The Cue Card

I must say “The Art of Racing in the Rain” took me by surprise. I’m a big animal and dog lover (we have a yellow Lab) but I typically don’t read novels about them. I’m especially leery of novels with animals talking or ones narrated from their point of view. It’s just that the books are often pretty bad — totally unbelievable, or silly, or filled with saccharine. I have a lot of respect for dogs and animals in general so I sort of steer clear of novels that make them seem fake or ridiculous, or in which the animals’ owners are irresponsible as well.

So when a friend dropped “The Art of Racing in the Rain” in my lap with a little dog in a flying costume on the front cover (which is a different cover than the one I pictured here) I sort of thought “no way.” However it was a friend and I couldn’t return the book without trying.

Sure enough it’s narrated by a dog, and yet this one didn’t drive me crazy like a lot of the others have. There’s so much more to it and the story and characters stood on their own, pulling me in along the way. Here’s what it’s about:

Enzo is a Lab, terrier mix who loves his human family that lives in Seattle; he thinks when he dies he’ll be reincarnated as a person. His owner Denny works at a fancy auto shop and is an up-and-coming race car driver, Eve, is his wife, and Zoe, their young daughter. Denny and Enzo love to watch old auto racing videos together, gleaning the wisdom these races can transfer to their lives. Yet when Eve becomes ill and Zoe’s taken in by her grandparents, Enzo must back Denny in the most challenging days of his life.

It’s a heart-jerking story and reaffirms the love a dog has for his family and vice-versa. I liked Denny and could see why Enzo thought so highly of him. By the end, I was taken in by the book hook, line, and sinker. I almost lost it on the last few pages, which rarely ever happens. “The Art of Racing in the Rain” is both humorous and touching. I was impressed by author Garth Stein’s depth and commitment to Enzo and his family, a true canine appreciator no doubt. My preconceived qualms about reading this turned out to be unfounded. It’s a human story as much as it is a dog’s story and one that I’m glad not to have missed.

Another book I finished recently was “Dear Life” by Alice Munro. It’s a collection of 14 short stories my book club chose to read and I was pleasantly surprised it offered quite a bit of discussion at our meeting. For a while I couldn’t get my head into the stories. Whether the characters didn’t really speak to me or my thoughts were focused elsewhere, I blame my own distracted reading rather than the clever writing of Alice Munro, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I had read and liked her previous collection of stories called “Too Much Happiness,” and I did appreciate many stories in this collection as well though I felt perhaps a bit detached. They’re all a bit dark or unsettling in various ways: in “Amundsen” a girl goes to teach at a tuberculosis sanitarium where she enters into a dismal relationship with the head doctor; in “Corrie” a woman believes she’s being blackmailed for an affair with a married man; in “Gravel” a girl feels guilty for the drowning of her sister; and in “In the Sight of the Lake” a woman with Alzheimer’s dreams about when she got lost on her way to the doctor’s.

Women are often getting the bad end of the stick in these stories. At the end, the collection includes four stories that are “autobiographical in feeling,” Munro says. I’m not sure they’re too revealing but they give a slice of life or impressions of what Munro’s upbringing was like in rural Ontario, where her father was a fox farmer and her mother, a school teacher, before she developed Parkinson’s disease.

I plan to read more of Alice Munro’s short story collections in the future. Eventually I’ll work my way backward through her works from most recent to the past and will get to “The View From Castle Rock” (2006) and “Runaway” (2004) in due time. Hopefully I’ll learn some more from reading from the short story master.

What about you — have you read either “Dear Life” or “The Art of Racing in the Rain”? And if so, what did you think of them?

I just finished Suzanne Collins’s young adult, post-apocalyptic novel “Catching Fire,” the second in the trilogy of “The Hunger Games,” and now I’m officially ready for the movie’s release on Nov. 22. Maybe I should do calisthenics to limber up for it or at least to battle the box office lines. You might recall the first movie raked in $152.5 million on its opening weekend in 2012 (I saw it then), and the second movie should surely smoke at the box office as well.

But what about the second novel? I must admit I thought “Catching Fire” matched up equally well to “The Hunger Games.” Of course there’s a lot of lead-up to what eventually takes place in the novel. You have to wait patiently at points to get to the action, but it all comes down in due time. And of course, at the book’s beginning, the author goes to lengths to remind readers of where things left off at the end of the first one. So there’s a bit of positioning with Book 2 but still it’s a compelling read.

You might recall Peeta and Katniss were co-winners of the very griesly 74th Hunger Games; you would have thought this would have given them a break in “Catching Fire,” but unfortunately not. While on the Hunger Games victory tour, they soon learn they’re targets of President Snow’s Capitol that views their victory as defiant and a symbol of rebellion across the twelve districts.

Snow is determined to make them pay, so he changes the rules announcing that the winners of the past Hunger Games have to face off against each other at the next Games, which is a terrible blow to Katniss and Peeta.

Without giving anything away, the final 100 pages of the book finds Katniss and Peeta back in the arena struggling to be the last ones standing. They have allies and enemies and each has pledged to save the other’s life, but odds are both of them can’t survive this time. So what on Earth is going to happen? You’ll have to check it out yourself if you’re one of the few alive who haven’t already.

