#23: The White Queen, Phillippa Gregory

The White Queen was great, and is perhaps my favorite Philippa Gregory book of the three I've now read. While I enjoyed The Other Boleyn Girl, I think it was titillating more than anything, like a Harlequin romance with real people. This one, though, seemed a little more grounded in events (and be warned, SPOILERS AHEAD).

The story focuses on Elizabeth Grey (née Woodville), who secretly married King Edward IV, even though she was a Lancastrian and he a Yorkist. Edward manages to bring a decent amount of peace to the realm, after keeping the Lancastrian king Henry VI away from the throne and fighting off the surrounding rebellions, but nothing lasts forever...and the book ends with (historically) two young princes locked up in the Tower of London, where they mysteriously vanish, their fate still unknown today. There's actually so much intrigue in this time period that I'm kind of surprised that this saga isn't nearly as popular as the Tudors. (Especially since these people are totally entwined with the Tudors - Elizabeth and Edward's daughter is Henry VIII's mother. This is the true beginning to that story.)

Which brings me to my only real criticism - I think Gregory ended The White Queen too early. Elizabeth's mother practices witchcraft and teaches her daughter some tricks - and at the end of the book, as Elizabeth and her children are taking sanctuary in Westminister Abbey, she and her eldest daughter put a curse on the person responsible for the (presumed) murder of her sons, that the murderer's son should die, and then his grandson, and his line end. The idea is that they'll watch and see what happens to the people around them, and by the curse, figure it out. King Richard III, a potential pepetrator, warns her about cursing people - that basically, once unleashed, you can't stop it, and you never know how it may come back to you (a sentiment echoed by her mother earlier on in the book).

Knowing how the history lesson ends, I was anticipating a bittersweet ending to this book - but The White Queen doesn't take it all the way there, and to its detriment, I think. Because in the book, Richard III's son dies and the implication, sort of, is that he is the murderer, though he has the least motive (which Gregory later says in the Author's Note). The likeliest historical perpetrators are the Tudors, the future Henry VII and his uncle Jasper, who have everything to gain by offing co-claimants. And I really thought that's where the book was going since Henry VII's line dies out within two generations (and both firstborn sons die before age 20) AND in the end, Elizabeth should regret cursing this man's progeny, since she's effectively just cursed her daughter, who ends up marrying him. She's desperate to regain the throne for her family, whom she sees as the rightful heirs, and she (fictionally) kills them off. It's satisfying and it sucks. (Though perhaps Gregory is saving it for the next book? The Author's Note says this is the first in a series about the Plantagenets...though I can't imagine Richard III and Henry VII duking it out can make an entire book.)

Anyway...my only other (minor) criticism is that Gregory doesn't label the kings (for example, Edward is just called Edward, not Edward IV), and it took me awhile to orient them historically. Which brings me to names - did the English only have like four names available to them? Everyone in this book is named Edward, Richard, Henry, or Elizabeth. Confusion!

#22: In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson

It took me forever to read this book. I started it in May, read about 70 pages, barely picked it up all summer, and then finished it right before Thanksgiving. So it might surprise you to know that I quite liked In a Sunburned Country. There's no plot to speak of - Bill Bryson comments on his various travels around Australia - but the book was lighthearted and funny.

Which came as a huge relief. I'd tried to read The Lost Continent a couple of years ago, but put it down about 100 pages in - the "humor" came in making fun of small-town America, with mean little observations masquerading as wit. Not cool, Bryson, not cool.

So In a Sunburned Country was a nice surprise. My goal was to read the travelogue before going to Australia, but alas, I read the bulk of it after returning. Which I actually think made the book more enjoyable - I barely went anywhere that Bryson went, but at the same time, I knew what he was talking about. Sadly, at this point, I can barely remember anything I learned from the book (it was chock full of tidbits) but I can say this: Australia rocks! Which has nothing to do with the book, but still...

#21: Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger

Eh, another book I didn't love. The Time Traveler's Wife is one of my top 5 favorite books ever, so I really wanted to fall in love with this one too. But it just didn't grab me. Niffenegger is a truly talented writer, and so full of original ideas, but I didn't feel like Her Fearful Symmetry came together convincingly. (And according to Entertainment Weekly, she received a $5 million advance for this book. $5 million, yowza!)

First off, I'm generally not into twin books. With the exception of Sweet Valley High, it seems like twins are always portrayed in literature as freaks...like in The 13th Tale, Flowers in the Attic, and even, if I remember correctly, The Shining. I'm not a twin so it's not a personal thing, but I dislike the use over and over again of twins as strange little beings with co-dependent love/hate relationships. (Clearly that last sentence doesn't apply to The Shining - but those little freaky kid ghosts that the boy sees are twins, right?)

With that off my chest...Her Fearful Symmetry is about two sets of twins, Elspeth and Edie, and Edie's daughters, Julia and Valentina. When Elspeth dies of cancer, she leaves her apartment - across from Highgate Cemetery in London - and a good wad of cash to the younger, American twins, with the stipulation that they live in the flat for a year before they can sell it. Their parents are also not allowed to enter the apartment. Julia and Valentina are both inseperable but also fighting for their own identities, which ends up creating a lot of conflict. Valentina, the meeker twin, ends up getting involved with Robert, who lives downstairs and was Elspeth's longtime companion. Which Elspeth doesn't like - she's come back as a ghost who's trapped in the apartment with the girls. And off it goes...

The thing is, while the story is interesting in its retelling, I felt as though the events in Her Fearful Symmetry happened at a distance, like we were held apart from it. You saw the characters but you didn’t know really them. And while I think it's a valid style choice, and I'm guessing one made to make the plot turns a surprise, I didn't connect with Julia or Valentina or any of the rest of them.

Maybe it was a style choice, but I felt that Niffenegger broke an essential style rule, that of "show, don't tell." I think we were often told about the characters' personality traits, instead of seeing them on display – and so it was not always believable. Elspeth is probably the best example: For 300 pages, she’s a friendly ghost figure who never expresses any sort of meanness. Then one day, Robert says she’s manipulative: “Elspeth isn’t nice. Even when she was alive she wasn’t very – she was witty and beautiful and fantastically original in – certain ways, but now that she’s dead she seems to have lost some essential quality – compassion, or empathy, some human thing – I don’t think you should trust her, Valentina.” (p.303) I read that passage and I was like, what? As it turns out, Elspeth is manipulative but I don’t think one sentence here and there can create a believable shift when the previous 300 pages have shown otherwise. The same thing happens with Valentina – she's the Mouse throughout the book and then all of a sudden she does something so ridiculously absurd and bold. I just don’t think her characterization backed it up.

At the end, I found Her Fearful Symmetry to be kinda vague. Like, what happened with Julia and Martin on that last night? There’s an implication, but… And who was Elspeth, really? Was she devious and she allowed the mist to disperse – or was she really not able to fix it? The text is unclear and I found that to be annoying. Again, it's a style choice, but I've never liked having to guess at the unanswered questions.

Still, Niffenegger is so good at evoking beauty in the midst of pain, which I think is the true strength of The Time Traveler's Wife. My favorite passage in this book, Her Fearful Symmetry, comes on page 50: “As each night passed he found it more difficult to evoke Marijke precisely. He panicked and pinned up dozens of photographs of her all over the flat. Somehow this only made things worse. His actual memories began to be replaced by the images; his wife, a whole human being, was turning into a collection of dyes on small white rectangles of paper. Even the photographs were not as intensely colourful as they had once been, he could see that. Washing them didn’t help. Marijke was bleaching out of his memory. The harder he tried to keep her the faster she seemed to vanish.”

