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.

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

I enjoyed this book more than anything else I've read in the last two or three years. The story spans 40 years in the life of an Englishman named Tony, who is also our narrator. Now living in retirement, he tells us much about himself. Then there is what others reveal about Tony, the shocking character he used to be when he was in his twenties. 

This book portrays first sexual experiences with great sensitivity and insight. It explores how our memories edit and even erase the complicated twists and turns of our lives. 

The Sense of an Ending has won many awards, including the Man Booker Prize in England.

Why You Cannot Understand English

Say this whenever you do not understand English: ‘Please repeat that, using different words.’ Say using different words so they will not repeat the same sentence you did not understand.

The six usual reasons you cannot understand English are:

(1) English is always changing. We use idiomatic expressions most of the time. Nobody knows them all, not even native speakers of English. 

(2) Confusion. Confusion is a hook to catch your attention. Advertisers use confusion to make you stop and look—and buy something. For this reason we see a steady stream of meaningless abbreviations and misspellings coming from merchants.

(3) Slang. Another reason we see incomprehensible messages is because people are trying to be cool, to use a slang word. If you don’t know what cool means, type ‘What does cool mean?’ into your search engine.

Money Saving Tip: Never waste your money taking a class in idioms or slang expressions. By the time you have memorized a list of words and phrases, nobody will be using them anymore. They will be out of date.

(4) Accents. If he has a Spanish accent and you are Korean, it will be difficult for you to understand his English. Accents may cause his vowels to sound different. You simply may not be able to understand one sentence he is saying. Even native speakers of English have a hard time understanding people with heavy accents. For this reason, students of English may want to work with accent reduction tutors.

(5) You Cannot See the Person. Experts in communication say that 70 percent of the message comes from seeing the other person, the visual part. We understand each other best when we can see each other’s facial expressions, body, and hand gestures.  Making eye contact is also important to good communication.

(6) The Other Person Does Not Want to Be Understood. Communication is a two-way street. If you cannot understand somebody, maybe he does not want to be understood. If someone is speaking in a vague or incomprehensible manner, just try to understand the basic or essential part.

 Copyright © 2013 Barbara A. English         All rights reserved.