Just got back from Phuket and it was totally amazing. I'll be writing little quips in the next few days. I had extreme highs and lows during my 4-5 days in the island paradise.
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Mr. Foreigner by Matthew Kneale -- B+
Well, not the masterpiece that I thought English Passengers was, but yet still a very entertaining book. If anyone has lived in Asia for any length of time, you'll see several hilarious parallels to your own life. This is the story of an young Englishman stuck in Japan teaching at a crappy English school and dealing with his confusing Japanese girlfriend and her frightening family. I read the entire book on a single bus trip, to give you an idea of what a quick and easy read this is.
Disobedience by Jane Hamilton -- B+
You can never accuse a Hamilton book of being "light reading," (I almost jumped off a bridge after reading A Map of the World), but this book is probably as close as she can get while still maintaining that dramatic focus on trauma within a family. A teenage boy inadvertently reads his mother's email (that fact is still hard for me to swallow), and discovers she's begun an affair with an immigrant violin maker. The book traces the boy's life as he traces his mother's affair through her emails to the lover and her best friend. The book is quite good, on the verge of being extra special, but never quite getting there. Lots of questions about family and how we feel about them (particularly a son's love for his mother), are touched on. The characters in the book are interesting, to say the least, including a younger sister obsessed with Civil War reenactments. Recommended.
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