I also find her to be so ridiculously creative. In both books, she's come up with original plots, which I think is a hard feat these days. Probably my favorite scene in Her Fearful Symmetry is Martin's dream about sitting on the Tube and realizing the women across from him are squirrels. How awesome is that?

#20: Julie and Julia, Julie Powell

Julie and Julia is another book that I liked fine enough, but didn't love. I suppose I feel sort of ambivalent about it, as I don't care to spend much time blogging about it. The writing is good - the kind of good where you don't notice the writing - but I just never got sucked into the story. (As always, I was curious to see what Amazon reviewers thought - more people hated it than loved it, and wow, the haters really hated it.)

Perhaps it was partly because I don't cook and I knew almost nothing about Julia Child. (The only thing I knew, actually, besides the fact that she was a cook, was that she served in the OSS. I didn't know the name of her famous cookbook, which I'm sure Julie Powell would find ridiculous. And actually, I realized that when I "think" of Julia Child, I somehow see her as Dr. Ruth. Go figure.) So I wasn't locked into the concept. On top of that, I'm a notoriously picky eater so I couldn't identify with cooking hardships, like boiling lobsters alive. (Hell, I don't think I'd touch a single recipe in that book.) So, in short, loving Julie and Julia for the cooking was out.

But really, it all, er, boils down to this: I just didn't connect with Powell. (Which is sort of funny because we have a lot in common, like our home state and alma mater and rabid affection for Civilization.) We clearly don't have the same sense of humor, so I didn't find most of the jokes funny. But more than anything, I felt like Powell skipped the hard stuff. The narrative was pretty jumpy and I often felt that she ended scenarios before discussing the fall-out or the resulting emotions. As a result, I had a hard time feeling her situation and empathizing with her, which I think is essential in a memoir like this. More than once, I was surprised by an emotional revelation - like when she and her husband were going through a rough patch - because she would mention it for a sentence or two and then not delve into it again for another 50 pages.

There are two other, similar books that I sprang to mind as I read Julie and Julia: A.J. Jacobs' The Know-It-All and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love - and they're both, hilariously, mentioned in some form in the credits. I have to say, I far preferred these other two memoirs. The Know-It-All was just awesomely funny (and, for those who don't know, about a guy's quest to read the encyclopedia from A to Z). But to the earlier point, with Eat, Pray, Love, I totally respected that Gilbert put all her emotions - good, bad, and ugly - out there on the table. She was neurotic, yes, but I totally understood what she was doing and why. But as much as I loved that book, there are legions of smart women who hated it, for that very same reason - so in closing, I'll just say, perhaps Julie and Julia is for them?

Next up: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. With not so many weeks until the New Year, I am trying to read quick in order to reach the blessed 30!

#19: Skinny Bitch, Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin

My best advice? RUN FROM THIS BOOK. My friend recommended this book to me - she said I would never look at food the same way again. And that may be true, but Skinny Bitch is, at its core, filled with untrustworthy information written by two women who are not qualified to be prescribing such advice.

At its most basic, Skinny Bitch is deceitful. This is a book promoting a vegan diet and while I have no personal problem with that, I wasn't interested in reading a manifesto on the subject. Veganism is not mentioned anywhere on the front cover or the back cover blurb. The authors (and perhaps marketing people) have done this purposely, in order to ambush the reader – thinking, and probably rightly so, that a book on veganism is not going to sell as well as one that’s billed as “a no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls who want to quit eating crap and start looking fabulous!” It’s kind of amazing then that Freedman and Barnouin manage to take everyone else – the FDA, the USDA, the dairy people, the beef people, Johnson & Johnson – to task for being sneaky in order to sell a product when it's exactly what they've done here.

Despite the fact that Skinny Bitch directly says that doctors are underqualified (p. 60), neither of these women are qualified to be dispensing what is essentially medical advice. Let me say it again: THEY ARE NOT QUALIFIED. Rory Freedman is billed as a former model's agent and a self-taught know-it-all. Kim Barnouin, a former model, holds an MS in Holistic Nutrition that she earned online from the Clayton College of Natural Health. According to the New York Times, she did most of her research online - don't worry, I will get to the problems with that.

The biggest flaw in this book is that the authors don’t acknowledge that there are different schools of thought, that people can have differing but still valid opinions, and that there are data sets to support just about everything. Everyone else, in the writers' unqualified opinion, is wrong – every other scientist, dietician, everyone. (Unless of course, they agree with them.) Their book is like listening to Sarah Palin speak – it’s just so hateful and doesn’t recognize that anyone else’s expertise/opinion can be equally valid. To Sarah Palin, you’re “un-American” if you don’t agree with her. And to these women, disagreement makes you a “fucking moron” or a “selfish whore.” I don’t even understand why these words are acceptable. It’s not tough love, it's abuse, and as the writers themselves say, “There is nothing uglier than a pretty woman who’s nasty.”

I am not a qualified medical professional, but some of Skinny Bitch's conclusions rang false to me. Since I don't want to go on here forever, I'll leave it at that. HOWEVER, I did work as a magazine fact-checker for a number of years, and I feel absolutely qualified to discuss the authenticity of one's sources. At the back of the book, Skinny Bitch lists a number of sources - some are from nutrition books, but the majority are from websites and online articles. The thing is, newspaper articles are not considered a primary sources and neither is the Internet - and that's because neither outlet is fact-checked. I am astounded that the majority of this book was written and then published based on such flimsy sources.

I took a look at 10 of the links provided (out of perhaps 30). Three of them no longer exist. One was a newspaper in India and another was what looked like a reputable newsmagazine. Truthaboutsplenda.com used research to back up its claims, but is funded by the Sugar Association, which represents the (conflicting) interests of the American sugarcane farmer. One had an advisory board with doctors, but was ultimately there to sell products; another's mission was aiding the spiritual evolution of the human race and unveiling conspiracy theories. Holisticmed.com, used multiple times, does not list an author (so you don't know who's writing this information) and says clearly on page one that the information is not intended as medical advice. And lastly, the last website had a well-known, if self-styled author, who was the center of controversy in 2002 after other vegans accused him of making false claims and distorting the (already bad) truth. They also relied quite a bit on information from PETA, which is a respectable but biased organization. In short, none of these are valid sources and would not pass muster at any major magazine. They could all be starting points, sure, but from the citations, it doesn't appear that the writers followed them up to find more concrete facts.

There's nothing wrong with veganism and I'm sure it has a good amount of science to support it. I just hope that anyone considering such a radical dietary change will find out about the pros and cons by reading a book written by legitimate experts.

#18: The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown

I'd probably have to give The Lost Symbol - the biggest book release of the year - 2.5 stars. It wasn't awful, but it's also no match for The Da Vinci Code or my personal favorite, Angels & Demons. Simply put, it just wasn't as enthralling as the other two - there was never a point where I felt absolutely compelled to keep reading.

So, The Lost Symbol is the third Robert Langdon novel, with our hero being lured to the Capitol under false pretenses. When he gets there, he finds out he's not there to give a speech; instead, greeted by his friend's severed hand, he learns that he must uncover the Mason's long-buried Lost Word to appease a lone madman. Over the course of the night, Langdon teams up with the victim's sister, Katherine, and runs all over D.C. trying to solve the mystery and avoid the CIA.

