Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford is a wonderful debut novel of star-crossed teenage romance during World War II. Growing up in Seattle, twelve-year-old Chinese-American Henry Lee and Japanese-American Keiko Okabe are the only Asian-American students at their school, subjected to the pervasive racism of the day. After Pearl Harbor, Keiko, her family, and other local Japanese-Americans are harassed, rounded up, and then interned in government concentration camps. Henry desperately tries to help Keiko and her family even as he struggles with his father's own anti-Japanese bigotry. At times the novel goes a bit Nicholas Sparks, but I found Jamie Ford's depiction of Chinese-American culture and the description of Seattle in the early 1940s at the outbreak of the war to be powerful and convincing. This is a lovely and moving novel and a stern corrective to those who romanticize the "good old days" of what this country was like for non-"whites."

Poetry -- my new ritual

Many years ago, I heard advice that its healthy to start your day with a glass of water, before eating or drinking anything else. This has long been an established ritual with me. I now have a new ritual, which began several months ago and also began by chance. I now start my morning with the reading of a poem (at least one but not more than three) from a collection of poetry I picked up by chance at a used book store. It is Garrison Keillor's Good Poems and it contains a wide range of poets and poetic sensibilities. After many years of ignoring poetry, I find myself increasingly drawn to poetry as an art form. I find its precision of language refreshing in a culture that too frequently uses words to obscure and confuse; I appreciate that poetry can be expressive without being inflammatory. I am finding poets whose works I plan to explore in the future. I would recommend finding a collection or reconnecting with an old favorite (Yeats? Sexton? Tennyson?) and getting started . . .