives; we are moving, say, away from Don DeLillo and Toni Morrisson and back to Charles Dickens and Jonathan Franzen. Whatever. I think there is validity in all of that criticism, but basically I like to meet a book on its own terms. Freedom promises a story, and in my opinion it delivers a wonderful one. You meet a couple in Minnesota, and then you follow their lives to Washington, D.C. In the meantime, through flashbacks and side-trips, the reader learns about the Cerulean Warbler, mid-eighties punk rock, mountain top removal mining, and the sex lives of millennial college students. I could not put this book down. I imagine that ten years from now when all the hype has burned away, people will pick this up, and if they are the type of reader I am, they will be captivated by the plot and the characters and not think too much about all the stuff people heap on to Franzen right now. I'm a fan, what can I say?
-Tim Dyke
Chwast, Seymour. Dante's Divine Comedy: A Graphic Adaptation.
In my "poetry craft class" we each have to present the day's discussion questions for one particular book on the syllabus. I got The Inferno. I read it and did fine, but I was a bit intimidated, so I ordered this graphic novel that just came out. In the end this comic book wasn't really helpful in preparing me for serious study of Dante, but it's a fun read. It's tongue in cheek, and light, but it has a weight and a power to it. The drawing style is almost stick-figure-like. It has a "zine" feel. It's like Dante for sarcastic indie-rockers in 2010. Which I mean as a good thing.
-Tim Dyke
Child, Lee. Nothing To Lose.
If there is such a thing as "Chick Lit," then there is such a thing as its male equivalent, and if this weren't a family blog, I might refer to it as "The-first-name-of-the-actor-whose-last-name-is-Van-Dyke" lit. I guess I could call it Macho Fiction. Anyway, the Lee Child series featuring action hero Jack Reacher is nothing to take too seriously, but I enjoy the books and find them good for resting my brain. It's fun fiction but not insulting to the intelligence. This particular iteration of the series involves two literal towns, Hope and Despair and how our hero finds romance in one and violence in the other.
-Tim Dyke
Bourdain, Anthony. Medium Raw
Perhaps you know the author from his TV show, No Reservations, or from his appearances on Top Chef. Perhaps you read his classic food tell-all, Kitchen Confidential. This book is probably not as revelatory as that one, but it's a good read and gives you some sense of what goes on in the restaurant world in 2010. There is a great chapter about the guy who preps the fish for Le Bernadin in New York. It's a well-written book that will make you squeamish in some places and hungry in others.
-Tim Dyke
Davis, Lydia. The End Of The Story.
I love this book. I had never heard of it or its author until I was assigned it for my "Fiction Craft Class." I understand that in certain circles it is considered a groundbreaking classic. I can't recommend it enough, and then as soon as I say that, I offer my usual disclaimer about how books are personal and how what is great to me might not speak to you at all. This novel involves a writer, Lydia Davis, who is trying to write a novel about the great, lost love of her life. The book you are reading is the book about her trying to write the book she never ended up writing. Or something. Grad students would call this meta-fiction, but that term annoys the $%&# out of me, so I just call it a good book.
-Tim Dyke
Galeano, Eduardo. Century of The Wind.
I just read this one for class. It's the third book in a three part series. It stands on its own. It is basically a book that hovers somewhere between poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. It's written as a series of paragraphs, each with titles, not directly linking to the paragraph that comes before or after. Imagine a collage of paragraphs. The collage begins in 1900 and ends in 1984 and deals with the history of Latin America. Che Guivara, Charlie Chaplain, Fidel Castro, Elvis Presley, and Pancho Villa all make appearances. It's an unusual, experimental book perhaps appealing only to a certain kind of taste, but I really think it's an incredible book, and despite my inadequate description, it's not that hard to read.
-Tim Dyke
James, Henry. What Maisie Knew.
I had never heard of this either until it was assigned. James tells the story of a young girl at the turn of the 19th century who is the victim of a vicious divorce between her horrifying parents. The whole book is told in the third person, but the narrator sticks with Maisie's nine year old point of view. It's darkly funny, and it really seems relevant to our present world in the sense that I am not sure adults act any better today than they did in this novel.
-Tim Dyke
Forche, Carolyn. Blue Hour.
This is a book of poems, and not everyone likes to read poetry, but if you do, this might really strike you. It has stuck with me, and I am still wallowing in it. I wouldn't say it's hard to read, but the poems are elusive; the lines make sense, but I am not sure exactly what the writer is talking about in every instance. In the end, I think this is all intentional. I think the subject of the book is how hard it is to make sense of things in a world marked by violence and tragedy. Its subject might be uncertainty. Here is a sample: "Certainty's tent was pulled from its little stakes/ It was better not to speak any language/ There was a man cloaked in doves, there was chandelier music/ The city, translucent, shattered but did not disappear/ Between the no-longer and the still-to-come/ The child asked if the bones in the wall/ Belonged to the lights in the tunnel/ Yes, I said, and the stars nailed shut his heaven"
-Tim Dyke
King, Steven. 11/22/63. [F King]
Cotterill, Colin. The Coroner's Lunch
Ondaatje, Michael. Cat's Table. 2011. [F Ondaatje]
Hegi, Ursula. Children and Fire. 2011. [F Hegi] 
Boyle, T.C. Wild Child and Other Stories 2010. [F Boyle]
Stephenson, Neal. REAMDE.
Bacigalupi, Paolo. The Windup Girl.
Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84. 