Part of the problem, I think, is that The Lost Symbol doesn't stand on its own - its format is VERY similar to The Da Vinci Code and towards the end, there's some thematic overlap with Angels & Demons. It didn't totally feel like its own book, although I think he made a smart choice in this one by not attempting to deliver the secrets of the Masons. In The Da Vinci Code, he comes up with an answer for the modern location of the Holy Grail, which requires a large suspension of disbelief; here, instead, he manages to wrap up the book without having to make something up, to the book's benefit. (It's the same sort of choice that Junot Diaz makes in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, with the Mongoose's secret message.)

I also think, perhaps, that for me, the Freemasons are just not as compelling as the history of Christianity or science versus faith at the Vatican. I don't really know anything about the Masons or the conspiracy theories surrounding them, so I didn't really have any preconceived notions to be stripped of.

In the end, I did learn something about the Masons (and feel like there are some places in D.C. that I'd like to re-see). But more than anything, I learned - or rather, remembered - that wow, it's really easy to manipulate people. Obviously this is a work of fiction but I was struck time and time again by how the villian managed to fairly believable gain entrance to places simply by acting with confidence.

People generally give Dan Brown shit, but I like him. I don't think he's setting out to write great literature - his purpose seems to be to write a good thriller. And I think he accomplishes that for the most part here. It's not The Da Vinci Code, but that's probably an unrealistic standard to hold him too. (And hey, Dan, if you're feeling somewhat down about the mushy reviews, have a listen to Elizabeth Gilbert talk about the expectations that come with blockbuster success.) So I totally have to give Dan Brown props for poking fun of himself:

On page 355, he writes, “In a flash, Langdon understood the meaning of Galloway’s last request. Tell Peter this: The Masonic Pyramid has always kept her secret…sincerely. The words had seemed strange at the time, but now Langdon understood that Dean Galloway was sending Peter a code. Ironically, this same code had been a plot twist in a mediocre thriller Langdon had read years ago.”

The name of that mediocre thriller? Digital Fortress, Dan Brown's first book.

#17: My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult

Ugg, I seriously hated this book. And interestingly, the friend who gave it to me loved it. Although I have no idea why. (Spoilers ahead, by the way)

The idea is interesting: A family conceives a baby that will be, with the help of science, a perfect genetic match for their dying daughter, Kate. But as a young teenager, Anna is tired of being noticed only when her body parts are needed and decides to sue for medical emancipation. But My Sister's Keeper just didn't captivate me. The characters were pretty one-dimensional, with the rebellious son, hero father, and callous lawyer; the mother was so awful that it was hard to see her point of view. With the trial, the novel could have had a lot of tension, but it just kind of plodded along. Partially it was the language - my friend liked its reliance on dialogue, but I felt that Picoult relied too much on allusion and metaphor to make "grand" points that weren't terribly insightful. So I was already disliking the book...and then I got to the end. Oh, the end.

What I really, truly hated about this book was the enormous cop-out ending. I felt like Picoult chose this subject - genetically engineered children, medical rights - to be controversial, which of course would stir up interest in the book upon publication. But then, there's nothing to back it up - Picoult doesn't take a stand and she doesn't offer any sort of meditation on the subject.

In the Readers Club Guide at the back of the book, Picoult says of the ending, "...this isn't an easy book, and you know from the first page that there are no easy answers." But I really felt that she took the easy road. At the end, Kate is at death's door. She needs the kidney that her sister doesn't want to donate, but she probably isn't going to make it, regardless - enough so that her doctor is actually against transplant. Even though Anna wins her case and gets to make her own decisions, she will presumably still be at the mercy of her mother's wishes for her to donate. It's not that Anna's not going to do it; it's more that, at the end, she's won the right to make her own choice. And here we are, at the big question: Should Anna feel obligated to save the sister she loves, even if it may not work and be bad for her own long-term health? The real crux of My Sister's Keeper is how can you balance the equally deserving but opposing needs of two children that you desperately love.

Guess what the answer is? That's right; there is no answer. Instead, Anna is killed in a car wreck immediately following the conclusion of the trial. Her kidney is given to her sister who, miraculously, recovers from leukemia and goes on to live a healthy life. Seriously? It annoyed me that Picoult never tried to answer the hard questions - I don't think there was a perfect ending that would have satisfied all readers, but I think she should have tried for something. But it really bugged me that she purposely chose a controversial topic and never did anything with it. (And no surprise, rebellious brother gets fixed and the scummy lawyer - who ran from his high school girlfriend over a seizure disorder, again, seriously? - gets the girl back anyway.)

Do yourself the favor of staying away from My Sister's Keeper. You will thank me, really.

#16: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

I ended up picking this book up by chance. I was traveling and had finished the two books I brought with me - The Sex Lives of Cannibals and Air Babylon - and wanted to trade them in for something else. But I just couldn't find anything decent, until I discovered The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in a spirituality focused used-book store in a small beach town. I only picked it up, actually, because a guy at Borders had just told me it was one of the best books he'd recently read. The point is, I hadn't intended to read it, but it came into my life anyway.

For the most part, I liked it, although not enough to read the next book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, in the trilogy. On the one hand, I was pretty into the book until the last 100 pages or so, and couldn't wait to dive back into it; on the other hand, I was absolutely shocked by the sexual violence in the book, which the jacket doesn't mention.

The book seems to be about disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who's both trying to solve the mystery of what happened to 16-year-old Harriet Vanger in 1966 and get revenge on industralist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. But I think the book, on a deeper level, is really about violence perpetrated against women. (Each section starts with some kind of statistic, after all.) And it's fine as a topic, but I wish I'd known beforehand that that's what the book is really about, because I'm not sure I would have picked it.

But otherwise, the book is pretty well-written, although I think Larsson (in the form of Blomkvist) took a few unbelievable leaps in solving the mystery. The writing is a little stiff - though that may be about the translation - and, as a side note, has a surprising amount of techy details (like an exhausted list of Mac laptop specs) which I found amusing for some reason. I would argue that the last 100 pages - which resolve the Wennerstrom thread after the Harriet mystery has been solved - could have been eliminated, but that's personal preference.

So, all in all, I liked it but I didn't love it. :)

#15: Air Babylon, Imogen Edwards-Jones

Hmm, I'm kinda surprised at myself that I've read another one of these Babylon books. While I quite enjoyed Fashion Babylon, and learned a lot, I found Beach Babylon to be amusing but lacking plot. Sadly, Air Babylon seems to fall into the second category as well.

Having said that, I didn't expect much and the books aren't marketed as high literature. They're good for a quick, amusing read and I liked this book enough to pass it on to a friend.

My only issue, really, is with the plot...or lack of plot. Air Babylon is about a day in the life of a British airport supervisor (at Heathrow, as I recall). It's more or less supposed to be an ordinary day, except at the end of it, a couple of the employees - including the narrator - are flying to Dubai to celebrate a birthday. Also, the supervisor has a crush on one of the flight attendents who's going to be traveling with the group. That's kinda where the plot ends - the book is really constructed around the anecdotes, and everything happens to link the anecdotes together. And in order to use the most hilarious/awful/shocking stories she discovered over the course of her research, Edwards-Jones always makes the worst thing happen. It made the book feel predictable and repetitive because you knew every new scenario was going to involve a crisis and there was no surprise when it indeed arrived.

Oh, and for the first ten pages, I assumed the narrator was a woman, I think because the cover shows a flight attendant. So it was a big shock to find out it was a man, and have to rearrange all my mental images I'd come up with.

