Factory Girls by Leslie Chang

This book is a comprehensive look at the lives of factory girls in China. The book describes how two young women in particular jumped from farms into city life and from one job to another -- to another -- all on a quest for a better life.

Factory conditions are harsh but perhaps not any more so than life back home on the farm. Working for a living means that the girls can send money home to their cash-poor families, enabling them to buy refrigerators and furniture, for example.

The girls seem to have adjusted to the factory way of life, a capitalist system with few restraints or amenities. They work long hours with few days off a year for a wage that is low by U.S. standards but that really makes a difference in the Chinese economy. Little is said about later, when the girls get older. Their safety net and future security appears to be the family farm and traditional life back home.

I looked inside my sneakers and the label inside said they were made in China -- probably at the very factory described by Leslie Chang. This is a New York Times Notable Book.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Computers and books printed on paper. 3D printing and type fonts from the Middle Ages. Google's headquarters in California and a secret society underground in New York. A code to break, and a puzzle that many are racing to solve. This novel is refreshing, ingenious and downright fun.

Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After

The author brings Rebecca, Henry, and George together. The characters find love and keep friends despite this alienated world of ours and the presence of almost a fourth character: Cruel Fate.   

"If F. Scott Fitzgerald and Marguerite Dumas had had a son, he would be Simon Van Booy," writes reviewer Andre Dubus III.

This novel is a real page turner.

Rachel Carson

William Souder, the author of On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, has written a graceful biography of one of the most important women of the twentieth century. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, published in 1962, started the environmental movement. 

Carson wrote about how the overuse of pesticides threatened all life on earth. She was writing at a time when many atomic tests were taking place in the atmosphere and the public was already alert to the concept of contamination of the environment. 

These two threats, atomic radiation and pesticides, have never gone away. The situation at Fukushima in Japan is unresolved as of this writing. Radioactive water from the nuclear disaster is still poisoning the sea. Secondly, many believe that the mass die-offs of bees all around the world are a result of their poisoning by insecticides.

It may come as a surprise to some that Carson was already familiar with the problem of global warming and the rising level of the sea. Scientists had already noticed the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels, the greenhouse effect, and the consequent melting of the polar ice caps.

Souder's book came out for the 50th anniversary of Silent Spring. The climate change deniers still don't think there is anything to worry about. They believe the environmentalists are deluded left wingers. In other words, what should be matters of fact have become politicized. I have to wonder where humanity, at this slow rate of progress, will be 50 years from now.

Food Rules: An Eater's Manual by Michael Pollan

I guess we know by now that the typical Western diet causes obesity and many chronic diseases, all of which could be prevented if we ate more vegetables. Eat mostly plants, says Michael Pollan. From "cook" to "try not to eat alone," this book is full of good reminders, in plain language, of things we all need to hear more frequently.

The book is very easy to read and should not take more than two or three hours to finish. Putting it into practice will be the difficult part for most of us.

Food Rules, which was originally published in 2009, was a #1 New York Times bestseller.

Tinkers by Paul Harding

This book was a New York Times bestseller and it won the Pulitzer Prize. I think the reason it has been acclaimed so highly is that the main character is a dying man, and death is a popular subject these days.

Tinkers is the story of a father and son. Often I did not know which of these men was speaking and I had to watch for clues. Occasionally a grandfather, too, gets into the action. The writing is nonspecific and lyrical, like reading poetry.

At times the writing style begins to flow nicely and this happens in short patches in which a brief story-within-a-story is being told. The harsh climate of New England is described very well.

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

In the odd Fang family, the two children, Annie and Buster, are called "Child A" and "Child B" by their parents. The children are used in scenarios the parents dream up to create strangeness and bring chaos to people around them -- and they are in the habit of calling this "performance art." They actually receive art grants to think up how to disrupt people's lives, using their own children as props. I was not going to finish reading this book, but about half way through it turned into a sort of detective thriller, and I was hooked.

The important question the author explores is whether or not art is more important than children and families. Does art exist in a world of its own, with its own rules, and is art more important than anything else? 

This book made it to the New York Times bestsellers list.