#30: Fashion Babylon, Imogen Edwards-Jones

Yeeeeesssss! I have arrived at Book 30, just before the clock strikes the proverbial midnight. Thank god. I can't adequately express the relief I feel to have accomplished this goal for the first time in, like, five years. Five years! Seriously.

I found this book after reading a post on Jezebel.com about luxury brands. It was based on a New York Times story by Guy Trebay (link below), about how stores are discounting luxury goods by 70 percent because of the economy. Some of the Jezebel commentators were saying that when a label/store can sell a $2000 blazer for $300 and everyone still makes money, that shows you how these fashion goods are worth exhorbinant and arbitrary prices. (For the record, I would never pay anywhere near $2000 for an item of clothing.) Anyway, someone recommended Fashion Babylon as a good look at just how arbitrary it is.

Fashion Babylon uses true stories (according to the author) to flesh out the fictional tale of a fledging British fashion designer who wants to show at New York Fashion Week. For the most part, I liked the book. It was definitely a quick read -- I read it in a period of about 36 hours -- and at times, I felt like maybe the author had written it a little too quickly. The one thing that bugged me was that she relied on the same celebrity names (Kate Moss, Scarlett Johanssen) and movies (Munich) over and over again as throwaways, which tends to imply lazy writing. Also, as an American reader, I found the overwhelming usage of British slang frustrating, as there were lines here and there I just didn't understand (but which didn't contribute to the overall book in any meaningful way). Still, I learned lots of interesting things about fashion. Like how designers will blantantly copy vintage dresses (by another label) and no one seems to notice, or how a designer will go out and buy simple pieces, like a white shirt, from a regular store and then just replace the label with their own. Or how, after the initial development investment, perfume only costs about 50 cents a bottle to produce -- no matter the cost on the shelf. The main point, I thought, was how designers set their prices to establish a value for their brand; if you want to be a Dior, you set prices like Dior, and it has little to do with what your clothes are worth (which is basically nothing). Then you sell your loot to a store and if it's in the U.S., they mark it up by another 3 times what they paid, and that's how, all of a sudden, you have a $600 dress. All I can say is: Thank God I learned to sew.

Luxury link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/fashion/04SHOPPING.html?_r=2

#29: Sleeping Tiger, Rosamunde Pilcher

I really love this book, and all of Rosamunde Pilcher's for that matter, although I've never gotten around to The Shell Seekers, her most famous. There's not much to them -- they are generally about a lonely person who gets surprised by love in an unusual place, but they're sweet and hopeful novels.

I hadn't read Sleeping Tiger since 1997 (the first year I started keeping a list of the books I'd read for the year), but saw it sitting there on the shelf beckoning to me. The book is about Selina Bruce, a 20-year-old orphan who's about to marry the wrong man. She's been brought up as a proper young English lady by her grandmother, who's recently died, and she's always done what's expected of her. And the plain girl is about to marry her grandmother's junior lawyer, mostly because she feels she has no other options. Until one day, her fiance gives her a book called Fiesta at Cala Fuerte. The author's photo on the back looks exactly like a photo she once saw of her father, who supposedly died in the war right before Selina was born. So the former wallflower runs off to the Spanish island of San Antonio to find her father and, not unexpectedly, she blossoms. I guess what I most like about it is the idea that you can escape to find yourself...and a glorious setting in the Mediterranean doesn't hurt.

Yeah, the Med. I got all excited to find my own San Antonio, which according to the book is located in the Balearics. But alas, a little Googling tells me it's a made-up island; the closest I could find was the club-land town of San Antonio on Ibiza. Still, there are five real Balearic islands -- perhaps peace and love could be found on Formentera or the one I'd never heard of, Cabrera?

In reading it again, I realize how much I've changed since I first read it (which was not 1997, btw). For one, I see now that the romance between Selina and George Dyer happens way too quickly and without much reason (which is okay, I still love the book). I also found all the vocabulary words I'd highlighted way back when -- words like acquiescence and aversion -- and it's hard to believe that I didn't know what they meant. But, most funny, I also now know that some of the Spanish phrases used in the book are incorrect, like when the Spanish police officer tells her "No hablo Inglese" (umm, "inglés") or when George tells Selina that ella should be pronounced "elya" (as opposed to "a-ya").

Most interesting, at the end of the book, on the inside of the back cover, I found a name and address written in my own handwriting. Problem is, I have no idea who this girl is, where I might have met her, or why I wrote her address down. Hmm.