As a side note, I can't say whether or not the anecdotes are at all true. The friend that I gave the book to spent a summer working as a flight attendant, and didn't think they sounded too outrageous. So, interestingly, an Amazon reviewer feels pretty strongly that Air Babylon is insulting exaggerated. But who knows...

#14: The Sex Lives of Cannibals, J. Maarten Troost

I read this book about a month ago, mostly while stuck in an airport, and I'm a little fuzzy on the details...but I actually had the same thought the moment I finished the book. What actually happened? There's not a plot to speak of; the author moves to Tarawa, an atoll in the Republic of Kiribati, with his employed girlfriend and he mostly writes about the ridiculous culture shock he experienced. (And it is ridiculous - I was in Kiribati ten years ago, though for a far shorter period of time, and Troost is not exaggerating in the slightest.)

So yeah, I can't really tell you what happened - he swam, he fished, he made a journey by boat - but oddly enough, it's not really a criticism. I quite liked The Sex Lives of Cannibals - it was an easy read (thus, good for traveling) and totally light-hearted and amusing. So, two thumbs up. Heck, he gets a thumb just for the title.

#13: Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

I'm not totally sure if I liked Revolutionary Road. In a weird way, it reminds me of my feelings on Wuthering Heights: On one hand, I hated it because the characters were despicable, but on the other, there's no denying that the author knew what he/she was doing. So I guess my verdict on this one is interesting. It's an interesting, infuriating book and be warned, I am going to SPOIL, SPOIL, SPOIL ahead.

I have to give serious props to Yates, though; I think Revolutionary Road is one of the most well-crafted books I've ever read. The story is about Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple that lives out in the 'burbs on the titular street in the 1950s. They're out there doing what they think they're supposed to be doing - raising kids, mowing the lawn, being prosperous - but they feel unfulfilled. And the main reason for that is they feel they're extraordinary people, destined for great things, better things that the mindless routine that everyone else is participating in. Eventually April comes up with an intricate plan to move to Europe so that Frank can "find" himself and his calling, and they can live a life of culture in Paris. But for all his talk, it turns out that Frank's afraid - of change, of himself. He starts quietly sabotaging the plan until a gift arrives in his lap: April's pregnant. He pushes her and manipulates her until she agrees to stay on Revolutionary Road and stick with the status quo, but never realizes that he's pushed her too far until it's too late. And the book ends just as it started, as a hot depressing mess.

In looking at the Amazon reviews, some people blamed April for the Wheelers' problems, calling her stuck-up and pushy. More people saw them as equally responsible, both holding unrealistic and over-inflated visions of who they were. But as I read the book, I realized that we really have no idea who April is, because she doesn't get to represent herself until the very end of the book, 40 pages from the end, when she commits her terrible deed. She's always seen through the eyes of other people and even with dialogue, the episodes are recounted from the other person's point of view. She's literally the last character who gets to direct the scene from her point of view; even her children get a turn first. During scenes with Frank, April's generally seen as mean because he both hates her and is afraid of her; during Shep-the-neighbor's turn at the wheel, April comes across as haughty, but yet he's also frustrated by his fixation with her. Once I realized this, it really made me question what was real with April and what was being put upon her by her suitors.

For example, one of Frank's great fixations is how April may be incapable of love (because he can't accept that she just might not love him), and he's disturbed by something she once said to him. The quote from the book is: "'I love you when you're nice,' she'd told him once, before they were married, and it had made him furious.'" (p. 49) But the thing I realized is, we don't actually hear her say it. Frank says that she said it. And we know that Frank is both an embellisher and a liar. He's very good at transforming situations into stories that work for his personal narrative, and we see that throughout Revolutionary Road. The most obvious example comes during his lunch meeting with Bart Pollock. Frank works for the same company that his father did and he's particularly haunted by a city lunch he had as a kid with him and a man named Oat Fields. So when Pollock takes him out to lunch, he's reminded of it - and then he turns the story into something that he sees as better. "He couldn't be sure - there were several hotels of this size and kind in the neighborhood - but the possibility was strong enough to please his sense of ironic coincidence. 'Isn't that the damndest thing?' he would demand of April tonight. 'Exactly the same room Same potted palms, same little bowls of oyster crackers - Jesus, it was like something in a dream. I sat there feeling ten years old." (p. 206) As a result of incidents like this, I think you have to question what was actually said and what Frank has decided what April has said. And thus, start to wonder if April is really this person we've been lead to believe she is.

So yeah, I really started to question whether April was actually as mean and withholding as she came across. (I doubt it.) And that feeling, more that anything, really made me see her as trapped. Frustratingly, depressingly trapped. I kinda knew that something drastic was coming at the end, because it seemed fairly obvious that she had to snap, and I have to admit, I really, really wanted her to poison him. Isn't that awful? But I seriously just wanted her to do him in and escape. Alas, it was not to be...

I can't end this though with talking about Frank, her horrible, manipulative little husband. He is truly awful because he was just obsessed with impressions, control, and his manhood (or, more correctly, how other people saw him as a man). He also uses the most deluded logic to make decisions, and there were moments in the book where I wanted to reach in and smack him. Like, for example, he takes a boring job at Knox Business Machines because he doesn't want to get sucked into an interesting job that he won't be able to leave when his life takes off. As a result, he spends years doing nothing at a job he hates. Huh? But the worst is his explanation near the beginning of the book of why he decided to marry his pregnant girlfriend, April. He doesn't actually want a baby but when she wants to get an abortion, his manhood feels threatened. So he manipulates her and guilts her into having it, because he simply can't bear the idea that she doesn't want to carry his seed. Which is what leads him to getting the job at Knox.

Frank is one of those people who is just all bullshit. Near the end of the book, when April wants to terminate her third pregnancy, he fashions himself to be a psychologist like Freud and tells her she has penis-envy. Of course, he knows zero about it but eventually convinces her that she needs to start seeing a psychiatrist because she has deep mental issues. And it's just so ridiculous because he manages to convince her that she's crazy - and she's not. Arguably, he is the one that's crazy. He doesn't want another baby; he just wants an excuse to stay in his comfy life and get out of going to Paris. Instead of being honest about his feelings, he concocts all this bullshit so he can still feel like the man. Okay, I need to breathe - can you tell that this book made me angry?

In the end - and this really is the end - people start to see beneath the veneer. John the crazy man realizes and confronts Frank about his cowardice in a painfully awkward social setting. In the last few pages, Shep realizes that Frank drove April to her demise because he was always playing a game. But I sort of had to wonder if it mattered, because April was still dead and Frank deposited his kids with relatives, allowing him to start playing the sad but worldly widower.

And the thing is, I think Yates intended all of these things. You're supposed to see Frank as this delusional idiot and I think you're supposed to see April as trapped in an image. In that respect, Revolutionary Road is genius. It just also happens to be as depressing as all hell.

#11 and #12: Something Borrowed and Something Blue, Emily Giffin

When I saw Something Borrowed and Something Blue on the "Buy 1, Get 1 Half Price" shelf at Borders a few weeks ago, I immediately snapped them up. I really enjoyed both of these books when I read them a few years ago. While they're firmly entrenched in the Chick Lit camp, Giffin skipped a lot of the standard cliches (as I recalled anyway).

