Mini Reviews: Gulp, The Egypt Game and The March

Gulp  
Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
by Mary Roach
★★★☆

I’m a fan of Roach’s writing. She manages to take any subject and make fascinating and hilarious. The alimentary canal is no exception. Roach begins with the mouth and follows the path of food all the way through the process. The results is a book that is both absorbing and disgusting. I definitely enjoyed the first half more than the second. It turns out my threshold for reading about poop is lower than I might have guessed. 

BOTTOM LINE: Interesting, gross, funny; I learned a lot. Definitely don’t listen to it at work or around your grandparents!

The Egypt Game

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder 
★★★☆

A young girl, April, moves into a new neighborhood after her actress mother decides to leave her with her grandmother. April finds a kindred spirit in her neighbor Melanie when they realize they are both fascinated by Egyptian culture. They create a game based on their interest and soon other kids join in the fun. All the while a local tragedy has everyone on edge.

I think I probably would have loved this one as a kid. Unfortunately I just read it for the first time. I still enjoyed it, but the fantastical elements of creating a world from your imagination wasn’t quite as powerful as an adult.

I loved that this story encourages kids to use their imaginations instead of relying only on TV and set games for entertainment. Embracing a different culture and learning about their traditions is a great lesson as well.

BOTTOM LINE: A good kids' chapter book with a few scary parts. A great focus on using your imagination.

The March

by E.L. Doctorow

★★

This is a fictional account of General Sherman’s march through the South during the Civil War. It covers the issues of freed slaves, captured Confederate soldiers and abandoned plantations.

The main problem I had with the book is that there’s no grounding center to the story. We get a glimpse at the lives of many people in the south, but we don’t really get to know any of them. We spend the most time with Pearl, a young African American girl named Pearl whose skin was so light that she passed for a white drummer boy. She’s an interesting character, but I never felt like we got to know her or any of the other characters very well.

BOTTOM LINE: I wanted more, more depth in the characters, more historical details, etc. The book felt like it barely skimmed the surface and I was never invested.

“The wretched war had destroyed not only their country but all the presumptions of human self-regard. What a scant foolish pretense was a family, a culture, a place of history, when it was all so easily defamed.”

Top 10 Contemporary Books Paired With a Classic

This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for the top 10 contemporary books that would be great paired with a required reading book. I picked one classic and one recent book for each pair. 

1) Howards End and On Beauty: These two are an obvious match. One is a book about the unlikely meeting of two very different families and the other is a modern re-telling of the same story. The two are just different enough to feel completely unique.

2) Little Women and March (by Geraldine Brooks): Four women grow up with their mother while their father is away fighting the Civil War. Little Women is famous for barely mentioning the patriarch of the clan, March tells his story.

3) Flowers for Algernon and Marcelo in the Real World: Two men with mental limitations try to find their way in the world. Both are characters that get under your skin and stay with you long after the final page.

4) King Lear and A Thousand Acres: Shakespeare and Iowa don’t seem like an obvious pairing, but the tragedy of a king and his daughters works well when retold as a Midwestern farmer and his troubled family.

5) Babbit and The Corrections: I think I’ve made it clear that I do NOT enjoy Franzen, but this pairing shows what works and what doesn’t. Both are books about unhappy Midwestern families, one does it well; the other just comes across as whiny.

6) Gone with the Wind and The March (E.L. Doctorow): A classic about the downfall of the South paired with a book about Sherman’s march through the South, burning it down as he goes. Bonus: Vanity Fair would be another great classic to pair with Gone with the Wind. The two share so much, including a kind and gentle heroine who is best friends with a selfish and ambitious woman.

7) A Moveable Feast and The Paris Wife or French Milk: Hemingway’s memoir about his time in Paris in the 1920s pairs nicely with the fictional version of his wife’s life during that same period. It would also work perfectly with French Milk, a twenty-something’s graphic novel about her trip to Paris.

8) The Sign of Four and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: Sherlock Holmes, the most famous detective of all-time and a 10-year-old with impressive deductive skills. Both have a hard time with normal social interaction, but they always solve the case.

9) The Iliad and The Odyssey and The Song of Achilles: Greek epic poetry can be daunting, but paired with this love story the characters might become more accessible.

10) The Secret Garden and The Forgotten Garden: Two novels about secret gardens, one meant for kids, the other with a gothic mystery twist.