The Well Thumbed Book: Replay by Ken Grimwood

by Karen Adler

There are very few books that my entire family has read and enjoyed. Replay by Ken Grimwood is one of them. I’m an omnivore when it comes to books—I love books of all genres. My dad favors books of the science fiction/thriller persuasion, while my mom enjoys literary yet suspenseful novels. As for my sister: Her tastes follow no discernible pattern, although she likes speculative and high-concept fiction. Replay fits into all of these categories.

The novel begins with the end. Jeff Winston, an unsuccessful forty-three-year-old journalist, dies. He wakes up and discovers it’s 1963, and he’s an eighteen-year-old college student at Emory University. And he knows every historical event that’s going to occur for the next twenty-five years—including who’ll win every World Series and presidential election. Shocked and unable to explain what has happened to him, he gathers his wits and places a bet on the Kentucky Derby, which he of course wins.

In this re-run of life, he makes it big in investing—but it all comes to nothing when he hits age forty-three and dies again. This time, he doesn’t live life for money. In each iteration of his life—“replays,” as he calls them—he struggles to understand what is happening to him. What happens when he tries to make his predicament public? What if he’s not the only one?

Ken Grimwood’s portrayal of Jeff Winston is so clever and believable that I wonder whether he hasn’t replayed his life at least once. If my whole family can agree to love this book, then yours will too.

The Well Thumbed Book: China Road by Rob Gifford

by Karen Adler

Route 66: an iconic highway that has been immortalized in countless songs, TV shows, books and movies. It’s a staple of our pop culture. Driving Route 66 is on many people’s bucket lists. But how many have heard of Route 312? Dating back to the Silk Road, Route 312 is China’s equivalent of Route 66, and spans 3,000 miles, from Shanghai to Turkmenistan. Rob Gifford, the former China correspondent for National Public Radio, is an expert on all things China. When his tenure as China correspondent ends, he decides to take one last trip: to travel China’s Route 312. China Road is the highly readable result.

Gifford chronicles China’s recent emergence as a rising power in the twenty-first century, but he does so in a personal and engaging way.

The structure of the book makes it intensely readable. Gifford recounts interesting anecdotes as he travels through sprawling metropolises and tiny towns, talking to people from all walks of life. In one hilarious episode, he ends up giving a sermon in a church for a small Christian community. The community simply assumed that, as a white man, Gifford was qualified to act as a priest. As he travels through different provinces of China, Gifford alludes to and then finally presents his thesis: that China is a colonizing country. As he meets with some Uighers, members of an oppressed Muslim minority, as well as several better-known Tibetans, he reveals a hidden side of China: the side of those Chinese who are frustrated with the discrimination and corruption. And on the same trip, he meets entrepreneurs who are happy with China’s rising economic status.

All in all, China Road is a delightful, insightful novel that captures the heart of China as well as Route 66 captures the heart of America.

If you can’t afford to drive the highway itself, reading the book is the next best thing.

The Well Thumbed Book: Q&A or Slumdog Millionaire

by Karen Adler

When friends and family exclaim that they love Slumdog Millionaire, my first question is, which version? Not many know that Slumdog Millionaire, the movie, was adapted from Slumdog Millionaire, the book.

Vikas Swarup originally entitled the novel Q&A, as the book, like the movie, centers around a poor man who by chance ends up on a popular game show, and, despite his lack of education, manages to get every question right. How does he do it? The book and the movie have different answers to this question. In the film version, young Jamal is determined to get on TV so the love of his life, Latika, will know where he is and be able to find him. The move illuminates the desperate conditions in the slums and follows the sometimes horrifying tribulations of a man trying to make it on his own, when everything is against him.

For anyone who’s already seen the movie, I have to warn you: the book takes a much more lighthearted tack on the story. In the book, the main character is named Ram Mohammed Thomas, and his beginnings are as odd as his name. Unlike the movie, the book isn’t structured chronologically. To me, this makes more sense; it’s unlikely that Jamal would have learned the answers to the game show questions in order. Instead, the book is organized around the questions of the game show, little vignettes that reveal how he knew the answer to an obscure question. His brother and mortal enemy of the book is instead his bumbling, happy-go-lucky best friend. (This change took me forever to figure out when I watched the movie; I was hopelessly confused as to why his friend seemed to think they were brothers. Although the book has a much more optimistic tone, it too shines a light on the back alleys of India, and is, I think, more authentic in many ways. No matter which version you prefer, it’s worth seeing both to get the full picture.

The Well Thumbed Book: Ink and Steel

by Karen Adler

Elizabeth Bear’s Ink and Steel is a kaleidoscope of a novel. Set in Elizabethan England, the novel centers around the Prometheus Club, a secret organization dedicated to Queen Elizabeth’s protection through magic and sorcery. The society includes prominent members of English royalty, as well as assorted playwrights of the time, whose plays include spells that strengthen the power of the monarchy. Christopher Marlowe is one of them, and when he dies in a mysterious way, the Prometheans recruit young Will Shakespeare in his stead, and instruct him in the art of spell-crafting. 

But Marlowe isn’t really dead. He’s been taken by the Queen of the Faeries, whose power is tied to Elizabeth’s. She binds Marlowe, once an agent of the mortal queen, to herself. Marlowe finds himself immersed in a dazzling yet dangerous world of magic, populated with characters from the great English myths and legends. Marlowe can now only reappear in the mortal realm for short spans of time before he feels the pull of the immortal one. On one such trip, he manages to confront an astonished Will Shakespeare and tell him all that has befallen him, including the fact that his attempted murderer was one of the Prometheans.

