THE LOTUS EATERS * AMERICAN DERVISH * HOW TO READ THE AIR

Our beautiful spring break in Puerto Vallarta was enhanced by two wonderful books.

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli - This is a love story, a Vietnam story, and a photographer's story about a young American woman who went to Vietnam during the war and made a life for herself as a photographer for Life Magazine. It's beautifully told and the characters and the land are very real and mostly appealing, and when they cannot be real or appealing, they are sympathetic. The love story is layered yet uncomplicated, and weaves through the story that is the war and the photography in the most seamless way.

American Dervish by Ayad Akhtar - What it's like to grow up Pakistani American and sort of Muslim. I loved this coming of age story about a kid who has to make sense of so many mixed messages from so many sources, that you wonder how he is going to make it in life. Will he buy into the craziness and contradictions, or will his innate skepticism save him? It sometimes reads like a movie, which is fine, as long as they make it into a good movie. It's sad and funny and maddening, just like life.

How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu - So happy this wasn't a vacation book. I started it the night we arrived home, and over 100 pages in, just flipped to the last chapter to see if anything ever happened that I needed to know about. The writing is somewhat inconsistent, way to wordy, way to conversationy, way to repetitious. It's two stories; one about a quiet guy whose marriage is breaking up, and the other about a trip that the guy's parents took before he was born. Although it's an African immigrant and second generation story, for me the layers didn't work and the parent part is all speculation. It's getting some press, but I couldn't get into it.