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. :(