Something Borrowed was just as good as I remembered. I think I read it in less than 36 hours, despite already knowing how it would end. The story is about two childhood best friends, Rachel and Darcy, who are now adults and living in New York City. Darcy's always had a charmed life and when the novel starts, she's engaged to a handsome banker named Dex. Rachel, on the other hand, is more of a hardworking wallflower. But, on the night of Rachel's 30th birthday, she gets drunk and sleeps with Dex and drama ensues. (I'm not giving anything away, by the way - this is all on the back cover of the book.) As a reader, you certainly like Rachel from the start and root for her, but I thought Giffin did a good job of giving Darcy some appealing qualities, so that she's not a one-dimensional villain. Giffin also does a good job of revealing the story layer by layer - it's not quite what it seems to be on page one and while it's not over-the-top, I don't think you can really guess what's going to happen, either.

Something Blue, on the other hand, isn't quite as good and I think that's because it relies too much on its predecessor. The second book is Darcy's story and what happens to her after she loses Dex (sorry, it's a spoiler, but it's on the back of this book's cover!). As established in Book One, Darcy is a selfish, self-absorbed girl who occasionally stuck up for her best friend. Those qualities work in Something Borrowed because Darcy's supposed to lose. But then, in Book Two, when she's the heroine you're supposed to care about, it doesn't quite work. And it takes her 210 pages to figure out that she's the most shallow person ever. I think you keep reading through Darcy's selfishness because you want to know what happens to Rachel and Dex, but is that really enough for a book to stand on its own? In contrast to Something Borrowed, Something Blue also has much more of a conventional Chick Lit ending - meaning that everthing gets tied up into neat little bows. It's not terribly cheesy for the genre but still makes it a fluffier book than the first.

On a final note, I noticed a continuity error between Books One and Two. In Something Borrowed, Darcy's father's name is Hugo Rhone, as seen on the wedding invitations (page 242). However, in Book Two, he apparently changed his name to Hugh (page 112). Oops!

Next up: I've started reading Water for Elephants. I'm not terribly captivated at this point (this point being Chapter Three) but since people seem to love it, I'm still keeping on. However, I might start reading Revolutionary Road as I've only got it out of the library until June 3.

Eat, Pray, Love the movie

So, yeah, they're turning the book into a movie starring Julia Roberts. Both parts of that sentence seem equally strange to me. Although I like Julia Roberts (especially in America's Sweethearts, call me a dork), I don't see her as Elizabeth Gilbert in the slightest. They just seem to have completely different vibes. (Although when I saw Gilbert at a reading, she said that she felt like she had no involvement in the movie whatsoever and felt like she had to let the work go and let it become the filmmaker's work...if I am remembering that correctly.) Buzz Sugar however recently reported that Richard Jenkins was recently cast as Richard from Texas, which seems absolutely appropriate.

But I also just don't see Eat, Pray, Love as a movie, as much as I love it. Because the thing is, nothing really happens. Yes, she travels to Italy, India, and Indonesia, but so much of the book happens in her head. It's about how she feels and what she's working out internally. And for God's sake, she spends most of her time in India in meditation - and frankly, I don't see more than five minutes of that on film being compelling.

Interestingly, a man is writing and directing the film, due out in 2011. It's Ryan Murphy, who I'd never heard of before but obviously should have, as he's the creator of Nip/Tuck, Glee, and the writer/director of Running with Scissors. (Funny enough, I haven't seen any of these, though I've heard good things about all.) I read a story recently that said he's still working on the EPL screenplay, though I can't seem to find it again on the Interwebs. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.

#10: Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

So upon a second read, I can still say that I love this book. I don't understand why people hate it so vehemently but my theory is that it involves the ugliest of emotions, jealousy. People are jealous that Elizabeth Gilbert got paid to write what seems like an easy book about living in Italy, India, and Indonesia over a period of a year following a nasty divorce.

But yeah...writing a book, even about your own life, isn't easy. More than anything, I really admire Gilbert's willingness to be honest. Over the course of 334 pages, she's happy, depressed, selfish, giving, and self-absorbed, just to name a few characteristics, and she doesn't seem to skimp on any of it. She doesn't hide it and she doesn't sanitize it. And sure, there were some parts I found annoying - reading about anyone's spiritual enlightment always comes across as a little false - but it's all there, no holds barred. I feel like if she had toned down her emotions, then the haters would be griping about dishonesty, or something like that. I guess you can never please some people. :)

Having said that, upon this second read, I have been persuaded to investigate meditation. Spefically, Ketut Liyer's "sit and smile" meditation, which I didn't specifically recall from the go-around. I'm not sure I'm really the Hindu mantra type, but still could use some calm feeling in m life, and I liked the idea of a meditation where you just try to emanate positiveness. I'm not terriby good at it yet, but I guess you've got to start somewhere... Like Bali, perhaps? Yeah, still hoping to go because Eat, Pray, Love makes it just seem strange, convoluted, and fantastic.

#9: The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

I seriously disliked this book, but I'm not terribly surprised - I avoid Oprah's choices like the plague. But it was our book club selection this month, so I read The Reader anyway. It infuriated me so much that upon completion, I searched the Web for other people's reviews - I just couldn't believe that everyone else loved this book. (It turns out, they didn't - popular reviews on sites like Amazon and Good Reads are mixed.) Oh, and by the way, serious spoilers ahead.

In a nutshell, The Reader is a first-person narrative by a German man named Michael Berg. At age 15, he contracts hepatitis and when he falls ill on the street, he meets an older woman named Hanna. They begin an affair. In between the nookie, Michael reads to her (hence, the title of the book). But Hanna always remains mysterious and refuses to talk about her past. Eventually, Michael grows up and grows out of the affair, and it coincides with Hanna's sudden flight from the town. Less than ten years later, Michael discovers all of Hanna's secrets when, as a law student, he attends the trial of five women accused of being Nazi concentration camp guards. Michael figures out that Hanna can't read and because of it, she's accepted more blame than she's due; although Michael considers telling the judge, he chickens out in the end. Hanna is sentenced to prison for life. I won't ruin the rest of the book; these details are enough to talk about what I want to discuss.

Michael's conclusion at the end of the book is meant to represent the "truth," and that's mostly what I object to...this ridiculous, one-sided, bullshit "truth." I did read a couple of reviews that suggested that perhaps Schlink intends the reader to see Michael's own culpability but after thinking that over, I have to dismiss it. It's always hard to tell where the line between writer and narrator ends, but Michael never has a moment of clarity, not a second of doubt. He's still blaming Hanna on the last pages. And since this is sort of Schlink's fictionalized autobiography, it also makes me think that he's presenting here his own meditation and conclusion on the question of German guilt.

Basically, in trying to figure out how - as part of the first generation of post-war Germans - to see the Holocaust, Michael settles on blame. He blames everyone: the generation before his, his parents, Hanna. And he's ultimately unsatisfied because no one seems as sorry as he thinks they ought to be. He's so self-righteous - and mid-book, clearly enjoys playing the martyr - that he never sees how he's contributed to the situation.

At the trial, when the other defendents realize that Hanna's digging herself into a hole with her honesty, they gang up on her and turn her into the scapegoat. The book implies, I think, that Hanna fell into her role as a guard (because she was running away from a situation where she'd have to admit her illiteracy) whereas these other defendents are actually bad people at heart (because they're still acting rotten, trying to evade responsibility). The big moral question, supposedly, is how we deal with our kind feelings toward Hanna, who admittedly worked as a guard at Auschwitz. But why aren't we ever asked to judge Michael's actions? He vacillates for pages about whether or not to go to the judge with this inside information, and finally does, saying: "I did go to the presiding judge after all. I couldn't make myself visit Hanna. But neither could I endure doing nothing." There's such a self-congratulatory tone to the sentences. The only problem? He doesn't actually tell the judge about Hanna. He goes there, sure, but he does NOTHING, because he's afraid to rock the boat and jeopardize his own situation. And that makes him no different than the millions of Germans during World War II who did nothing in resistance because they were afraid of the potential consequences to themselves. You could say Michael's dilemma is minor in comparison, but he was never presented with the big question in his lifetime - this is his moral test and he fails. Actually, he fails it every time. And in the context of the trial, it actually does have some consequence - Hanna gets a life sentence and the other women, who deserved more, only get a few years. Michael helps them get away with murder, in all senses of the phrase.