The Well Thumbed Book: Cleopatra's Heir

by Karen Adler

Cleopatra: Queen of Egypt, sex goddess, lover of Mark Antony, iconic martyr. Not many think of her as a mother of four. After she was overthrown, her son and heir, Caesarion, was supposedly killed, and her two younger children were spared, and fostered by the wife of Mark Antony.  But what if Caesarion escaped the attempt on his life? Gillian Bradshaw’s creative novel, Cleopatra’s Heir, starts with this little-known nugget and takes off running. 

Bradshaw has done her research:  Julius Caesar, Caesarion’s father, was thought to have had epilepsy, so she simply gives his son the same disability.  When Roman troops massacre Caesarion’s small party in the desert, Caesarion has an epileptic seizure, and the troops leave him for dead. Caesarion, not quite eighteen, wounded and on his own, comes upon an Egyptian named Ani, and his caravan. Caesarion has enough wits about him to not betray his identity, and Ani, in need of a secretary who can read Greek, offers him a job. Caesarion is not in a position to refuse, so he reluctantly accepts—even though he is disgusted with himself to be associating with such low tradesmen. In his mind, it’s the only way for him to return to Alexandria and rescue his siblings.

The Well Thumbed Book: The Welsh Girl

by Karen Adler

The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies is one of those books that is capable of sparking a great debate among its readers over the motivations and actions of its characters.  The novel is set in a small town in World War II-era Wales, not an area known for its love of the English.  The townsfolk are none too pleased that a POW camp has been established nearby. The story is fairly simple: Karsten, a German prisoner in the camp, is tormented by his decision to surrender to the British forces and decides to escape.  When a Welsh girl, Esther, discovers a German soldier who has escaped from the POW camp, she must decide what to do.  

The Well Thumbed Book: About the Author, a Novel by John Colapinto

by Karen Adler

For an avid book-lover like me, there’s something very appealing in books about books. Novels featuring an author, editor, reviewer, or even a reader as the hero play to my sense of self-importance. Authors can be more than puppeteers; they can be the actors, too.

John Colapinto’s About the Author gives positive reinforcement to my somewhat narcissistic notion that books with authors as the main characters make for the most interesting plotlines. The novel’s protagonist, Cal Cunningham, is one of the millions of writers who has never managed to see any of his works in print. He enjoys recounting anecdotes about his life and relationships to his straight-arrow housemate, Stewart Church. When Stewart is killed in a car accident, Cal discovers that Stewart is also a writer who’s been taking down all of Cal’s stories and has transformed them into a novel. For Cal, this discovery is a goldmine. He makes the manuscript his own, swiftly finds a publisher, and in a short space of time, goes from nobody to celebrity author, along the way becoming the blissfully happy husband of Stewart’s ex-girlfriend, Janet.

The Well Thumbed Book: The Eyre Affair

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde is impossible to describe.  It’s true—I’m not just saying that because it’s one of those books that the publisher calls “genre-defying” or because it has such a complex plot.  Fforde himself can’t adequately describe the novel, and he wrote it.  He received seventy-six rejections from literary agents before he finally found an agent willing to take on the manuscript without first reading a plot summary. That agent was hooked from the first chapter -- as I was.

Nevertheless, this is a book review, and you’re probably reading this column because you'd like to know what the recommended book is about.  So I shall do my best. 

The Eyre Affair is a sci-fi detective novel set in a world where great works of literature supply the stuff of pop culture. When people attend a midnight show to quote all the lines in unison, it’s not The Rocky Horror Picture Show – it’s Hamlet that packs them in.

The Well Thumbed Book: Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes

by Karen Adler

I am using a prepositional phrase in this sentence. This is the subsequent sentence, and without writing a third sentence, I can connect this sentence with a correlative conjunction (a.k.a.and) to an independent thought.

What if there were a language without clauses, without colors, without numbers, and without words to draw the distinction between dreams and reality? Daniel Everett’s fascinating book, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, is about such a language and more. Everett and his family were missionaries/linguists who lived with the Pirahã, an extremely isolated tribe of indigenous people in the heart of the Amazon.

The Well Thumbed Book: Interred With Their Bones

by Karen Adler

Just because this thriller includes wealthy patrons with sinister motives, lost secrets/mysteries of great writers and artists, and an attractive Harvard scholar as the protagonist, à la Robert Langdon, does not mean Interred with Their Bones is another Da Vinci Code.

Now that I’ve gotten the ubiquitous (and almost obligatory) comparison out of the way, I feel free to tell you how much I enjoyed Jennifer Lee Carrell’s debut thriller as its own unique work.

The Well Thumbed Book: Kindred by Octavia Butler

Publisher’s note:  This is the debut of our new book column, which will recommend one new book each week.  In most cases, the book will be “new” only in the sense that you may not have heard of it before.  Most of the books chosen for review here will be books published some years back:  Some that were popular for a while but have since become obscure; others that have always been undiscovered gems.  By all means,  give us your feedback, not just on the recommended book of the week but on any other similar books you would like to bring to light.


Amazon.com assured me that I would like the novel Kindred by Octavia Butler.  I like to rate the books I buy on Amazon, so the automated genies that run the site can recommend books they think I’ll like.  They sometimes recommend books that are way off the mark, but as soon as I looked at Kindred, I knew this time they had picked a winner.  It was a former bestseller--and justifiably so--but while it has won impressive reviews reviews on Amazon and has received critical acclaim from both popular and literary magazines, it has never achieved the kind of blockbuster status of, for example, The Time Traveler’s Wife.  But the book is every bit as good, maybe better.