Compared to the first book, Book 2 plays out more behind the scenes and involves underlying resistance against the autocratic Capitol’s control, whereas Book 1 was more focused on surviving the Hunger Games competition, which plays out longer and more brutally than in Book 2. Yet “Catching Fire” is just about as suspenseful and it ends with quite a humdinger. It’ll be interesting to see if the movie does it justice; the cast looks to be fantastic and I plan to see it opening weekend. When all is said and done, I’m sure there’ll be a dark shadow cast over Panem, which you won’t want to miss.

Jennifer Haigh’s 2011 novel “Faith” turned out to be a good pick for our book club this month as it concerns various issues that made for an interesting discussion: notably those having to do with religion, morality, loyalty, family and the secrecy and silence that often dwell within. It’s about an Irish-American family and what happens when a sibling is accused of a horrendous crime.

The story’s narrator, Sheila McGann, is trying to get to the truth surrounding accusations against her brother (Art), a Catholic priest, who’s been charged with molesting a child. In doing so, she uncovers the history of her family and the roles it played in her brother’s ultimate undoing.

The story takes place outside Boston in 2002 at the height of the priest-pedophile scandals that were rocking the country then. It’s not a topic I ever thought I’d seek to read a novel about, but it’s not a story so wrapped up in Catholicism or the priesthood that those with different or more secular views wouldn’t enjoy it. It happens to be about an Irish-Catholic family but also could be true for so many other kinds of families who keep quiet about unseemly or unredeemable things among themselves.

The story flows along speedily and is suspenseful. You wonder what the sister will find out about her brother, Art, and whether he is guilty, and if not, why someone would make such an accusation. Sheila, the narrator, seems convinced Art’s not guilty and sets out to redeem him until she finds out something about his past that casts some doubt in her mind. Her other brother, Mike, thinks Art is guilty and needs evidence to prove otherwise. He can’t take Art’s innocence on “faith” but goes to dubious lengths to get to the truth. The parents, too, are an interesting mix (the mother a diehard Catholic, the stepfather a non-believer) that lend complexity to the plot — not to mention Art’s accuser who seems to have a lot of issues herself.

I hadn’t read author Jennifer Haigh before, but found her a compelling and natural storyteller. It surprised me taking to such a book about the priesthood scandal. But it’s a story with characters who aren’t just black and white, or good and bad, but are morally more nuanced facing a very difficult situation. The narrator is self-effacing, and it’s interesting how she comes to grips with uncovering what she finds out. I think the narrator’s voice makes it quite a worthwhile journey into discovery.

I’d read Haigh again and have heard her latest book, a short-story collection called “News From Heaven,” is good as well. Let me know if you have read “Faith” and what you thought of it, or other books from this author.

The novel “Serena” received such critical acclaim when it came out in 2008 that I had always wanted to read it. Authors such as Lee Smith called it a “flat-out masterpiece – mythic, terrifying and beautiful.” Anna Quindlen said that it’s “a new classic in the category of love gone terribly wrong.” And Pat Conroy wrote that “Serena” catapults Ron Rash “to the front ranks of the best American novelists.”

Those are some pretty strong statements, which caught my attention, including the fact that it’s being made into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper among others. (The movie’s U.S. release date remains to be determined apparently, but if you’re overseas in Russia it looks to be coming out in time for Halloween — or so says IMDB.com.)

So I finally pounced on the novel “Serena,” but it’s not really meant as a fast read. I had to absorb its Appalachian story and atmosphere slowly like fine wine. It’s set in 1929 at the dawn of the Great Depression, about newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton who are determined to make a timber empire in the North Carolina mountains and wilderness. Their greed and lust for power will lead them to stop at nothing to get their way, including killing or vanquishing all those who fall out of their favor, and standing in the way of governmental plans for a national park. Together they make a formidable duo, inseparable in word and deed, resolute in their intense marriage and plans for an empire.

But the pair starts to unravel when Serena learns she will never be able to bear a child and begins to suspect that George is trying to protect an illegitimate child he fathered before he met her. The ending is a reckoning that’s both hard to believe and not hard to believe — with such nefarious characters. Still, you can’t turn away.

Ron Rash’s writing is exquisitely vivid and visual in its depiction of the mountainous landscape, the timber camp, and the characters that inhabit it. Serena is an anti-hero you wouldn’t want to cross paths with. It’s amazing that Jennifer Lawrence will go from playing Katniss in “The Hunger Games” to the cruelness of Serena in this. But both become very powerful.

I can see why the novel garnered such acclaim. Rash’s writing reminded me a bit of Charles Frazier’s — (“Cold Mountain”) because of its Appalachian landscape — mixed perhaps with a dose of Cormac McCarthy’s because of its darkness and impending violence. I would read Rash again, perhaps I will pick up his more recent novel “The Cove.” He’s definitely an immense talent, an expert on all things Appalachia, who I’ll plan to keep tabs on in the future.

Whenever the movie “Serena” comes out, you’ll need to check the wooded landscape, because according to IMDB a portion of it was filmed in the Czech Republic; so much for Appalachia! Also look for its stars, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, to team up once again (for their third time), in “American Hustle” due out around Christmas.