Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

I've just finished this novel and I feel lukewarmly about it.

In 1942, Henry is a scholarship student at an all-white school in Seattle, the only student of Chinese descent; the only other non-white student, also on scholarship, is Keiko Okabe, of Japanese descent.  To help offset the cost of their tuition, they both help serve lunch in the cafeteria every day.  Henry's only other friend is a black street musician named Sheldon.  Through Sheldon, they become acquainted with Seattle's jazz scene.

More than 40 years later, Henry has taken early retirement from Boeing to nurse his dying wife; with a lot of time on his hands, he walks past the long-shuttered Japantown landmark, the Panama Hotel, and learns that Japanese "evacuees" left family treasures in the basement when they left Seattle for internment camps and and the new owner of the Panama Hotel would like to reunite these items with the families of their original owners.

It's a very popular book club book which was why I was eager to read it.  It's also a first novel, and I think it shows.  There are some errors in continuity which surprise me; I find myself wondering why an editor didn't catch and correct those errors.  Those errors don't really ruin the book.  They're distracting, and I find myself feeling confused as a reader.  I stop, and reread the paragraph, and the proceeding paragraph, and this happened several times during the book.  I feel that there should be some kind of rule about the revealing of information; it needs to be linear, and told "in order."

I was bothered by some other things, too.  One was that one of the characters called his Dad "Pops."  I didn't know anyone called their father "Pops" except in Charlie Chan movies.

But, sometimes, the very things that are not very literary or very elegant, seem to appeal to other readers, perhaps because they have grown up on the kinds of cliches we find in films.

The story's structure, moving back and forth across forty years, is the kind of structure I find I enjoy.  I know some readers find that challenging.  The story consists of memories, told in the present tense, of 1942, and the "present day," which in this case is 1985.  In 1942, Japanese-Americans were "evacuated" from their homes on the West Coast and interned in camps inland. The characters in this novel was interned in Montana, I believe.

I think the element that makes this story so popular with readers is that of young love.  I think that is a perennially popular subject and the story could be set in any historical period and appeal to readers.

My sense is that the author is a writer who has to work very hard at avoiding cliches in storytelling and style. Nevertheless, he is obviously a writer who knows how to tell a story that is very appealing to readers.

Inferno by Dan Brown

I always knew I would end up reading this book, although I had not read any of the other books he'd written, because I took a class on The Divine Comedy when I was in college.

My teacher was an expert on symbols in medieval art and the images and allusions that appear in Dante's poem.  He spent each class unpacking allusions. He illustrated his lectures with slides of art he'd photographed all over Italy.  Good times. No really, I loved that class.

So I'd probably like this book, I thought.

Ironically, at the point where I'd just completed the first seven chapters or so, I read a column in the Guardian or the Telegraph about the gratuitous stupidities in Brown's writing.  For instance, there is a line in the description of a young doctor, in one of the first chapters, that is redundant, clumsy, and cliched.  Of course, using cliched descriptions, hackneyed phrases, and stereotypes as a substitute for characterization seems to be a hallmark of the suspense writer.  This writer acknowledged that while Brown's style stinks, his style has actually improved greatly.  I bet that's true.

What I found was that I found the book engrossing and delightful despite Brown's frequent insertions of facts that had no place in the narrative, and chase scenes that read like travelogues.

I think I felt secretly pleased that Brown recited facts that some readers would never otherwise have any exposure to, or interest.  But, I don't think Brown unpacked very many images, and I imagine that treating Dante's work in greater depth would have hampered the narrative.

Some of the suspense was well done, I thought, and some of it seemed a little tricky to me.

I also found the ending a little contrived, and I didn't quite believe the twist.  I read the book in two days, which I certainly regard as a strong recommendation.  Really loved it.

This is another apocalyptic novel; in this case, the suspense revolves around a one-man bioterrorism plot.  I don't want to spoil the ending, but Brown raises serious issues that I suspect most readers will just ignore.

Who says art history doesn't pay?  They certainly haven't met Dan Brown.

This is quite funny, and a "spot on" parody of Brown's style:

http://bit.ly/1fvWZxy