Instead, Michael wallows in this pseudo-guilt, agonizing over whether he's a bad person because he loves a bad person. Seriously? It's just so overwrought and melodramatic. Which is sort of amazing in a book that uses almost no description. Rather, The Reader is a book filled with vague, contradictory prose that intends to ask these big questions, but kinda just meanders around them instead. Since I've already written an epic, I'll let someone else's review take over...I laughed out loud when I found it, since clearly she and I folded down the exact same pages with the intent of making the point. So, for more on The Reader's stilted prose, click here: http://www.caribousmom.com/2008/08/16/the-reader-book-review/

Anyway, moving on: I'm about halfway through my second trip through Eat, Pray, Love. I've been reading it with a more critical eye, just to try and see it through the haters' eyes, but what can I say, I still love it.

#8: In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje

Yes, I've read this book before - multiple times, in fact. It's interesting to me because certain scenes always stick out, even now I can recount them, but then there are other details that I consistently forget. In the Skin of a Lion is a weird, strange, lovely book. And since I've blogged about it recently, I won't go into it again. Mostly I'm just adding this entry as a record of book #8. Alright then, moving on...

The Sisterhood of Mean Girls

So, as I was Googling to try and verify that the Sisterhood girls did indeed go to different schools in the first book, I came across a very disturbing story about how Ann Brashares came to write The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Although I first read the account on Wikipedia, it seems to be well substantiated in outlets I trust, like Gawker and The New York Observer (although the link no longer exists).

According to these sources, a young woman named Jodi Anderson used to work at Alloy Media + Marketing, a company which connects products to a targeted audience...and the audience seems to be teen girls. (I'd always wondered why the company published books and sold clothes, and now I know!) Anyway, in the book division, Alloy works as a packager, coming up with marketable ideas and outlines and then hiring a writer to produce an actual book. Anderson apparently came up with the Pants concept, based on her own experiences of sharing a pair of pants with her college girlfriends, and she thought she was going to be chosen to write the book, since it was her idea and all - but Brashares, co-president of the company, decided to write it instead. Anderson has since written her own book (actually multiple books), but none have been anywhere near as successful as The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. She apparently has also not commented on the matter.

This makes me ill. I'm always amazed at what people are willing to do to one another. No doubt Anderson's employment contract stated that Alloy owned any and all ideas and could do what they wanted with them, but I don't think it excuses it. No matter what the legalese says, you're still building your success on somebody else's inspiration. The contract is a way of making everyone who profited feel better. My old boss essentially tried to do the same thing, although I had already left the job so there was no contract to bind - but he had been a crafty litttle devil when he'd signed his, and owned every new concept, no matter which staffer came up with it. He said to my face that he was claiming ownership over everything with an implied and what are you going to do about it? Thankfully, I was smart enough to tell him to shove it.

Anyway, I found all this Alloy information by way of articles and blogs about Kaavya Viswanathan, the high-schooler-turned-Harvard-student whose first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life was a bestseller containing a great deal of plagarism. Viswanathan also worked with Alloy publishing and according to Slate (via The New York Times), her original novel involved Irish history - not the un-dorking of an Indian girl trying to get into Harvard (which is kinda-sorta Viswanathan's personal tale). No one really seems to blame book packaging for the plagarism; I think it's more frustration, seeing people write best-sellers and earn themselves fame and fortune in the process, only to find out there's unhandedness involved (because I think we could all write bestsellers if given a concept and someone else's book to lift from). As one of the literary agents involved said, per the Boston Globe: "We had all recognized that Kaavya had the craftsmanship, she's beautiful and charming, she just needed to find the right novel that would speak to her generation and to people beyond her years as well." Her original concept wasn't good enough, so they gave her a new one. OMG, and apparently she got half a million dollars for it, too. Kill me now. (Even worse, the Amazon reviewers mostly trash it, controversy aside.)

This blogger talks mostly about Opal Mehta but also briefly about Ann Brashares:
http://avastconspiracy.blogspot.com/2006/05/dirty-chick-lit-secret-exposed-in.html

Ann Hulbert on Kaavya Viswanathan:
http://www.slate.com/id/2140683/fr/rss/

The New York Times on book packaging:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/books/27pack.html?_r=1

#6 and #7: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Books 3 and 4

So I finished books 3 and 4 - Girls in Pants and Forever in Blue - about two weeks ago, maybe more. I've forgotten the finer details, so I won't spend much time on this post. But I do know that out of all four books, I think I liked Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood the best, mostly because it was the only book that hadn't been pillaged for the movies. It was nice not to know what was going to happen. (Book Two wasn't bad in that respect, but the third was the only one that was truly Hollywood-free.) For the same reason, I wasn't quite as into Book 4, as the Sisterhood movie sequel basically followed right along. But overall, as easy reads, the series was pleasant and enjoyable, and even contained little nuggets of wisdom that I identified with.

There's only one thing that I really wanted to point out: At the beginning of Book 3, the girls all go to the senior party together, and I think it's pretty well implied that all four of them (plus Brian and Effie) go to the same high school. But I would be willing to bet good money that in Book 1, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, they go to different schools (though as I recall, two of them - maybe Carmen and Lena? - did go to the same school). I remember especially because I found it a little hard to believe that they would be able to remain best friends with all the distractions and new schoolmates that high school presents. Anyway...

At the moment I'm reading two books: Frida: A biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera and In the Skin of a Lion. Frida's not bad, but it's slow, and I'm sort of wondering if I'm going to read all of it - in general, biographies aren't my genre (I generally find the nitpicky details, like dates and names of schools and neighbors, tedious). I'm not sure what I'd start otherwise, though - maybe a second run of Eat, Pray, Love?

#4 and #5: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Books 1 and 2

I really love the movie version of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants so I decided to pick up the book. I'm kind of a sucker for teen movies and films because even though I'm no longer a teenager, I find that they generally contain the optimism and hope that I miss from being a teenager. You know, that your friends are going to be your friends forever and everything is destiny and your life will work out perfectly. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not an unhappy adult - I just miss that unabashed innocence of the uncomplicated years is all. There's something very powerful in that belief.) I was also under the mistaken impression that this was a book written during my teen years and I'd just missed it - but no, it was written in 2001 and I was in my 20s then.

Anyway, I wasn't so keen on the first book. And apparently the movie producers weren't either, since they changed almost every detail. (I tried to find an explanation for this on the Internet, but no go; almost every review said they remained mostly faithful to the book. Huh? Did we see the same movie?) The basics remained the same: It's a story about four best friends who find a pair of jeans that fits them all perfectly and they send the pants around to each other over the summer as a way of staying connected. Lena goes to Greece and falls in love; Carmen goes to South Carolina to visit her divorced, single father, only to discover he's found a new family; Bridget goes to soccer camp in Baja and falls for a coach; and Tibby stays home to work at a drugstore and she forms a friendship with a 12-year-old who has leukemia. But then after that, the book is pretty different - and strangely, I think the screenwriter did the better job. I recognize that I have a strong bias toward the movie, and perhaps I wasn't giving the book its own fair shot, but I just found it to be...meandering. The movie does a much better job of providing reasons and/or explanations - like why Bridget is so reckless, what happens with her and Eric on the beach, why Lena's in love with Kostos at the end of the summer...