#28: Mademoiselle Boleyn, Robin Maxwell

I found this book to be, for the most part, poorly written, historically inaccurate, and boring –and if this wasn't Book 28 just two weeks from the beginning of the new year, I would have chucked it through the window somewhere in the middle. So I'm a little bit pissed at Mademoiselle Boleyn because I felt like I had to keep reading it, and I was terribly impatient to just be done with it.

When I started this book, I asked myself, Why do I keep reading these Tudor histories? I love the Tudors, am obsessed to be honest, but the same thing keeps happening over and over again – which it should, considering the events are historical record. But it makes for repititious reading; the historical details are scarce, especially when it comes to Henry's wives, so I find that even the tone and the scenarios tend to be the same from book to book. Over time, it gets to be boring...which is probably why I haven't read a book on the Tudors in, like, 9 months.

So at first, I got excited by Mademoiselle Boleyn – something different! The book focuses on Anne's upbringing in foreign courts, and ends where the other books generally start. But my enthusiasm dimmed when I realized why writers don't write about Anne's upbringing: We know little about it. Robin Maxwell essentially made this book up – she took a real person, put her in the correct location (Francois I's court), and then went hog wild on the details. And that really bugged me – I know that this is a novel, but still, I think history owes Anne Boleyn more than that. She was a real person and she deserves our respect – she certainly deserves more than the author's lewd imaginings where, for example, Anne catches her sister in an orgy.

But the book really lost my interest when Maxwell decided to make Anne Boleyn and Leonardo da Vinci the best of friends. It's not just unlikely; it's stupid. In the Readers Guide, Maxwell writes in her defense: "This is a perfect literary amalgam of a period that is chock-full of holes, an extrapolation of known facts, and a leap of imagination. I reasoned that the friendship could have happened, and there is no evidence against it." Sure, Francois' sister Marguerite never wrote in her diary, "Oh, mon dieu, I can hardly believe that Anne and Leonardo haven't struck up a friendship! Why ever not?" But generally speaking, you don't often find "evidence" against things that never happened. People don't tend to dwell on the thousands of things that could have been, but weren't.

In terms of historical accuracy, I'd have to give this book a big fail. While of course Anne is the protagonist, and thus is the focus of the book, I felt that Maxwell inaccurately enlarged Anne's importance at the French court. In truth, Anne was a minor personage until she caught Henry VIII's eye. I guess I don't see the point of making her the star of the French court when she wasn't; historical fiction is still supposed to have some basis in history. In order to increase the tension of the book, Maxwell has everything come together at the Field of Cloth of Gold, a two-plus-week extravaganza where Henry and Francois meet in friendship in 1520. Here, in the book, Anne meets her true love Henry Percy and Mary Boleyn catches Henry VIII's eye; about 20 pages later, the book ends with Anne's return to England, and she catches Henry VIII's eye on Dover Beach. While all of these events did indeed happen, none of them happened at these places or points in time. They've been bunched together to help the novel out. There's not that much of a historical record, but I don't see the point of distorting what there is. If you want to create the secret life of Anne Boleyn based on your wild imaginings, fine, but don't claim that your work is a researched piece of likely history (which is what the Readers Guide is all about). It seriously just bugged.

Anyway, I'm done venting. I've moved on to the next book, Sleeping Tiger by Rosamunde Pilcher. I've read it multiple times but not for several years; I've lately been thinking about going abroad for an extended period of time, so a book about escaping abroad seemed appropriate. :)

#27: The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin

Woo hoo, number 27 done and we're just barely into December. My 30 books are within sight. :)

So, I just finished The Westing Game. I never would have picked this up in a million years, but I'm in a book club and it's the December choice. It's a children's book and it reads like a children's book, and after running through the Twilight series, I have a serious hankering for adult fiction. The basic premise of The Westing Game is that 16 people have been selected to live in an apartment building called Sunset Towers, although they don't realize that they've specifically been brought together until they find out they're all the supposed heirs of eccentric millionaire Samuel W. Westing. The will pairs them up into 8 groups and whichever group figures out who murdered Westing wins the fortune. You're supposed to play along and figure it out for yourself, too. Personally, I couldn't be bothered (although I managed to keep up), but I can see how it would be fun if I was still 8-years-old. I loved Encyclopedia Brown, after all.

And that's that. I haven't totally decided on the last three books but I'm thinking Paolo Coelho's The Witch of Portobelllo, Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton, and perhaps Lolita.