A couple humorous reads mix in with the serious fare

I've made some progress on Resolution No. 10 by reading three books so far this year.

But I have to say that when I said I would try to read some lighter fare this year, it hasn't really worked out that well. I don't know if I just happen to pick up books that are filled with heavy issues or if that's just what most authors write about these days. It seems even when I don't pick out a book for myself - as was the case with the last novel I read - it still turns out to be a bummer.

I just finished reading "The Year of Fog," by Michelle Redmond. My mom randomly picked it up at the Gilroy library because it had a sticker on it that said "Silicon Valley Reads." I don't know if it is part of a book club offering, or if that sticker means the author is from the Bay Area, or perhaps if the sticker was just because the novel is set in San Francisco.

I kind of knew what I was getting into, though, when I read the book jacket about how the main character Abby spends a year looking for her fiance's missing daughter. A missing 6-year-old has to be a downer. The story is told from Abby's point of view as she continually goes back to the day on the beach when she looked away and her fiance's daughter disappeared. She is convinced the little girl is still alive, though as time passes others become more sure she has drowned in the rough waters off the Bay. The author mixes in a lot of facts about photography and memory - Abby is a photographer and she is obsessed with memory because she is trying to remember important details from the day that Emma disappeared. The details of all this memory and photography stuff might be enthralling to someone who knows less about it than the average person, but as I studied photography in college and worked in a psychology lab that did research on memory, all the details seemed confusing to the story. Sure, all the case studies Abby sites are real, but they don't really have anything to do with Abby's search except that they make the book twice as long as it needs to be. The characters don't seem real enough to make their despair matter.

The first book I read this year is one I got from the library as well, but for the life of me I cannot remember the name of the book or the author. It was by an Irish author, but no one well-know such as Roddy Doyle or Frank McCourt. In fact, the one thing I liked about the book was that it was set in Ireland, but that wasn't really the focus of the story. In a lot of books I've read by Irish authors, the country or city almost becomes a character in itself. This story was set outside of Dublin and the fact it was in Ireland was beside the point.

The story is about a widowed man who raises his young daughter alone. He and his wife are unhappy together, but he is saved from leaving her when she dies in a car accident. He doesn't miss her when she is gone - he's mostly just numb. The early part of the story, about him helping his daughter recover from the loss of her mother is juxtaposed against another great lose for the man - one that he seems unable to overcome. The book was well-written and the characters were mostly interesting, including the mother of his daughter's best friends from down the street who helps him grieve after both deaths with which he has to deal with. But I really disliked that in the last thirty pages of the book the author reveals something that changes the meaning of most of the book. It seemed to come out of nowhere, with little foreshadowing and there was not enough space in the last pages to make it all make sense. I don't mind a surprise ending in a thriller or mystery novel, but not in a dramatic book such as this.

In between these two novels, I read the latest from David Sedaris, "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk." The book is a departure from Sedaris' other work, which is usually essays about his adventures in life. I enjoy his pieces and love when one shows up in "The New Yorker" in between books. This latest endeavor however is fiction. Each story tells some cynical insight into humor nature through the point of view of animals. The stories are dark, some a little on the morbid side, but they work because in almost all of them I could think of at least one person that I could pin those characteristics on in real life. There is an owl who looks down upon is own family because he sees himself as so much better than them. There is a motherless bear who seeks out pity from all she meets. There is the Chipmunk from the title story who gives him to pressure from her family not to date someone different.

Now I am partway through a copy of "Bossypants," a book of essays by Tina Fey. So far, it's funny even though Fey has the same self-deprecating humor that she uses as Liz Lemon on "30 Rock." It's not really a biography, but Fey does share some bits about her life and how she ended up where she is. One of the funniest chapters so far is her recap of her honeymoon in which she and her husband took a cruise because he is afraid of flying - alone to have a fire break out on board the ship. I've always seen a lot of similarities between Liz Lemon and myself - and that might extend to Fey herself as she admits partway through the piece that she really doesn't like the cruise. The one time I went on a cruise, I felt the same way.