But the characters are compelling, without a doubt, and quite similar to the live-action versions. So I decided to read Book 2, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood. I was totally curious as to how things turned out - I've seen the second version of the movie, but with the way Book 1 ended, it seemed impossible for the book version and the movie version to match up. And sure enough, they didn't, not really in the slightest. But that was okay - I quite liked Book 2. Even though it also suffered from some contrived situations, it was touching - and I felt genuinely bad for Lena and Bridget, especially. In the second book, the girls are still in high school; Lena stays home for the summer agonizing over Kostos, Carmen stays home and ruins her mother's relationship with a new boyfriend, Tibby goes to a filmmaking course in Virginia, and Bridget runs off to Alabama to reconnect with herself and her grandmother.

My only real gripe with the second book was the emphasis on appearance - which seems like a harmful thing in a book written for teen girls. Basically after the ambiguous thing that happens with soccer coach Eric in Mexico, Bridget slides into a funk. She quits soccer and dyes her trademark hair black - and god forbid, gains 15 pounds. And while I realize it's supposed to be a metaphor, I was mostly just left with the impression that weight = bad. I just wonder if young girls realize that Bridget re-finds herself because she confronted the truth - and not just because she went back to being that gorgeous, svelte girl that everyone loved.

Anyway, so I'm on to Book Three tomorrow. Yes, I've been sucked into this series. And I'm kinda hoping Lena is going to get the movie's fairy tale ending with Kostos. I don't think it's going to happen but having lived through a similar situation in real life, I know it sucks and you think about it forever, so I've got my fingers crossed for her.

And on a final note, as an added bonus, the very hilariously awesome clip of America Ferrera and Blake Lively promoting The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. Yes, it's the one with the eye roll...

http://gawker.com/5041417/in-the-name-of-the-sisterhood-blake-lively-forgives-america-ferrera-her-eye+roll

My List of 30

Alright, so thinking about that list of the 1001 Greatest Books EVER in the wee hours has led me to think about my list of 30 for the year. I'm not sure why I made a list, except that I was a bit frustrated that I didn't read some of the books I intended to last year - I skipped a lot of "serious" ones in favor of easy reads.

I also want to re-read some great books this year. While I don't especially like re-reading - there are just too many out there - it troubles me to have forgotten the intricacies of books I absolutely love.

Okay, so here it is. I have no doubt that at the end of the year, I will find that I've read a completely different list.

I've already read four: Beach Babylon, The Temptation of the Night Jasmine, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (as yet un-blogged)

The next 17 are previous un-read tomes I'd like to tackle:
5. The Second Summer of the Sisterhood
6. The Subtle Knife
7. The Canterbury Tales
8. Lolita
9. The Beautiful and the Damned
10. The Golden Notebook
11. Alfred and Emily
12. War and Peace
13. 1,000 Years of Solitude
14. Revolutionary Road
15. The Reader
16. Metamorphosis
17. The Bell Jar
18. Hayden Herrera's biography of Frida Kahlo
19. Joanna Denny's Anne Boleyn
20. Nicholas and Alexandra
21. Outliers

And the ones I've already read and would like to read again:
Eat Pray Love, An Italian Affair, The Great Gatsby, A Moveable Feast, In the Skin of a Lion, Villette, The Time Traveler's Wife, The Red Tent, House of the Spirits, Farenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5, My Father's Glory, and My Mother's Castle

And actually, if memory serves, 11 of these books are on the list of 1001 from the last post. (And some, bizarrely aren't - like A Moveable Feast, Farenheit 451, or The Canterbury Tales. What's up with that?) Hmm, maybe I should register myself after all...

Yes, I like making lists. Because don't you know, making lists of what you ought to be doing helps you put off doing it?!? Yes, let's keep making lists...

The 1% Well Read Challenge

Who'd have thunk it, but apparently there are reading challenges all over the Internet. Apparently there are also a heck of a lot of people blogging about their reading, just like me. I had no idea. I seriously need to spend more time surfing the web.

Anyway, I came across this website, http://1morechapter.com/, that presents the challenge to read 10 books in a year from 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I've come across this hefty tome before in the library. And while I probably won't join the challenge, mostly because I've already made a list of my 30 books for this year (okay, so it's longer than 30 already, sue me), I was interested to see which of the 1001 books I've already read. The list has changed between editions, but I'll count both...I think I'm going to need all the help I can get.

Play along here: http://1morechapter.com/projects/1001-list/

Alright, so here goes:

1. The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri (hated it)
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
3. Atonement, Ian McEwan
4. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
5. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
6. Felicia's Journey, William Trevor
7. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields
8. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
9. Time's Arrow, Martin Amis
10. Amongst Women, John McGahern
11. Possession, A.S. Byatt (This one has been axed from the current 1001 version. A crime against literature and the awesomeness that is Possession if you ask me...)
12. Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
13. Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
15. The Swimming-Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst
16. Beloved, Toni Morrison
17. An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro
18. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marcia
19. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
20. Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis
21. The Handmaiden's Tale, Margaret Atwood
22. The Lover, Marguerite Duras
23. Empire of the Sun, J.G. Ballard
24. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
25. A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro
26. The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
27. The Shining, Stephen King
28. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
29. Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
30. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

Okay, I'm only about 1/3 of the way through the 1001 and already have 30. Since I don't want this to go on forever, I'm switching format:

Slaughterhouse-Five (31); 2001: A Space Odyssey (32); God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (33); Cat's Cradle (34); One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (35); Franny and Zooey (36); To Kill a Mockingbird (37); Breakfast at Tiffany's (38); The Lord of the Rings (39); The Talented Mr. Ripley (40); The Old Man and the Sea (41); The Catcher in the Rye (42); 1984 (43); Cry, the Beloved Country (44); Animal Farm (45); The Little Prince (46); The Grapes of Wrath (47); Rebecca (48); The Hobbit (49); Tender is the Night (50); Brave New World (51); A Farewell to Arms (52); The Sound and the Fury (53); Orlando (54); The Sun Also Rises (55); The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (56); The Great Gatsby (57); A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (58); A Room with a View (59); Heart of Darkness (60); Dracula (61); The Kreutzer Sonata (62); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (63); The Death of Ivan Ilyich (64); Return of the Native (65); Little Women (66); Crime and Punishment (67); Fathers and Sons (68); The Woman in White (69); Madame Bovary (70); Villette (71); The Scarlet Letter (72); Wuthering Heights (73); Jane Eyre (74); Le Pere Goriot (75); Last of the Mohicans (76); Frankenstein (77); Northanger Abbey (78); Pride and Prejudice (79); Gulliver's Travels (80)

Huh. I'm impressed with myself. I've read most of the stories in Borges' Labyrinths but didn't count it; I know I've also read some Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but can't actually remember which ones I read and which ones I just saw the movie of. What can I say, it all happened within the same time period and it's not really my genre. But I figure if I can't remember, I can't guess-timate.

But midway through I also realized why I don't give lists like this much attention - because they're invariably filled with books you ought to read but feel like taking a bullet. There are a number on there I started and put down early, within 30 pages or so. But there were also a few that deserve a special shout-out because I stopped reading them almost at the end - and I never do that. Except when a book is killing me slowly, which is what happened with In Cold Blood, A Passage to India, Jude the Obscure, Vanity Fair, and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Oh me oh my, this was fun.

#3: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

While I completely understand why this book won the Pulitzer Prize, I'd have to rate it my feelings on it somewhere from fair to good. I did like it, I found some parts absolutely captivating, but I'd also like to sit down with Junot Diaz and get some answers.

In terms of tone, starting on page one, the novel kicks ass. You don't figure out who the narrator is until the middle of the book but that unknown voice is hilarious and irreverant, and peppers the beginning bits of the novel with these wise-ass footnotes where you learn all you ever wanted to know (and perhaps more) about the history of the Dominican Republic. I certainly didn't know much, just Porfirio Rubirosa and its reputation for beautiful beaches and a location on a small island with Haiti. Oh, and that they're losing the fight with Spain over which country holds the true remains of Christopher Columbus.

Seemingly the title gives the book away: On the face, it's a book about this fat Dominican sci-fi nerd called Oscar and his short life (not sure about wondrous, though). He's obsessed with Tolkien and girls and never really comes close to either one. If you believe in magic, the reason behind Oscar's bad luck is a fukú – or a family curse that's affected all of them because his grandfather dared oppose the infamous Dominican dictator Trujillo. If you don't believe, Oscar's troubles are his own fault because he never makes much attempt to change the situation. He knows he's a dork, and he's sad about being a dork, but he never makes peace with it or tries to change it. That's one of my main gripes about the book, his lack of agency. I believe in the idea of the fukú, but Oscar doesn't really know about it – so he can't blame it. He just wallows. And as a result, he becomes annoying and I never really came to see beyond it because he stays a pretty one-dimensional character. I just never cared that much about what happens to him in the end.

On the other hand, the story of his grandfather's demise and his mother's childhood and escape to America is fascinating – and reminds me of Latin American magical realism novels. Which I love. Because who doesn't need a little magic in their lives? I sure do. Anyway, the middle section of Oscar Wao is filled with the mysterious Caribbean, a brutal dictator, beautiful women, a magic Mongoose with golden eyes, a man without a face, and missing words...and reminds me of novels like Love in the Time of Cholera and The House of the Spirits.

My other gripe with the book is the use of slang – I would actually say overuse, although I couldn't find a reviewer that agreed with me. If I ever meet Junot Diaz, I'm going to ask him about it. While certainly the abundant usage of Dominican slang helps set the tone, I got annoyed with it pretty quickly. As a Spanish speaker, I didn't mind the general terms but there was quite a bit that wasn't even in the dictionary. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani implies that it was enough to get a general sense of the meaning (she calls it, "a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale"), but I disagree – a novel is a work of art created by words. And so if you can't grasp the intricacies of the words, doesn't that vague up the message? I don't know for sure, but it bugged me. None of my friends seem to mind it, although one said that it took her the entire book to figure out the meaning of tio, or uncle.

Oh, the other thing I would ask Junot Diaz? I would ask him what the Mongoose says at the end of the book. It gives Oscar a three-word message, but like all the "truths" in this novel, the words get swept away by the fukú, lost forever. And I'm totally curious if even Diaz knows what the Mongoose says – or if he can only guess at it.

Kakutani's review that contains way more details on the book's plot than you may want to know:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/books/04diaz.html

#2: The Temptation of the Night Jasmine, Lauren Willig

I'm sad to come here today and report that this is the worst book in the series. The Secret History of the Pink Carnation was one of the wittiest books I've ever read and it's like this one, the fifth installment, wasn't even written by the same person. It really lacks the charm and cleverness of its predecessors – even the ones I didn't much like. And by the way: I'm going to discuss how the novel ends in the next paragraph so fair warning, SPOILER AHEAD.

But more importantly, nothing really happens. There are no genuine high points of drama, so the book just seems endless. Instead, The Temptation of the Night Jasmine is just a collection of little moments and a lot of hand-wringing over a ridiculous misunderstanding. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure what took nearly 400 pages to tell. The book is about two things: Robert’s plan of revenge and his occasional wooing of Charlotte. And in the end, he doesn’t even fulfill half his brief: His prey is murdered by someone else, and the murderer escapes into a carriage. Of course he gets Charlotte, but that part was easily predictable by page 14. That is, the page where the two characters make their first appearance. (And fair enough, it's a romance.)

The “tension” in the book, I'm guessing, is supposed to emerge from Robert’s about-face with cousin Charlotte. He romances her on a rooftop and then disappears; when he returns, he acts like his affection was a misunderstanding on her part. And that’s fine, but Willig hits us over the head so many times with Charlotte’s earnest confusion that it just becomes jokey, instead of suspenseful: “It would be too tempting to let herself believe that Robert had come because he couldn’t stay away, that the strange note in his voice had been a sign of repressed emotion, that his concern about Medmenham was a sign that he still wanted her for himself.” (p.202) Gee, as it turns out, the most convoluted explanation for Robert’s standoffish behavior was totally true! I have to roll my eyes over the beating that feminism just took with this paragraph.

Those are all plot and characterization issues, but sadly, language got an equal thrashing here. Willig has written some really incredible novels and I just don’t understand what happened with this one. One thing I noticed early on was the overuse of adverbs, which weighed down conversations that were intended to be light banter. As an example, the two page spread starting on page 28 uses 10 adverbs to describe the word “said” (or its equivalent). He/she said: gloomily, firmly, blandly, giddily, earnestly, thoughtfully, offhandedly, prosaically, ruefully, hopefully. The “said adverbly” set-up alternates with an equally plodding device, that of substituting more complicated verbs for “said.” On these two pages alone, she uses: asked, articulated, murmured, inquired, mimicked, commented, and grumbled. In dialogue, the word “said” blends in and the reader passes over it; other verbs tend to stop or slow the speech down. Obviously, you’re going to use adverbs; I certainly have in here. Same with more sophisticated verbs. The issue is overuse. And in the end, it amounts to dialogue that isn’t allowed to stand on its own. I think that is the biggest weakness in the novel, and reading it page after page just became tedious.

Alright, I’ve bashed this novel enough so I’ll leave well-enough alone. Sad to say, this was probably my last Pink Carnation novel. :(

#1: Beach Babylon, Imogen Edwards-Jones

I knew it had been awhile since I'd blogged but wow, two months. Yikes! Sometimes I procrastinate and come to the blog with 4 or 5 books queued up, but today the news gets worse: I've only finished one book since New Years. Clearly I am going to have to read hard and heavy in the coming months to make up for this initial shortfall.

I didn't intend to immediately read another "Babylon" book - they're interesting but it feels a little like reading Danielle Steele (ie, like cotton candy for the brain = initially sweet but bad for long-term health). I started both Witch of Portobello (Paulo Coelho) and The Monsters of Templeton (Lauren Groff) but I couldn't get into either one. So I ended up on Beach Babylon. It wasn't great - it's really just a bunch of anecdotes (about life working at a luxury beach resort) strung together. And while they're individually interesting, every book needs a real plot, and this one just didn't have it. But having said that, it was a quick read and I clearly got through it. And that's really all I have to say about it...

Oh, except for the cover. I've made it a little larger than usual so you can see how this gorgeously tanned woman has the freakiest pale hand. It doesn't even look like it belongs to her. And it kinda creeps me out.

Next up: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I'm on page 20 or so, but so far it's fantastic. Which is why it won the Pulitzer Prize, I suppose. Since it's our current book club pick, I had to temporarily put down Lauren Willig's new novel, The Temptation of the Night Jasmine. I'm on page 100 or so of that, and so far, sadly, it's awful.